On several occasions after the Guermantes party I attempted to see her again, but each time I was unsuccessful, for M. de Guermantes, in order to satisfy the requirements not only of his jealous nature but also of his medical regime, allowed her to attend social functions only in the day-time and even then placed an embargo upon dances. This seclusion in which she was kept she frankly avowed to me when at last we met, for several reasons. The principal one was that, although I had only written a few articles and published some essays, she imagined me to be a well-known author, an idea which even caused her naively to exclaim, recalling the days when I used to go to the Allee des Acacias to see her pass by and later visited her in her home: "Ah! if I had only guessed that would be a great writer one day!" And having heard that writers seek the society of women as a means of collecting material for their work and like to get them to describe their love-affairs, she now, in order to interest me, reassumed the character of an unashamed tart. She would tell me stories of this sort: "And then once there was a man who was made about me, and I was desperately in love with him too. We were having a heavenly life together. he had to go to America for some reason, and I was to go with him. The day before we were to leave I decided that, as our love could not always remain at such a pitch of intensity, it was more beautiful not to let it slowly fade to nothing. We had a last evening together - he of course believed that I was coming with him - and then a night of absolute madness, in which I was ecstatically happy in his arms and at the same time in despair because I knew that I should never see him again. I few hours earlier I had gone up to some traveller whom I did not know and given him my ticket. He wanted at least to buy it form me, but I replied: 'No, you are doing me a service by taking it, I don't want any money.'"
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1074-1075
I'm often amused (because I'm easily amused at what I say and do, being childlike in my simplicity) by what I find I have written in the margins of the book. As you know, weeks and sometimes months go by in between when I initially read the novel and wrote notes to myself, and then the actual blogging part of the venture, and thus I sometimes forget what I've noted. In this case I scribbled "Rust Never Sleeps," both an homage to NY and also to the spirit of Odette's rather ribald story. Marcel records this anecdote from Odette, where she tried to make herself seem more interesting because she thinks that writers cultivate the society of women so that they can mine them for stories. That said, I can remember times with a number of women when we both knew that it would almost certainly be the last time we ever say each other, and it was filled with the same measure of passion and sadness. I guess it's the almost gymnastic inverse of make-up sex.
Proust adds, when reflecting upon Odette: "It must be added that Odette was unfaithful to M. de Guermantes in the same fashion the she looked after him, that is to say without charm and without dignity. She was commonplace in this role as she had been in all her others. Not that life had not frequently given her good parts; it had, but she had no known how to play them." (p. 1074)
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