Marcel Proust: The Fugitive (Unabridged)
The Fugitive: Chapter One
No doubt I had not ventured to interpret…
When I vowed to myself that Albertine would…
To carnal pleasure I did not even give a thought…
Knowing that Saint-Loup was in Paris I had sent for him…
By an inverse gymnastic, I who had made a mental effort…
But as soon as they had gone, the head…
I thought of Albertine all the time and never was…
Since Manon returned to Des Grieux…
No doubt, just as I had said in the past to Albertine…
Time passes, and gradually everything that we have said…
I was during these days so incapable of forming any picture…
I remained speechless with astonishment…
The suppression of suffering?
I asked Francoise the time.
No doubt these nights that are so short…
How could she have seemed dead to me when now…
Sometimes I came in collision in the dark lanes…
And I then felt, with an intense pity for her…
How she used to hasten to see me at Balbec…
I had thought that my social relations, my wealth…
At any rate I was glad that, before she died…
Besides, from a single fact, if it is certain…
No doubt it was because in that silent and deliberate arrival…
I tried not to think of anything, to take up a newspaper.
I had indeed suffered at Balbec when Albertine…
At the moment in which the good Albertine had returned…
The person that I had been so short a time ago…
Often this memory that Albertine was dead was combined…
No doubt an incident such as this of the Buttes-Chaumont…
'Apart from the fact that not for anything in the world…'
Associated now with the memory of my love…
Chapter Two
A few days later, however, as I was coming home…
A moment before Francoise brought me the telegram…
I saw thus at that same hour, for so many people…
The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that…
Certain women who were old friends of Swann…
Gilberte recognised the drawings.
Notwithstanding this, in her snobbishness…
The illusions of paternal affection are perhaps no less…
Well, the next day, which was my mother's at-home day…
It is precisely the same. For the woman…
On the other hand, Albertine and Andree…
'Did those excursions to the Buttes-Chaumont…'
Albeit I was not exactly a man of that category…
Some time later, when I attended the first performances…
Chapter Three
And as I went indoors to join my mother who had left the window…
Notwithstanding his contempt, the waiter was…
The Prince, to put the Marquis at his ease…
Thus for instance one evening a letter from…
What she might or might not have done with Andree…
The sun continued to sink. My mother must be nearing…
Chapter Four
Can't you imagine how it would have amused her…
Other friends of my mother who had met Saint-Loup…
These two marriages which I had already begun to discuss…
The person who profited least by these two marriages…
I gathered that Robert and his wife had been on…
One fine day she had changed her tune, the son-in-law…
The doubt that Aime's words had left in my mind…
'And the second time,' Gilberte went on…
