182 Days of Marcel Proust

Proustolatry

2010-10-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

A fascinating story from the Financial Times magazine about the passion of a Proust collector.

Jacques Guérin was head of the French perfume company Parfums d’Orsay. But although he would remain there for over 50 years, it was never the primary focus of his life. His real passion lay in the rare books, precious manuscripts and artists’ papers that he collected. He loved to stroll in and out of the city’s antiquarian bookstores, scanning the shelves, sniffing out something unique. He was making his usual rounds one day in 1935 when, on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he saw a bookshop he had never noticed before. He went inside and began to browse. The owner asked if he could be of help, if there were any writers in particular who interested him. Guérin demurred, but mentioned Baudelaire and Proust. The bookseller, named Lefebvre, expressed surprise. Only a few minutes earlier he had bought some proofs, corrected by the hand of Marcel Proust. The seller had just left. In addition to these autograph manuscripts, he had also been told that Proust’s desk and bookcase were for sale, but he had declined them, as he was not set up to deal with furniture. He said that the man would soon be returning to the store to pick up a cheque.

The Days After: Edmund White's Proust

2010-07-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

Marcel Proust: A Life, by Edmund White
Penguin Books, 2009

While I was blogging about In Search of Lost Time, I pretty much avoided reading biographies and critical studies, except occasionally to check some facts or details on the Web, where I read Edmund Wilson's essay on Proust. And now that I've finished the three thousand-odd pages of the novel, I don't have much stomach yet for reading another thousand pages of biography, like the ones by Jean-Yves Tadié or William C. Carter. But Edmund White's little volume, in the Penguin Lives series, is just the right size. It's nice to revisit the novel through White's eyes, and he's a fine writer.

White asserts at the beginning that "Proust's fame and prestige have eclipsed those of Joyce, Beckett, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of Gide and Valéry and Genet, of Thomas Mann and Brecht, for if some of these writers are more celebrated than Proust in their own country, Proust is the only one to have a uniformly international reputation."

But he notes that his contemporaries were less enthusiastic: "Gide was irritated that Proust never acknowledged his own homosexuality nor ever presented homosexual inclinations in an attractive light." Alphonse Daudet called him "the devil" and Paul Claudel "a painted old Jewess." He was also the source of many anecdotes. Reynaldo Hahn, one of Proust's lovers, recalled his rapt contemplation of a rosebush, about which White comments:.

Typically, Proust also invoked this very scene, but said that inhaling the moment was ineffectual; only the sudden, unprompted awakenings of memory, triggered by something illogical and unforeseen (the madeleine, for example), could invoke the past in its entirety.

Colette described him as a "tottering young man of fifty." And White sums up: "He was such a presence that many people spoke of him as tall, but in fact he stood just five feet six inches."

His father was Christian and his mother Jewish, and he was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic church. But White classifies him as "a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less a savior." He caricatured Jews, such as the Blochs, and never reveals his Jewish origins in his fictions. "The apparently gentile Proust, who had campaigned for Dreyfus and had been baptized Catholic, was a sort of modern Esther" -- who concealed her Jewishness until she could use it to help her people. His support of Dreyfus (whose case White summarizes) caused a strain in his friendships in the aristocracy as well as a split with his own father.

He was born on July 10, 1871 to Jeanne Weil, the daughter of a rich stockbroker, and Adrien Proust, a physician whose father had been a grocer in the village of Illiers, near Chartres. His mother, like the narrator's grandmother in In Search of Lost Time, loved the letters of Madame de Sévigné. They were very close, and he shared her passion for literature and for making fun of other people. He describes his father as a "brute" and a "vulgar man" in Jean Santeuil, but idealizes both of his parents in the Search. The village of Illiers is of course the model for Combray, and is today officially known as Illiers-Combray. His mother was pregnant with him during the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris was besieged and its residents nearly starved. "As a result, Jeanne Proust was so weakened from hunger and anxiety that when Marcel was born he was sickly and fragile and at first not expected to live." His brother Robert was born two years later, and they were close throughout his life. Like the narrator of the Search in the opening section of Swann's Way, he "could not go to sleep without his mother's kiss.

Not only did Proust not outgrow his dependence; it became the template for his adult loves, since for Proust passion was a nagging need that became only more demanding the more it was denied. Indeed, Proust would drive away all his lovers (in his fiction as in his life) through his unreasonable demands.

The Prousts lived at 9 boulevard Malesherbes when he was small. The parents' room was at the other end of a forty-five-foot long corridor from the children's rooms. Marcel's schoolfriend Fernand Gregh remembered the apartment as having "a rather dark interior, bursting with heavy furniture, weatherstripped with curtains, stuffed with carpets, everything black and red." White observes that "This was the Paris of ... the recently built Palais Garnier opera house, which resembles a cross between a Victorian inkwell and a Liechtenstein medal for bravery." The Eiffel Tower was new "(and much criticized)" in the Paris of Proust's childhood. "All his life Proust would remain faithful to the ugly furnishings his parents and relatives had accumulated" and "he filled his room with hideous but sacred objects which spoke to him of his dead parents, his childhood, time lost."

Like the narrator, Proust played in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, where his closest friends were two sisters, Marie and Nelly Benardsky. Marie may have been the model for Gilberte Swann. White notes that readers are often confused (I certainly was) about how old the narrator and Gilberte are in these early scenes, since they seem sexually precocious at the same time that they are playing children's games and being watched over by nannies like Françoise: "In fact they are teenagers, sixteen or seventeen, in a period before adolescence was invented, at a time when people passed directly from childhood to adulthood, when a boy would be wearing short pants one day and taking a mistress the next."

White observes that "it would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men." Some, like Odette or the Duchesse de Guermantes or La Berma, "are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly." (La Berma is modeled on Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane.) But others, such as the delivery girls with whom the narrator flirts, are "boys-in-drag." The narrator's obsession with Albertine's lesbianism is possibly drawn from his experience with Alfred Agostinelli, "who was primarily heterosexual."

Can the putatively heterosexual Narrator's overpowering jealousy about Albertine's lesbian affairs actually be a reflection of the homosexual Proust's fury when his bisexual lovers drifted back to women?

Proust had his first asthma attack in 1881 after a walk in the Bois de Boulogne. "Asthma was one of the great decisive factors in Proust's development." It made him solitary and kept him distanced from the world: "if he wanted to see hawthorn trees in bloom, he had to be driven through the countryside in a hermetically sealed car." His school attendance was irregular: He entered the Lycée Condorcet in 1882, and made friends with Jacques Bizet, the son of the composer of Carmen, and Daniel Halévy, the composer's nephew. He fell in love with Bizet when they were seventeen, but Halévy recalled, "we were beastly to him." Proust's mother, suspecting that Marcel and Bizet were lovers, forbade her son from seeing him. White says that Proust "believed that sex between boys was innocent and became a 'vice' only with age." Bizet later became a drug addict and committed suicide ten days before Proust's death.

Rejected by Bizet, Proust fell in love with Bizet's mother, Geneviève Straus, who was the daughter of Fromental Halévy, composer of the opera La Juive, which is alluded to in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. (Rachel, Robert de Saint-Loup's mistress, is nicknamed "Rachel, when of the lord" by the narrator, in an allusion to an aria from La Juive.) Because of her wit, Geneviève Straus is one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Proust's favorite professor at the Lycée Condorcet was Alphonse Darlu, "who believed in spirituality but not Christianity." Darlu's brand of idealism influenced him greatly.

Proust rejected André Gide's more ordinary form of realism, his method of building up a character or situation through the accretion of small details, by saying that he, Proust, could be interested only in those details that pointed towards a general truth or that expressed poetic enchantment. Every page of Proust's masterpiece piles up several "general truths"and adds to the elevated philosophical tone.

White calls Proust "the great philosophical novelist," and puts him in the company of George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil.

He struggled with his homosexuality when he was seventeen, and cultivated an infatuation with forty-year-old Laure Hayman, who was his uncle's mistress (and, he would later find out, his father's). Laure, like Odette, had a house on the rue de La Pérouse, rode in the Bois de Boulogne and loved chrysanthemums. He shunned the "decadent" writers of his day and modeled his style, including his long sentences, on the classics. When he was in his early twenties, his favorite writers were Pierre Loti and Anatole France, whose style fitted his taste for classicism. Later, John Ruskin "would influence him to abandon France's materialism for a more congenial brand of spiritualism."

On November 11, 1889, after graduating, he signed up for a year of military service, which he would remember nostalgically as "a paradise," though "at the time he complained bitterly." The nostalgic view of his service is depicted in The Guermantes Way, when the narrator visits Saint-Loup at Doncières, which is modeled on Orléans, where he was stationed.

In September 1890, he visited Cabourg, a resort on the coast of Normandy that became Balbec in the novels. And that fall he started reading law in Paris and entered the École libre des sciences politiques ("Sciences-Po") to study politics. His legal and political studies gave him a grounding in those subjects, which makes it possible for him to create pictures of the diplomatic corps in his novels. He was inspired by Balzac, who moves with ease in various sections of society. And these studies also gave him, "more important for a writer, to their vocabularies, including their sophisticated strategies of evasion." He took a course in diplomacy from Albert Sorel, who is the model for M. de Norpois, "the ultimate slippery statesman."

In 1891 he met Oscar Wilde and invited him to dine with his parents, but the perhaps apocryphal story has it that Wilde was offended by the Prousts' "heavy, dark furniture" and left after saying, "How ugly everything is here." In Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust alludes unsympathetically to Wilde's fall. A scandal involving Prince Philip von Eulenberg in 1906 also alerted Proust to the uneasy position of gay men in contemporary society. At the same time, however, he was becoming friends with Robert de Flers and Lucien Daudet, and his mother was alarmed by a photograph he had taken with them in 1892, touching off a quarrel with his parents that he depicted in Jean Santeuil. Although he continued to seek out the company of other gay men, he tried not to be identified as gay himself:

Years later he would tell André Gide that one could write about homosexuality even at great length, so long as one did not ascribe it to oneself.

He began his rise in society and cultivated his gift for imitating the mannerisms of the people he met. White notes that this talent for mimickry "would come in handy later when he would begin to create his cast of great Dickensian eccentrics: the baron de Charlus, Madame Verdurin, the duc de Guermantes, the maid Françoise, all of whom have a distinctive, not to say preposterous, way of speaking." He also loved to write pastiches of famous writers, and said that he did it to purge his own style of imitation: "to become original again afterwards and not produce involuntary pastiches the rest of one's life." He also used it as an analytical tool, examining other writers' style by attempting to reproduce it. He includes a pastiche of the Goncourts' journal in Finding Time Again. He attracted the attention of eminent writers like Anatole France and Maurice Barrès, and became a regular at the salon of Princess Mathilde, Napoleon's niece, who appears under her own name in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

He also met Henri Bergson, but White dismisses him as a serious influence on Proust's thought, except for a conversation on the nature of sleep that they had after World War I, which is reflected in Sodom and Gomorrah. "Bergson seems to have dismissed Proust as someone interested only in high society (le monde)," White says. And he notes that Proust developed a reputation as a snob. Jean Cocteau wrote of Proust that he "doesn't hesitate to judge society people and accuse them of stupidity. He finds them stupid but superior, which is the very definition of snobbism." White asserts that the young Proust was attracted to aristocrats because he saw them as "living, breathing, walking, talking history, a modern incarnation of a medieval legend." The Duchesse de Guermantes, whom the narrator first sees in the church at Combray in the chapel of her ancestor Gilbert the Bad, becomes the narrative embodiment of this attitude. But as White observes, "he ended up as the most penetrating critic of snobbism who ever lived." His contemporaries in society were shocked by his portraits of them in the Search, and the Comtesse de Chévigné, "one of the models for the duchesse de Guermantes," burned his letters. But others were impressed by "his elaborate politeness."

He knew all the secrets of the aristocracy and spent thirty years learning their rituals, feuds, genealogies, and vanities, but he was also distanced from this world by the fact he was half-Jewish, untitled, gay, and an invalid.

In 1892-93, Proust, Daniel Halévy, Robert Dreyfus and Fernand Gregh started a literary magazine called Le Banquet. When it folded, Proust began publishing fiction in La Revue Blanche. In 1893, he met the dandy Robert de Montesquiou, who became one of the models for Charlus, as he had already been the model for des Esseintes in Huysmans' Against the Grain, although Huysmans had never met him -- he heard about Montesquiou from Mallarmé. Montesquiou was a subject for Proust's mimickry, but he admired his "reverence for the arts and extraordinary social connections; the young man shared the first and coveted the second." But Montesquiou wasn't the only model for Charlus's "tantrums, his preposterous pride in his social position and lineage, his endless monologues." Proust also modeled the baron on the corpulent Jacques Doasan, "who ruined himself heaping presents on a Polish violinist," just as Charlus does with Charles Morel. And White suggest that Proust gave Charlus "his own tyrannical whims, his aestheticizing, and his peevishness."

In 1894, he met the composer Reynaldo Hahn, who was five years his junior, beginning an affair that would last for two years -- "like Proust, he was half-Jewish, gay, and artistic." They "traveled together and were put up in châteaus together by tolerant hostesses." One hostess who tolerated them was Madame Lemaire, whose "tyrannical ... attentions to her guests" influenced Proust in his creation of Madame Verdurin. Their relationship finally foundered on Proust's "obsessive neediness." The scene in which Swann goes searching through Paris for Odette "had its antecedent in Proust's life when he was unable to find Reynaldo and nerly went mad."

In 1895 they visited Sarah Bernhardt at Belle-Île on the coast of Brittany. While there, Proust began writing Jean Santeuil, a novel that he later abandoned. The character he based on himself is not the narrator but is observed in third person. In it, his parents are depicted as "vulgar bullies and obstructionists who stand in the way of their son's social and artistic ambitions," whereas in the Search, written after their deaths, they are "wise, refined, melancholy beings who want nothing but their ailing, neurasthenic son's health and happiness." There is scant mention of homosexuality in the early novel, "although already Proust is disguising his boyfriends as girls," and Jean obsesses over a suspected lesbian relationship over two girls modeled on Hahn and Daudet. Hahn is not represented in the Search: "Already in Jean Santeuil Proust was ridding himself of Hahn by writing about him, since for Proust to paint the verbal portrait of a friend was to give him the kiss-off." White suggests that breaking up with Hahn may have been one reason why Proust stopped working on the novel. But its was also "one of the few equal and reciprocated sexual and romantic relationships of Proust's life" and they remained friends -- Proust read Swann's Way to him while he was working on it, and the relationship of Swann and Odette in the novel, with its "alternating bouts of jealousy and reconciliation," is based on the dynamic of Proust's relationship with Hahn. Lucien Daudet, seven years younger than Proust, was his next "focus of amorous interest in 1896 and 1897." Daudet was the son of one of the most celebrated French writers of the day and had studied painting with Whistler. Their affair lasted eighteen months, and they, too, remained friends afterward.

