Telephone

The Telephone is the narrator’s instrument of waiting and contact during an anxious night when he hopes Albertine will visit. Installed in his bedroom with a whirring signal in place of its usual bell, it first makes him listen for an answer and then delivers a call that reveals how little communication can settle: Albertine’s voice reaches him together with the sounds of a world he cannot see or verify.

Installation and domestic use

The narrator restores the telephone connection to his room and cuts it off from the route to the porter’s lodge, where calls would normally be switched at that hour. The arrangement lets him hope that Albertine, perhaps having supper with other girls at a café, might telephone him. He does not send anyone to her home; instead, he makes the bedroom the point at which any message from her must arrive.

The instrument is in his room partly because Françoise refuses to use it, however urgent the occasion. The narrator describes this reluctance as a new defect made possible by Bell’s invention: Françoise evades attempts to teach her how to operate it. To avoid disturbing his parents, the usual bell has been replaced by a whirring noise. A receiver in the passage outside Françoise’s room would be simpler, but would not serve the narrator’s purpose of staying close enough to hear the call himself.

Waiting for the signal

Once the telephone is set up, the narrator remains motionless for fear of missing its sound. In the stillness he notices the clock’s ticking for the first time in months. Françoise comes in to tidy the room and talk, but her conversation is intolerable to him: as he waits, his feelings change from fear to anxiety and then despair, while he worries that even her low voice might cover the call he hopes for.

The telephone’s importance lies not in any message already received, but in its capacity to end this suspended waiting. The narrator dismisses Françoise gently so that the noise of her leaving will not drown out the instrument. He then listens again, experiencing the passage from sound through thought to feeling as almost instantaneous—as though he were listening directly with his heart. The awaited call has become the measure of the evening, and its absence keeps the narrator’s attention fixed on a future sound.

The call and its surroundings

At last, after the narrator’s longing has reached what he describes as its culmination, the telephone gives its mechanical whirr. He rushes to answer. It is Albertine, asking whether she is disturbing him by calling so late. He conceals his joy and asks whether she is coming over, while interpreting her remark as an apology for arriving shortly rather than as notice that she will not come.

The call does not give him direct access to Albertine’s circumstances. Her voice is mixed with other sounds: a cyclist’s horn, a woman singing, and a brass band in the distance. Those details make the absent caller seem present in a particular setting, while also emphasizing that the narrator cannot see where she is or know what she is doing. He associates the sounds with the festivities that, after Albertine has attended Phèdre, have kept her from coming to him. The telephone thus connects them acoustically without resolving the uncertainty that governs their exchange.

Negotiation and consequence

Albertine first says that she is near home but far from the narrator, and explains that she has only just found his note again. The narrator is convinced that she is lying. His response is divided: he wants her to come, but also wants to inconvenience her, and initially refuses what he soon intends to obtain. The telephone makes this negotiation possible at a distance, but it does not make either speaker’s intentions transparent.

When Albertine offers to come, saying she is at a friend’s house, the narrator doubts the offer’s sincerity and presses her to choose for herself rather than present the visit as something he requested. She finally says she will take a cab and arrive in ten minutes. The call therefore changes the night’s course: what had been a vigil for a possible message becomes an agreement for a visit. Yet the narrator’s relief remains entangled with suspicion. The device brings Albertine’s voice into his room, not knowledge of the life from which that voice has come.