My Years With Proust - Day 483

The windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from without, were not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and old-fashioned hoar-frost.  All of a sudden, the sun, would colour this muslin glass, gild it, and gently disclosing in my person an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate me with memories, as thought I were in the heart of the country amidst golden foliage in which even a bird was not lacking.  For I could hear Albertine ceaselessly humming:

          For melancholy
          It but folly,
          And he who heeds it is a fool.

   I was too fond of her not to be able to spare a smile for her bad taste in music.  This song had, as it happened, during the past summer, delighted Mme Bontemps, who presently heard people say that it was silly, with the result that, instead of asking Albertine to sing it when she had company, she would substitute:

          A song of farewell rises from troubled springs,

which in its turn became "an old jingle of Massenet's the child is always dinning into our ears."

   A cloud passed, blotting out the sun; I saw the prudish, leafy screen of glass grow dim and revert to a grey monochrome.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 2-3

Proust, using the metaphor of dawn, continues to explore the new life of Marcel and Albertine as they co-exist in his Paris apartment.  As with all relationships the two of them share, but also don't share.  Proust describes their bathrooms: "The windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from without, were not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and old-fashioned hoar-frost."  All of us construct windows "not smooth and transparent but crinkled with an artificial and old-fashioned hoar-frost" with our partners in which we sort of share everything but also deliberately keep part of ourselves from view.  It's why we never want to share out phone with our girlfriend/fiancee/wife: who knows what's on there?  Even if you're madly in love with your partner you still put up the leaded glass, although it could simply be unintentional because you don't know yourself well enough to share everything.

The relationship between Marcel and Albertine seems that it's off to a solid start.  They're enjoying that blissful, stupid domesticity that happy couples enjoy.  Marcel even smiles at Albertine's bad taste in music.  As I've often opined, you start off loving her in spite of her idiosyncrasies and end up loving her because of them.  When I think back on my happiest moments with women they're almost all associated with the quiet, sleepy domesticity of morning: getting her coffee, reading the paper, discussing new stuff I've learned about the world (I'm inevitably the first one up), thoughts on literature or films (I'm considered exhausting in the morning) or simply slipping back into bed for whatever endues. I guess it just represents a very quiet, unaffected intimacy which couples have, and it's sadly one of the first things to go when the relationship starts to die.  Even here in this lovely scene between Marcel and Albertine you can see the signs of decay: "A cloud passed, blotting out the sun; I saw the prudish, leafy screen of glass grow dim and revert to a grey monochrome."