Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

In the same way that Elstir liked to see incarnate before him, in his wife, the Venetian beauty he had often painted in his works, I gave myself the excuse that there was a degree of aesthetic selfishness in my attraction toward beautiful women who could cause me pain, and I felt something close to idolatry for the future Gilbertes, the future Duchesses de Guermantes, the future Albertines whom I might meet and who, it seemed to me, might inspire me, as if I were a sculptor walking among fine classical marbles. I ought, though, to have realized that even earlier than this attraction to each of them was my sense of the mystery surrounding them and that therefore, rather than asking Gilberte to introduce me to young girls, I would do better to go out to places where we have no connection with them, where between them and oneself one feels something unbridgeable, where two steps away, on the beach, going for a bathe, one feels separated from them by impossibility. That is how my sense of mystery had been able to attach itself in turn to Gilberte, to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to Albertine and to so many others. No doubt in due course the unknown, and almost the unknowable, had become the known, familiar, indifferent or painful, yet it always retained something of the charm it had once possessed.