Proust's first book, Pleasures and Days, was published in 1896, when he was twenty-seven. It was not enthusiastically received. Anatole France, the model for Bergotte in the Search, "complained that Proust wrote 'sentences long enough to make you consumptive,'" and Léon Blum called it "this book that is too coquettish and too pretty," partly because it was printed in an unusually luxurious and expensive edition, costing four times as much as other books its size. Proust did no significant writing in 1897 and 1899, but read constantly, particularly Balzac.

Proust was influenced by the story of how young, ambitious men from the provinces (epitomized by Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions) could social-climb their way through Paris with the help of mistresses -- and even a powerful male lover: Lucien, for instance, is aided by Vautrin, a master criminal who is clearly in love with him.

Balzac also gave him "a taste for the theatrical," as in the scenes in Jupien's male brothel in Finding Time Again, the scene in Swann's Way in which Mlle. Vinteuil and her female lover desecrate the portrait of Mlle. Vinteuil's father, and the cruel treatment of Charlus by Mme. Verdurin in The Prisoner. Proust also read Shakespeare, Goethe, and George Eliot, and was especially affected by the character of Casaubon in Middlemarch, "who labored all his life on an insignificant and absurd work," as Proust put it.

In 1897, Proust fought a duel with the novelist Jean Lorrain, who had called Proust "one of those pretty little society boys who've managed to get themselves pregnant with literature" in a review of Pleasures and Days, and managed to suggest that Proust was gay in a newspaper article. (Lorrain was gay, too.) Neither man was injured. He would fight other duels in the years to follow, never harming anyone. (The narrator of the Search alludes to his own duels, but never gives an account of one.)

It was this hypervirile image that Proust was eager to cultivate, as a way of offsetting his spreading reputation as a homosexual. To be labeled a homosexual in print (as opposed to living a homosexual life in private or discreetly among friends) was social anathema, even in Paris, until the recent past.

Proust now turned his literary efforts to translating John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. He was interested in Ruskin the aesthete, not Ruskin the social thinker and pacifist. White notes that Proust "was a fierce patriot, a proud ex-soldier, and anything but a pacifist." He worked from a literal, word-for-word translation done by his mother and Marie Nordlinger, Hahn's English cousin, and traveled to Amiens with Hahn and to Venice with his mother to see the architecture Ruskin described. "The style Proust worked out in French and retained for his later fiction, with its complex syntax and long sentences (so unusual in French literature) sounds very much like Ruskin." But it's the essay that served as the translation's preface, "On Reading," that constitutes Proust's "first mature piece of writing." It's about the effect of reading on the development of a child's imagination, a theme to which Proust returned in the "Combray" section of Swann's Way.

What is important to point out is that Proust's first genuine writing came in the form of a personal essay written in opposition to the theories of a major thinker.... So much of the literary art of our times has struck sparks by opposing one genre to another -- novel and memoir, for instance, or fiction and essay.... In Proust's case, the fertile encounter took place between the essay and the novel.

Proust now made friends among the aristocracy. Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, a member of one of France's most eminent families, is one of the models for Robert de Saint-Loup. Another friends was Antoine de Bibesco, a Romanian prince, who once tried to show Proust how to shake hands with a firmer grip, only to be told that people would think he was gay if he did.

Which is just an indication of how devious the thinking of a homosexual of the period could become -- a homosexual affects a limp handshake so that heterosexuals will not think he is a homosexual disguising himself as a hearty hetero -- whereas in fact he is exactly what he appears to be: a homosexual with a limp handshake...

He was shocked when Bibesco told people what Proust had confided to him: an attraction to another aristocrat, Bertrand de Fénelon. "Proust seems not to have realized how his reputation as a homosexual had become general knowledge in his circle." It turned out that Fénelon was bisexual, but Proust didn't learn it until later years. Fénelon also contributed to the portrait of Saint-Loup: He once walked along the backs of the banquettes in a restaurant to fetch a coat for Proust, as Saint-Loup does for the narrator in The Guermantes Way. Proust also enlisted Bibesco to spy on Fénelon, as the narrator does "in his fits of jealousy over Albertine." With his friends, he traveled to various cathedrals around Paris, recording architectural details that would enter into descriptions in the Search. He went to Holland with Fénelon in 1902, where he saw Vermeer's View of Delft, which is the painting with the patch of yellow that Bergotte goes to see in The Prisoner before being felled by a stroke.

In February 1903, his brother Robert married, and in November of that year their father died, one day after the birth of Robert's daughter. Two years later, in September 1905, their mother died at age fifty-six. Marcel would mourn her death for the rest of his life, and said, "In dying, Maman took with her her little Marcel," which White interprets as a turning point from "the intellectual dandified Marcel" to "the determined, wise, ascetic Proust." He also observes that the narrator's mother in the Search has Proust's mother's "disappointment with her son's lack of self-discipline," while the narrator's grandmother is given "his real mother's tenderness, her unconditional love for him in spite of all his failings."

He was thirty-four when his mother died, and had published only a book of stories and a translation of Ruskin, but his ambition was "to write a book that would rival Balzac's panorama of Parisian society." He had both the knowledge of the world and the sensibility to accomplish the task, and he had been left a fortune by his parents: "the equivalent of about $6 million of our money today, including a monthly revenue of some $15,000." He would squander a lot of it on gifts, even ordering an airplane for Alfred Agostinelli -- though he canceled the order after Agostinelli's death -- which becomes the yacht the narrator offers to buy Albertine in The Prisoner. He would also make bad investments on a whim, but he spent little on himself: "He was a playboy-monk."

In December 1906 he moved to 102 boulevard Haussmann, where he insulated his bedroom from noise and dust, lining the walls with cork and covering the windows "with layers of heavy curtains that were never opened." Here he began his project, beginning it "as a sort of Platonic dialogue with his mother on the subject of Sainte-Beuve, the nineteenth-century literary critic," the centenary of whose birth had been widely celebrated in December 1904. Proust dissented radically from Sainte-Beuve's belief that the reader should study a writer's biography in order to fully understand his work. Proust believed that this led Sainte-Beuve to radically undervalue such writers as Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Nerval. "A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices," Proust asserted. But the dialogue about Sainte-Beuve was not the only thing he was planning to write:

In a letter of this period he said he was planning: a study of the nobility; a Parisian novel; an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert; an essay on women; and an essay on pederasty. Other topics mentioned were gravestones, stained-glass church windows -- and an essay on the novel. What is crucial to underline is that at its very inception Proust thought of his book as several books, mostly essays.

By June 1908 he was working on the fictional conversation with his mother on Sainte-Beuve, writing constantly, but also worrying about publishing what he was writing, which he called "obscene." The work, which had a "provisional title," Against Sainte-Beuve, Memories of a Morning, was a novel, and one of the characters was gay. It would end, he wrote to Georges de Lauris, "with a long conversation on Sainte-Beuve and aesthetics." White observes that In Search of Lost Time ends with a meditation and not a conversation on aesthetics. And that Sainte-Beuve's autobiographical theory has been countered in the novel by Vinteuil, who "is a mighty creator as a composer and a totally self-effacing wimp as a man -- the perfect counterargument to Sainte-Beuve's theory of the harmonious congruity between an individual's life and work." And that from the very beginning Proust had planned to write about homosexuality in his novel.

He was afraid he wouldn't live to complete the work: "He was so ill that he was spending about twenty thousand dollars a year for medicines." But he hadn't completely withdrawn from the world. At Cabourg, "he studied the actress Lucy Gérard and the two daughters of Viscount d'Alton" as models for the "gang of girls" in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. But he also studied "with feverish fascination" a group of boys he met on the beach, including 19-year-old Marcel Plantevignes, who visited Proust in his room until a woman warned Plantevignes about Proust's homosexuality. Proust flew into a rage when the woman told him that Plantevignes had agreed with her about the accusation, "and even challenged Plantevignes's father to a duel." Proust's own seconds thought the challenge absurd and like "a duel from an operetta by Offenbach." The duel was called off and the friendship resumed when Plantevignes and his parents assured Proust that they didn't believe he was gay. Plantevignes also claimed that he suggested the title, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur.

In mid-August 1909 Proust talked to an editor about the novel he said he had nearly finished: a novel of about 300 pages, followed by an essay, a conversation about Sainte-Beuve, of 150 pages. The editor turned it down and another decided not to publish it as a newspaper serial. Proust decided to continue work and did so for the next three years. He conceived of the novel as a story about the narrator's childhood in Combray followed by the adolescent experiences of the narrator and Gilberte Swann in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées -- the "Swann in Love" section, which is four-fifths of Swann's Way, was not part of the original conception. The section is integral to the complete Search because Swann's unrequited love for Odette is echoed later in the narrator's relationship with Albertine, and Swann's failure to become a writer is reflected in the experience of the narrator, who finally overcomes what is blocking his writing.

And it suggests that one reason for Swann's failure is his addiction to friendship and frivolity and especially to "idolatry," by which Proust meant the collector's love of fine furnishings, beautiful mistresses, and great paintings: the perishable Things of this world rather than the immortal ideas that lie behind them, which can be recaptured only through involuntary memory -- and which only then can be codified in great works of literary art.

Proust had learned how to shape a novel, how to introduce a theme, drop it, and return to it later, and how to work with a narrator whose impressions of other characters changes as the story progresses: The narrator of the Search first hears of Charlus as a womanizer and assumes that he is Odette's lover, but gradually learns otherwise. The creation of the character of Charlus, White observes, "falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James." Like Dickens's characters, Charlus is made up of "memorable traits" and presented in "Dickensian bold relief." But "by building up a slow composite of images through time, Proust achieves the same complexity that James had aimed at."

Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth but (especially in his late novels) nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another. Proust succeeded in rendering characters with the same startling simplicity as Dickens but generated a lifelike subtlety and motion by giving us successive "takes" over hundreds of pages.

Proust rewrote and expanded the first volume of the Search from 1909 through 1911. He dictated to his stenographers, had the manuscript set in type, then filled the margins with changes and additions, even pasting in new pages. "In fact, if any writer would have benefited from a word processor it would have been Proust." He paid for the typesetting, which was expensive, himself. In 1910 he worked on what would become Swann's Way and The Guermantes Way, then divided the manuscript in two volume, one called Time Lost and the other Time Regained. He rarely went out, although he was present at the famously controversial opening night of the Stravinsky/Diaghilev/Nijinsky Rite of Spring. In 1911, he subscribed to Théâtrophone, which broadcast concerts over the telephone. He heard Act III of Die Meistersinger and the opera Pelléas et Mélisande this way. He preferred Wagner, and some critics have compared the Search to Parsifal: Parsifal's quest for the Grail being parallel to the narrator's search for "the secret of literature" and the "young girls in flower" to the Flower Maidens. And the name Guermantes echoes that of Gurnemanz, the leader of the Grail Knights.

By 1912, Proust's manuscript had reached 1,200 pages and he began to look for a publisher. He was working with a typist named Albert Nahmias, on whom he had a crush, and who eventually lent his name to Albertine. The novel was sent in October to the publisher Fasquelle, which had published Flaubert, Zola, and the Goncourt brothers. They returned it in December with a reader's note expressing complete bewilderment. He then sent it to Gallimard, which was a new publishing house started by André Gide, Jacques Copeau and Jean Schlumberger. But the readers, led by Gide, seem not to have read the manuscript, dismissing Proust as "a socialite and a snob." In any case, "the book was much too long for a fledgling house." Gide would later express regret at the missed opportunity. Then it went to Ollendorff, where a reader protested about Proust's using "thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep."

Finally, Proust resorted to self-publication through Bernard Grasset:

Grasset, whom Proust compared to an ebony paper-cutter, so hard and sharp and efficient was he, virtually invented modern publishing in France; he was the first to resort to massive press offensives, advertising, bribing well-known personalities to launch a good word-of-mouth campaign, and so on.

Proust met Alfred Agostinelli in 1907; he chauffeured Proust in Normandy, and again a year later drove him from Cabourg to Versailles. But Proust did not see him again until 1913, when Agostinelli was 25 and living with a woman named Anna. Proust hired him as a secretary, and both Agostinelli and Anna moved into Proust's apartment.

At that time homosexual relations, especially between the classes, were viewed benignly as a form of patronage -- or weren't focused upon at all, except when a scandal erupted; and such scandals were never characteristic of France ... in large part because the laws dating back to 1791 (and ratified by the penal code of 1810) had already decriminalized sodomy.

"Patronage" relationships were typically between an older rich man and a younger poor man, and were then "considered to be charitable and generous." Proust was indeed generous, sending money to members of Agostinelli's family. He "was certainly in love," and his fits of jealousy are reflected not only in his portrayal of the relationship between the narrator and Albertine, but also in that of Swann and Odette, passages of which he reworked in August 1913.

Agostinelli and Anna moved out of Proust's apartment on December 1, 1913, while Proust was sleeping. They had lived with him from the beginning of the year. Proust was "devastated" and tried to lure Agostinelli back by promising to buy him an airplane -- Agostinelli's interest in flying is reflected in the narrator's accompanying Albertine to the airfields around Paris. The departure of Agostinelli cast a shadow over the publication of Swann's Way in November 1913. The reviews were good, but Proust took no pleasure in them.

On May 30, 1914, Agostinelli died while making his second solo flight over the Mediterranean: He clung or a while to the wreckage of the plane, but drowned because he couldn't swim. Proust took Anna in and helped her until she could go out on her own again. He was unable to work even on the page proofs of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which he began receiving in June. But the publication of that book had to be postponed because of the outbreak of World War I in August, giving him time to rework it, to separate it from The Guermantes Way, and to give Albertine a greater role in it. He also conceived of The Prisoner and The Fugitive at this time. He also gave the theme of lesbianism a greater prominence in the work as a whole. "In the eight years following Agostinelli's death Proust's book doubled in volume." As the nature of the book Proust was working on became better known, André Gide wrote him to apologize for rejecting Swann's Way. Proust also recovered from Agostinelli's death by having an affair with Ernst Forssgren, "a six-foot-four blond Swedish Adonis," his valet-secretary, which ended when Forssgren emigrated to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Swedish army.

Proust worked through the war, researching details by writing thousands of letters to people asking for facts, details and anecdotes. He lost many friends in the war, including Bertrand de Fénelon, killed in combat, and Emmanuel Bibesco, who killed himself because he had a terminal illness. His faithful companion and only servant during the war was Céleste Albaret, who wrote a memoir of her life with Proust. "Only his mother and Céleste ever gave him the unconditional love that he expected." Céleste steadfastly denied to biographers that he was gay, but admitted that he had visited a male brothel -- for "research," she claimed. He "even gave some of his parents' furniture to be used in this hotbed of homosexual prostitution" -- a detail reflected in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in which the narrator gives some of the furniture he has inherited from his Aunt Léonie to a brothel. According to one not entirely reliable witness Proust was turned on sexually by watching live rats stabbed to death with hatpins. Several others report that he would spit on his mother's picture while having sex -- a reënactment of the scene with Vinteuil's daughter and her lesbian lover in Swann's Way, and perhaps also reflected in The Guermantes Way when Charlus has an excited fantasy about wanting to see Bloch beat his mother.

