Albertine Simonet. Niece of Mme. Bontemps and narrator’s mistress

Of all the many characters of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ Albertine is one of the most central but also the most enigmatic; – we see her only through the narrator’s eyes and her own lies. It is for that reason perhaps that Jacqueline Rose wrote the novel ‘Albertine’ (Vintage, 2001) to fill-in the gaps which Proust leaves us. She appears in more pages than any one else and yet we know less about her than any other major character.

Long before she first appears in the novel, Albertine is mentioned by Gilberte when discussing a M. Bontemps who is a member of the new government. “He’s the uncle of a girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine’, She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but just now she’s the queerest-looking specimen…. I don’t know her. I only used to see her about, and hear them calling ‘Albertine’ here and ‘Albertine’ there. But I do know Mme. Bontemps, and I don’t like her much either.’” [I. 552]  By the end of the novel there are several hints that Gilberte had in fact known Albertine better than she admitted and that they possibly had a lesbian affair together.

Albertine does not appear till the second book, ‘Within a Budding Grove’ when she is one of the little band of girls who appear along the seafront at Balbec. Though Marcel is in love with all the girls in the little band, one stands out with her “brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks, a black polo cap … pushing a bicycle.”  He learns that she is the ‘Simonet girl’ from a respected local family that spell their name with one ‘n’. “Possibly there had been Simonnets who had done badly in business, or worse still. The fact remains that the Simonets never failed, it appeared, to be annoyed if anyone doubled their ‘n’. They were as proud, perhaps, of being the only Simonets in the world with one ‘n’ instead of two, as the Montmorencys of being the premier barons of France.” [I. 904]

Introduced to her by Elistir, Marcel gradually meets all her friends and spends the rest of that first summer in Balbec in their company. Emboldened by certain signs from Albertine, Marcel attempts to kiss her but is soundly rebuffed. However, Albertine is discreet and they remain friends. “Pleasing people more easily than she wished, and having no need to trumpet her conquests abroad, Albertine kept silent about the scene she had had with me by her bedside, which a plain girl would have wished the whole world to know.” [I. 1003] 

Some years later, Albertine visits Marcel at his parents home in Paris and Françoise catches them amorously tickling each other in bed together; Françoise’s dislike and distrust of Albertine remains a constant theme throughout the novel. Their relationship during this period is part sexual but hard to define. Although Marcel did not for example invite her to the party at the Princess de Guermantes, he had arranged: “that she was to pay me a visit shortly before midnight. I was not in the least in love with her; in asking her to come this evening, I was yielding to a purely sensual desire. [II. 669]

The friendship continues on the second visit to Balbec and gradually Marcel’s physical desire for Albertine is rekindled. The description of their relationship is always from Marcel’s perspective and the reader has no better idea of Albertine’s inner feelings or private life than does the narrator; she is always an object, either of desire or of jealousy. “It would be untrue, I think, to say that there were already symptoms of that painful and perpetual mistrust which Albertine was to inspire in me, not to mention the special character, emphatically Gomorrhan, which that mistrust was to assume. [II. 815] Neither Marcel nor the reader knows where Albertine is or what she does when she is not with him but there are increasing undertones of lesbian liaisons.

As in the earlier relationship between Swann and Odette, Marcel becomes increasingly consumed  with Albertine’s ‘secret life’. Increasingly he questions her and increasingly he catches her lies as she evades his questions. Beneath the veneer of Balbec’s provincial respectability, at least in the eyes of the narrator, there appears to be quite a lively lesbian social life of which Albertine is possibly a part. In addition to the little band of Albertine’s friends, like Andrée, there are Bloch’s sister and cousin who make-out in public, the actress Léa and various attractive young women in whom Albertine displays a furtive interest, if only to watch them surreptitiously in the mirror.

