Alas! Albertine was several persons to me. The most mysterious, most simple, most loathsome of these revealed herself in the answer which she made me with an air of disgust, and the exact words of which, to tell the truth, I could not quite make out (even the opening words, for she did not finish her sentence). I did not succeed in reconstituting them until some time later when I had guessed what was in her mind. We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them.
"Thank you for nothing! Spend money on them! I'd a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way to go and get myself (me faire casser) . . ."
At once her face flushed crimson, she looked appalled, and she put her hand over her mouth as though she could have thrust back the words which she had just uttered and which I had quite failed to catch.
"What did you say, Albertine?"
"Nothing, I was half asleep and talking to myself."
"Not a bit of it, you were wide awake."
"I was thinking about asking the Verdurins to dinner, it's very good of you."
"No, I mean what you said just now."
She gave me endless versions, none of which tallied in the least, not simply with her words which, having been interrupted, remained obscure to me, but with the interruption itself and the sudden flush that had accompanied it.
"Come, my darling, that's not what you were going to say, otherwise why did you stop short?"
"Because I felt that my request was presumptuous."
"What request?"
"To be allowed to give a dinner-party."
"No, no, that's not it, there's no need for ceremony between you and me."
"Indeed there is, we ought never to take advantage of the people we love. In any case, I swear to you that that was all."
On the one hand it was still impossible for me to doubt her sworn word; on the other hand her explanations did not satisfy my reason. I continued to press her. "Anyhow, you might at least have the courage to finish what you were saying, you stopped short at casser."
"No, leave me alone!"
"But why?"
"Because it's dreadfully vulgar, I'd be ashed to say such a thing in front of you. I don't know what I was thinking of. The words - I don't even know what they mean, I heard them used in the street one day by some very low people - just came into my head without rhyme or reason. I had nothing to do with me or anybody else, I was simply dreaming aloud." . . .
. . . But while she was speaking there continued within me, in that curiously alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that have barely touched us succeed in carving an impression, in which our sleeping hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain), the quest for what it was that she had meant by that interrupted sentence, the missing end of which I was so anxious to know. And all of a sudden an appalling word, of which I had never dreamed, bust upon me: le pot.* I cannot say that it came to me in a single flash, as when, in a long passive submission to an incomplete recollection, while one tries gently and cautious to unfold it, one remains ravelled in it, glued to it. No, in contrast to my habitual method of recall, there were, I think, two parallel lines of search: the first took into account not merely Albertine's words, but her look of exasperation when I had offered her a sum of money with which to give a grand dinner, the look which seemed to say: "Thank you, the idea of spending money upon things that bore me, when without money I could do things that I enjoy doing!" And it was perhaps the memory of the look she had given me that made me alter my method in order to discover the end of her unfinished sentence. Until then I had been hypnotised by the last word, casser. Break what? Break, break, break. And all at once her look, and her shrug, when I had suggested that she should give a dinner-party sent me back to the words that had preceded. And immediately I saw that she had not simply said casser but me faire casser. Horror! It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest or prostitutes, who consents to such a thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself presently to a man. Albertine had not been lying when she told me that she was half-dreaming. Her mind elsewhere, forgetting that she was with me, impulsively she had shrugged her shoulders and begun to speak as she would have spoken to one of those women, perhaps to one of my budding girls. And abruptly recalled to reality, crimson with shame, pushing back into her mouth what she was about to say, desperately ashamed, she had refused to utter another word.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 343- 346
*Note on page 1110: "Slang for anus. What Albertine been about to say was "me faire casser le pot," an obscene slang expression meaning to have anal intercourse (passive)."
Proust tells us, "We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them." This is his way of explaining the process wherein he had solved the mystery of Albertine starting, but then breaking off, a sentence, which she, no matter how he pesters her, is willing to share with him. All she will tell him is, ""Because it's dreadfully vulgar, I'd be ashed to say such a thing in front of you. I don't know what I was thinking of. The words - I don't even know what they mean, I heard them used in the street one day by some very low people - just came into my head without rhyme or reason." In the end (some pun intended) Marcel figures out that she's talking about anal sex, or at least her wish for him to leave her "free for once in a way to go and get myself (me faire casser)" le pot. As I proposed yesterday, either Marcel is one of the great linguistic Sherlock Holmses of his age or he's more than a bit of a lunatic. Or it could well be that Albertine, smarter than she's given credit for and certainly more clever than Marcel realizes, is just winding him up. A couple moments earlier in the argument she had asked if Mlle Vinteuil was at the Verdurins' party, knowing that he would immedately think of Mlle Vinteuil's friend and their alleged sapphic relationship with Albertine. Is she doing the same thing here, throwing out a vague reference to both distract him and also torture him? As he reveals to the reader, "And immediately I saw that she had not simply said casser but me faire casser. Horror! It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest or prostitutes, who consents to such a thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself presently to a man." If that was her goal, Albertine succeeded admirably.
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