My Years With Proust - Day 605

"Monsieur has no need to look cross. On the contrary he's going to be pleased.  Here are two letters from Mademoiselle Albertine."

   I felt, afterwards, that I must have stared at her with the eyes of a man whose mind has become unbalanced.  I was not even glad, nor was I incredulous.  I was like a person who sees the same place in his room occupied by a sofa and by a grotto: nothing seemingly real to him any more, he collapses on the floor.  Albertine's two letters must have been written shortly before the fatal ride.  The first said:

   "My dear, I must thank you for the proof of your confidence which you give me when you tell me of your intention to bring Andree to live with you.  I am sure that she will be delighted to accept, and I think it will be a very good thing for her.  Gifted as she is, she will know how to make the most of the companionship of a man like yourself, and of the admirable influence which you manage to exert over other people.  I feel that you have had an idea from which as much good may spring for her as for yourself.  And so, if she should make the slightest difficulty (which I do not believe she will), telegraph to me and I will undertake to bring pressure to bear upon her."

   The second was dated the following day.  (In fact she must have written them both within a few minutes of one another, perhaps at the same time, and must have predated the first. For, all the time, I had been forming absurd ideas of her intentions, which had simply been to return to me, and which anyone not directly interested in the matter, a man without imagination, the negotiator of a peace treaty, the merchant who has to examine a transaction, would have judged more accurately than myself.). It contained these words:

   "Is it too late for me to return to you? If you have not yet written to Andree, would you be prepared to take me back? I shall abide by your decision, but I beg you not to be long in making it known to me; you can imagine how impatiently I shall be waiting.  If it is to tell me to return, I shall take the train at once.  Yours with all my heart, Albertine."

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 486-487

As every right-thinking individual knows, women are both the smarter sex and also the more vicious.  Essentially, my brothers, we don't stand a chance.  It's either a testament to God's bizarre sense of humor or evolution's attempt at a make up for giving men slightly more muscle mass.

In one of his notes after Albertine's flight, Marcel tried to make her jealous by proposing that he was going to ask Andree to move in with him. She, as always, effortlessly outmaneuvers him and renders his efforts, and him for that matter, impotent.  I love this line: "Gifted as she is, she will know how to make the most of the companionship of a man like yourself . . ." Marcel probably barely felt the thin blade enter his brain as she drew him close for a kiss.  And speaking of a surgical cut, what about this line: "I feel that you have had an idea from which as much good may spring for her as for yourself." Yes, she will make you just as unhappy as you make her.  And, not to ignore Marcel's jealous surrounding his suspicion that Albertine and Andree are actually lovers, she proposes to "undertake to bring pressure to bear upon her."  MIKE DROP.

Yes, I know that I'm being overly skeptical and remarkably insensitive to their suffering, although, obviously, you can be both heartbroken and vindictively clever/funny at the same time. Now, can you be sincere and insincere at the same time?  See, if you can be, maybe the best prove would be the fact that, at least according to Marcel, Albertine wrote these two notes one right after the other, or maybe even at the same time.    In the second note she writes, "Is it too late for me to return to you? . . . If it is to tell me to return, I shall take the train at once.  Yours with all my heart, Albertine."  In the light of the first note is she being utterly insincere in this note, or is what made the first note so transparently snarky is the fact that she is in love with him, and the second note expresses that love, no matter how much they had hurt each other in the past.

Now, beyond all this, of course, is the bigger tragedy of these words hanging in space, hurrying to Marcel, as Albertine lay cold and dead.  For some time now I've had this thought about the period leading up to my demise (I've always wanted to pass dramatically and instantly as compared to slowly fading away, although the latter would give me more time for mending fences, or destroying them).  I've thought about writing two dramatically different letters to every woman I ever loved, neither one hateful, obviously, but I'd want them to express the dramatically different ways I thought about them, sometimes within the space of a half-hour.  I"d leave the letters in the care of a friend, or my caretaker at my house in Zanzibar or at my hut in the Wadi Rum bedu camp, and tell them that for each pair they should flip a coin, and then send the "winning" letter off.  Each letter would be a lie, which would mean that they would both be true.