In 1917 and 1918 Proust started going out more often, especially to the Ritz, whose headwaiter, Olivier Dabescat, gave him many anecdotes about the well-to-do for the novel. But his health, exacerbated by uppers like adrenaline and caffeine and downers like opium, was deteriorating. He was also forced to move, and stayed for a while in the home of the actress Réjane, one of the models for La Berma, before settling at 44 rue Hamelin.

In June 1919, Gallimard reissued Swann's Way, and published In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and a collection of short pieces and pastiches. At the end of the year he won the Goncourt Prize for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by a vote of six to four, after campaigning for the award with presents and dinners for the judges. The award was controversial, regarded by some as "the coronation of an invalid who lived in the past." His book was "dismissed ... as disorganized childhood and adolescent memories -- formless, plotless, endless." The criticism was frustrating for Proust, who knew the shape of the novel as a whole, and especially the role of memory in it: "the theme of involuntary memory" is introduced in the episode with the madeleine near the beginning of Swann's Way, but is not fully developed until the final book, Finding Time Again. The complete work was not published until 1927, five years after Proust's death.

Proust was anti-intellectual and convinced that the domain of art, which is recollected experience, can never be tapped through reasoning or method alone; it must be delivered to us, fresh and vivid, through a process beyond the control of the intellect or willpower. Paradoxically, if Proust was anti-intellectual he was also profoundly philosophical, in that what he sought was not the accidents but the essence of a past event. Involuntary memory, be definition anti-intellectual, nevertheless refines away all the unnecessary details of a forgotten moment and retains only its unadorned core.

In the summer of 1918, he fell in love with a waiter at the Ritz, Henri Rochat, "a handsome Swiss who wanted to be a painter." Although his fortune had been shrunk by 25 percent through spending and poor investing, he again showered his lover with gifts. Rochat moved into Proust's apartment where he spent his days painting.

What researchers have figured out in recent years is that Proust wrote first The Fugitive, soon after Agostinelli's departure and death, while the material was still vivid in his mind and a weight on his heart, whereas he elaborated [The Prisoner] later, even though the book actually precedes The Fugitive in the published sequence. Why? Simply because the main inspiration for the Albertine of [The Prisoner] is Henri Rochat, not Alfred Agostinelli. It was Rochat who lived in his own room, solitary and self-sufficient, in Proust's gloomy apartment, whereas Agostinelli had lived with his wife and only briefly under Proust's roof. Accordingly, [The Prisoner], which had been sketched out as early as 1916, doubled in size during the two years Rochat lived with Proust.

Eventually, Proust tired of Rochat's mooching and managed to get rid of him.

In January 1920, Proust published his essay on Flaubert in La Nouvelle Revue Française, in which he differentiates his style from Flaubert's by writing about the author's lack of use of metaphor, whereas Proust's style is richly metaphorical. In the spring of 1921, he began to suffer increasingly from dizzy spells, and one of his last outings was to see Vermeer's The View of Delft on loan to the Jeu de Paume. He would refer to this visit in his account of Bergotte's similar outing and death, and "on the night before he died Proust dictated a last sentence, 'There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer's craft.'" (Vermeer is also the subject of Swann's never-completed study.)

In May 1921, Sodom and Gomarrah was published, "and Proust was almost disappointed by the lack of scandal." One who took offense at Proust's "ugly picture ... of homosexuals" was André Gide. In a conversation with Gide, Proust explained "that he had transposed to the female characters all his homosexual memories that were tender and charming and so had been left with nothing but grotesque details for his homosexual characters." But elsewhere Proust argued that gay people had been so persecuted by Christians "that the only gays who'd survived had been invalids impossible to cure."

In September 1922, his health began to fail more rapidly. He developed pneumonia which turned into bronchitis and a lung abscess. He died in the evening of November 18, 1922.

"Every page of Proust is the transcript of a mind thinking ... the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice: the sovereign intellect," White comments. He is not, however, a realist: "Instead, we read his fables of caste and lust, of family virtue and social vice, of the depredations of jealousy and the consolations of art not as reports but as fairy tales."

Proust may be telling us that love is a chimera, a projection of rich fantasies onto an indifferent, certainly mysterious surface, but nevertheless those fantasies are undeniably beautiful, intimations of paradise -- the artificial paradise of art.... Proust is the first contemporary writer of the twentieth century, for he was the first to describe the permanent instability of our times.

Day One Hundred Eighty-Two: Finding Time Again, pp. 322-358

2010-05-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

From "At this moment an unexpected incident occurred. ..." through "... between which so many days have taken up their place -- in Time."

_____

La Berma's daughter and son-in-law have left her, "spitting a little blood," and come to the party to see Rachel. A footman brings their note to Rachel who "smiled at the transparency of their pretext and at her own triumph," and sends word that her performance is over. "The footmen in the ante-room, where the couple's wait continued, were already beginning to snigger at the two rejected supplicants." Meanwhile, Rachel makes fun of them before allowing them to enter, "ruining at a stroke La Berma's position in society, as they had destroyed her health." She also plans to taunt La Berma backstage about their crashing the party. "Yet she might have shrunk from delivering it if she had known that it would be fatal."

We learn now that the Duchesse is unhappy because the Duc, having mostly stopped being unfaithful to her, has fallen in love with Odette. He has "sequestrated his mistress to the point that, if my love for Albertine had repeated, with major variations, Swann's love of Odette, M. de Guermantes's love for her had recalled my love for Albertine." Odette has come full circle, becoming "once more, just as she had appeared to me in my childhood, the lady in pink" kept by his Uncle Adolphe.

As for the Duc, the narrator sees him as "little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ruin so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm." And he watches as the Duc, "tried painfully to pass through the door and descend the staircase on his way out," an image that will haunt the narrator until the closing pages of the novel.

Odette has turned talkative in her old age, and under the impression that the narrator "was a well-known author," tells him stories about her affairs, including one with M. de Bréauté. As for Swann, she says, "Poor Charles, he was so intelligent, so fascinating, exactly the kind of man I liked best." And the narrator thinks, "perhaps this was true." The narrator listens to her stories, which she tells him "simply to give me what she thought were subjects for novels."

She was wrong, not because she had not provided the reserves of my imagination with an abundance of material, but because this had been done in a much more involuntary fashion and by an act that I initiated myself as I drew out from her, without her knowledge, the laws of her life.

The Duchesse, too, is forthcoming, in her own way, with the narrator, and they leave the main drawing-room to visit the smaller rooms where people are getting away from the crowd and listening to music. In one room they see a beautiful woman whom the Duchesse identifies as Mme. de Saint-Euverte, the wife of one of the grand-nephews of the Mme. de Saint-Euverte at whose soirée Swann and the Duchesse, then the Princesse des Laumes, had chatted long ago. The Duchesse denies having been at that party. The present Mme. de Saint-Euverte, stretched out in a cradle-like chaise longue, becomes for the narrator a symbol of "both the distance and the continuity of Time. It was Time that she was rocking in that hollow cradle, where the name of Saint-Euverte and Empire style were bursting into flower in red fuchsia silk."

The Duchesse now takes it on herself to denounce Gilberte as "the most artificial, the most bourgeois thing I've ever seen," and to chide the narrator for coming "to great soulless affairs like this. Unless of course you're gathering material...." He points out how hard it must be for Gilberte "to have to listen, as she just has, to her husband's former mistress." But the Duchesse doubts that it affects Gilberte at all, and claims that "there were an awful lot of stories" about how Gilberte was unfaithful to Saint-Loup, including with an officer whom he wanted to challenge to a duel. She calls Gilberte "a slut," which the narrator sees as "the product of the hatred she felt for Gilberte, by a need to hit her, if not physically then in effigy."

Gilberte introduces him to her daughter, and says that Saint-Loup "was very proud of her. Though of course given his tastes, Gilberte went on naïvely, I think he would have preferred a boy." Mlle. de Saint-Loup, he tells us, "later chose to marry an obscure literary figure, for she was devoid of snobbery, and brought her family down to a level below that from which it had started." And she becomes the nexus of the story he is telling us:

They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her. Above all it was the two great "ways" which had led to her, along which I had had so many walks and so many dreams -- through her father, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way, through her mother, Gilberte, the Méséglise way which was the "way by Swann's". One, through the little girl's mother and the Champs-Élysées, led me to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to the Méséglise way; the other, through her father, to my afternoons at Balbec, where I could visualize him close in the sunlit sea.

But there are other tangling ways: He had first seen Odette as the lady in pink at the house of his great-uncle, whose manservant was the father of Charles Morel, whom both Charlus and Saint-Loup had been in love with. And so on, as the threads draw in Albertine and the Verdurins and Vinteuil's music and Legrandin and the other characters of the novel, so that "between the least significant point in our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us in fact a choice about which connection to make."

Thus, "in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space." And "memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to is, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality." And here he begins the task of writing the book, of restoring the past "from our ceaseless falsification of it," which necessitates

putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries.

He assumes the task at his "big deal table, watched by Françoise," who "through being so close to my life, ... had developed a kind of instinctive understanding of literary work, more accurate than that of many intelligent people, let alone fools." He constructs his book "not as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making," assembling his notes and sketches, "pinning a supplementary page in place here and there," a process with which Françoise can sympathize, "as she always used to be saying how she could not sew if she did not have the right number thread and the proper buttons."

Anxieties arise, however: "feeling myself the bearer of a work of literature made the idea of an accident in which I might meet my death seem much more dreadful." And he understands "that since my childhood I had already died a number of times." He also experiences the incomprehension of others, when he shows them his first sketches for the work: "In the places where I was trying to find general laws, I was accused of sifting through endless detail." (The reader, or at least this one, certainly knows what he means here.) He returns to his beloved Arabian Nights for a parallel to his experience: "I would be living with the anxiety of not knowing whether the Master of my destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, when I broke off my story each evening, would stay my death sentence, and permit me to take up the continuation again the following evening." And he accepts the possibility that the book itself will "eventually die, one day.... Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men."

Yet he remains convinced that he has something to say about his great theme:

the fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels, and this universality could only delight me, since this was the truth, the truth suspected by everybody, that it was my task to elucidate.... It was this notion of embodied time, of past years not being separated from us, that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work.

And then he recalls the Duc de Guermantes, weighed down by years, perched "on the scarcely manageable summit of his eighty-three years, as if all men are perched on top of living stilts which never stop growing, sometimes becoming taller than church steeples, until eventually they make walking difficult and dangerous, and down from which, all of a sudden, they fall." So his first concern is with the people in his novel, describing them, "even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space."

That is (to single out the last words of the novel), "in Time."

FIN

Day One Hundred Eighty-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 292-322

2010-05-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

From "Throughout this conversation Gilberte had talked to me ..." through "... when I'm really just a bundle of nerves.' "

_____

Gilberte and Andrée have become friends, which intrigues the narrator because Rachel, who is performing at the party, had been the mistress of both of their husbands, except that Andrée's husband (Octave) had left Rachel for her. And he speculates that Gilberte feels that Rachel had "been more deeply loved by Robert than she had ever been." Gilberte also reveals her scorn for the hostess, who is now her aunt, "for having been Mme de Saint-Loup since slightly earlier than Mme Verdurin entered the family, she considered herself always to have been a Guermantes and to have been dishonored by the misalliance her uncle had contracted by marrying Mme Verdurin." Gilberte is also rather dismissive of the Duchesse de Guermantes: "I saw you talking to my aunt Oriane, who has plenty of good qualities, but I don't think it would be unfair, do you, to say that she's hardly one of the intellectual elite."

The narrator is thinking of the party as a kind of farewell to the social life: "I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward." He recognizes that he is about to turn the lives of the people he has met into fiction, to "take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws." Which is, in a phrase, pretty much what In Search of Lost Time attempts to do. But he still has a longing for some kind of new life: "a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses." At the same time, he is prey to nostalgia, to a longing to find that his grandmother or Albertine would somehow turn up to be alive.

I forgot only one thing, which was that if they really were still living, Albertine would now have something like the appearance that Mme Cottard had presented at Balbec, and that my grandmother, being over ninety-five years old, would show me nothing of that beautiful, calm, smiling face with which I still imagined her now.

He notices the Duchesse de Guermantes "deep in conversation with a frightful old woman." Later, he will learn that the woman is Rachel, now a famous actress, one of several that the Duchesse now associates with, having given up the Faubourg Saint-Germain, "which, she said, bored her to death." He tells her of his encounter with Charlus, and when Morel enters, "the Duchesse greeted him with a politeness which I found a little disconcerting." But remembering the marriage into the Cambremer family of the "daughter" (earlier: niece) of Jupien, "the tradesman from our building, and that the additional factor which had enabled her to become a glittering success was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus," he reflects that "a name is always taken at its current valuation." The valuation of the Duchesse, for example, is now low: "The new generations concluded from [her friendship with actresses] that Mme de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some demi-rep who had never really been properly upper-crust." He also wonders if her friendship with Rachel reflects "the antipathy which the unpredictable Duchesse had recently developed towards Gilberte."

The mutability of relationships is further demonstrated by the fact that it was in the Duchesse's home that Rachel "had, long ago, received her most terrible humiliation. Rachel had gradually, not forgotten, but forgiven, but the singular prestige which the Duchesse had, in her eyes, thereby received could never be effaced."

"Meanwhile, at the other end of Paris," as the narrator puts it, the other party to which he was invited, the tea given by La Berma for her daughter and son-in-law is a disaster. Everyone has gone to the Princesse's. La Berma (previously reported as dead) is fatally ill, but "to pay for the luxury her daughter needed and which her son-in-law, idle and with poor health, was unable to provide, she had returned to acting." While on stage, she is vividly alive, but in fact is in great pain. She also resents the fact that Rachel has become a success, for she "still regarded Rachel as a tart who had been allowed to appear in dramas in which she, La Berma, was playing the leading role, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses she wore on stage." To make matters worse, "the son-in-law was furious that Rachel, whom he and his wife knew very well, had not invited them" to her performance at the Princesse's. A solitary guest shows up at La Berma's tea party.

But soon the blast of air which was sweeping everything towards the Guermantes, and which had swept me there myself, was too strong, and he rose and left, leaving Phèdre, or death, it was not very clear any longer which of the two it was, with her daughter and her son-in-law, to finish eating the funeral cakes.

As it turns out, Rachel's performance is unconventional, and "Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume" and "a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles." But the Princesse "was acting as a claque. She was whipping up enthusiasm and creating favorable impressions by constantly giving voice to exclamations of delight. Here alone her Verdurin nature could still be seen."

