The Captive
  • Published:
    1970
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook / Audio
  • Main Genre:
    General Fiction
  • Pages:
    289
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At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seenabove the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks of lightassumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was. The firstsounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came tomy ears dulled and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere orquivering like arrows in the resonant and empty area of a spacious,crisply frozen, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of thefirst tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or settingforth into the blue. And perhaps these sounds had themselves beenforestalled by some swifter and more pervasive emanation which,stealing into my slumber, diffused in it a melancholy that seemed topresage snow, or gave utterance (through the lips of a little personwho occasionally reappeared there) to so many hymns to the glory ofthe sun that, having first of all begun to smile in my sleep, havingprepared my eyes, behind their shut lids, to be dazzled, I awokefinally amid deafening strains of music. It was, moreover, principallyfrom my bedroom that I took in the life of the outer world during thisperiod. I know that Bloch reported that, when he called to see me inthe evenings, he could hear the sound of conversation; as my motherwas at Combray and he never found anybody in my room, he concludedthat I was talking to myself. When, much later, he learned thatAlbertine had been staying with me at the time, and realised that Ihad concealed her presence from all my friends, he declared that hesaw at last the reason why, during that episode in my life, I hadalways refused to go out of doors. He was wrong. His mistake was,however, quite pardonable, for the truth, even if it is inevitable, isnot always conceivable as a whole. People who learn some accuratedetail of another person's life at once deduce consequences which arenot accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation ofthings that have no connexion with it whatsoever.When I reflect now that my mistress had come, on our return fromBalbec, to live in Paris under the same roof as myself, that she hadabandoned the idea of going on a cruise, that she was installed in abedroom within twenty paces of my own, at the end of the corridor, inmy father's tapestried study, and that late every night, beforeleaving me, she used to slide her tongue between my lips like aportion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had the almost sacredcharacter of all flesh upon which the sufferings that we have enduredon its account have come in time to confer a sort of spiritual grace,what I at once call to mind in comparison is not the night thatCaptain de Borodino allowed me to spend in barracks, a favour whichcured what was after all only a passing distemper, but the night onwhich my father sent Mamma to sleep in the little bed by the side ofmy own. So it is that life, if it is once again to deliver us from ananguish that has seemed inevitable, does so in conditions that aredifferent, so diametrically opposed at times that it is almost an opensacrilege to assert the identity of the grace bestowed upon us.When Albertine had heard from Françoise that, in the darkness of mystill curtained room, I was not asleep, she had no scruple aboutmaking a noise as she took her bath, in her own dressing-room. Then,frequently, instead of waiting until later in the day, I would repairto a bathroom adjoining hers, which had a certain charm of its own.Time was, when a stage manager would spend hundreds of thousands offrancs to begem with real emeralds the throne upon which a greatactress would play the part of an empress. The Russian ballet hastaught us that simple arrangements of light will create, if trainedupon the right spot, jewels as gorgeous and more varied. Thisdecoration, itself immaterial, is not so graceful, however, as thatwhich, at eight o'clock in the morning, the sun substitutes for whatwe were accustomed to see when we did not arise before noon. Thewindows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might notbe visible from without, were not of clear glass but clouded with anartificial and old--fashioned kind of frost. All of a sudden, the sunwould colour this drapery of glass, gild it, and discovering in myselfan earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicateme with memories, as though I were out in the open country gazing at ahedge of golden leaves in which even a bird was not lacking. For Icould hear Albertine ceaselessly humming: For melancholy Is but folly, And he who heeds it is a fool.
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EDITIONS
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    • First Edition
    • Jan-1970
    • Vintage
    • Paperback
    • ISBN: 039470598X
    • ISBN13: 9780394705989
    •  
    • Sep-2000
    • Vintage (UK)
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 0099425130
    • ISBN13: 9780099425137
    •  
    • Feb-2014
    • Createspace
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 1495394980
    • ISBN13: 9781495394980
    •  
    • Sep-2015
    • Createspace
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 1517393590
    • ISBN13: 9781517393595
    •  
    • Oct-2012
    • Naxos Audiobooks
    • Audio CD
    • ISBN: 1843796228
    • ISBN13: 9781843796220



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