My Year With Proust - Day 42

   "And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at Montjouvain, some year later, an impression which at that time was without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of what cruel side of human passion called 'sadism'.  We shall see, in the due course, that for quite another reason the memory of this impression was to play an important part in my life.  It was during a spell of very hot weather; my parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day, had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the reflection of the tiled roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade and gone to sleep among the bushes on the steep slope that rose up behind the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before, one day when they had gone to call on M. Vinteuil.  It was almost dark when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go away, but I saw Mlle Vinteuil (or thought, at least, that I recognized her, for I had not seen her often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, where she was now growing into a young woman), who probably had just come in, standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made into a little -sitting room for herself.  The window was partly open; the lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I had been hiding there in order to spy upon her. . .

   At the far end of Mlle Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece, stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside, then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close beside her a little table on which she placed the photograph. . ."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 168-169

This scene is as troubling as it is voyeuristic, although I suspect that it was both more troubling and more voyeuristic a century ago upon its publication than it is today.  You probably don't need any more proof of the influence of Proust than the decidedly "modern" and "intimate" feel of this scene.  I'm having flashbacks to scenes from David Lynch's brilliant Blue Velvet.  It focuses on Mlle Vinteuil, who, at least according to Proust's mother, had virtually killed her father.  "Poor M. Vinteuil, he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting his reward.  Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form?  It can only come to him from her."