My Year With Proust - Day 44

   "In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle Vinteuil felt the sting of her friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and ran away; and then they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls.  At last Mlle Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the sofa, where she was screen from me by the stooping body of her friend.  But the latter now had her back turned to the little table on which the old music-master's portrait had been arranged.  Mlle Vinteuil realized that her friend would not see it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she herself had just noticed it for the first time: 'Oh! there's my father's picture looking at us; I can't think who can have put it there; I'm sure I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it.'

   I remembered the words that Mlle Vinteuil had used to my parents in apologizing for an obtrusive sheet of music.  This photograph was, of course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical response: 'Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any longer.  D'you think he'd start whining, d'you think he'd pack you out of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?' . . .

   . . . But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with affection by a woman who had just shown herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held out a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter would have done to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty, in robbing M. Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred rights of fatherhood.  her friend took the girl's head in her hands and placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection she had for Mlle Vinteuil, as well as by the desire to bring what distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.

   'Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror?' she said, taking up the photograph.  She murmured in Mlle Vinteuil's ear something that I could not distinguish.

   'Oh! You would never dare.'

   'Not dare to spit on it? On that?' shouted the friend with deliberate brutality.

   I heard no more, for Mlle Vinteuil, who now seemed weary, awkward, preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back to the window and drew the shutters close; but I knew now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil, in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime, on account of his daughter, had received from her after his death."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 171-172

This scene gets darker and more complicated, and we're not done with it yet, even if the shutters are now closed. Mlle Vinteuil's "discovery" of her father's portrait paints her relationship with her friend in an entirely different light.  Does she love her friend or does she just hate her father?  We'll keep discussing this issue in the next post as well, but it makes me wonder how much of relationships are based on the sadism that Proust discussed.  You'll see one partner deliberately make the one wait for no reason, and it would be one thing if it were just power-politics, but often it's just the relationship equivalent of pulling the flies off wings.  And how much of the early sexual energy of a relationship is just a sadistic desire to have more sex than the previous relationship, and engage in exactly the same type of sexual acts that you would not have been caught dead doing with your previous partner. So the inevitable decline in sexual frequency is less a slackening of desire but rather a cooling of the sadistic drive that fueled the early period.