Now we learn that the narrator is as yet unaware of the identity of the actress, who, "without any gratification of my vanity, for she was old and ugly, ... was giving me the eye, though in a somewhat restrained manner." It turns out that she was trying to get him to recognize her, which he doesn't, until Bloch whispers to him, "Isn't it funny to see Rachel here!" The revelation "instantly shattered the enchantment which had given Saint-Loup's mistress the unknown form of this disgusting old woman." He is made "aware that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts" because "La Berma was, as they say, head and shoulders above Rachel, and time, by making Rachel a star at the same time as Elstir, had overrated a mediocrity and consecrated a genius."

He also becomes aware of what time has done to Mme. de Guermantes, whose wit has grown sour, just as Bergotte "kept his characteristic sentence rhythms, his interjections, his ellipses, his epithets, though all in order to say nothing." And he realizes that the Duchesse, once so exalted, so dazzlingly inaccessible, now treats him as one of her oldest friends, that she has

forgotten certain details which had seemed to me then to be essential, namely that I did not go to Guermantes, and was only a middle-class boy from Combray at the time when she came to Mlle Percepied's nuptial mass, and that for the whole year after her appearance at the Opéra-Comique, despite all Saint-Loup's entreaties she never invited me to her house. To me this seemed terribly important, because it was precisely at this point that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter. But to her it just seemed to be a part of the same ordinary life as always.

He reminds her of the time when he first went to the Princesse de Guermantes, uncertain whether he had really been invited, and of the red dress and red shoes she wore, and she grows melancholy about the passage of time. And though she has not forgotten that Rachel once gave that disastrous performance at her house, she remembers it quite differently: "it was I who discovered her, saw how good she was, sang her praises and made people take notice of her at a time when she had no reputation and everybody thought she was ridiculous."

Day One Hundred Eighty: Finding Time Again, pp. 271-292

2010-05-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

From "The friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes ..." through "...at the time of the Caliphs, by Sinbad the Sailor. "

_____

The young woman's misinformation about society reveals to the narrator more about the mutability of reputations: "the young woman was intelligent, but this difference between our two vocabularies made it both uneasy and instructive." The passage of time "prevents a newly disembarked American woman from seeing that M. de Charlus had held the highest social position in Paris at a time when Bloch had had none, and that Swann, who put himself to such trouble for M. Bontemps, had been treated with the greatest friendship by the Prince of Wales. ... [T]his ignorance ... is also an effect (but this time operating upon the individual rather than the social stratum) of Time."

I had heard, during the last years of Swann's life, even society people, when his name was mentioned say, as if it were his claim to notoriety, "You're speaking of the Swann of Colombin's?" [Swann had an affair with a woman who served tea there.] And I now heard even people who ought to have known better saying, when they were speaking of Bloch: "The Guermantes Bloch? The close friend of the Guermantes?"

After a rather brutal assessment of Bloch as having "the almost frightening, deeply anxious face of an old Shylock," the narrator foresees Bloch "in ten years, in drawing-rooms like this whose inertia will have made him a leading light."

But the narrator also has an insight into how he must have appeared in his early days: "The first times I dined with Mme de Guermantes how I must have shocked men like M. de Beauserfeuil, not so much by my mere presence, as by the remarks I made, indicating that I was entirely ignorant of the memories which constituted his past and which shaped the image he had of society!" And he realizes of his still-living acquaintances, such as Charlus and Gilberte, that he "had even ceased to think of them as the same people I had once known, and that it needed a chance flash of attention to reconnect them, etymologically as it were, to the original meaning they had had for me." This disjunction between the avatars of the same person was why "at least twenty years since she had met Bloch for the first time, Mme de Guermantes would have been prepared to swear that he had been born into her world and been dandled on the knee of the Duchesse de Chartres when he was two years old."

His life begins to seem to be made up of many threads.

And today all those different threads had come together to create the web, here of the Saint-Loup household, there of the young Cambremer couple, not to mention Morel, and so many others whose conjunction had combined to create a set of circumstances that it seemed to me that the circumstances were the complete unity, and the characters merely component parts.... A simple social relationship, even a material object, if I discovered it in my memory after a few years, I saw that life had gone on weaving different threads around it which eventually became dense enough to form that inimitable, lovely, velvety loom on the years, like the accretion which in old parks shrouds a simple water-pipe in a sheath of emerald.

And he becomes aware once again of the essential unknowability of other people, that "between us and other beings there is a margin of contingencies, just as I had understood in my readings at Combray that there is a margin in perception which prevents absolute contact taking place between reality and the mind.... Even with the Duchesse de Guermantes, as with certain pages of Bergotte, her charm was visible to me only at a distance and vanished when I was close to her, for it all lay in my memory and my imagination."

A conversation about whether or not the Marquise d'Arpajon is dead makes him realize that "with ordinary, very old, society people, we got confused about whether they were dead or not, not only because one knew little about, or had forgotten, their past, but because they had no connection of any sort with the future." One old woman, he observes, takes the news of the Marquise's death not as a blow, but "on the contrary, felt as if she had won a victory in a competition against distinguished competitors every time that a person her age 'disappeared.' Their deaths were the sole means by which she could still become pleasantly aware of her own life."

And then a "stout lady" greets him and it is a moment before he recognizes her as Gilberte. It's the moment that was alluded to earlier, when Gilberte says "You thought I was Mama, it's true I am beginning to look very like her." They talk about Robert and about the war, which has begun to take some of the aspect for the narrator of the Arabian Nights.

Day One Hundred Seventy-Nine: Finding Time Again, pp. 249-271

2010-05-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

From "And as with snow, too, ..." through "... It's just like a novel.'"

_____

The narrator's heightened consciousness of the effect of time also causes him to turn his attention to the younger people at the party: "now it was not only what had become of the young people of the past, but what would become of the young people of today, that was giving me such a strong sensation of time." A few guests, however, seem to have withstood the ravaging effects of time and "at the age of fifty they began a new kind of beauty." But women "who were too beautiful or too ugly" couldn't benefit from this kind of transformation: The former "crumble away like a statue," and the latter "did not really look as if they had aged," but haven't improved either. In a few, the process has either "accelerated or slowed down." One former beauty has been ravaged by her addiction to "cocaine and other drugs." But one man, who "must have been over fifty, and looked younger than he had when he was thirty ... had found an intelligent doctor and cut out alcohol and salt."

And then there's Odette: "'You think I'm my mother,' Gilberte had said to me. It was true." Expecting to see a great change in Odette, he doesn't recognize her at first. Having calculated how old she must be, "it seemed to me [she] could not possibly be the one I was looking at, precisely because she was so like her old self." And because Odette "had not changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She was like a sterilized rose.... The voice had stayed the same, needlessly warm, captivating.... And yet, just as her eyes seemed to be looking at me from a distant shore, her voice was sad, almost pleading, like that of the dead in the Odyssey. Odette was still capable of acting." Three years later, he will see her again at Gilberte's and find that her mind is going, though when a guest says, "She's a bit gaga, you know," Odette will visibly take offense. "[S]he who had betrayed Swann and everybody else was not being betrayed by the entire universe; and she had become so weak that she no longer even dared, now the roles were reversed, to defend herself against men. And soon she would not defend herself against death."

And thus the Princesse de Guermantes's drawing-room was illuminated, forgetful, and flowery, like a peaceful cemetery. There, time had not only brought about the ruin of the creatures of a former epoch, it had made possible, had indeed created, new associations.

Bloch has "permanently adopted his pseudonym of Jacques du Rozier as his own name" and has become a famous and successful writer. He has shaved his moustache and wears a monocle, and "his Jewish nose had disappeared, in the way that a hunchback, if she presents herself well, can seem to stand almost straight." He comments to the narrator that the Princesse de Guermantes is hardly the "marvellous beauty" that he had once raved about, and the narrator has to explain that this isn't the same person: "The Princesse de Guermantes had died and it was the former Mme Verdurin whom the Prince, ruined by the defeat of Germany, had married." Bloch protests that he must be wrong, because he had looked up the Prince in the Almanac de Gotha, and found that he was "married to somebody terribly grand, ... Sidonie, Duchesse de Duras, née des Baux." But the narrator explains that this is still the former Mme. Verdurin, who, "shortly after the death of her husband, had married the penniless old Duc de Duras, who had made her a cousin of the Prince de Guermantes, and had died after two years of marriage." So Mme. Verdurin, who scorned the aristocracy, is now in the thick of it.

So "the outward changes in the faces that I had known were no more than the symbols of an interior change which had been going on from day to day." Case in point: Charles Morel, whose arrival is greeted with "a stir of deferential curiosity" because he's now "a man of some distinction" and commended for "his high moral standards." "I was perhaps the only person there who knew that he had been kept simultaneously both by Saint-Loup and by a friend of Saint-Loup's."

Society itself has loosened up: "The Faubourg Saint-Germain, like a senile dowager, made no response beyond a timid smile to the insolent servants who invaded her drawing-rooms, drank her orangeade and introduced her to their mistresses." The younger members of society assume "that Mme Swann and the Princesse de Guermantes and Bloch had always been in the most elevated social position."

Someone having asked a young man from one of the best families if there was not some story about Gilberte's mother, the young nobleman replied that it was true that in the first part of her life she had been married to an adventurer named Swann, but that she had subsequently married one of the most prominent men in society, the Comte de Forcheville.

Bloch, who had once "cut such a sorry figure" in his former attempts to get into society, "had not left off publishing those books of his, the absurd sophistry of which I was today doing my best to demolish so as not to be bogged down by it, works without originality but which provided young people, and a large number of fashionable women, with the impression of an unusually rarefied intellect, a sort of genius." But his final arrival in society has been eased by "the few names he had retained from his acquaintance with Saint-Loup enabled him to give his current prestige the illusion of infinite regress." Bloch introduces the narrator to a young woman who is also a friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes, "and who was one of the smartest women of the day." But even she is completely confused by the lineages of the various friends of the narrator, having been led to believe that the Forchevilles are socially superior to the Guermantes.

Day One Hundred Seventy-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 226-249

2010-05-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

From "At that moment the butler came to tell me ..." through "... now broadly spread beneath the snow."

_____

The narrator's reverie in the library comes to an end when the music in the drawing-rooms is over and he can join the guests there, but he is sure he can continue in the same meditative frame of mind. He's misaken because "a dramatic turn of events occurred which seemed to raise the gravest of objection to my undertaking."

He enters the drawing-room to discover what appears to him to be a masked ball taking place: "everybody seemed to have put on make-up, in most cases with powdered hair which changed them completely." In other words, time has changed them. The transformation is more than physical: M. d'Argencourt, who has long treated the narrator coldly, has become "another person altogether, as kindly, helpless and inoffensive as the usual Argencourt was contemptuous, hostile and dangerous."

the new, almost unrecognizable d'Argencourt stood there as the revelation of Time, which he rendered partially visible. In the new elements which made up the face and character of M. d'Argencourt one could read a certain tally of years, one could recognize the symbolic form of life not as it appears to us, that is as permanent, but in its reality, in such a shifting atmosphere that by evening the proud nobleman is depicted there in caricature.

The experience, the juxtaposition of the people he remembers with what time has made of them, "was like what we used to call an optical viewer, but giving an optical view of years, a view of not one moment, but of one person set in the distorting perspective of Time."

And then the table is turned on him: the Duchesse de Guermantes addresses him as "my oldest friend." A young man calls him "an old Parisian." Another young man, whom he had met when he arrived, leaves a note for him signed, "'your young friend, Létourville.' 'Young friend!' That was how I used to write to people who were thirty years older than myself, like Legrandin." Bloch arrives, and in his mannerisms "I would have recognized the learned weariness of an amiable old man if I had not at the same time recognized my friend standing before me ... and was astonished to notice on his face some of the signs generally thought to be more characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he really was old, and that it is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men."

Most disturbing to him is the realization that he had "discovered this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I wanted to begin to clarify, to intellectualize within a work of art, realities whose nature was extra-temporal." He persists, however, in thinking of himself as young, and when Gilberte de Saint-Loup suggests that they go to dinner together, he agrees, "So long as you don't think it compromising to dine alone with a young man," which causes the people around him to laugh and him to correct himself, "or rather, with an old man." Still, he thinks to himself, "I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing."

And now it dawned upon me what old age was -- old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends' children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d'Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world.

And he continues to survey the crowd of once-familiar faces -- Legrandin, Ski, etc. -- to note how "Time, the artist, had 'rendered' all these models in such a way that they were still recognizable but they were not likenesses, not because he had flattered them, but because he had aged them." He observes the influence of heredity:

I had seen the vices and the courage of the Guermantes recur in Saint-Loup, as also his own strange and short-lived character defects, and in Swann's case his Semitism. I could see it again in Bloch. He had lost his father some years ago and, when I had written to him then, had not at first been able to reply to me, because in addition to the powerful family feeling that often exists in Jewish families, the idea that his father was a man utterly superior to all others had turned his love for him into worship.

And he stumbles on the difficulty of reconciling his long-held image of people with the present reality, "to think of the two people under a single heading," to realize "that they are made of the same material, that the original stuff did not take refuge elsewhere, but through the cunning manipulation of time has become this, that it really is the same material, never having left the one body."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 211-226

2010-05-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

From "It was sad for me to think that my love ..." through "... of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love."

_____

The narrator comes to realize that the emotions we experience in our relations with others outlive the relationships themselves:

I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted.... So that I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like the models for a painter.

He aphoristically remarks that "happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind." This echoes Nietzsche's "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," except that Proust appends, "Sorrow kills in the end." It also results in a somewhat more sophisticated spin on the cliché that artists must suffer to produce art:

let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life.

Sexual passion, in the narrator's scheme of things, is primary: "A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us." But the interrelationship between pleasure and pain is also key: "If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappiness would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless." The greater the experience of unhappiness, the more likely the work is to succeed: "one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart." There is no substitute for the painful experience: "Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion."

The narrator makes one of his digressions on homosexuality in reflecting on how his "encounters with M. de Charlus" had revealed "how utterly neutral matter is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion."

A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.... if M. de Charlus had not given to the "faithless one" over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d'octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love.

Similarly, Proust gave his male lovers feminine faces (and names like Albertine and Gilberte and Andrée that betrayed their masculine origins), reinforcing the point here that the emotion -- passion, obsession, desire for possession -- is universal, whatever physical form may inspire it. "The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself." (On the other hand, Schopenhauer warned, "Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.")

Reflecting on his life, he reiterates his premise of the primacy of emotion, which exists in the observer, not in the thing observed: "it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind." He had lost the physical presence of his grandmother long before he experienced grief for her death. "I had seen love placing qualities in a person which are only in the person who loves."

Dreams were another, very striking, fact of my life, and had probably done more than anything else to convince me of the purely mental nature of reality, and I did not spurn their help in the composition of my work... this nocturnal muse ... sometimes compensated for the other one.

