My Years With Proust - Day 376

Albertine incited Andree to actions which, without going very far, were perhaps not altogether innocent; pained by this suspicion, I would finally succeed in banishing it.  No sooner was I cured of it than it revived under another form.  I had just seen Andree, with one of those graceful gestures that came naturally to her, lay her head lovingly on Albertine's shoulder and kiss her on the neck, half shutting he eyes; or else they had exchanged a glance; or a remark had been made by somebody who had seen them going down together to bathe: little trifles such as habitually float in the surrounding atmosphere where the majority of people absorb them all day long without injury to their health or alteration of their mood, but which have a morbid effect and breed fresh suffering in a nature predisposed to receive them.  Sometimes even without my having seen Albertine, without anyone having spoken to me about her, I would suddenly call to mind some memory of her with Gisele in a posture which had seemed to me innocent at the time but was enough now to destroy the peace of mind that I had managed to recover; I had no longer any need to go and breathe dangerous germs outside - I had, as Cottard would have said, supplied my own toxin.  I thought then of all that I had been told about Swann's love for Odette, of the way in which Swann had been tricked all his life.  Indeed, when I come to think of it, the hypothesis that made me gradually build up the whole of Albertine's character and give a painful interpretation of every moment of a life that I could not control in its entirety, was the memory, the rooted idea of Mme Swann's character, as it had been described to me.  These accounted contributed towards the fact that, in the future, my imagination played with the idea that Albertine might, instead of being the good girl that she was, have had the same immorality, the same capacity for deceit as a former prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me if I had happened to love her.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 832

Marcel, despite his earlier protestations that he was not a jealous person, is certainly suffering over Albertine.  One wonders how much of this is a deliberate attempt on Albertine's part to inflict pain on him.  Proust tells us, "I had just seen Andree, with one of those graceful gestures that came naturally to her, lay her head lovingly on Albertine's shoulder and kiss her on the neck, half shutting he eyes; or else they had exchanged a glance; or a remark had been made by somebody who had seen them going down together to bathe . . ."  If these are unconscious actions on the part of Albertine and Andree then they are remarkably self-confident or largely oblivious to the world around them, and especially the pain that they were causing Marcel.  All of this makes me think that they are consciously doing their best to inflict pain, although, as we've seen, he's hardly blameless and not above treating Albertine fairly shabbily and provoking arguments.  As we know, once jealousy takes over then it seldom ends gracefully, and Marcel even finds himself reflecting back on "some memory of her with Gisele in a posture which had seemed to me innocent at the time but was enough now to destroy the peace of mind that I had managed to recover."  He even begins to compare his situation to that of Swann and his long-standing struggles with Odette, and fears that he, too, will end up "tricked all his life."