I returned on foot through narrow lanes; I accosted plebian girls as Albertine perhaps had done, and I should have liked to have her with me. Yet these could not be the same girls, at the time when Albertine had been in Venice, they would have been children still. but, after having been unfaithful in the past, in a basic sense and out of cowardice, to each of the desires that I had conceived as unique - since I had sought an analogous object and not the same one, which I despaired of finding again - now I systematically sought women whom Albertine had not known, just as I no longer sought those that I had desired in the past. True, it often happened to me to recall, with an extraordinary violence of desire, some wench of Meseglise or Paris, or the milk-girl I had seen early in the morning at the foot of a hill during my first journey to Balbec. But alas! I remembered them as they were then, that is to say as they certainly would not be now. So that if in the past I had been led to qualify my impression of the uniqueness of a desire by seeking, in place of a convent-girl I had lost sight of, a similar convent-girl, now, in order to recapture the girls who had troubled my adolescence or that of Albertine, I had to consent to a further departure from the principle of the individuality of desire: what I must look for was not those who were sixteen then, but those who were sixteen to-day, for now, in the absence of that which was most distinctive in the person and which eluded me, what I loved was youth. I knew that the youth of those I had known existed no longer save in my impassioned recollection, and that it was not them, however anxious I might be to make contact with them when my memory recalled them to me, that I must cull if I really wished to harvest the youth and the blossom of the year.
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 642-643
We've been talking about what Marcel saw in Albertine, which seems to be an essential part of the question of whether or not he actually loved her. I come down on the side of him actually loving her, but, then, I'm a romantic. That said, it appears that a desire to control her was an integral part of the lived reality of their relationship. I keep coming back to that opening scene in the novel where he waited, helpless, in his bedroom, hoping that his mother would tear herself away from the soiree to come see him. To me, so much of his fascination with Albertine is a desire to recapture that moment, and the ability to overcome that helplessness manifested itself in his mania for controlling Albertine (warning: pop psychology). After her death he devotes a goodly amount of time to either trying to meet women (unsuccessfully) or to at least understand why he finds some women attractive. Often he finds himself trolling for women that he thought Albertine herself would find beautiful, and, as he tells us, "I should have liked to have her with me." Now, this could be general perviness, but it could also be a desperate attempt to reconnect with Albertine. He also adds this point: "I had to consent to a further departure from the principle of the individuality of desire: what I must look for was not those who were sixteen then, but those who were sixteen to-day, for now, in the absence of that which was most distinctive in the person and which eluded me, what I loved was youth." I don't think he means this in a Roy Moore sort of way (I feel nothing but sympathy for the woman went through as a fourteen year old girl, but I also have to admit that the word schadenfreude was invented for exactly how I feel about what that hypocritical son of a bitch is going through; but I digress . . .). Rather, I think what he's trying to recapture is innocence, and, I know this sounds strange for a person fascinated with the past, the possibilities of the future.
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