I don’t buy that Proust named Albertine after Alfred Agostinelli, I just don’t .
“As Proustians know, Albertine was based on Proust’s real-life secretary and chauffeur, Alfred Agostinell.
Says who? There’s no more reason to buy that idea than to agree that Combray is Illiers.
On what basis? No, I don’t think so.
But I myself haven’t come up with a better theory. WIth all the attention I’ve given to names and signs, I would think I’d have figured it out by now. But these things take time.
I need to spend way more time thinking about Albertine. She started surfacing in my mind as I was writing draft three of my novel Folly. Suddenly she was in the room with Marcel and the main character Maggie. Marcel gets totally freaked out about some Albertine pages that never get removed from the final draft of The Fugitive (I think, need to check).
It came out on the page. I let it happen, and I’m glad I did, because basically it was perfectly thematic- I was writing an entire novel about a girl stuck in a room with Marcel. So why hadn’t I thought to include Albertine earlier?
Well I know the answer. I’ve spent so much time reading the beginnings and endings of The Recherche, searching for clues that I didn’t get to reading those volumes closely enough. The most important character! Certainly the one Proust has devoted the most pages to.
I’m thinking of her now. Was she conceived of as a libertine, hence her name Albertine? I’m trying to picture her for myself. Here’s an image I found:
She’s fearless, right?
And then there’s the crazy thought I’m having that I’m going to share- because I want to give you a sense of the process I go through, how many odd names I look up, how many ideas I chew up and discard.
My latest is about Leone Battista Alberti.
His name’s just too fucking amazing not to consider, reflect on. I mean, there is Leone, right? as in Tante Leonie. Then there’s Battista- as in Baptism. As in immersion in water, the whole Cambre-Mer thing. And then there’s Alberti the name, mixed in with Martin and Martine to get Albertine. And Alberti the theorist, author of On Painting, speaking of the vanishing point on the horizon.
Well I think Proust is speaking of the vanishing point in time as well.
About this quote:
As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of Time, and one of the forms that it assumes, which is forgetting – The Fugitive
When you reach that point, everything falls by the wayside. You’re in the Madeleine zone of memory, the only way you can combat the forgetting (the vanishing, the disappearance in time and space). And that, my friends, is writing. Marcel Proust as Saint of the Mark, resurrecting Albertine in words. He is resurrecting her as The Prisoner (in his room) and then as Albertine Gone, dead.
And then there’s also the fact that Alberti was a cryptographer. He created the Alberti Cypher – a device with two concentric wheels that could rotate around each other and be used to encode text.
Mixing up the letters is so Proustian. As in when Marcel receives a letter he believes is from Albertine – though she’s dead- but turns out to be from Gilberte.
I do love a good puzzle. It’s what’s kept me going this whole time, in pursuit.
Which is why I’m constantly looking for clues, assuming there’s a secret subtext or code. And if there were any kind of nom de plume that would work nicely, this would be a good one. You know how much I love noms de plume.
Look, I get that Albertine’s name likely has nothing whatsoever to do with Alberti. Then again, no more so than Albertine has to do with being Alfred Agostinelli. Which means it’s a possibility, and some thought to it. Not just a biographical connection. Which feels very un-Proustian.