"Francoise assured me that you were awake and that I wouldn't be disturbing you," said Albertine as she entered the room. Since since, next to making me catch cold by opening the window at the wrong moment, what Albertine most dreaded was to come into my room when I was asleep: "I hope I haven't done wrong," she went on. "I was afraid you'd say to me:
What insolent mortal comes to meet his doom?"
And she laughed that laugh which I always found so disturbing.
I replied in the same jesting vein:
Was it for you this stern decree was made?
And, let she should ever venture to infringe it, added: "Although I'd be furious if you did waake me."
"I know, I know, don't be frightened," said Albertine.
To show that I was mollified, I added, still enacting the scene from Esther with her, while in the street below the cries continued, drowned by our conversation:
I found in you alone a certain grace
That charms me and of which I never tire
(and to myself I thought: "Yes, she does tire me very often"). And remember what she had said to me the night before, as I thanked her extravagantly for having given up the Verdurins, so that another time she would obey me similarly with regard to something else, I said: "Albertine, you distrust me although I love you and you place your trust in people who don't love you" (as though it were not natural to distrust the people who love you and who alone have an interest in lying to you in order to find out things, to thwart you), and added these lying words: "It's funny, you don't really believe that I love you. As a matter of fact, I don't adore you." She lied in her turn when she told me that she trusted nobody but myself and then became sincere when she assured me that she knew quite well that I loved her. but this affirmation did not seem to imply that she did not believe me to be a liar who spied on her. And she seemed to forgive me as though she saw these defects as the agonising consequence of a great love or as though she herself did not feel guiltless.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 115-116
Proust had spoken before about the dangers of routine, and here he shares one of the most common examples of routine: the shared performance. Sometimes it's based on a famous/infamous family adventure/misadventure, but often, at least when I was married, was a scene from a movie. Granted, this covers all relationships. Anyone who has spent any time with my most excellent friend Sanford has heard Alec Baldwin's famous speech from Glengarry Glen Ross (which was written specially for the movie and wasn't in the play, much of the chagrin of someone going to see the play who has only seen the film). My friend Alfonso tells me that his family runs through different scenes from It's a Wonderful Life endlessly. In happier days in our little family it was mainly episodes from Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Blackadder or Simple Men. On the one hand this is all shared history, which is the part of the stuff that binds us together, but on the other hand it also takes up space and becomes the default setting. In the instance above Marcel and Albertine are exchanging lines from the play Esther, which always formed the passive-aggressive way for her to gently call him a tyrant - and for him to admit, again gently, that maybe, just maybe she might be right, but that it doesn't matter because his power of her couldn't be challenged (at least then).
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