My Years With Proust - Day 637

Then, without making the slightest effort to make her words consistent with those of a few months earlier, Andree said to me with a lurking smile: "Ah! yes, but you're a man. And so we can't do quite the same things as I used to do with Albertine." And whether because she felt that it would increase my desire (in the hope of extracting confidences, I had told her that I would like to have relations with a woman who had had them with Albertine) or my grief, or perhaps destroy a sense of superiority to herself which she might suppose me to feel at being the only person who had had relations with Albertine, she went on: "Ah! we spent many happy hours together; she was caressing, so passionate.  But it wasn't only with me that she liked to enjoy herself.  She had met a handsome young man at Mme Verdurin's called Morel.  They came to an understanding at once.  He undertook - having her permission to enjoy them himself, for he liked little novices, and as soon as he had set them on the path of evil would abandon them - he undertook to entice young fisher-girls in remote villages, or young laundry-girls, who would fall for a boy but might have responded to a girl's advances.  As soon as a girl was well under his control, he'd bring her to a safe place and hand her over to Albertine.  For fear of losing Morel, who took part in it all too, the girl always obeyed, and yet she lost him all the same, because, as he was afraid of what might happen and also as once or twice was enough for him, he would run off leave a false address.  Once he had the nerve to bring one of these girls, with Albertine, to a brothel at Couliville, where four or five of the women had her together, or in turn.  That was his passion, and Albertine's too.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 612-613

Once the dam breaks the flood waters rage as Andree starts to tell secrets to Marcel about her relationship with Albertine.  It's difficult to know what to make of this confession.  Marcel himself wasn't certain whether Andree was trying to entice him or make him unhappy or just play games with him. I've never liked Morel in Remembrance of Things Past, and here he seems to be little more than a pimp.  Of course, his moral ambivalence would also make him a useful tool to use in constructing a salacious narrative if Andree were just making up the story.  If the story is true then we're seeing a very different side of Albertine, although the story seems so over the top that it reads more like a fantasy.