The Captive and The Fugitive

In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, VOLUME 5 The Captive and The Fugitive MARCEL PROUST Edited and Annotated by William C. Carter Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Frontispiece: Manuscript page from La Prisonnière. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The passage shown here corresponds to our pages 119–20. Photos on pages v (Proust, 1900) and ix (Proust, c. 1896) used with permission of Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY. Copyright © 2023 by Yale University. Translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc., copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Adobe Garamond with Scala Sans and Didot types by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932066 ISBN 978-0-300-18621-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction THE CAPTIVE THE FUGITIVE Chapter 1. Grief and Oblivion Chapter 2. Mademoiselle de Forcheville Chapter 3. Sojourn in Venice Chapter 4. A New Aspect of Robert de Saint-Loup Synopses Acknowledgments I remain deeply grateful to an exceptionally talented and knowledgeable group of scholars, writers, and readers of Proust, many of whom are good friends, whose expertise and skills proved invaluable in helping me to revise and annotate C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of In Search of Lost Time. They are Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Robert Bowden, Ronald Cohen, James Connelly, Sara Depczenski, Elyane Dezon-Jones, Hollie Harder, Elisabeth Howe, Marie-Colette Lefort-Posty, and Bryan Plank. This volume has benefited immeasurably from their many contributions. My sincere thanks to everyone at Yale University Press who is involved in this monumental project of creating a new edition of Proust’s novel, especially Heather Gold, Eva Skewes, Susan Laity, and my longtime, incomparable editor Dan Heaton. Dan continues to be a cheerful and excellent guide on this long Proustian journey. I also wish to express my gratitude to my research assistant Nicolas Drogoul and to my wife, Lynn, for her constant support and encouragement. Introduction Marcel Proust died on November 18, 1922, at the age of fifty-one. In the last weeks of his illness he had time to revise only the first hundred pages or so of La Prisonnière (The Captive). This volume appeared in 1923, to be followed by La Fugitive, now titled Albertine disparue, in 1925 and by Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) in 1927. Scott Moncrieff, alas, did not live to complete his extraordinary achievement by translating Le Temps retrouvé, the last volume of Proust’s novel. The two volumes included in this book, The Captive and The Fugitive, were the last of Scott Moncrieff’s monumental contribution to Proust and his readers in the anglophone world. His translation of La Prisonnière was published in 1929 and that of La Fugitive in 1930. He died on February 28, 1930. For the latter title, Scott Moncrieff chose The Sweet Cheat Gone, a line from the poem “Ghost” by Walter de la Mare. The best English translation of Albertine disparue, although one far from ideal, might be Albertine Gone. We have maintained however, as have other editions, Proust’s original title, La Fugitive. Le Temps retrouvé was published in translation as Time Regained in 1931 by Stephen Hudson, the nom de plume of Proust’s English friend Sydney Schiff, and as The Past Recaptured by Frederick A. Blossom in 1932. There have been additional translations since that time. Scott Moncrieff used as The Captive’s subtitle, “My Life with Albertine,” a phrase the Narrator uses a number of times throughout the volume. Albertine, loosely held as a “prisoner” in the Narrator’s apartment, is the object of his jealous obsession, an obsession that easily becomes indifference once he feels confident of her fidelity. Among remarkable passages we find a highly poetical and erotic one in which he watches Albertine sleeping. Another is the music of the street cries of Paris, whose ambulatory vendors barking their wares have long since disappeared. There are also beautiful meditations on music, especially Vinteuil’s newly discovered septet. Charlus’s insulting behavior toward the Verdurins leads to a humiliating quarrel that follows the performance of the septet. The volume concludes with the abrupt departure of Albertine. The Fugitive includes profound meditations on loss and time and memory, the Narrator’s sojourn in Venice, and revelations about the prospects and evolution of Gilberte Swann and Robert de Saint-Loup. The volume ends with the Narrator’s return to Combray as the guest of Gilberte. He is puzzled and disturbed by his lack of curiosity about the village and its environs. He is also astonished to learn that he completely misread the erotic signal that Gilberte sent him all those years ago when they were both so young at Combray. Since I have expressed, in the earlier volumes, my wholehearted and sincere admiration for Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff’s remarkable skill in translating Proust’s novel, I will not repeat that here. Nor will I repeat my earlier explanations of how I approach revising, editing, and annotating these pages. I will say that in this book, as in the earlier ones, I have corrected some errors and have updated usage where appropriate. For example, Scott Moncrieff sometimes translated literally idiomatic expressions, thus creating phrases that make no sense in English even in context. In The Captive, Proust used the expression