And he comes to realize the central role that Swann has played in his life:

the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte. It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes,where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann.

But he also realizes that "I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine." Existence itself is an arbitrary, accidental thing.

Similarly, Albertine played an important role in bringing him to this point of realizing his mission as an artist: "she was so different from me.... If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Six: Finding Time Again, pp. 191-211

2010-05-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

From "On the subject of books, I had remembered ..." through "... and to have died for my benefit."

_____

A copy of George Sand's François le Champi in the Prince's library reminds the narrator of the night his mother spent in his room, reading the book to him, and "a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord."

[T]hings -- a book in its red binding, like the rest -- at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to "describe things," to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between or present self and the past, the essence of which is is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh.

This takes us back to the beginning of this volume and the Goncourt parody, when he berated himself for his inability to see and hear as the Goncourts did, to record the minute details of a scene. Now such minutiae are dismissed as "a miserable list of lines and surfaces."

He recalls the night his mother read François le Champi to him as "perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had alas! ... obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will." On the other hand, he regards this one as a "most glorious day" on which the discovery of the book in the Guermantes' library "illuminated not only the old fumblings of my thoughts, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art."

What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously -- a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it -- a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence.

What the writer does is "the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality." The writer's task is to "translate" what "already exists within each of us."

How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them?

We run the risk "of dying without having known" the reality "which is quite simply our life." But more than that, art enables us to glimpse the reality that is other people's lives:

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, ... we ... have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists.

Art also undoes the work of the narrator's old nemesis, habit:

The work carried out by our vanity, our passions, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.

And he recognizes that this is the path he must follow if he still wants to be an artist: "I needed to restore to even the slightest of the signs which surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) the meaning which habit had made them lose for me." He realizes that "the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again." He resolves to find in his life the materials for his novel, not transcribing the events of his life, but searching through it for the pieces he can assemble into fiction:

The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder.... In every work of art one can recognize those the artist hated most and also, alas! those whom he loved best. All they have done is to pose for the artist at the moment when, against his will, they were causing him the most suffering.

To succeed as an artist he realizes that he needs to be willing to use what life has presented him, and to distance himself from those whom he has loved, including Albertine and his grandmother: "All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Five: Finding Time Again, pp. 171-191

2010-05-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

From "The Duchesse de Létourville, who was not going to the Princesse de Guermantes's party ..." through "... than that sort of cinematographic approach."

_____

Jupien and the narrator leave the Baron sitting on a bench to rest while they go for a stroll and talk about Charlus and his state of health. Jupien confides that he can't leave the Baron alone for long because "he's still as randy as a young man" and he's so generous that he keeps giving away "everything he's got to other people." The Baron was temporarily blind, and during this period of sightlessness Jupien once left him alone in a room at "the Temple of Shamelessness," as he calls his brothel, and returned to find Charlus with "a child who wasn't even ten years old." Charlus also tends to cause trouble because of his pro-German sympathies, which he is not shy about voicing loudly:

Even though the war was long over, he would groan about the defeat of the Germans, among whom he counted himself, and say with pride: "And yet there is no doubt but that we shall have our revenge, for we have proved that it is we who are capable of the greater resistance and who have the better organisation."

Considering the date of Finding Lost Time, Proust is being chillingly prophetic here.

Jupien parts with the narrator: "Look, he's already managed to get into conversation with a gardener's boy.... I can't leave my invalid alone for a second, he's nothing but a great baby." The narrator continues on his way, reflecting that the change from his usual routine is doing him some good, though "The pleasure today seemed to me to be a purely frivolous one, that of going out to an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes." He reflects once again on his lost vocation: "I now had proof that I was no longer good for anything, that literature could no longer bring me any joy, whether through my own fault, because I was not talented enough, or through the fault of literature, if it was indeed less pregnant with reality than I had thought."

And then, entering the courtyard to the Guermantes's house, he dodges an approaching car and steps on some uneven paving stones, triggering the first of a series of epiphanies:

But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive around Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.

He realizes that the paving stones had triggered a memory of similarly "uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark's" in Venice, just as "the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?"

Then, while he is waiting in a sitting room for the conclusion of a piece of music that his hostess wishes not to be interrupted, it happens again: a servant knocks a spoon against a plate, which triggers his memory of a hammer striking the wheel of the train he had recently sat in, feeling indifferent to the beauty of the countryside. And again, a butler gives him a plate of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, and when he wipes his mouth with the napkin, the texture of it recalls a similar sensation while he was looking out to sea at Balbec. Each instant of involuntary memory -- connections between past and present triggered by the madeleine, the paving stones, the sound of the spoon, the texture of the napkin -- "suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."

The narrator perceives in these moments in which "the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in" something he calls "extra-temporal." When he tasted the madeleine, "at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being."

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.

He believes he has experienced "a little bit of time in its pure state." This perception of "the essence of things"

languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them.

"I knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names" -- an observation that takes us back to the concluding sections of Swann's Way ("Place-Names: The Name") and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ("Place-Names: The Place"). He recalls the disillusionments at Balbec, the fact that he did not experience its beauty when he was there as much as he did in remembering it, and that he was unable to recapture that beauty when he went back for a second visit.

Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came in contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths.

This is a vindication of the narrative strategy of In Search of Lost Time, the endless analysis of relationships (Swann-Odette, narrator-Gilberte, narrator-Albertine), the attempt to understand the emotional intricacies of a life.

It is also an attempt to give coherence to one's own existence:

I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already I used attentively to fix before my mind's eye some image which had impelled me to look at it.

He has been trying to decipher "impressions such as that made on my by the sight of the steeples of Martinville" and other epiphanic moments. And he concludes

I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art?

The "primary character" of these epiphanies, the thing that gives them their authenticity for the narrator (and hence for the reader), "was that I was not free to choose them." They are not subject to logical analysis. "The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary." Whereas the spontaneous impression contains its own truth, and demands an elucidation that "can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards."

Art, then, is a process of discovery, not of will: "we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, ... we cannot shape it according to our wishes." And above all, it can't be dominated by rules or theories: "A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached." Proust/the narrator here strikes back at proclamations about the social or political role of the artist: "the sound of the spoon on a plat, or the starched stiffness of the napkin ... had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations." He admits that the war has brought out proponents of these roles, which remind him of "M. de Norpois's simple theories in opposition to 'flute-players'" when he criticized Bergotte to the young narrator. And he even takes a dig, I think, at stream-of-consciousness writers:

Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.

Day One Hundred Seventy-Four: Finding Time Again, pp. 149-171

2010-05-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

From "However I felt immediately, from the unenthusiastic way in which they spoke of him ..." through "... thrown down by a gravedigger trying to pin them more securely in their graves."

_____

The narrator knows, of course, where Saint-Loup lost his croix de guerre, but he is not shocked by the revelation: "if Saint-Loup had indeed entertained himself during the evening in that way, it was only to fill in time while he was waiting, because, seized with the desire to see Morel again, he had used all his military connections to discover which regiment Morel was in."

He tells us about the way the butler torments Françoise by putting the worst possible spin on the war news and terrifying her with thoughts of the Germans invading Paris -- it amounts to the butler's "own private war against Françoise (whom actually he liked, despite that, in the same way that one likes somebody whom one enjoys enraging every day by beating them at dominoes).... He waited for bad news like a child waiting for an Easter-egg, hoping that things would go badly enough to frighten Françoise, but not so badly as to cause him actual suffering."

The narrator also tells us about Françoise's wealthy relatives who, when their son is killed in the war, go to help their daughter-in-law run her café. And it occasions this bit of authorial breaking of the fourth wall:

In this book, in which there is not one fact that is not fictitious, not one real character concealed under a false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the needs of my exposition, I have to say, to the honour of my country, that Françoise's millionaire relatives alone, who came out of their retirement to help their niece when she was left without support, that they and they alone are real living people.... I take a childlike and deeply felt pleasure, in transcribing their real name here: appropriately enough, they are called by the very French name of Larivière.

It's a lovely tribute, of course, but a bit of a fib, for Proust earlier introduced two minor characters, Marie Gineste and Céleste Albert, who were "real living people," the latter his own housekeeper.

And then comes the great blow of Saint-Loup's heroic death at the front, two days after he returned to it. The narrator recalls "that self-effacement that characterized the whole of his behaviour, right down to the way he would follow me out on the street bare-headed to close the door of my cab every time I left his house." And he links this great loss to that of Albertine:

Only a few days after I had seen him in pursuit of his monocle in the hall at Balbec, when I had thought him so haughty, there was another living form which I had seen for the first time on the beach at Balbec, and which also no longer existed outside the state of memory: this was Albertine, trudging across the sand that first evening, indifferent to everything around her, as much at home there as a seagull... His life and Albertine's, discovered so late, at Balbec, and so swiftly over, had scarcely touched; it was he, I reminded myself as I saw how the nimble shuttles of the years weave slender connections between those of our memories which seem at first most independent of each other, it was he whom I had sent to Mme Bontemps's house when Albertine left me. And then it had turned out that their two lives each had a parallel, and unsuspected, secret.

The "parallel ... secret" is their homosexuality.

Françoise, who had not particularly liked Saint-Loup, "flaunted her grief" and seems to relish imagining the grief that afflicted Saint-Loup's mother. "And she watched for signs of grief in me with such avidity that I feigned a degree of brusqueness when speaking of Robert." He notes that Saint-Loup was buried "in the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray," although the church was previously said to have been destroyed. And he notes that although he had expected the Duchesse de Guermantes to receive the news of Saint-Loup's death "with the same indifference that I had seen her display towards the deaths of so many others whose lives had seemed so closely bound up with her own," she is in fact "inconsolable."

And then he learns that Saint-Loup's efforts to locate Morel had had ironic consequences: Because the army's attention had been alerted, Morel is identified as a deserter and arrested. Morel, thinking that Charlus is behind the arrest, claims he was led astray by Charlus and M. d'Argencourt, who are arrested but soon released. Morel, too, is released and sent to the front, "where he showed great gallantry, survived every danger, and came back at the end of the war, with the medal that M. de Charlus had once vainly solicited for him, and which he owed indirectly to the death of Saint-Loup.

Several years pass, in which the narrator returns to the sanatorium, which "cured me no more than the first." On the train taking him back to Paris, he reflects on the failure of his literary ambitions and feels indifferent to the beauty he witnesses in the countryside -- a sign of the extent of his depression. On his return, he is invited to "a tea-party given for her daughter and son-in-law by La Berma" (no matter that her death has earlier been reported in the novel) and to a reception at the new home of the Prince de Guermantes. The name evokes his childhood memories: "I had wanted to go to the Guermantes' house as if that might have been able to bring me closer to my childhood and to the depths of my memory in which I saw it." He finds himself in "the streets leading to the Champs-Élysee," which unleashes another flood of memories: "And, like an aviator, who has up to that point travelled laboriously along the ground, suddenly 'taking off,' I rose up slowly towards the silent heights of memory."

And then he sees, getting out of a cab, aided by Jupien, M. de Charlus, "convalescing now from an attack of apoplexy." He has "an unruly forest of entirely white hair" and "a white beard, like those formed by the snow on the statues of river-gods in the public gardens.... [T]he old, decayed prince now wore the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear." He watches as Charlus tips his hat and bows to Mme. de Saint-Euverte, whom earlier he "would never have consented to dine with." And he speaks to the narrator, at first in a pianissimo that contrasts with the loudness that attracted so much attention when he once walked on the boulevards, of the deaths of so many of his contemporaries.

Day One Hundred Seventy-Three: Finding Time Again, pp. 128-149

2010-05-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

From "I went back downstairs and into the little ante-room ..." through "... and the matter could easily be sorted out."

_____

Downstairs, "There was a great deal of excitement about a croix de guerre which had been found on the floor: nobody knew who had lost it and to whom it should be returned to prevent the owner's being punished." The narrator listens to the men who are there and learns more about them, including Maurice, "who obviously performed his terrible fustigations of the Baron only out of mechanical habit, a neglected education, need of money and a preference for getting it in a way that was meant to be less trouble than working, but which may in fact have been worse." There is some conversation among the men about Charlus and his pessimistic attitude toward the war.

While he is waiting there, he begins to get a better sense of the clientele, which appears to be very upper-crust:

Clients could be heard asking the manager whether he couldn't introduce them to a footman, a choirboy or a black chauffeur. Every occupation interested these old maniacs, as well as troops from every branch of the services, and from all the Allied nations.... [O]ne old man, whose curiosity had doubtless been assuaged on every other front, was insistently asking whether it might be possible for him to meet a disabled soldier.

Jupien comes downstairs, and is startled to see the narrator there. He orders the men in the room to leave, but the narrator suggests that he and Jupien should talk outside. When Jupien realizes that the Baron is coming down he puts the narrator in an adjacent bedroom where he can listen and not be seen. So the narrator watches as Charlus demonstrates his familiarity with the men who are waiting for clients. The narrator realizes that the men have been passed off as various sorts of criminals and unsavory characters, designed to heighten the Baron's pleasure, but that some of them don't know what Jupien has told him. Charlus says to Maurice, "You never told me that you'd knifed an old concierge in Belleville." Maurice is surprised and denies it: "Either the story was in fact false, or, if it were true, its perpetrator none the less thought it abominable and something to be denied." This throws cold water on the Baron's arousal. The narrator learns that "Jupien did sometimes warn them that they ought to be more perverse," and as the Baron is leaving, says, "He really is a crook, he told you all that stuff to mislead you, you're too gullible," which the narrator notes "only hurt M. de Charlus's pride."

After another client, a priest, has left, Jupien talks to the narrator about his establishment, explaining that he set it up "simply as a way of helping the Baron and amusing him in his old age." The place caters to men who, like the Baron, "enjoyed being with working-class people who exploited him. Low-life snobbery is no more difficult to understand than the other sort." He tells the narrator about a hotel bellboy whom the Baron propositioned who was afraid Charlus was a spy. "He felt a lot more comfortable when he realized he was not being asked to hand over his country, just his body, which may not be any more moral, but is less dangerous, and certainly easier."

Listening to Jupien, I said to myself, "What a pity it is that M. de Charlus is not a novelist or a poet! Not so much in order to describe what he sees, but because the position in which somebody like Charlus finds himself in relation to desire gives rise to scandals around him, forces him to take life seriously, prevents him from separating emotions and pleasure, and from getting stuck in an ironic and externalized view of things, by constantly reopening a stream of pain within him. Almost every time he propositions somebody, he suffers a humiliation, if not the risk of being sent to prison.

Jupien goes on to defend his establishment because it caters to "the most intelligent, the most sensitive and the pleasantest in their professions. The house could easily, I assure you, be turned into a school of wit or a news agency." The narrator, however, "was still preoccupied with the memory of the blows I had seen M. de Charlus receiving."

