Image 1 of 1
Albertine disparue (also known as La Fugitive) is the sixth volume of Marcel Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu. Published posthumously in 1925, this haunting novel explores the aftermath of loss and the relentless workings of memory. The narrator awakens to devastating news: Albertine has left him. What follows is an extraordinary psychological investigation into grief, obsession, and the mechanisms by which we both preserve and destroy the image of those we’ve loved.
Proust’s narrator discovers that Albertine’s absence intensifies rather than diminishes his torment. Unable to possess her in life, he attempts to reconstruct her through memory, jealousy, and investigation—interrogating witnesses, analyzing her past, torturing himself with suspicions about her relationships with other women. Yet gradually, almost imperceptibly, something remarkable happens: forgetting begins its work. Through subtle variations and repetitions, Proust shows us how even the most consuming passion eventually yields to time’s erosive power.
Albertine disparue offers profound insights into the paradoxes of desire and memory. Can we ever truly know another person? Does jealousy seek truth or merely confirmation of its own narrative? How does forgetting differ from healing? This volume stands as one of Proust’s most psychologically acute works, a masterpiece of interior observation that speaks powerfully to anyone who has experienced the strange aftermath of a relationship’s end—that liminal space between obsessive remembering and merciful forgetting.
