My Years With Proust - Day 375

But Albertine had at once turned back towards me a gaze which nevertheless remained strangely still and dreamy. Mlle Bloch and her cousin having finally left the room after laughing very loud and uttering the most unseemly cries, I asked Albertine whether the little fair one (the one who was the friend of the actress) was not the girl who had won the prize the day before in the procession of flowers. "I don't know," said Albertine, "is one of them fair? I must confess they don't interest me particularly, I never looked at them.  Is one of them fair?" she asked her friends with a detached air of inquiry.  When applied to people whom Albertine passed every day on the front, this ignorance seemed to me too extreme to be entirely genuine.  "They didn't appear to be looking at us much either," I said to Albertine, perhaps (on the assumption, which I did not however consciously envisage, that Albertine loved her own sex) to free her from any regret by pointing out to her that she had not attracted the attention of these girls and that, generally speaking, it is not customary even for the depraved of women to take an interest in girls whom they do not know. "They weren't looking at us?" Albertine replied without thinking.  "Why, they did nothing else the whole time." "But you can't possibly tell," I said to her, "you had your back to them." "Well then, what about that?" she replied, pointing out to me, set in the wall in front of us, a large mirror which I had not noticed and upon which I now realised that my friend, while talking to me had never ceased to fix her beautiful preoccupied eyes.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 830-831

Marcel and Albertine continue their cat mouse which is as much about deciphering her sexuality as it is about the tortured nature of their relationship.  In response to a question about the appearance of Bloch's sister and her cousin, Albertine, feigning indifference, asks, "I don't know, is one of them fair?"  Marcel admits that he "did not however consciously envisage that Albertine loved her own sex."  On the one hand a reader today would say, "seriously? well duh," although I suspect that this response is as anachronistic as Proust's failure to make the connection.  In today's age when homosexuality or bi-sexuality is much more readily accepted, I guess I would argue that making that connection would be a more natural part of the thought process, as compared to an age when it was less common (or least the acceptance of it was less common) and thus making that intellectual jump would have seemed more scandalous, and thus more far-fetched.  I loved Proust's use of the mirror in the scene, which allowed Albertine to watch the young women while seeming to be focused on Marcel.  There was, in fact, as Proust discovered, "a large mirror which I had not noticed and upon which I now realised that my friend, while talking to me had never ceased to fix her beautiful preoccupied eyes."  Albertine sees the young women, and more importantly actually sees herself, in the mirror.