My Years With Proust - Day 406

   But I, engrossed from the very first by these people whom I did not know, was suddenly reminded of what Cottard had said to me in the ballroom of the little casino, and, as though it were possible for an invisible link to join an organ to the images of one's memory, the image of Albertine pressing her breasts against Andree's brought a terrible pain to my heart.  This pain did not last: the idea of Albertine's having relations with women seemed no longer possible since the occasion, forty-eight hours earlier, when the advances she had made to Saint-Loup had excited in me a new jealousy which had made me forget the old.  I was innocent enough to believe that one taste necessarily excludes another.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 904

And following up on one part of a discussion we had a couple days ago dealing with the perplexing question of Albertine liking both Robert Saint-Loup and women.  Proust had written, "I felt more or less cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, assuming that the two things were irreconcilable."  He hinted that he knew the question was more complicated, and less irreconcilable, than he understood then.  In this passage he follows it up by proclaiming, "I was innocent enough to believe that one taste necessarily excludes another."  As with so much of Remembrance of Things Past, one has to wonder if this says much more about Proust himself than it does about Albertine.  I guess we'll have to wait for the rest the novel to solve this mystery. As Master Shake reminds us, all will be revealed.  This seems especially appropriate on a day when #BiTwitter is trending on Twitter.