My Years With Proust - Day 459

Once we were in the carriages which had come to meet us, we no longer had any idea where we were; the roads were not lighted; we could tell by the louder noise of the wheels that we were passing through a village, we thought we had arrived, we found ourselves once more in the open country, we heard bells in the distance, we forgot that we were in evening dress, and we had almost fallen asleep when, at the end of this long stretch of darkness which, what with the distance we had travelled and the hitches and delays inseparable from railway journeys, seems to have carried us on to a late hour of the night and almost half-way back to Paris, suddenly, after the crunching of the carriage wheels over a finer gravel had revealed to us that we had turned into the drive, there burst forth, reintroducing us into a social existence, the dazzling lights of the drawing-room, then of the dining-room where we were suddenly taken aback by hearing eight o'clock strike when we imagined we were long since past it, while the endless dishes and vintage wines would circulate among the men in black and the women with bare arms, at a dinner glittering with light like a real metropolitan dinner-party but surrounded, and thereby changed in character, by the strange and sombre double veil which, diverted from their primal solemnity, the nocturnal rural, maritime hours of the journey there and back had woven for it. Soon indeed the return journey obliged us to leave the radiant and quickly forgotten splendour of the lights drawing-room for the carriages, in which I arranged to be with Albertine so that she should not be alone with other people, and often for another reason as well, which was that we could both do many things in a dark carriage, in which the jolts of the downward drive would moreover give us an excuse, should a sudden ray of light fall upon us, for clinging to one another.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1132-1133

Proust describes, in very Proustian lush detail, the trip to and from a dinner party, and managed to convey the sense of confusion when you are travelling and have completely lost track of time and space.  I love the intricate and intimate description, which in the end makes his earthy comment that "we could both do many things in a dark carriage" all the more carnal.  In literature and in cinema success is so often tied to pacing.  One killing after another in a slasher film becomes surprisingly tedious very quickly, but if you divide it up with humorous or sexual scenes the action is that much more vibrant.  Here Proust has managed to do something similar, but makes that one line jump off the page after the rich detail of the description of the trip and the party. Now that we're over a couple thousand pages into Remembrance of Things Past I had just about convinced myself that while Marcel was a very jealous lover, he wasn't a particularly passionate one.  This makes me think that there may be more to Marcel than meets the eye.