Marcel dispatches Robert de St. Loup to offer Albertine's aunt 30,000 francs to persuade the fugitive to return. More directly, he tells Albertine that he had ordered a yacht and a Rolls for her; what a pity they won't be used! And he plays the jealousy card by suggesting that Andee could replace her. (He never thinks to say: "I love you. Please come back!") Alas, the next news he gets is from the aunt, telling him that Albertine was killed in a fall from her horse. This sets Marcel off on a hundred-page revel in the metaphysics of grief. He knows he's healing when he sees a provocative blonde in the street and sets out to learn her name: Forcheville. She proves to be his childhood sweetheart, Gilberte Swann, whose mother has remarried the impoverished nobleman who was sniffing about her in Swann's Way, and who as part of the deal adopted Gilberte. Marcel then does take up with Andree, who spins all sorts of lurid stories about the dead girl, some of them involving the violinist Morel. Marcel and his mother make his long-delayed pilgrimage to Venice, and Gilberte marries St. Loup-who like almost every character in the novel, is now revealed to be a homosexual. Marcel visits Mme. de St. Loup at Tansonville and learns, among other things, that when he first spied her on those premises as a boy, the gesture she flipped him wasn't a dismissal but an invitation to the ball."