The rule that she must not enter my room until I had rung amused her greatly. As she had adopted our family habit of quotation, and in following it drew upon the plays in which she had acted at her convent and for which I had expressed a liking, she always compared me to Assuerus:
And death is the reward of whoso dares
To venture in his presence unawares . . . .
None if exempt; nor is there any whom
Or rank of sex can save from such a doom;
Even I myself . . .
Like all the rest, I by this law am bound;
And, to address him, I must first be found
By him, or he must call me to his side.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 10
As I've proposed several times, there's always more to Albertine than meets the eye, and I hope that Proust reveals more in this book and the next. Here she is quoting from the Racine play Esther. While there is some debate about the actual identity of Assuerus (some have argued that he's Xerxes, although that seems unlikely) it is told in the Old Testament that he is a Persian king. Esther ensnares and manipulates him, and in the process saves the life of her father Mordecai and, by extension, the Jewish population living within the Persian empire. By calling Marcel Assuerus, Albertine is not too subtly, although apparently gently, accusing him of being a bit of a tyrant. And if she's quoting Racine she clearly is brighter than Marcel proposes. It reminds me of when my ex-wife changed my name in her phone to Don Draper, which I don't think was a commentary on my business acumen.
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