My Year With Proust - Day 198

   "I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes.  The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me. having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum.  I imagined her doing so.  And indeed on those evenings when some changed in the atmosphere or in my own state of health brought to the surface of my consciousness some forgotten scroll on which were recorded impressions of other days, instead of profiting by the forces of renewal that had been generated in me, instead of using them to unravel in my own mind thoughts which as a rule escaped me, instead of setting myself at last to work, I preferred to relate aloud, to excogitate in a lively, external manner, with a flow of invention as useless as was my declamation of it, a whole novel crammed with adventure, in which the Duchess, fallen upon misfortune, came to implore assistance from me - who had become, by a converse change of circumstances, rich and powerful.  And when I had thus spent hours on end imagining the circumstances, rehearsing the sentences with which I should welcome the Duchess beneath my roof, the situation remained unaltered; I had, alas, in reality, chosen to love the woman who in her own person combined perhaps the greatest possible number of different advantages; in whose eyes, accordingly, I could not hope to cut any sort of figure; for she was as rich as the richest commoner - and noble also; not to mention that personal charm which set her at the pinnacle of fashion, made her among the rest a sort of queen."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 65

So much of the early stages of The Guermantes Way, the third volume in Remembrance of Things Past, centered on Proust's love, or at least fascination, with Mme de Guermantes.  As we've seen, he maneuvers ways to bump into her in the street every morning.  This short section reveals one of the great truisms: our desire that the person we love suffers some sort of calamity which brings them under our control.  It's not quite the same phenomenon as our fond wish that we ourselves suffer a disaster to make people who had doubted us feel guilty, such as the famous "soap poisoning" scene from A Christmas Story.  Rather, in this particular case if the person falls upon hard times, either financially or physically, it serves two purposes: first off, it makes them, in our fantasy world, dependent upon us whereas our chief frustration up that point has been our inability to control them; and, secondly, it makes us appear saint-like, compassionate and endlessly forgiving and generous, and then she, and the entire world, will finally understand our suffering.  I'd like to say that this ends in the teenage years, but I know my version of this stretched well into middle age.