This never came up in our meeting, and I thought it was too funny to leave unmentioned...
In our reading for the October 2 meeting Proust granted us a rare visual description of Albertine's body:
"Before Albertine obeyed and took off her shoes, I would open her chemise. Her two little uplifted breasts were so round that they seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have ripened there like fruit; and her belly (concealing the place where a man's is disfigured as thought by an iron clamp left sticking in a statute that has been taken down from its niche) was closed, at the junction of her thighs, by two valves with a curve as languid, as reposeful, as cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. She would take off her shoes, and lie down by my side" (C, 97)
"...Two valves..."
Two valves?!
Hey, that's what he sees. That made me laugh out loud when I read it.
Come to think of it, his descriptions of Albertine's breasts remind me of the speculation that Michelangelo, being homosexual, preferred to use male models for his sculptures of women -- and only added the breasts on as a kind of afterthought.
Doesn't this image of Michelangelo's Night match Proust's description of Albertine's "two little uplifted breasts," which "seemed to have "ripened there like fruit"?
Artistic symmetries through the centuries.
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