As the narrator is leaving, an aerial bombardment starts up, and he runs through the darkened streets until the flames from a burning building let him see his way. He wonders if a bomb has hit Jupien's house, "on which M. de Charlus might prophetically have written 'Sodoma' as had, with no less prescience or perhaps as the volcano was starting to erupt and the catastrophe had begun, the unknown inhabitant of Pompeii." He reflects on the clientele, and how they have given up the society to which they once belonged, "so that while their names were known to society hostesses, these had gradually lost sight of their faces, and never any longer had a opportunity to receive them as visitors." And he thinks about the men who service their desires, "whom one might have thought ... fundamentally bad, but not only were they wonderful soldiers during the war, true 'heroes,' they had just as often been kind and generous in civilian life, even model citizens. They had long ceased to pay any heed to the moral or immoral implications of the life they led, because it was the life that everybody around them led."

I know few men, ... indeed I may even say I knew nobody, who in terms of intelligence and sensibility was as gifted as Jupien, for that wonderful "accumulated wisdom" which provided the intellectual framework of his remarks was not the produce of the school education or university training which might have made him a truly exceptional man, while so many fashionable young men derive no profit from it.... The profession he followed, however, might justifiably be regarded, admittedly as one of the most lucrative, but as the worst there is.

And he reflects on how people are controlled by their "dreams," by the unconscious forces "which we cannot always perceive but which [haunt] us. It was my belief in Bergotte and in Swann which had made me love Gilberte, my belief in Gilbert the Bad which had made me love Mme de Guermantes. And what a great expanse of sea had been hidden away in that most painful, jealous, and seemingly most individual love of mine, for Albertine!" Charlus's is a "dream of virility" which, though it manifests itself in a desire to be chained and beaten, betrays "a dream just as poetic as other men's desire to go to Venice or to keep a mistress."

And then he goes home, where Françoise tells him "that Saint-Loup had dropped in, with apologies, to see whether, during the visit he had paid me that morning, he might have dropped his croix de guerre."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Two: Finding Time Again, pp. 108-128

2010-05-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

From "From time to time, seeing some rather shifty-looking individuals ..." through "... to meet with him. But nobody came."

_____

Concerned that Charlus's over-loud proclamations have attracted some attention from thuggish types, they turn into a side-street filled with soldiers on leave and lose themselves in the crowd. Charlus admires the men and their uniforms, causing the narrator to reflect that "his frivolity was so much second nature to him, that ... the war, like the Dreyfus Affair, was merely a vulgar and passing fashion." And the narrator's homophobia has a resurgence when he observes that "for a brief moment he displayed none of the mannerisms by which men of his sort reveal themselves. And yet, why is it that none of them can ever have a voice that sounds absolutely right? Even at this moment, when it was approaching its most serious, his still sounded slightly wrong, as if it needed tuning."

Charlus returns to the topic of Morel and his refusal to reconcile with him unless Morel makes the first move. And here the narrator jumps ahead to tell of an encounter with Morel "two or three years after the evening on which I walked down the boulevards with M. de Charlus," when the narrator urges Morel to make the move toward reconciliation with the aging Charlus and is told, "Good Lord, yes, I know how kind he is! And how considerate, and honest. But leave me alone, don't talk to me about it any more, I beg you. It makes me ashamed to say it, but I am afraid." And then, after Charlus's death, the narrator receives a letter that Charlus had left for him to be opened postmortem, in which he reveals that he is thankful that Morel didn't come to see him because he "had decided to kill him."

Continuing on their walk, Charlus compares wartime Paris to Pompeii, and imagines future archaeologists uncovering the ruins of the city:

This will provide lecture material for the Brichots of the future, for the frivolity of a period, when ten centuries have elapsed, is a subject for the most serious erudition, especially if it has been preserved intact by a volcanic eruption or by the lava-like substances thrown up by bombardment.... While i may think that tomorrow we may meet the fate of the cities of Vesuvius, they in their turn felt threatened by the fate that befell the accursed cities of the Bible. On the walls of one house in Pompeii was discovered the revealing inscription: Sodoma, Gomora.

Whereupon Charlus begins to talk about the beauty of the young soldiers they pass upon the street. And when he takes his leave from the narrator, the latter comments "that by going home M. de Charlus would not thereby be leaving the company of soldiers, as he had converted his house into a military hospital, and in doing this, I believe, had yielded far less to the demands of imagination than to those of his kind heart."

After Charlus's departure, the narrator finds himself tired and thirsty, but aerial bombardment has caused the hotels and shops in this district to close. Then he spots among the abandoned houses a place "were life seemed, on the contrary, to have triumphed over fear and bankruptcy and where activity and wealth continued to flourish." He sees an officer "hurriedly leaving it" who reminds him of Saint-Loup, which brings to mind that Saint-Loup "had been unjustly implicated in a case of espionage because his name had been found on some letters captured on a German officer." And he wonders if "this hotel was being used as a meeting-place for spies." He enters to find some soldiers and working-class men chatting in a room, and overhears some initially fairly innocuous conversation followed by "an exchange which made shudder," in which some men who seem to work in the hotel talk about the boss going out to fetch some chains, and one says, "I was beating him all last night till my hands were covered in blood." He concludes, "If they had turned away peaceable citizens, it was not because the hotel was a nest of spies."

Curiosity prevails, and the narrator orders a room and has a glass of cassis sent up to it. Then he goes exploring, hears "stifled moans," a plea for mercy and "the sound of a whip, probably one with nails to give it extra sharpness, for it was followed by cries of pain." There is a side-window to the room that has been left uncurtained, and through it the narrator sees

chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, receiving the blows which Maurice was delivering with a whip which was indeed studded with nails, ... already running with blood, and covered in bruises which proved that the flogging was not happening for the first time, there, right in front of me, I saw M. de Charlus.

This is not the only revelation: the "boss" of the place is Jupien. And both of the floggers that the narrator glimpses look like Morel, which causes the narrator to speculate that "there had never been anything but a relation of friendship between Morel and [Charlus], and that M. de Charlus persuaded young men who bore some resemblance to Morel to come to Jupien's so that he could have the illusion, with them, of taking his pleasure with Morel himself."

Day One Hundred Seventy-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 85-108

2010-05-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

From "The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely. ..." through "... And he began to roar with laughter as if we had been alone in a drawing-room."

_____

As the narrator and Charlus stroll along the boulevard, the latter holds forth on the war, though with occasional asides on other topics, such as his estrangement from Morel. "The boy is mad about women, and never thinks about anything else," Charlus says, which the narrator has reason to doubt, "having with my own eyes seen Morel agree to spend a night with the Prince de Guermantes for fifty francs." But he has also known men who were once willing to yield to such enticements give them up out of "religious scruples," fear of exposure "when certain scandals broke, or by a fear of non-existent diseases in which they had been made to believe.... Thus it was that the former lift-boy at Balbec would no longer have accepted, for love or money, propositions which now seemed to him as dangerous as approaches from the enemy." And Morel "had fallen in love with a woman with whom he was still living and who, being more strong-willed than he was, had been able to demand absolute fidelity from him."

Charlus goes on to talk about Norpois' enthusiastic support of the war -- "I think the death of my aunt Villeparisis must have given him a new lease of life" -- in his newspaper articles, and to talk about the old aristocracy of Europe in familiar terms; "As for the Tsar of the Bulgars, he is a complete nancy, a raving queer, but very intelligent, a remarkable man. He likes me very much." The narrator finds Charlus "obnoxious when he started on topics like these. He brought to them a self-satisfaction as annoying as that which we feel in the presence of an invalid who is always pointing out how good his health is."

The narrator takes an opportunity to digress about "the relations between Mme Verdurin and Brichot." The latter's articles in the newspaper have "literally dazzled" society, to the annoyance of Mme. Verdurin, who, "exasperated by the success that his articles were having in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now took care never to have Brichot to her house when he was likely to meet there some glittering woman whom he did not yet know and who would hasten to entice him away." The narrator himself doesn't care much for Brichot's articles: "The vulgarity of the man was constantly visible beneath the pedantry of the literary scholar." And Mme. Verdurin "never started an article by Brichot without the prior satisfaction of thinking that she was going to find ridiculous things in it." And when she does, she makes a practice of mocking them to her guests, and by extension to mock her society rivals, such as Mme. Molé, who profess to admire them. Mme. Molé, the narrator tells us, "was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in reality she thought the equal of Michelet."

Meanwhile, Charlus continues to talk about the war from his own peculiar point of view: "all those great footmen, six feet tall, who used to adorn the monumental staircases of our loveliest female friends, have all been killed." And he claims to be less distressed by the damage done to the cathedral at Rheims than to "the annihilation of so many of the groups of buildings which once made the smallest village in France both charming and edifying." The narrator thinks of Combray, and hopes Charlus won't talk about it, but he does, noting the destruction of Saint-Hilaire: "The church was destroyed by the French and the English because it was being used as an observation-post by the Germans. The whole of that mixture of living history and art that was France is being destroyed, and the process is not over yet." He goes on to proclaim pro-German sentiments, making the narrator uneasy:

He had developed the habit of almost shouting some of the things he said, out of excitability, out of his attempt to find outlets for impressions of which he needed -- never having cultivated any of the arts -- to unburden himself.... On the boulevards this harangue was also a mark of his contempt for passers-by, for whom he no more lowered his voice than he would have moved out of the way.

Day One Hundred Seventy: Finding Time Again, pp. 63-85

2010-05-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

From "And now, returning to Paris for the second time ..." through "... a murder occurring in Russia should have anything Russian about them."

_____

Now in 1916, the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte, still at Tansonville, in which she reports that "all the other chateaux in the neigbourhood, abandoned by their panic-stricken owners, have almost all been destroyed from top to bottom." She has stayed there "not only to save the house but to save those precious collections my dear father set so much store by." Combray itself is held half by the French and half by the Germans after the battle of Méséglise, which lasted eight months.

And he is visited by Saint-Loup, inspiring in him "that feeling of shyness, that sense of eeriness which in fact all soldiers on leave made me feel, and which one experiences when one comes into the presence of someone suffering from a fatal illness, who none the less still gets up, gets dressed, and goes for walks." They talk about a recent Zeppelin raid and "the beauty of the aeroplanes as they climbed into the night," a scene that Saint-Loup calls "Wagnerian" and "seemed rather pleased with this comparison between airmen and Valkyries."

On the street, the narrator encounters Charlus. The narrator has just contrasted him with Saint-Loup, who had "aligned himself with that section of the aristocracy which put France above everything else, while M. de Charlus was a defeatist at heart." Charlus is no longer the figure in society that he once was, partly by choice, partly by virtue of having quarreled with Mme. Verdurin, who "had now summed up her condemnation, and alienated everybody from him, by pronouncing him 'pre-war.'" Furthermore, she is trying to persuade them that Charlus, who has always boasted of his German kin, is a spy: "I used to have a house that was situated high above a bay. I'm convinced the Germans told him to set up a base there for their submarines."

Mme. Verdurin's campaign against Charlus "had found a tireless and particularly cruel spokesman in Morel, who writes cruel satires on him for the gossip columns, attacking not only his patriotism but his homosexuality. The narrator observes that the style of the pieces is "derived from Bergotte," but not from Bergotte's prose; rather, Morel writes in the tone of voice that he used to use when he imitated Bergotte's manner of speech. But Morel has finally enlisted, going against Mme. Verdurin's wishes: She is reluctant to let any of her inner circle go, "regarding the war as a great 'bore' which made them abandon her."

Cottard receives another brief resurrection, just long enough to prescribe croissants to be dipped in Mme. Verdurin's breakfast coffee as a preventative to her migraines: Though the wartime shortages have made croissants unavailable, Cottard obtains an order for them to be custom-made for her.

This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the croissant she was soaking, she said: "How awful! It's worse than the most horrific tragedy." But ... the look which lingered on her face, probably induced by the taste of the croissant, so valuable in preventing migraine, was more like one of quiet satisfaction.

As for Cottard, he dies again, "followed soon afterwards by M. Verdurin, whose death upset only one person, that, oddly enough, being Elstir." M. Verdurin had been one of the painter's earliest patrons, before he split with the little set.

The shortage of grown men has caused Charles to do "the same as some Frenchmen, who in France had loved women, but who now lived in the colonies: he had, out of necessity, developed first the habit of, and then a taste for, little boys," though by "keeping up a plentiful correspondence with men at the front, he was not short of sufficiently mature soldiers when they came on leave." Charlus "was mad about Moroccans, but most of all, about Anglo-Saxons, whom he viewed as living statues by Phidias."

Charlus does indeed have pro-German sentiments, partly because of his tendency to take the side of the underdog, though the "Germans, in his eyes, were very ugly, perhaps because they were too close to his own blood."

He may have believed that taking sides against the Germans would be acting as he acted only during his periods of sexual pleasure, that is, in opposition to his compassionate nature, burning with desire for seductive evil, and crushing virtuous ugliness.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Nine: Finding Time Again, pp. 43-63

2010-05-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

From "It occurred to me that it was a long time..." through "...which he very much hoped to hear performed after the war."

_____

The narrator recalls the two months he spent in Paris in 1914 before returning to the sanatorium, and the contrasting views of Bloch and Saint-Loup toward the war, Bloch being the more chauvinist of the two. Saint-Loup maintains that those who don't fight are afraid and counts himself among the number who are afraid, but later the narrator learns that Saint-Loup is working to re-enlist. And Bloch, who expects to be exempt from service because of nearsightedness, shows up in a panic a few days later because he has been declared fit to serve. Bloch resents Saint-Loup as one of "the 'favoured sons' in their braided uniforms, strutting around at headquarters."

I sensed that parading about was not at all what Robert wanted to do, even though I was not so fully aware of his intentions then as I later became when, the cavalry continuing inactive, he obtained permission to serve as an officer with the infantry, and then with the light infantry, or when finally occurred the sequel which the reader will discover later.

During his conversation with the narrator, Saint-Loup asks if he has heard the rumor that the Duchesse de Guermantes is filing for divorce, but the narrator cites no confirmation of the rumor. We also learn that Saint-Loup, on a recent visit to Balbec, had tried to seduce the manager of the restaurant, who had inherited it from M. Nissim Bernard, whose lover he had once been. Saint-Loup was unsuccessful because the manager was one of those "promiscuous youths" who become "men of principle." Saint-Loup has given up the heavy use of cocaine in which he had indulged at Tansonville because "heroism -- as one remedy replaces another -- was curing him.

The narrator also notes that Saint-Loup now demonstrates a "horror of effeminacy" that causes him "to find any contact with virility intoxicating" -- an attitude once displayed by Charlus: "By adopting the habits of M. de Charlus, Robert found that he had also taken on, albeit in a very different form, his ideal of masculinity." In Saint-Loup this resembles the stiff-upper-lip attitude toward death that "appears in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, a fact which would be simply ridiculous if it were not also ugly and terribly sad, because it is the way that people who think that that grief does not matter, who think that there are more important things in life than partings, etc., experience grief."

