My Year With Proust - Day 249

   When Francoise had left the room and Albertine was seated once again on my bed:

   "Do you know what I'm afraid of?"  I asked her.  "It is that if we go on like this I may not be able to resist the temptation to kiss you."

   "That would be a happy misfortune."

   I did not respond at once to this invitation.  Another man might even have found it superfluous, for Albertine's way of pronouncing her words was so carnal, so seductive that merely in speaking to you she seemed to be caressing you.  A word from her was a favour, and her conversation covered you with kisses.  And yet it was highly gratifying to me, this invitation.  If would have been ok, indeed, coming from any pretty girl of Albertine's age; but that Albertine should be now so accessible to me gave me more than pleasure, brought before my eyes a series of images fraught with beauty.  I remembered Albertine first of all on the beach, almost painted upon a background of sea, having for me no more real an existence than those theatrical tableaux in which one does not know whether one is looking at the actress herself who is supposed to appear, at an understudy who for the moment is taking her principal's part, or simply a projection.  Then the real woman had detached herself from the beam of light and had come towards me, but only for me to perceive that in the real world she had none of the amorous facility with which one had credited her in the magic tableau.  I had learned that it was not possible to touch her, to kiss her, that one might only talk to her, that for me she was no more a woman than jade grapes, an inedible decoration at one time in fashion on dinner tables, are really fruit.  And now she was appearing to me on a third plane, real as in the second experience that I had had of her but available as in the first; available, and all the more delicious so in that I had long imagined that she was not.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 374-375

Marcel proposes, ". . . if we go on like this I may not be able to resist the temptation to kiss you."  Albertine respondes, "That would be a happy misfortune."  As my excellent friend Mike Kelly would opine, shit is getting real. Or maybe it's not.  It seems like they are still lightly flirting, but there is an earthiness, barely constrained, that is slipping through, although, again, we're still witnessing a lot of posturing.

Proust reflects upon the power of Albertine's words.  "Another man might even have found it superfluous, for Albertine's way of pronouncing her words was so carnal, so seductive that merely in speaking to you she seemed to be caressing you.  A word from her was a favour, and her conversation covered you with kisses."  It's difficult for me to read this passage and not play Lucinda Williams' Something About What Happens When We Talk from her wonderful Sweet Old World album in the background.  The big difference is that Lucinda brings an authenticity based on experience that Albertine clearly hasn't earned.  That said, some women can make the most casual statement into a more erotically charged statement than reams of inauthentic naughtiness from other women.  Clearly, Albertine has "it", not matter how you define "it."

But why?  Doubtless part of this relates, as always seems to be the case in Remembrance of Things Past, of perception and memory.  "If would have been ok, indeed, coming from any pretty girl of Albertine's age; but that Albertine should be now so accessible to me gave me more than pleasure, brought before my eyes a series of images fraught with beauty.  I remembered Albertine first of all on the beach, almost painted upon a background of sea, having for me no more real an existence than those theatrical tableaux in which one does not know whether one is looking at the actress herself who is supposed to appear, at an understudy who for the moment is taking her principal's part, or simply a projection"  Albertine, "almost painted," still exists on that beach in Marcel's mind.