My Years With Proust - Day 439

Sometimes it was I who would go to fetch my beloved, a little later in that case; she would be waiting for me under the arcade of the market at Maineville.  At first I could not make her out; I would begin to feat that she might not be coming, that she had misunderstood me.  Then I would see her, in her white blouse with blue spots, spring into the car by my side with the light bound of a young animal rather than a girl.  And it was like a dog too that she would begin to caress me interminably.  When night had completely fallen and, as the manager of the hotel remarked to me, the sky was all "studied" with stars, if we did not go for a drive in the forest with a bottle of champagne, then,heedless of the late strollers on the faintly light esplanade, who in any case could not have seen anything a yard away on the dark sand, we would stretch out in the shelter of the dunes; that same body whose suppleness contained all the feminine, marine and sportive grace of the girls whom I had seen that first time against the horizon of the waves, I held pressed against my own, beneath the same rug, by the edge of the motionless sea divided by a tremulous path of light; and we listened to it with the same untiring pleasure, whether it held back its breath, suspended for so long that one thought the reflux would never come, or whether at last it gasped out at our feet the long-awaited murmur.  Finally I would take Albertine back tp Parville.  When we reached her house, we were obliged to break off our kisses for fear that someone might see us; not wishing to go to bed, she would return with me to Balbec, from whence I would take her back for the last time to Parville; the chauffeurs of those early days of the motor-car were people who went to bed at all hours.  And indeed I would return to Balbec only with the first dews of morning, along this time, but still surrounded with the presence of my beloved, gorged with an inexhaustible provision of kisses.  On my table in would find a telegram or a postcard.  Albertine again!  She had written them at Quetteholme when I had gone off by myself in the car, to tell me that she was thinking of me.  I would re-read them as I got into bed.  Then, above the curtains, I would glimpse the bright streak of the daylight and would say to myself that we must be in love with one another after all, since we had spent the night in one another's arms.  Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1052-1053

And just when I convince myself that Marcel never actually loved Albertine, and that instead he just wanted to control her, I come across this passage.  We should always remember that love is a madness, or, as Sherwood Anderson framed it, a "divine madness."  It makes us far more than we are, for better or for worse.  I think back to the early stages of every love affair I've ever had and those mad days when you would move heaven and earth to be in each other's presence, whether directly (taking two more one floor rides in an elevator just to maul each other in relative privacy) or indirectly (manufacturing fake errands so that you could swing by your office to send one more flirty email).  Very early in Remembrance of Things Past Proust talks, sadly and prophetically, about the dangers of routine (I think it was routine, but I'll go back and check), and how it ruins love and intimacy and desire and spontaneity.

Oh, and if the following passages doesn't make you want to go knock off a quickie in the sand dunes you're hopeless: " . . . heedless of the late strollers on the faintly light esplanade, who in any case could not have seen anything a yard away on the dark sand, we would stretch out in the shelter of the dunes; that same body whose suppleness contained all the feminine, marine and sportive grace of the girls whom I had seen that first time against the horizon of the waves, I held pressed against my own, beneath the same rug, by the edge of the motionless sea divided by a tremulous path of light; and we listened to it with the same untiring pleasure, whether it held back its breath, suspended for so long that one thought the reflux would never come, or whether at last it gasped out at our feet the long-awaited murmur." This is one of the most sexually-charged moments in Remembrance of Things Past when, if you're not paying attention, you would just assume that he's talking terrain.