. . . whereas Albertine had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity, the fact that she did not belong to ordinary humankind, but to an alien race which moves among it, hides itself among it and never merges with it. I had as it happened seen two paintings by Elstir showing naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them, a girl is raising her foot as Albertine must have raised hers when she offered it to the laundress. With her other foot she is pushing into the water another girl who gaily resists, her thigh raised, her foot barely dipping into the blue water. I remembered now that the raised thigh made the same swan's neck curse with the angle of the knee as was made by the droop of Albertine's thigh when she was lying by my side on the bed, and I had often meant to tell her that she reminded me of those paintings. But I had refrained from doing so, for fear of awakening in her mind the image of naked female bodies. Now I saw her, side by side with the laundry-girl and her friends, recomposing the group which I had so loved when I was sitting among Albertine's friends at Balbec. And if I had been an art-lover responsive to beauty alone, I should have recognised that Albertine recomposed it a thousand times more ravishingly, now that its elements were the nude statues of goddesses like those which the great sculptors scattered among the groves of Versailles or arrayed round the fountains to be washed and polished by the caresses of their waters. Now, beside the laundry-girl, I saw her as a water-maiden far more than she had been for me at Balbec: in their twofold nudity of marble statues in the midst of a grove of vegetation and dipping into the water like bas-reliefs of Naiads. Remembering Albertine as she lay on my bed, I seemed to see the curve of her thigh, I saw it as a swan's neck, seeking the other girl's mouth. Then I no longer even saw a thigh, but simply the bold neck of a swan, like the one that can be seen in a voluptuous sketch seeking the mouth of a Leda who is rapt in the palpitating specificity of feminine pleasure, because there is no one else with her but a swan, and she seems more alone, just as one discovers on the telephone the inflexions of a voice which one fails to perceive so long as it is not dissociated from a face in which on objectivises its expression. In this sketch, the pleasure, instead of reaching out to the woman who inspires it and who is absent, replaced by an expressionless swan, is concentrated in her who feels it. At moments the contact between my heart and my memory was interrupted. What Albertine had done with the laundry-girl was indicated to me now only by quasi-algebraic abbreviations which no longer meant anything to me; but a hundred times an hour the interrupted current was restored, and my heart was pitilessly scorched by a fire from hell, while I saw Albertine, resurrected by my jealousy, really alive, beneath the caresses of the young laundry-girl to whom she was saying: "Oh, it's too heavenly."
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 536-538
We've talked before about whether or not we owe the dead anything, with the most obvious debt being simply to remember them. Once I shared a story about my wife reading our college alumni magazine and telling me, sadly, that one of our classmates had died. There was a pause as I tried to place the name, and then she said, with that sense of patient resolve that long-suffering wives can muster, "You slept with her." And then it all came rushing back to me, and I felt ashamed, not that we had slept together fifteen years earlier, but that I had forgotten her name. Rather, I was ashamed that I at least owed her memory. Marcel keeps trying to forget Albertine, but is so fixated by her memory, and his prurient interests in her secret life, that he can't forget her. He confesses, "while I saw Albertine, resurrected by my jealousy, really alive, beneath the caresses of the young laundry-girl to whom she is saying: 'Oh, it's too heavenly.'"
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