My Years With Proust - Day 676

But if some, their fears allayed, remained in Jupien's establishment, others were tempted not so much by the thought of recovering their moral liberty as by the darkness which had suddenly settled upon the streets.  Some of these, like the Pompeians upon whom the fire from heaven was already raining, descending into the passages of the Metro, black as catacombs.  They knew that they would not be alone there.  And darkness, which envelops all things like a new element, has the effect, irresistibly tempting for certain people, of suppressing the first halt on the road to pleasure - it permits us to enter without impediment into a region of caresses to which normally we gain access only after a certain delay.  Whether the first approach is easy and that there is no need of the gallant speeches which in a drawing-room might run on for ever (at any rate in daylight), on a normal evening, even in the most dimly lit street, there is at least a preamble in which the eyes along feed on the repast which cannot yet be enjoyed and the fear of passers-by, the fear also of the man or woman before us, prevents us from doing more than look and speak.  In the darkness this time-honoured ritual is instantly abolished - hands, lips, bodies may go into action at once.  There is always the excuse of darkness, and of the mistakes that darkness engenders, if we are not well received.  And if we are, this approaches, gives us of the woman (or the man) whom we have selected the idea that she is without prejudices and full of vice, which adds an extra pleasure to the happiness of having bitten straight into the fruit without first coveting it with our eyes and without asking permission.  Meanwhile the darkness persisted; plunged into the new element, imagining that they had travelled to a distant country and were witnessing a natural phenomenon like a tidal wave or an eclipse, that they were enjoying not an artificially prepared, sedentary pleasure but a chance encounter in the unknown, the men who had come away from Jupien's house celebrated, while the bombs mimicked the rumbling of a volcano, deep in the earth as in a Pompeian house of ill fame, their secret rites in the shadows of the catacombs.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 863-864

Wow, the sirens sounded, the blackout began, and somehow someone opened up a Paris branch of Plato's Retreat.  In the last post we discussed the sexual urgency of the patrons of Jupien's house of assignation, and how it carried on no matter how many bombs fell outside.  Well, apparently the same profligacy was mirrored in the darkness of the Metro.  "In the darkness this time-honoured ritual is instantly abolished - hands, lips, bodies may go into action at once."  Now, one wonders how much of this freedom was a matter of male or class privilege, and how much of it was equally offered and sought.  Still, in a world where death constantly loomed and life hung on gossamer threads it's also very believable that people would give into life-affirming pleasures.  Proust's sexual fluidity is also apparent in his description: "There is always the excuse of darkness, and of the mistakes that darkness engenders, if we are not well received.  And if we are, this approaches, gives us of the woman (or the man) whom we have selected the idea that she is without prejudices and full of vice, which adds an extra pleasure to the happiness of having bitten straight into the fruit without first coveting it with our eyes and without asking permission."