Albertine is the most controversial character of Recherche du temps perdu, the most mentioned yet the one we know the least about: we do not know where she comes from, what she does for a living, where she ends up… and even when she dies, we wonder if she ever existed at all. Several critics saw in Albertine Proust’s driver Alfred Agostinelli, a young Italian with whom Proust had been madly in love. The novel and Proust’s life become the excuse for a contemporary love story – where Marcel, Albertine and Alfred hide, bluff, swap genders and roles, experiencing love as an eternal question, aware that the heart of things cannot be captured, but only glimpsed at.
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