I read The Fugitive by Marcel Proust.
The sixth and shortest volume of In Search Of Lost Time begins where the fifth ends: the narrator wakes to find his house guest and love interest Albertine has packed her things and gone.
He believes her disappearance is temporary and that she will return when he promises to make certain concessions. But she does not. He becomes desperate and writes a letter which he hopes will convince her to come back. She replies that if he needs her so badly, she will return.
Instead of accepting, he writes a letter which retracts his former position and insists that they would be unhappy together and are better off apart. He hopes this will make him appear independent. However, his juvenile plan backfires: she writes a beautiful, short letter, thanking him for the kind words and telling him she will forever remember their final night of twofold twilights: the end of the day and the end of their relationship.
He invites a female friend of theirs named Andree to live with him and writes Albertine telling her so, hoping to stir jealousy and entice her to return.
The next letter he receives is news that she was thrown from a horse and killed.
He receives two more letters from Albertine, both sent before her death. The first is her approval of Andree and best wishes. The second entreats that if he has not yet written to Andree and it is not too late to return, she will take the train at once.
Naturally, this devastates him.
He enters Albertine's former room and finds two similarly styled, engraved rings. The housekeeper insists that they are gifts from Albertine's lover.
He sends a friend named Aime to investigate these allegations and learns more than he feared about Albertine's nature. It is clear to him that he didn't know her. He compares her to a spy who conceals her identity and an alien living among humans.
Despite his disgust with Albertine's behavior, everything he reads, touches or sees reminds him of her. Ordinary moments they spent together become extraordinary when recalled. In his dreams, he forgives her and tells her all the things he wishes he said when she was alive. His greatest fantasy is Albertine writes to him that she has recovered from her riding accident and will come to live with him.
After much time passes and his life regains normality, he receives a telegram which reads: You think me dead. I wish to meet and talk marriage. Albertine.
Because he has no emotional response to the content, he is certain that his feelings for Albertine have faded. This is fortunate because, cruelly, the telegraph office made a mistake and the message was from Gilberte – a friend who had not corresponded with him for a long time – not Albertine.
Gilberte is the daughter of Charles Swann (the man who gives the first volume of In Search Of Lost Time its name.) She is ashamed of this connection because Swann was disfavored by society's elite (including the Guermantes, who lend their name to the third volume.) She marries the narrator's friend named Robert de Saint-Loup – who hides a secret similar to Albertine's – and is widowed some time thereafter.
The narrator rekindles his friendship with Gilberte and walks with her along paths which once stirred fond memories. Gilberte confesses that she once loved him but he missed the signs. Sadly, he is not interested in her nor nostalgic for The Guermantes and Swann's Way.
The narrator is never identified but it is hinted that he shares at least his first name with the author. He is an aspiring author himself and often complains of writer's block. Proust does not suffer from this malady: his seven volume magnum opus about time and memory earns distinction as the longest novel ever written.
The earlier volumes detail the narrator's friendships with artists, authors, actresses and Swann, the Dreyfus case and the most famous sweet cake in literature.
