The narrator decides to marry Albertina

The narrator’s decision to marry Albertine is a sudden reversal of his declared intention to break with her. It grows out of his fear that she may pursue relationships beyond his reach: a future he had framed as freedom becomes intolerable once he imagines her leaving for Trieste and returning to the company of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. The decision does not resolve that uncertainty; it turns jealousy into a proposal of shared life.

The decision to separate

The break begins as a settled plan. The narrator tells his mother that he has irrevocably decided not to marry Albertine and will soon stop seeing her. His mother is pleased, and he is glad to have reassured her before she leaves for Combray. Her journey is to attend the deathbed of one of her mother’s sisters, while he is to remain behind and continue taking the sea air, as his grandmother would have wished.

On the return from La Raspelière, with the other passengers having left the carriage, he means to speak seriously to Albertine. But his resolve is entangled with another plan: he expects Andrée to return to Balbec and imagines keeping her affection while avoiding any obligation to marry her. He recognizes that he must make his position clear to Albertine, yet his intentions are already divided between an announced rupture and the desire to retain other possibilities.

Jealousy fixes on Trieste

The prospect of Albertine going to Trieste changes the emotional meaning of departure. The narrator’s attention fastens on the possibility that she will spend Christmas there with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. He knows his jealousy is attaching itself arbitrarily to a place: even if Albertine is elsewhere, he thinks, she could still meet other women. Yet Trieste becomes more than a destination. It stands for an unknown world of Albertine’s memories, friendships, and earlier attachments, from which he feels excluded.

That imagined world reverses his former attraction to distant places. Trieste no longer appears as a place of beauty or promise; in his jealousy it becomes a hostile city he would like erased from reality. The fear spreads beyond the specific possibility of travel. Now that Albertine’s intimacy with Mlle Vinteuil has become almost certain to him, he imagines that whenever she is away she may be with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, Bloch’s sister and cousin, or other women. Even the possibility that Albertine might see the Bloch girls that evening is enough to intensify his distress.

From imagined loss to a proposal

When Albertine says she will stay with him for the next few days, the narrator does not treat that assurance as enough. Instead, he proposes that they return to Paris together and asks whether she would like to live with him there for a while. His stated aim is to prevent her from being alone, at least temporarily, and thereby to prevent her from meeting Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. The proposed arrangement would in practice leave Albertine alone with him, since his mother is also away.

His mother’s absence follows from her journey to Combray. Although she has little affection for her aunt, she goes because she feels she should have visited sooner and wishes to act in the spirit of her own mother. Her journey thus leaves the narrator with a practical opportunity to keep Albertine close, while also echoing the family loyalties and memories that shape his mother’s actions.

The reversal and its significance

When his mother finds him crying, she reminds him that he had said Albertine bored him and that he was glad to have abandoned the idea of marrying her. He answers that this is not the reason for his distress. He has spent the night calculating his future and reconsidering what Albertine’s longstanding attachment to Mlle Vinteuil’s friend might mean. In his mind, this connection was not innocent; he believes Albertine may have been initiated into a pattern of desire and may still be pursuing it when he is absent. These are the narrator’s suspicions, not independently confirmed facts.

He then tells his mother that he had deceived both her and himself in good faith the previous day, and that he has changed his mind. He insists that he must marry Albertine and cannot live without doing so. The force of the decision lies in its reversal: the less certain he feels about Albertine’s fidelity, the more urgently he seeks to bind her to him. Marriage appears not as the conclusion of restored trust, but as a response to the prospect of separation and the limits of his knowledge of her private life.