They are a mysterious couple: although he reveals all his inner musings and agonies to the reader, it is still unclear whether Marcel is driven by love, lust, jealousy or just a prurient obsession with her lesbian tastes. As for Albertine, she remains an enigma: flirtatious with his friends, amorous with Marcel after a bottle of cider but mysterious and evasive about her female contacts. His jealousy is driving him insane and Marcel decides to break with Albertine: “The idea of marrying Albertine appeared to me to be madness.” [II. 1149]

It is at this moment that he discovers Albertine is an old and intimate friend of Vinteuil’s daughter, whom Marcel had seen in a lesbian embrace when he was a young boy in Combray. With horror, he learns that she is coming to Balbec for a musical engagement. Marcel decides that the only way to save Albertine from her vices is to take her away from Balbec to Paris, immediately, even if is obliged to marry her. In the event, he does not marry her but moves her into his parents’ home where she becomes part of the household, almost like a pet.

Though she is described as being pretty and plump when he first meets her it is not clear if she retains her looks or if other people find her attractive. Charlus finds her pretty but his taste in women is questionable: “She really is extremely pretty. And she would be even prettier if she cultivated a little more the rare art, which she possesses naturally, of dressing well.” [III 220]. Saint-Loup however is apparently shocked when he finally sees her photograph.   “‘She’s bound to be wonderful,’ Robert was saying, not yet having seen that I was holding out the photograph to him. All at once he caught sight of it, and held it for a moment between his hands. His face expressed a stupefaction which amounted to stupidity. ‘Is this the girl you love?’ he said at length in a tone in which astonishment was curbed by his fear of offending me….. What had struck Robert when his eyes fell upon Albertine’s photograph was not the thrill of wonderment that overcame the Trojan elders on seeing Helen go by and saying: ‘One glance from her eclipses all our ills’, but precisely the opposite impression which may be expressed by: ‘What, it’s for this that he has worked himself into such a state, has grieved himself so, has done so many idiotic things!” [III. 946]

Because the obsessive jealousy of the narrator continues for hundreds of pages and he finds the most outrageous Sapphic interpretation in every innocent action, the reader tends to sympathize with Albertine and understand why she feels like a captive. The relationship between Marcel and Albertine is one of the longest and most tortured in literature and it is with a great sense of relief that most readers greet Françoise’s sudden announcement that “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone.” [III. 425] and are delighted to learn that Albertine has finally run away and left him. However, the agony is not yet over. He spends a frantic period of sending his friends all over France, trying to find her and persuade her to return.

But of course she does not return. Albertine is dead and the narrator spends the final half of The Fugitive learning to forget her. But his obsessions do not die and he continues delving into her secrets and questioning her friends about her sexual proclivities. Apparently all his most fevered imaginings were well founded. Albertine had been devoted to every form of depravity from an early age. She even had an arrangement with the odious Morel to seduce young fisher-girls and farmers daughters and take them off to brothels for group sex. But as more and more of her closely guarded secrets are revealed the passage of time dulls the pain till eventually, Marcel feels nothing but indifference.

At the end of the novel, when Marcel has decided that he is finally going to write his great work of art he backhandedly immortalizes Albertine as his inspiration.

“Certainly, it was to her face, as I had seen it for the first time beside the sea, that I traced back certain things which I should no doubt include in my book. And in a sense I was right to trace them back to her, for if I had not walked along the front that day, if I had not got to know her, all these ideas would never have been developed …. But the pages I would write were something that Albertine, particularly the Albertine of those days, would quite certainly never have understood. … Had she been capable of understanding my pages, she would, for that very reason, not have inspired them.” [III. 954]

In his original 3-volume plan for the novel, the character of Albertine did not exist. She was added during the War when Proust added a further four volumes to the final novel. It was written following a period during which he had conducted a passionate but suffocating affair with his chauffer, Albert. Eventually Albert abandoned Proust, he needed ‘to escape’, and was killed shortly after in  flying accident.

from Proust for Everybody
a work in progress by Patrick Alexander