My Years With Proust - Day 518

  For all that I might, before Albertine returned, have doubted her, have imagined her in the room at Montjouvain, once she was in her dressing-gown and seated facing my chair or (if, as was more frequent, I had remained in bed) at the foot of my bed, I would deposit my doubts in her, hand them over for her to relieve me of them, with the abnegation of a worshipper uttering a prayer. All through the evening she might have been there, curled up in a mischievous ball on my bed, playing with me like a cat; her little pink nose, the tip of which she made even tinier with a coquettish glance which gave it a daintiness characteristic of certain women who are inclined to be plump, might have given her an inflamed and provocative air; she might have allowed a tress of her long, dark hair to fall over her pale-pink waxen cheek and, half shutting her eyes, unfolding her arms, have seemed to be saying to me: "Do what you like with me" - but when the time came for her to leave me, and she drew close to me to say good-night, it was a softness that had become almost familial that I kissed on either side of her sturdy neck which then never seemed to me brown or freckled enough, as though these solid qualities were associated with a certain frank good nature in Albertine.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 71-72

I made the point the other day that Albertine is a concept much more than an actual woman.  Part of this relates to the age, certainly, and the role that patriarchy plays in it.  All too often she is yielding if not inert: "Do what you like with me".   Certainly Proust's homosexuality play a role in his description of Albertine: "a coquettish glance . . . might have given her an inflamed and provocative air." In describing Albertine, just in this paragraph, we get words like mischievous, plump, familial, sturdy, solid and frank.  What I always come back to is that while Proust was writing Remembrance of Things Past he was dying, albeit slowly, but in poor and degrading health, in and out of sanatoriums, and facing a shrinking physical and temporal world.  I think that Albertine represented beauty and youth and health and vitality and the life force itself.  It may be that Proust was tired and jealous of life itself, and thus his conflicted reaction to Albertine.  Proust shares, " . . once she was in her dressing-gown and seated facing my chair or (if, as was more frequent, I had remained in bed) at the foot of my bed, I would deposit my doubts in her, hand them over for her to relieve me of them, with the abnegation of a worshipper uttering a prayer."