ABSTRACT
The challenge of taking the risk to love is of all ages. Even in his youthful works, Marcel Proust already wrote about the Calvary that is known as love. Longing for the beloved is torment, by the mere fact that it is unattainable. Proustian love is a Calvary because it can never be reciprocal. For Proust, love is “cette maladie” that is always closely connected to being physically and mentally ill. Love is the torment that, from his earliest work on, is always linked to ruin and damnation. Being in love is a subjective experience, in which the objective qualities of the beloved’s persona play a fairly small role. Proust compares humiliation in love to an unmanageable child who is beaten. Proust himself draws all the parallels between the relationship of the narrator as a child with his mother and as an adult with Albertine.
