“The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other”

“The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other” is the narrator’s account of how desire reveals its priorities through renunciation. A pleasure that appears to be the main attraction may be only a public explanation, concealing the attachment for which someone actually gives it up; the maxim therefore treats choice not as a transparent report of feeling but as evidence that must be read against appearances.

The Choice Behind the Maxim

At the Princesse de Guermantes’s gathering, the narrator is invited by the Duc de Guermantes to supper with a small company of distinguished guests, among them the Princess of Hesse, Mme de Ligne, Mme de Tarente, Mme de Chevreuse, and the Duchesse d’Arenberg. He declines, recalling that Albertine is due to visit him after the theatre. His attention had seemed elsewhere, yet the appointment governs his decision: the socially attractive supper is what he abandons, and the expected meeting is the pleasure that prevails.

The narrator does not claim that he was enjoying himself less at the gathering. His point is that several pleasures can be real at once, while their relative importance emerges only when circumstances force a choice. He formulates the maxim at the moment when an apparently ordinary refusal could be misread. The visible sacrifice may even reassure or mislead a jealous observer, because people can display one reason for giving something up while acting for another. Choice reveals a hierarchy of feeling, but it does not necessarily reveal that hierarchy to onlookers.

From Private Desire to Stronger Passions

The narrator places romantic attachment within a wider succession of competing motives. In peacetime, a soldier might give up social life for love; once war is declared, the passion for fighting can become stronger than love, without requiring an appeal to patriotic duty. The example makes the maxim more than a rule about romantic preference: what counts as the supreme pleasure changes when a more powerful commitment becomes active.

The narrator also considers pleasures that are not yet fully present. Their future possibility can make itself felt as regret or discouragement before it becomes something a person consciously pursues. Thus the hierarchy is neither fixed nor always fully legible in the present. A choice marks what has force at that moment, while later experience may disclose another attachment that had not yet taken shape.

The Cost of Keeping Someone Company

The maxim’s reflection on choice is set beside the cost of the narrator’s late conversation with the seriously ill Swann. Swann has assured him that he is glad to tell his story, but the narrator senses that talking so late, when Swann is unwell, demands an effort that may leave him angry with himself afterward. The comparison is to a spendthrift who regrets extravagance yet cannot prevent himself from repeating it. The pleasure of conversation competes with sleep, health, and routine; its immediate appeal does not erase its cost.

The passage follows that cost into the bodily consequences of age or illness. A disturbance of customary sleeping hours can become a nuisance: the talker continues from politeness or excitement even as the hour for sleep passes, then faces the insomnia and fatigue that follow. The image of visitors received among locked trunks, in a house poised for a journey or removal, gives the conflict a material shape. Pleasure may be genuine while the body’s depleted capacity makes it increasingly difficult to sustain.

A Principle of Reading Appearances

Across these examples, the maxim links desire to sacrifice without reducing every sacrifice to a simple confession. The narrator’s refusal of supper discloses the importance of Albertine’s visit to him, but the same outward behavior could mislead anyone trying to infer another person’s motives. The contrast between apparent and operative pleasures makes the maxim a tool for reading both action and social appearance.

Its scope also changes the meaning of the word “pleasure.” The chosen attachment may be love, conversation, or a more impersonal passion such as fighting; what matters is that it overcomes an alternative whose attraction remains real. The maxim’s lasting force lies in this comparative structure: desire becomes clearest not when a person possesses every option, but when one claim compels the abandonment of another.