The ideal of masculinity found in homosexuals like Saint-Loup is not the same, but it is equally conventional and dishonest.... War, which renders capital cities, where only women remain, the despair of homosexuals, is at the same time a story of intense romance for homosexuals.... [F]or Saint-Loup war was ... the very ideal he imagined himself pursuing in his much more concrete desires, clouded in ideology though they were, an ideal he served alongside the kind of people he liked best, in a purely masculine order of chivalry, far removed from women, where he could risk his life to save his batman, and die inspiring a fanatical love in his men.

Not that the narrator doesn't respond positively to this Hemingwayesque homoerotic romanticizing of war: "I admire Saint-Loup's asking to be set to the positions where there was greatest danger infinitely more than M. de Charlus's avoiding wearing brightly coloured cravats."

From Saint-Loup he also learns that "the lift" from the Balbec hotel has joined up and has asked Saint-Loup to recommend him for the flying corps.

Returning to the sanatorium, he receives letters from Gilberte and Saint-Loup. She reports that the air-raids on Paris caused her to return to Tansonville, but that she had had to billet officers of the invading Germans there. Fortunately, they had "good manners which she contrasted with the disorderly violence of the French deserters, who had devastated everything as they passed through the property." The letter from Saint-Loup is characteristic of the man he had known when they first met at Balbec: "Saint-Loup ... remained intelligent and artistic, and, while halted at the edge of some marshy forest, with characteristic good taste would note down descriptions of the landscape for me, in the same way as he would have done if he had been out duck-shooting." Saint-Loup also eschews anti-German chauvinisim:

If Saint-Loup happened to mention a melody by Schumann, he would only give its title in German, nor did he have recourse to circumlocution to tell me that, when he had heard the first twitterings of the dawn chorus at the edge of the forest, he had been as intoxicated as if he had just been spoken to by the bird in that "sublime Siegfried," which he very much hoped to hear performed after the war.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 29-43

2010-05-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

From "Thoughts like these, tending in some cases to diminish..." through "...the monotonous tramp of one's constitutional in the rustic darkness."

_____

Except for a visit in August 1914 for a medical examination, the narrator has been away in a sanatorium "until the time, at the beginning of 1916, when it became impossible any longer to obtain medical staff." He returns to wartime Paris to find Mme. Verdurin and Mme. Bontemps the queens of society. The museums are all closed, so "elegance" has established itself "in the absence of the arts." In fact, the whole aesthetic of the times has changed: Mme. Verdurin goes to Venice but what she admired

was not Venice, nor St. Mark's, nor the palaces, all of which had delighted me so much and for which she had cared very little, but the effect of the searchlights in the sky, searchlights about which she provided information supported by figures. Thus from age to age is reborn a certain realism as a reaction against the art previously admired.

And the cause that had once divided society, the Dreyfus affair, is virtually forgotten: "Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things.... Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say, 'In those prehistoric times.'"

Mme. Verdurin, once so contemptuous of the aristocracy, has changed with the times: "as the number of socially glittering people making advances to Mme Verdurin increased, so the number of those she called 'bores' diminished." The war is the chief topic of conversation, of course, and hostesses vie to outdo themselves with the latest news, so that the salons are also infested with spies. "Mme Verdurin would say: 'Do come in at five o'clock to talk about the war,' just as she would once have said 'to talk about the [Dreyfus] Affair', or more recently: 'Do come and listen to Morel.'" Morel, in fact, "was a deserter, but nobody knew this."

Another star of the salons is Octave, who has been discharged from service for medical reasons, has married Andrée, and has "become for me the author of a series of admirable works which were constantly in my thoughts" -- so constantly that the narrator realizes that Octave was also involved in "Albertine's departure from my house." At this point, the narrator says of Albertine, "I simply never thought about her," although this and other such statements are self-contradictory: realizing that you don't think about something is to think about it, which is what made the Tolstoy family's game of trying not to think about a white bear so difficult.

One person Mme. Verdurin is unsuccessful at luring to her salon is Odette, but the rest of society is "more than happy to take advantage of the luxury of the Verdurins, which continued to increase with their wealth at a time when even the richest people, unable to draw their dividends, were economizing."

The narrator finds himself enjoying a mostly solitary life, watching the airplanes defending the skies over Paris, which he claims did not evoke memories of the airplane sighted on his last visit to Versailles with Albertine, "for the memory of that drive had become indifferent to me." In a restaurant he is touched by the sight of a soldier on leave outside, allowing "his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows," which evokes memories of the people who would gather outside the hotel windows in Balbec to watch the diners there, though it's more poignant, knowing that the man will return to the trenches after seeing "the shirkers rushing to grab their tables." And once again the supposedly forgotten Albertine comes to mind as he reflects "how lovely it would have been, on evenings when I had dined out, to arrange to meet her out of doors, beneath the arcades!"

Day One Hundred Sixty-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 3-29

2010-05-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

From "All day long, in that slightly too bucolic residence..." through "...the oblivion which piles up so relentlessly?)"

_____

The narrator is still where he was at the end of The Fugitive, staying at Tansonville with Gilberte. Saint-Loup shows up occasionally during his stay, but the narrator finds him changed, and in his description of him repeats verbatim one he had given of Legrandin in The Fugitive. He is "slenderer and swifter," with the "habit of conducting himself like a gust of wind."

A full description of him would also have to take account of his desire, the older he grew, to appear young, as well as of the impatience characteristic of men who are always bored and blasé, being too intelligent for the relatively idle life they lead, in which their faculties are never fully stretched.

Toward Gilberte, Saint-Loup affects "a sentimentality ... that bordered on the theatrical.... Robert loved her. But he lied to her all the time." He remarks to the narrator on her resemblance to Rachel, which "one could, at a stretch, now see between them," and the narrator speculates that this caused Saint-Loup to pick her over "other women of comparable fortune" when his family put pressure on him to marry. The narrator also observes in Saint-Loup a "regression to the birdlike elegance of the Guermantes" which brings out in him the effeminate "manners of M. de Charlus," although "Robert never permitted his type of love to come up in conversation," dodging the topic of homosexuality as if he were indifferent to it.

As for the narrator, he has "lost all recollection of the love of Albertine," but he discovers that "there is also an involuntary memory of the limbs" when he wakes up in the night and calls out "Albertine!" It seems that "a recollection suddenly burgeoning within my arm had made me reach behind my back for the bell, as if I had been in my bedroom in Paris." This physical memory causes him to call out for her help in locating the pull.

Morel, he sees, is "treated as the son of the house." Françoise naively regards this as characteristic of the generosity of the Guermantes, having observed that Legrandin similarly served as patron to Théodore, the one-time grocerer's assistant in Combray. The narrator meets Théodore's sister and learns that his surname is Sautton, and that he "must be the person who wrote to me about my Figaro article!"

In conversation with Gilberte, the narrator says, "I once knew a woman who ended up completely shut away by the man who loved her; she was never allowed to see anyone, and could only go out accompanied by trusty servants." Gilberte replies that "someone as good as you must have been horrified by that," and adds that he ought to get married: "A wife would make you healthy again, and you world make her very happy." He claims that he was once engaged but "couldn't make up my mind to marry her" and that she broke it off "because of my fussiness and indecision." This is as close as he can get to confession: "It was, indeed, in this over-simplified form that I regarded my adventure with Albertine, now that I could see it only from the outside."

From his window, he can see the spire of the church at Combray, but he postpones visiting it:

"Never mind, it'll have to wait for another year, if I don't die in the meantime," seeing no obstacle to this other than my death, never envisaging that of the church, which seemed bound to endure long after my death, as it had endured for so long before my birth.

More than Albertine, the thing that haunts him now is his "lack of an aptitude for literature." And it is brought home to him when Gilberte gives him a copy of "a recently published volume of the Goncourts' journal," which he reads in bed that night. In this parody "excerpt" Goncourt visits the salon of Mme. Verdurin: "Cottard, the doctor, is there with his wife, and the Polish sculptor Viradobetski, Swann the collector, an aristocratic Russian lady, a princess with a name ending in "-ov" which I don't quite catch." "Brichot, from the University" is there, too, and the talk turns to Elstir, whom, he is told, they called "Monsieur Tiche." The extract is filled with elaborate and minute descriptions of the room and even the china from which they eat, and reports of the conversation. The narrator is stung by "The magic of literature!" and reflects,

Certainly, I had never concealed from myself the fact that I did not know how to listen, nor, as soon as I was not alone, how to observe. My eyes would not notice what kind of pearl necklace an old woman might be wearing, and anything that might be said about it would not penetrate my ears.

He rebukes himself for making judgments about people, for later discovering that someone he thought "a society bore, a stuffed shirt, ... was a major figure!" He concludes that "Goncourt knew how to listen, as he knew how to see: I did not." And he regrets that he is "unable to go back and see all the people whom I had failed to appreciate" and that "the progress my illness was making" is forcing him "to break with society, give up travelling and visiting museums, in order to enter a sanatorium and undergo treatment."

Day One Hundred Sixty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 609-658*

2010-05-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, concluded, from "After lunch, whenever I did not set out to wander around Venice...."
Chapter IV: A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup

_____

Okay, first off: I think the telegram announcing Albertine's resurrection is a mistake that Proust would have corrected in revising The Fugitive. The reaction to the telegram is not at all what we expect from the intensely obsessive narrator, who more characteristically would have endlessly pondered Albertine's motives in both faking her death and then announcing that she had done so. And he is also paranoid enough to wonder if the telegram is a hoax, and if so, who is playing the trick on him and to what end. But instead he stuffs it in his pocket and goes off to prowl the back alleys of Venice. It can be argued that it has thematic significance, in fusing Albertine with Gilberte, but that has already occurred in his imaginings. And the explanation that the errors in the telegram are the result of Gilberte's faulty penmanship is awkward at best. The telegram is a melodramatic gimmick that the novel would have been better off without.

But accepting what the novel gives us, we set out on a bit of a travelogue, ostensibly so the narrator can take notes for a "study of Ruskin." (Proust, of course, translated Ruskin, as the note reminds us.) It's striking in this chapter how often Venice is likened to, or contrasted with, Combray, and not, as one might expect, Paris. The reason, I think, is that Proust wants to bring us back to the beginning of the novel as he nears its conclusion -- and at this point, the end of The Fugitive looks like a conclusion, with its assemblage of revelations about many of the principal characters.

Albertine still hovers in his mind, of course, despite his assertions that he has forgotten her. A painting by Carpaccio "almost revived my love for" her because one of the costumes worn by a figure in it resembles the Fortuny coat she wore on their trip to Versailles on the eve of her departure. And he even wonders if a young Austrian woman he meets also "loved women" the way Albertine did.

A figure from the past -- the Baroness Putbus -- almost makes him stay in Venice after his mother leaves because of the promiscuous lady's maid that Saint-Loup once told him about. But he makes a mad dash for the train and joins her, carrying three letters -- two for her, one for him -- that had been handed him at the last moment. The letters announce two marriages: Gilberte's to Saint-Loup and Mme. de Cambremer's son to Jupien's niece. Of the latter marriage, the narrator reflects:

It allows the Cambremers to drop anchor at the Guermantes', where they never dared hope pitch their tent; what is more, the child, since she was adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable for the Cambremers since they had lost their own; and finally she is the adopted and, according to the Cambremers, probably the real -- that is, the natural -- daughter of someone whom they consider to be a prince of the blood.

The narrator of course knows the truth of the relationship between Charlus and Jupien, and between Charlus and Morel, who once was going to marry Jupien's niece. Moreover, he recognizes that both marriages signal the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain's definition of society, with Saint-Loup, a Guermantes, marrying "the daughter of Odette and a Jew." Money, which Jupien's daughter will inherit from Charlus and which Gilberte already possesses, is the key, and it has been, as the narrator tells us, the cause of much behind-the-scenes intrigue among the various families involved. The narrator's mother has heard "that it was the Princess of Parma who arranged the marriage of the young Cambremer." Meanwhile, the rumors have started that both grooms are gay. Charlus, on learning from the Princess that Cambremer is the nephew of Legrandin, is pleased: "If he took after his uncle, after all, that shouldn't put me off, I have always said that they make the best husbands."

The effect on society of the marriages is colossal: "the magical charm that Mme de Cambremer had imagined the Duchesse de Guermantes to possess evaporated as soon as she found herself solicited by the latter." And "Gilberte started to show her contempt for what she had so desired, to declare that the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were fools unfit for company, and, matching words with deeds, did indeed cease to seek their company." And when Jupien's niece dies of typhoid soon after the wedding, because she is thought to be related to Charlus the effect is extraordinary: "the death of a petty commoner throws all of the princely families into mourning." Meanwhile, Legrandin has begun styling himself Comte de Méséglise. And Charlus discovers that his widowed son-in-law shares his sexual orientation.

Gilberte and Saint-Loup decide to live at Tansonville, but the neighbors at Combray are not impressed with the fact that Odette's daughter lives there now. The narrator goes to visit them, leaving his current girlfriend in the apartment he now rents and under the supervision of a friend "who was not attracted to women." His visit is particularly to try to cheer up Gilberte, "since Robert was deceiving her, but not in the manner which everyone believed and which perhaps even she still believed, or at any rate declared. For "Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, showed himself off in public with women whom he compromised and whom everyone, no doubt even Gilberte, believed to be his mistresses." In fact Saint-Loup is having an affair with Charles Morel.

Reviewing the past, the narrator comes to realize that Saint-Loup had been giving signals of his homosexuality for a long time. He had once told the narrator:

"It's a shame that your girlfriend from Balbec does not have the fortune required by my mother, I think that the two of us would have got on well together." He had meant to imply that she was from Gomorrah as he was from Sodom.... In the end it was the same factor that had inspired both in Robert and in me the desire to marry Albertine (that is, her love for women). But the causes of our desire, like its ends, were opposite. I had been driven to it by the despair I had felt at the discovery, Robert by his satisfaction; I in order to prevent her through constant surveillance from yielding to her inclination; Robert in order to cultivate it and to enjoy the freedom that he would allow her to offer him her girl-friends.

Saint-Loup "ceaselessly" impregnates Gilberte, but he flirts with waiters in restaurants. And the narrator learns from Aimé that Saint-Loup had put the moves on "the lift" during the narrator's first visit to Balbec, causing a scene that had to be hushed up. The narrator thinks Aimé may be lying, but he can't be sure. He also remembers that Saint-Loup had looked "rather lingeringly" at Morel one time at the Verdurins, and remarked "It's strange how this lad remind me of Rachel." But Saint-Loup's acceptance of his homosexuality also affects his friendship with the narrator: "It was only as long as he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, at least for a period of time, the men who did not interest him directly were subject to a display of indifference."

Odette now finds herself in the role of being protected by Saint-Loup: "The fact that she was no longer in her prime was of little importance in the eyes of a son-in-law who did not love women."

