My Years With Proust - Day 468

. . . I still clung to life; but I knew that I had nothing now but bitterness to expect from it.  I ran to the lift, heedless of the hour, to ring for the lift-boy who acted as nightwatchman, and asked him to go to Albertine's room and to tell her that I had something of importance to say to her, if she could come see me there.  "Mademoiselle says she would rather come to you," was the answer he brought me.  "She will be here in a moment." And presently, sure enough, in came Albertine in her dressing gown.

   "Albertine," I said to her in a low voice, warning her not to raise hers so as not to wake my mother, from whom we were separated only by that partition whose thinness, to-day a nuisance, because it confined us to whispers, resembled in the past, when it so clearly echoed my grandmother's intentions, a sort of musical diaphanousness, "I'm ashamed to have disturbed you.  Listen to me.  To make you understand, I must tell you something which you do not know.  When I came here, I left a woman whom I was to have married, who was ready to sacrifice everything for me.  She was to start a journey this morning, and every day for the last week I have been wondering whether I should have the courage not to telegraph to her that I was coming back.  I did have the courage, but it made me so wretched that I thought I would kill myself.  That is why I asked you last night if you would come and sleep at Balbec.  If I had to die, I should have liked to bid you farewell."

   And I let the tears which my fiction rendered natural flow freely.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1155-1156

Marcel finally has it out with Albertine, sort of.  None of us like to breakup with someone, and so we often consciously or unconsciously misbehave, hoping that she'll break up with us and we can maintain the fabricated moral high ground.  To facilitate the breakup we also sometimes invent stories to facilitate the process, although I think that everyone past the seventh grade could routinely come up with a better effort than Marcel's. Still when you're in love or in pain, or in love and in pain, it's hard to think logically, so we shouldn't be too hard on Marcel.  The excuse itself might have been lame, but the scene itself is set up nicely, including the thin partition separating him from his mother and the reminder of the young Marcel tapping on the wall to contact his grandmother.

Note to self: try and use the word diaphanousness more in polite company.  I suspect if I tried to use it in impolite company I would get punched.  I often will present challenges to my friends to use a specific word or phrase during a faculty senate or Core division meeting with the promise of an adult beverage as a reward.  I think if one of them can bring in "musical diaphanousness" it might qualify for two adult beverages.