The narrator decides to marry Albertine

The narrator’s decision to marry Albertine is a sudden reversal born not of renewed trust but of sharpened jealousy. After a night spent calculating what Albertine’s past might mean, he tells his mother that he has been deceiving himself and insists that marriage is now indispensable. The declaration turns fear of losing Albertine into a determination to secure her, even as the evidence driving it remains his own anxious interpretation.

The Morning Conversation

At Balbec, the narrator’s mother comes to him after waking because she thought she heard someone crying. She finds him out of bed, his eyes full of tears. He takes her head in his arms and admits that the previous day he spoke unfairly about Albertine. His apology is a marked retreat from the earlier claim that Albertine bored him and that he was glad to have abandoned the idea of marrying her.

His mother initially sees no reason for such distress. She points out that she is leaving that day and has little time to comfort him, since the morning of a journey leaves no time even when the luggage is packed. When she draws his attention to the sunrise, she also thinks of her own mother. For the narrator, however, the view of the sea and dawn cannot displace what has seized his mind.

A Memory Reframes Albertine

The scene that overwhelms the present is the narrator’s recollection of Montjouvain. He sees Albertine with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, recalling Albertine’s laughter and her contemptuous words about Mlle Vinteuil’s father. The sunrise framed by the window becomes only a dim veil over that remembered scene. The contrast makes the past feel more forceful than the landscape before him: the mother offers a spectacle associated with his grandmother, while the narrator’s attention is fixed on an image that seems to expose Albertine’s intimate life.

In the night’s wakeful reflection, he treats Albertine’s long-standing affection for Mlle Vinteuil’s friend as evidence that her attachment could not have been innocent. He concludes that Albertine had been initiated into the desire he feared and supposes that she may still be indulging it in his absence. These conclusions are presented as the narrator’s calculations and suspicions, not as independent confirmation of Albertine’s conduct. His decision therefore rests on an unstable mixture of remembered evidence, inference, and the fear that separation would leave him unable to know what she was doing.

The Declaration and Its Stakes

The narrator understands that his announcement will hurt his mother. He recognizes in her serious preoccupation an expression like the one she wore at Combray when she accepted the need to spend the night in his room, and like his grandmother’s expression when she let him drink brandy. Those memories make his mother’s distress legible to him, but do not alter the course he is choosing.

He first says that he will not remain at Balbec as his mother wished, but will leave with her because he does not feel well there and would rather return home. Then he presents the decisive change as settled: after reconsidering the matter through the night, he says he cannot live without marrying Albertine and will not change his mind again. The force of the declaration lies in its urgency and certainty; it is a resolve spoken in response to imagined betrayal, rather than a reconciliation grounded in new knowledge. The scene ends with the decision announced to his mother, while the suspicions that produced it remain unresolved.