My Years With Proust - Day 471

It was no longer as of a delightful place where the people were pensive, the sunsets golden, the church bells melancholy, that I thought now of Trieste, but as an accursed city which I should have liked to see instantaneously burned down and eliminated from the real world.  That city was embedded in my heart as a fixed and permanent point.  The thought of letting Albertine leave presently for Cherbourg and Trieste filled me with horror; as did even that of remaining at Balbec. For now that the revelation of her intimacy with Mlle Vinteuil had become almost a certainty, it seemed to me that at every moment when Albertine was not with me (and there were whole days on which, because of her aunt, I was unable to see her), she was giving herself to Bloch's sister and cousin, possibly to other girls as well.  The thought that very evening she might see the Bloch girls drove me mad.  And so, when she told me that for the next few days she would stay with me all the time, I replied: ''But the fact is, I want to go back to Paris.  Won't you come with me?  And wouldn't you like to come and live with us for a while in Paris?"

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1158-1159

Proust reveals more jealous anguish associated with Albertine's sexuality and, at least in Marcel's mind, promiscuity: "For now that the revelation of her intimacy with Mlle Vinteuil had become almost a certainty, it seemed to me that at every moment when Albertine was not with me (and there were whole days on which, because of her aunt, I was unable to see her), she was giving herself to Bloch's sister and cousin, possibly to other girls as well."  If you're suffering that horribly there really only seems to be one logical answer: invite her to move in with you.  Truthfully, what could possibly go wrong?  That said, and to be fair, we've all done exactly the same thing in one form or another.  There comes a time in any relationship (and I suppose you could treat that as a relationship with a person or a relationship with a faith) where you're either all in or all out.  Is the sorrow caused not by the person but rather by your limited relationship with the person?  Can you really just be that much more unhappy by being with them all the time?  Well, yes, of course you can, but you're still better off knowing that.  A few pages earlier Marcel referred to Albertine as both his "sickness" and his "remedy."  Following that logic I suppose there's a point when you also need an inoculation, even if its a dead version of the relationship.