The Intermittencies of the Heart

The Intermittencies of the Heart is the title and governing idea of the Balbec sequence in which the narrator suddenly recovers the living presence of his grandmother in memory and, through that recovery, understands that he has lost her. The phrase describes more than fluctuating emotion: memory can remain dormant, then reinstate an earlier self so completely that grief arrives belatedly, as a discovery. The episode makes the heart’s apparent continuity deceptive, and makes the return of pain both a wound and evidence that the past has become present again.

The title and its central idea

The title appears over the sequence of the narrator’s second stay at Balbec. Its central insight is that the past is not always consciously possessed simply because it can be named or recalled in general terms. The narrator has thought and spoken about his grandmother after her death, yet those thoughts had not restored the particular person he loved. The memory of her had remained latent; only a renewed context of feeling brings it back with its former force.

The narrator connects these interruptions of memory with interruptions of the heart. He questions the comforting idea that every inner treasure—past joys and sorrows alike—is permanently available within the self. If memories persist, they may lie in an inaccessible region, displaced from consciousness by other memories. When their original context of sensations returns, they can in turn displace what is incompatible with them and install the self that once experienced them. The title thus names a discontinuous inner life in which the person of the present may not have access to the emotional reality of a former self.

Balbec and the return of the grandmother

The return happens on the first night of the narrator’s second visit to Balbec. Suffering from cardiac fatigue, he bends down cautiously to remove his boots. The physical circumstance recalls the first evening of his earlier stay, when his grandmother had stooped to help him. With that remembered scene comes a sudden upheaval: sobbing and tears break through, and he recognizes her face as it had been when she was alive and concerned for him.

This is not the grandmother whom he had been surprised and remorseful to find himself scarcely missing. It is the real, living grandmother whose presence he had last experienced after her stroke in the Champs-Élysées. The memory arrives involuntarily and restores her not as a general idea or a name, but as the person who had once comforted him. Precisely because that restoration feels real, he becomes conscious of her death for the first time in its full emotional meaning, more than a year after her burial.

The episode exposes the mismatch between factual chronology and emotional time. By the calendar, his grandmother has been dead for more than a year; by the returning self’s experience, the earlier evening at Balbec is almost immediate. The narrator describes time as if it consisted of distinct, parallel lines: the self who had sought refuge in his grandmother’s arms reappears without passing through the intervening period. The present self cannot simply combine all its former selves into one continuous experience. Each has its own memories and desires, and may temporarily make the others inaccessible.

Grief, guilt, and the work of memory

Once the grandmother’s living image returns, the narrator’s grief also recalls his conduct toward her. He remembers using displays of suffering to draw her attention, and then supposing that his kisses could undo the distress he had caused. He recalls a particular injury: when Saint-Loup took her photograph, he had made impatient remarks about her pose and appearance. Her face had tightened at his words. The recollection now hurts because he can no longer repair that moment or console her with the affection he once assumed would erase it.

He does not try to soften this pain by treating his grandmother as merely absent, as though she might return or remain personally accessible through the photograph. Instead, he accepts the suffering in the form in which the sudden memory has brought it. The pain, however cruel, is proof that the memory is present within him. He understands that recalling the dead also means recalling the injuries one inflicted on them: since the dead exist only in the living, the blows remembered after death continue to strike the survivor. His grief is therefore both attachment and self-accusation, and its force confirms that the recovered memory is not a neutral image.

The distinction between this recovered memory and the preceding forgetfulness is decisive. Forgetfulness had not preserved a truthful, peaceful version of the past; it had left the narrator with conventional and neutral substitutes, unable to recreate a real moment of life. He suspects that the mind’s instinct for self-preservation may begin to build defenses against pain even while its first shock is still present. Yet any truth he might draw from his loss, he believes, must come from the particular, spontaneous impression of this return, not from the blankness that preceded it.

Sleep and the limits of conscious control

The passage extends the pattern into sleep. After falling asleep, the narrator experiences a dream in which grief and remorse are intensified rather than managed by waking intelligence. In the dream he seeks his grandmother, fears that she has been left alone, and remembers having failed to write to her. He searches for her address and calls on his father for reassurance. The dream’s questions and mistaken assumptions do not cancel the fact of her death; they show how the emotional knowledge of loss can coexist with older expectations and guilt.

Sleep also unsettles ordinary measures of time. Elsewhere in the narrative, after a deep sleep following dinners at La Raspelière, the narrator takes what seem to be repeated attempts to ring for the valet as if they were real; only the final ring has actually occurred. Awakening requires him to fit an obscure stretch of sleep into the framework of time, and, without an external point of reference, he may fall asleep again. This account parallels the Balbec recollection: conscious time cannot guarantee a continuous record of what the self has lived, while sleep and memory can make experiences unavailable, repeat them, or return them in altered temporal order.

The title’s wider reach

The idea is not confined to mourning. During the narrator’s wait for a telephone call from Albertine, he listens in growing anxiety, and the rapid passage from hearing to thought to feeling seems to him like direct communication with the heart. When the call finally comes, his longing and suspicion shape how he interprets her words and whether she will visit. The scene offers a contrasting kind of intermittence: not the return of a past self through remembered sensation, but the present emotional life repeatedly intensified by expectation and frustrated desire.

The narrator’s understanding of Albertine also changes through partial, belated knowledge. On his second visit to Balbec, he begins to suspect that her apparent frivolity and stated social obligations may conceal other reasons for leaving him. Later, Cottard’s observation of Albertine and Andrée dancing gives a new direction to his suspicions; when he confronts Albertine, she denies the allegation, and the narrator reflects that love makes a person both more distrustful and more readily reassured by the beloved’s denial. These episodes do not resolve uncertainty so much as reveal how feeling controls what seems credible. The title’s pattern therefore joins memory and desire without making them identical: each can alter the narrator’s present by making one version of a person or of himself suddenly dominant.

The title’s decisive achievement is to make delayed feeling an event in its own right. The narrator did not fully experience his grandmother’s death when it happened; he experiences it when involuntary memory restores the person whose absence he had not yet emotionally understood. The return cannot undo the loss, and the recovered self cannot remain the only self. But for a moment, memory makes absence present enough to be recognized—and grief becomes the measure of what the narrator had, until then, failed to recover.