"I came," she said, "because while I was asleep I thought I heard someone crying. It awakened me. But how is it that you aren't in bed? And your eyes are filled with tears. What's the matter?"
I took her head in my arms: "Mamma, listen, I'm afraid you'll think me very changeable. But first of all, yesterday I spoke to you not at all nicely about Albertine; what I said was unfair." . . .
. . . "But come," my mother was saying, "you said nothing unpleasant about her, you told me that she bored you a little, that you were glad you had given up the idea of marrying her. That's no reason for you to cry like that. Remember that your Mamma is going away to-day and couldn't bear to hear her big pet in such a state. Especially, my poor child, as I haven't time to comfort you. Even if my things are packed, one never has any time on the morning of a journey."
"It's not that."
And then, calculating the future, weighing up my desires, realising that such an affection on Albertine's part for Mlle Vingeuil's friend, and one of such long standing, could not have been innocent, that Albertine had been initiated, and, as every one of her instinctive actions made plain to me, had moreover been born with a predisposition towards that vice which my anxiety had all too often sensed in her, in which she must never have ceased to indulge (in which she was indulging perhaps at that moment, taking advantage of an instant in which was not present), I said to my mother, knowing the pain that I was causing her, which she did not reveal and which betrayed itself only by that air of serious preoccupation which she wore when she was comparing the gravity of making me unhappy or making me ill, that air which she had worn at Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night in my room, that air which at this moment was extraordinarily like my grandmother's when she had allowed me to drink brandy, I said to my mother: "I know how unhappy I'm going to make you. First of all, instead of remaining here as you wished, I want to leave at the same time at you. But that too is nothing. I don't feel well here, I'd rather go home. But listen to me, don't be too distressed. This is what I want to say. I was deceiving myself, I deceived you in good faith yesterday, I've been thinking it over all night. I absolutely must - and let's settle the matter at once, because I'm quite clear about it now, because I won't change my mind again, because I couldn't live without it - I absolutely must marry Albertine."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1167-1169
And with Marcel's declaration that "I absolutely must marry Albertine," which most of us could have seen coming, even if we didn't have some partial osmotic knowledge of Remembrance of Things Past, we've reached the end of Cities of the Plain. That was exhausting, and that's not simply Ramadan speaking. I should probably go back and compare posts by volume because I have a sinking suspicion that I wrote more on Cities of the Plain than the previous three volumes. Why? I'm not certain. I still think I enjoyed Swann's Way most of all, but I may change my mind someday when I re-read the entire novel and am not tasked with taking notes. I think I devoted so much time to unpacking Cities of the Plain because it was the volume which dealt with sex the most extensively. While I'm sure you could construct a compelling argument to the contrary, but I don't think this is true because I'm a perv, but rather because his observations seem remarkably "human" and "modern." Whatever one thinks of Marcel proposing, "And then, calculating the future, weighing up my desires, realising that such an affection on Albertine's part for Mlle Vingeuil's friend, and one of such long standing, could not have been innocent, that Albertine had been initiated, and, as every one of her instinctive actions made plain to me, had moreover been born with a predisposition towards that vice which my anxiety had all too often sensed in her . . ." Proust is still trying to delve more deeply into the subject matter and not just rejecting it out of hand as a sin (cue Lady Gaga). Even if Proust makes statements which seem a tad clunky about sexuality now and then, it's rather amazing, and more than a bit sobering (especially during this age of perpetual GOP war on the LGBT community), that he was talking so openly about the subject.
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