My Year With Proust - Day 350

   I decided not to question Albertine as to how she had spent the evening, feeling that I should only reproach her and that we should have no time left, seeing how late it was already, to be reconciled sufficiently to proceed to kisses and caresses.  And so it was with these that I chose to begin from the first moment.  The loss of all equanimity, of all sense of directions, that we feel when we are kept waiting, and, taking the place inside us of the calm spirit in which we had been picturing her coming as so great a pleasure, prevents us from deriving any from it.  Albertine was in the room: my disordered nerves, continuing to flutter, were still awaiting her.

   "I want a nice kiss, Albertine."

   "As many as you like," she said to me in her good-natured way.  I had never seen her looking so pretty.

   "Another?" she asked.

   "Why,you know it's a great, great pleasure to me."

   "And a thousand times greater to me," she replied.  "Oh, what a pretty book-cover you have there!"

   "Take it, I give it to you as a keep-sake."

   "You really are nice . . ."

   One would be cured for ever of romanticism if one could make up one's mind, in thinking of the woman one loves, to try to be the man one will be when one no longer loves her.  Gilberte's book-cover, her agate marble, must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward state, since now they were to me a book-cover, a marble like any others.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 764-765

Albertine has finally arrived and Marcel puts aside his anger and impatience, at least on the surface, because he knows (or at least he believes) if he confronts her she'll just lie, an argument will erupt, and then he'll have no chance for sex.  At least at this point it looks like they're relationship has truly come full circle.  There's always that dangerous moment when you start making love to your booty call, but it seems that he's moved beyond that and his love for Albertine is just a memory.  And it's not just her, because he very casually gives her a book cover that he had received as a gift from Gilberte.  As Proust tells us, "One would be cured for ever of romanticism if one could make up one's mind, in thinking of the woman one loves, to try to be the man one will be when one no longer loves her." Of course, if you can convince yourself, and more important her, that you know love her then you'll be irresistible to her.