"Drawing closer in spite of myself to the monster that was mesmerising me, I answered: 'What! You don't expect me to believe that of all your group Albertine was the only one with whom you did that sort of thing!'"
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 559
Marcel continues his "interrogation" of Andree as he tries, clumsily, to get her to admit that she and Albertine were lovers. As I was rereading this section I kept coming back to a similar realization that I've frequently had in relation to Albertine; that is, I wish I knew more about Andree. If we've only received occasional glimpses into Albertine's mind, we get much less into that of Andree. Obviously Marcel has always had feelings for her, even if they were only carnal, and that subset of carnality where you want to sleep with someone simply because they are the friend of your lover. And inside of that subset there's an even smaller subset: your desire to sleep with someone simply because they are the friend of your ex-lover out of spite. Even though Marcel refers to Andree as a "monster," she's still a monster who is "mesmerising" him. Previously he wrote of Andree: "For the first time she seemed to me beautiful. I said tomyself that her almost frizzy hair, her dark, shadowed eyes, were doubtless what Albertine had loved so much, the materialisation before my eyes of what she pictured in her amorous day-dreams, what she saw with the expectant eyes of desire on the day when she had so suddenly decide to leave Balbec." (pp. 556-557) He also tells us that, "I gazed at her nevertheless, and, with such liveliness, naturalness and assurance as a person can must who is trying to make it appear that he is not afraid of being hypnotised by someone's stare. . ." Obviously, there's much more to Andree than we've seen so far.
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