My Years With Proust - Day 368

   Albertine had made me take a note of the dates on which she would be going away for a few days to visit various friends, and had made me write down their addresses as well, in case I should want her on one of those evenings, for none of them lived very far away.  This meant that in seeking her out, from one girl friend to another, I found her more and more entwined in ropes of flowers.  I must confess that many of her friends - I was not yet in love with her - gave me, at one watering-place or another, moments of pleasure.  These obliging young playmates did not seem to me to be very many.  But recently I thought of them again, and their names came back to me.  I counted that, in that one season, a dozen conferred to on me their ephemeral favours.  Another name came back to me later, which made thirteen.  I then had a sort of childishly cruel impulse to settle for that number.  Alas, I realised that I had forgotten the first, Albertine who was no more and who made the fourteenth.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 817

Marcel comments on the time he spent with so many of Albertine's friends during that season.  Now, it seems to me that the obvious question here is what does Proust mean by the terms "ephemeral favours" and "moments of pleasure," decidedly vague descriptions from an author known for the extraordinary precision of his language, which speaks, in my mind anyway, to the intentionality of their vagueness.  It could very well be that all the members of Albertine's troop were unfailingly friendly and these were nothing more than innocent shared moments over coffee; which along would certainly speak to a society where men and women co-mingled socially with ease; which seems like a "duh" but I've done enough travelling around the world to have encountered many places where that is rare if not absolutely prohibited today.  Of course, it could also be that these favours were more tangible and carnal than purely ephemeral, which would also remind us why this novel was so groundbreaking in its modernity.  I don't know if I have any evidence that these moments of pleasure were any more than innocent meetings, other than the extreme delicacy of Proust's language, which almost seems like I'm trying to prove a positive by a negative - or, essentially, prove something not be evidence but by lack of evidence (and I would scold by students for this sloppy methodology).  Maybe a more damning bit of evidence relates to Proust's preoccupation with the number of her friends with which he had spent moments of pleasure, which speaks to a fascination with sexual conquests.  Most men can tell you exactly how many women they've slept with, or at least can render it roughly in exponential notion. If nothing else, I guess we know that Marcel was not quite as frail as he sometimes appears.  Clearly I needed to lead a life that included more ropes of flowers.