The Captive

In The Captive, Proust's narrator is living with Albertine in his mother's Paris apartment. He is chronically concerned about who she may or may not love. In The Fugitive, Albertine is irretrievably lost to him, and he retreats to Venice, where he receives a telegram from Gilberte, Swann's red-haired daughter. Rich with irony, the story inspires meditations on desire, homosexuality, music, and the art of introspection. The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions.