The narrator’s jealousy and anxiety about Albertine

The narrator’s jealousy and anxiety about Albertine take shape as an ordeal of waiting: unable to see her or know where she is, he turns a dark strip of glass and a silent telephone into measures of her absence. Her eventual call brings relief, but also sharpens his suspicion and his sense that her life is inaccessible to him. The episode makes jealousy less a settled conviction than a cycle of longing, conjecture, and attempted control.

The vigil and its signs

After returning from a reception, the narrator waits in the hall for Albertine, watching the narrow vertical strip of darkness visible through the glass panel in the front door. Because everyone else in the building has already come home, he imagines that a change from black to gold would mean that Albertine has entered and will soon be with him. He bends forward, fixing his gaze on the strip; it remains dark. The ordinary entrance to the building becomes a threshold on which he projects the arrival he longs for.

The intensity surprises him. He had scarcely thought of Albertine during the Guermantes reception, yet now the possibility of going without a simple physical pleasure causes him acute mental suffering. He recognizes a pattern from earlier attachments, especially his anxious waiting when Gilberte was late. His jealousy is therefore bound up with the recurrence of a familiar fear: that the desired person may not come, and that the self left waiting cannot make the absence bearable.

Objects shaped by absence

When the narrator returns to his room, Françoise approaches to remove the rose from his buttonhole, since he has come away from the party. Her gesture reminds him that Albertine may not arrive and makes him acknowledge that he had wanted to look smart for her. He pulls away, crushing the flower; Françoise’s comment about the spoiled rose irritates him. In his state of expectancy, the presence and speech of another person feel intolerable because they confirm that Albertine is still absent.

He then regrets having so often let Albertine see him unshaved, with several days’ growth of beard, when she had visited before. This concern with his appearance accompanies his fear that she is indifferent and giving him the cold shoulder. To make the room more attractive, he places on the bedside table Gilberte’s turquoise-studded cover, made to hold Bergotte’s booklet. An object long kept close to him in sleep is brought into the room’s present vigil, while the absent Albertine remains the person for whose benefit he is trying to arrange his surroundings.

The narrator’s uncertainty extends beyond the question of whether Albertine will come. He imagines her in an “elsewhere” that may be more agreeable than his company, and admits that this thought wounds him. Though he had told Swann scarcely an hour earlier that he was incapable of jealousy, he now recognizes the beginnings of an anxious need to discover where Albertine spends her time and with whom. The contradiction exposes how little a general declaration about one’s feelings can withstand the experience of waiting for a particular person.

The telephone and the call

Because he hopes Albertine may telephone after supper, the narrator changes the telephone connection so that it reaches his room instead of the usual destination at the porter’s lodge. A receiver placed nearer Françoise’s room would be simpler, but useless: Françoise refuses to use the telephone, even when the occasion is important. The narrator remains still so that he will not miss the instrument’s altered whirring signal, which has replaced the bell to avoid disturbing his parents. In the silence, he notices the clock ticking for the first time in months.

Françoise comes in to tidy the room and talks to him. He detests the trivial continuity of her conversation because his feelings are changing rapidly beneath his outwardly cheerful replies: fear gives way to anxiety, then to despair. He pretends to suffer from rheumatism to explain his unhappy expression. He also worries that Françoise’s quiet voice may cover the call he is waiting for. Once she has gone, he listens again, as his attention passes from hearing a sound to interpreting it and from interpretation to feeling so quickly that he seems to listen with his heart.

At last the telephone whirs. The sound is both mechanical and, to him, sublime; after the long, unrelieved vigil, he springs to answer. Albertine is on the line. Her first question is whether she is disturbing him by calling so late. He restrains his joy, taking the remark as an apology for a visit that may follow, and asks whether she is coming. She says no, unless he absolutely must see her. The call ends the uncertainty of whether she will communicate, but not the larger uncertainty about her intentions or whereabouts.

Suspicion, bargaining, and distance

Albertine says she is near home and far from the narrator; she adds that she had not read his note properly and had only just found it again. He feels sure she is lying. At first, his anger makes him want to inconvenience her rather than simply to see her, and he resists asking directly for what he wants. Her voice arrives mixed with street and public sounds, including a cyclist’s horn, a woman singing, and a distant brass band. These details place her at a remove in surroundings he cannot share, giving his imagined version of her evening the force of a scene while leaving its meaning uncertain.

Their conversation turns on a misunderstanding—or a disputed account—of his note and her answer. Albertine says she thought he had been cross and apologizes; she wishes she had not gone to Phèdre if it was to cause such trouble. The narrator says he is not annoyed about the performance, since he had asked her to attend it. When she offers to call the next day or the day after and make things up, he first tells her not to come for the next few days, claiming that he will not be free for two or three weeks. Then he reverses himself: since he has waited all evening and she is still out, he would rather she come at once, and he will drink coffee to stay awake.

Albertine asks whether the visit can be put off until the next day, and the narrator hears her excuses as words spoken by someone who does not intend to come. He finally says that he will not be free tomorrow or for the next three weeks. When she then says she will come immediately, mentioning that she is at a friend’s house, he doubts the offer’s sincerity and challenges her to decide for herself. She agrees to take a cab and arrive in ten minutes. The exchange shows how their communication becomes a contest of offers and refusals: he tries to compel the visit while presenting himself as indifferent, and each concession can be read as either genuine or tactical.

The hidden life beyond his reach

The call also awakens a deeper fear than the immediate disappointment of a delayed visit. The narrator connects his need for another person to his childhood at Combray, when he wanted to die if his mother sent word through Françoise that she could not come upstairs. He distinguishes that earlier dependence from his desire for Albertine, whose appeal had been associated with the visible, sensuous image he remembers from Balbec. On this evening the two feelings do not fully combine, but their proximity makes the present attachment more painful: longing for Albertine is no longer merely longing for the surface of an adored figure; it has begun to resemble an older need for a loved person’s presence.

From Albertine’s last words over the telephone, the narrator begins to understand that her life is at a great distance from his—not in physical space alone, but in its arrangements and knowledge. He imagines it as a concealed system of defenses, so that efforts to locate the truth repeatedly miss their mark. The comparison expresses his fear that facts and falsehoods are so entangled that he may never disentangle them. He foresees that he could remain ignorant for months or years, and thinks that only confining Albertine might end that ignorance, while immediately acknowledging that prisoners escape. At this point, the prospect of prolonged suffering is still a vague anxiety, but the call has revealed its source: her presence may be secured for a moment, while knowledge of her independent life remains beyond his grasp.

The episode closes by turning from the telephone’s present-day distance toward the narrator’s memory of Albertine at Balbec. As her visit is about to materialize, he recalls the Grand Hotel at Balbec at sunset: the open glass panels, the dining room before the diners have taken their places, and reflections of the last steamer for Rivebelle in a mirror. This remembered setting contrasts with the late-night room where he has been waiting and trying to interpret a voice over a wire. Jealousy thus brings together two Albertines—the remembered figure of Balbec and the woman whose current whereabouts and intentions he cannot know. The distance between them sustains the very longing that her arrival is expected to relieve.