Albertine disparue is the title of the sixth volume of Marcel Proust's

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

 seven part novel, À la recherche du temps perdu

In Search of Lost Time

In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...

. It is also known as La Fugitive (in French) and The Sweet Cheat Gone (in English).

Publication

The final three volumes of the novel were published posthumously and without Proust's final corrections and revisions. The first edition, based on Proust's manuscript, was published as Albertine disparue to prevent it from being confused with Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...

's La Fugitive (1921). http://tempsperdu.com/chronop.html The first definitive edition of the novel in French (1954), also based on Proust's manuscript, used the title La Fugitive. The second, even-more-definitive French edition (1987–89) uses the title Albertine disparue and is based on an unmarked typescript acquired in 1962 by the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Mante-Proust typescript

After the death in 1986 of Proust's niece, Suzy Mante-Proust, her son-in-law discovered among her papers a typescript that had been corrected and annotated by Proust. The late changes Proust made include a small crucial detail and the deletion of approximately 150 pages. This version was published in French (Paris: Grasset, 1987) and translated as Albertine Gone by Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989); the translation is now out of print.

Whether Proust's changes to the manuscript can be integrated into the text of modern editions of Lost Time, remains the subject of contentious debate. Current French editions adopt different approaches to the problem. The 1987 French Pléiade edition preserved the deleted material. However, Jean Milly's 2002 GF Flammarion edition follows Proust's typescript, and restores the sub-title "Sodom and Gomorrah III."

This disagreement reflects the dilemma created by the condition of Albertine disparue/La Fugitive. Proust's edited typescript shows his final intentions, but he did not have time to fully realize those intentions. Thus, the typescript leaves Albertine disparue inconsistent with Time Regained. Moreover, Proust's anticipated (but never realized) further volumes of Sodom and Gomorrah might ultimately have included the deleted material.

For the 2002 English translation of the volume, editor Christopher Pendergast charged Peter Collier with translating the 1954 edition.

External links

• Albertine disparue, French text.