Thus, thanks to Robert, she was able, on the threshold of her fiftieth (some said her sixtieth) year to dazzle with extraordinary luxury at any dinner-table and very soirée to which she was invited. Without needing as she had done before to have a "friend," who now would no longer have forked out, or even acted his part. Thus she embarked on a final period of chastity, which seemed definitive, and she had never been more elegant.

The narrator's views on homosexuality also seem to have mellowed: "I found that it made no difference from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human to take it wherever one could find it." But Saint-Loup's "liaison" with Morel offends him because Saint-Loup is married, and to Gilberte, and he feels the pain of losing his friendship.

He feels another pain when he visits Combray and no longer experiences the love he had once felt for the place. "I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte." Moreover, Gilberte reveals that she had fallen in love with him the first time they saw each other, and she explains the "indecent gesture" she made at the time: "I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I'm ashamed of it now." For his part, he now realizes that his life might have been different "if I had not met two shadowy figures coming towards me side by side in the twilight" and decided to break with Gilberte. But he also observes that the torment of that love and separation has vanished:

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

In Search of Lost Time might well have ended right there.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Five: The Fugitive, pp. 588-609*

2010-05-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, through "...But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality."

_____

The narrator and his mother travel to Venice, where, from the top of St. Mark's, the golden angel "promised me joy half an hour later on the Piazzetta, a promise more reliable than his previous mission to bring tiding of Great Joy to men of good will." He is there because, he assures us, "I had nearly forgotten Albertine." Yet of course the fact that he feels compelled to mention it reveals what he tells us in the same sentence: "I did still remember her a little." He remembers her especially when he cruises the "humble campi and deserted side canals" off the beaten tourist paths where he "found it easier to meet women of the people" and wondered "if anyone could have told me exactly how far, in this passionate perusal of Venetian women, what was due to them, and what to Albertine, or my former desire to travel to Venice." As he stopped "to talk to working girls, as Albertine might have done before me, ... I wished that she were with me." And he realizes that "they could not be the same girls" Albertine had met when she was there, because they would be older -- as he himself is, "for what I now loved, despite the specific qualities of the person, and what escaped me, was youth itself."

With his mother, he explores the more familiar sights of Venice, "where the slightest social call takes on at once both the form and the charm of a visit to a museum and that of a naval maneoevre." They meet Mme. Sazerat there, and one day, in a hotel restaurant he sees an old woman with "a sort of red, leprous eczema covering her face" and recognizes "beneath her bonnet, in her black tunic, created by [Worth], but looking to the uninitiated as if it belonged to an old concierge, the Marquise de Villeparisis," whose death he and Charlus had talked about in The Prisoner. She is joined by "her former lover, M. de Norpois," also showing signs of age, though never previously reported dead. Norpois recognizes a Prince Foggi, with whom he talks at length about diplomatic matters.

Meanwhile, the narrator mentions Mme. de Villeparisis to Mme. Sazerat, who nearly faints because Mme. de Villeparisis, then the Duchesse d'Havré and "the most beautiful woman of the day," had brought ruin to Mme. Sazerat's father in a love affair in which "she acted like a common whore." Mme. Sazerat asks to be taken to see her, but when the narrator points her out is confused to see "only an old gentleman sitting beside a horrid old lady with a red face and a hunchback."

Back at the hotel, the narrator receives a letter from his broker which "opened for an instant the gates of the prison where Albertine lay living within me." He had invested heavily "in order to have more money to spend on her," and after her death ordered the broker to sell everything, leaving him "the owner of barely one-fifth of the wealth that I had inherited from my grandmother." And then he receives a telegram:

DEAR FRIEND YOU BELIEVE ME DEAD, MY APOLOGIES, NEVER MORE ALIVE, WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU TO DISCUSS MARRIAGE, WHEN DO YOU RETURN? AFFECTIONATELY, ALBERTINE

His reaction to this extraordinary message is only to confirm that he is no longer in love with Albertine. He is no longer able even to visualize her: "the memory that recurred was that of a girl already stout and mannish, in whose faded features there sprouted like a see the profile of Mme Bontemps." After telling the hotel porter that it had been delivered by mistake, he puts it in his pocket and tries to "act as if I had never received it."

I had definitively stopped loving Albertine. In such fashion this love, after diverging so much from what I had foreseen, in the light of my love for Gilberte; after causing me to make such a long and painful detour, finally in its turn, after claiming exemption, surrendered, as had my love for Gilberte, to the universal rule of oblivion.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Four: The Fugitive, pp. 563-587*

2010-05-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, concluded, from "The memory of Albertine had become so fragmented within me...."

_____

The narrator claims, "I was happier to have Andrée by my side than I would have been to have Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée would be able to tell me more about Albertine that Albertine herself had ever told me." And what Andrée tells him as they're making out is pretty hot stuff. For one thing, that Albertine "had met a handsome lad at Mme Verdurin's called Morel," and that Morel had acted as bait, luring "young laundry-maids and young fisher-girls" into threesomes with him and Albertine and once taking Albertine and one of the girls "to a house of ill-fame in Couliville, where four or five women took her together or in succession."

But Andrée also claims that Albertine felt remorse and "hoped that you would save her, that you would marry her." Then she recalls the time that the narrator almost caught them in the act. The narrator's reaction is that "this was the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress, if indeed it was true, which suddenly surfaces from the depths when we no longer have any use for it." He questions Andrée's veracity, and notes that she had been spreading malicious rumors about a "man whom we had met at Balbec and who since then had been living with Rachel." This is Octave, who when he first appears in the novel is a rather foppish young golfer whom Albertine dismisses as "a lounge lizard." He is also a nephew of the Verdurins, whom he mocks. In an extended aside, the narrator tells us that later, Octave is to leave Rachel and marry Andrée, and that he will reveal himself as a talented designer who "introduced into contemporary art a revolution at least equal to hat accomplished by the Ballets Russes." (Peter Collier's note tells us that Octave is modeled in part on Jean Cocteau.)

The narrator continues with Andrée's revelations, including the suggestion that the reason Albertine left the narrator was that she didn't want the other "girls of the little gang" to know she was living with a man to whom she was not married. He finds it satisfying that her revelations confirm his original suspicions instead of "the wretched and cowardly optimism to which I had later yielded." And he forms a theory that Albertine's lesbianism had brought out her "masculine" side, "creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility." (Our narrator is of course subject to homophobic hokum.)

His grilling of Andrée is interrupted by dinner with his mother, who reports that the Princess of Parma has paid her a visit -- an unheard of thing. It was her way of making amends for the snub she had delivered the narrator's mother, who "thought, and later I came to share her opinion, that the Princess of Parma had quite simply failed to recognize her annd thought she need take no notice of her." On learning what she had done from the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princess broke protocol and made her visit.

Andrée and the narrator meet again a week later, when she presents another theory for Albertine's leaving: that her aunt feared the narrator wouldn't marry her, spoiling her for another marriage that Mme. Bontemps had in mind for her. And that the visit Albertine was supposed to make to Mme. Verdurin was not to meet Mlle. Vinteuil there, but this young man. Andrée also claims that there had never been anything physical between Albertine and either Mlle. Vinteuil or her lover. The narrator retains his doubts:

But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who had been lying? Truth and life are indeed an uphill path, and, without ever really getting to know them, I felt that the final impression which they left me was one where sadness was perhaps still overshadowed by fatigue.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Three: The Fugitive, pp. 544-563*

2010-04-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, from "A month later, Swann's young daughter...." to "...the snobbery of royalty with that of a domestic servant."

_____

Gilberte was still Mlle. Swann when the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes first deigned to receive her, and they treated her with a certain condescension, pretending to have been barely acquainted with Swann, even though they had received him for more than 25 years. "But this is how the Faubourg Saint-Germain speaks to the bourgeoisie about anyone from the bourgeoisie, whether to flatter their listeners with the exception made in their favour for as long as the conversation lasts, or whether, preferably, to humiliate them at one and the same time." But after Forcheville adopts her, it is Gilberte herself who shies away from being identified as Swann's daughter.

Visiting the Guermantes when Gilberte is there, the narrator notices that two of the Elstir drawings that once were upstairs are now in the drawing room -- "Elstir was now in fashion." Gilberte, too, recognizes them as Elstirs, and the Duchesse has to bite her tongue when she almost slips and says that Swann was the one who recommended that she buy them: "it was precisely your ... some friends of ours who advised us to buy them." And when the narrator starts to say something about their once not being on display, "I saw Mme de Guermantes's frantic signals" and likewise covers the slip.

When he casually works his article in the Figaro into the conversation, he learns that neither the Duchesse nor the Duc has read it. The latter sends a servant to fetch the newspaper and reads it while he's there. Meanwhile, the Duchesse receives a visiting card from Lady Rufus Israels, whom Gilberte denies knowing, even though she does: "The fact is that Gilberte had become quite snobbish," even to the point of sometimes pretending that Swann was not really her father.

Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance.

The Duc finishes the article and offers "some rather muted compliments," criticizing "the somewhat hackneyed form of my style" but congratulating him on "having found an 'occupation.'" The Duchesse invites him to join her at the opera, but he turns her down, saying that he has recently lost a friend who "was very dear to me.... It was from that moment that I started to write to everyone to tell them of my great sorrow and to cease to feel it."

The Duc and Duchesse aren't the only ones who, contrary to the narrator's hopes, failed to see the article. In fact, he receives only two letters about it: One is from Mme. Goupil, an old neighbor in Combray, and the other from someone named Sautton, a name he doesn't recognize. "Bloch, whose opinion on my article I would have so liked to know, did not write to me," but later reveals in a rather snide fashion that he had read it. "Bergotte had not written me a word," the narrator says, but that shouldn't be surprising since Proust killed him off in The Prisoner -- another continuity gaffe.

The narrator's thoughts turn to Swann, who would have been happy to see Gilberte received by the Guermantes, but disappointed at her failure to acknowledge him as her real father. "And it was not only where Swann was concerned that Gilberte gradually consummated the process of forgetting: she had hastened this process within me in relation to Albertine.

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

Albertine's death causes a form of phantom pain, but the narrator takes his ability to mention her death at all "without actually suffering much" as a sign that he's a "new person who would be quite able to live without Albertine."

Meanwhile, he and Andrée have begun "a semi-carnal relationship" -- whatever that may be. He recalls that they were in his room because "I was banned from the rest of the apartment since it was Mama's at-home day." Here there's a curious aside about his mother's visiting Mme. Sazerat and being bored to death, which spurs another memory about his mother being snubbed by the Princess of Parma. The significance of these asides, if any, is unclear. But as he is going to see Andrée, who is waiting in his room, he discovers that he has other visitors, who were waiting in another room: It's Charlus, who is reciting love poems to Morel, who is leaving for his duty in the reserves. "I left them as swiftly as I could, although I felt that to call on friends with Morel gave M. de Charlus great satisfaction, giving him the momentary illusion of being married again." Evidently, Mme. Verdurin's separation of them hasn't fully taken hold.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Two: The Fugitive, pp. 523-544*

2010-04-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, through "...And they left together for Saint-Cloud."

_____

And so the narrator moves from grief to acceptance, though not without characteristically overcomplicating the process:

I now realized that before I could forget her completely, and regain my initial indifference, I would need, like some traveller returning down the same route to his point of departure, to experience in reverse order all the emotions which I had felt on the way out towards my great love.

This return, he tells us, had "four stages," although at this point it's not clear what the second, third and fourth will be. "The first of these stages set in at the beginning of winter" as he walks through the Bois de Boulogne, conscious that it's the same day of the year as when he called Albertine home from the Trocadéro. He hums phrases from Vinteuil's sonata as he walks: "The thought that Albertine had played it for me so often no longer hurt me too much, for nearly all my memories of her had entered that second phase of their chemical reaction, where instead of oppressing the heart with anxiety, they soothe it." In fact, "I thought I saw my love dispersed or even dissolved in the little phrase."

He starts girl-watching, recalling how Albertine "had seemed to me to stand for all the girls whose sight had so often rooted me to the spot in the street or on the road." And he comes upon a group of three girls, "whose smart and athletic demeanour" reminds him of Albertine and her little gang. Two of them are brunettes and one is blond. He follows them until they get into a carriage and ride away. But then, a few days later, he sees them again, "emerging from under the archway of our house." The blond "cast me a first, furtive look, then, when she had gone past, turned her head back towards me and cast a second that finally set me alight." The concierge tells him that the blond was there to see the Duchesse, and that her name is Mlle. d'Éporcheville.

The narrator thinks that he recognizes the name: Saint-Loup had once told him about meeting a "very well-connected young lady, loosely related to the Guermantes, ... in a house of ill-fame and having been intimate with her." This is all the narrator needs to set him in a frenzy of fantasy. The concierge is uncertain at first whether Mlle. d'Éporcheville was the blond, but the narrator is sure she is because he had "correctly guessed which one of the little gang of girls walking along the sea front was called Albertine Simonet." And the concierge's wife confirms his suspicion.

Of course, he needs confirmation, so he sends off a telegram to Saint-Loup, and starts making preparations to visit the Duchesse at the same time that Mlle. d'Éporcheville makes her return visit. But Saint-Loup replies that the girl he slept with was named De l'Orgeville, that she was "short, dark and dumpy" and that she's now in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, something that distracts the narrator from his latest erotic obsession happens: His article about his epiphany of the three steeples is published in the Figaro. It's been so long since he submitted it that he doesn't recognize it at first: "How tedious! The leading article bore precisely the same title as the one which I had submitted but which had not been published. But not only the same title, here and there were one or two identical words. That was too much. I would write in to complain." Then once he realizes the truth, he goes amusingly through the experiences shared by every first-time published author: imagining the reactions of readers as they pick it up, fearing that they will not notice his name at the end, trying to read it through their eyes, and so on. "I saw Bloch, the Guermantes, Legrandin and Andrée drawing from each sentence the images contained in the article."

Then all my images, all my reflections and all my epithets, taken in themselves and with no memory of the failure of my aims that they represented, charmed me with their brilliance, their novelty, and their profundity.

He goes to see the Duchesse that afternoon, not so much to see Mlle. d'Éporcheville, "who because of Saint-Loup's telegram had lost the better part of her character," as to find out if the Duchesse has read his article. The blond girl is there, and he learns that her name is de Forcheville. She says to him:

"Don't you remember that you used to know me very well, you used to visit my house, I am your friend Gilberte. I realized that you did not recognize me. But I recognized you straight away."

He learns that Swann's death has left Odette very rich, that she has married Forcheville, and that he has adopted Gilberte, who came into "an enormous fortune" of her own when one of Swann's uncles died and left it all to her.

As for the Duchesse's reluctance to recognize Odette or Gilberte, all of that is in the past, particularly where Gilberte is concerned. The Duchesse has succumbed to the pressure of society, and when the Duc informs her that a friend of their wanted to invite her to the opera but was uncertain whether she should do so because Gilberte will be there too, the Duchesse replies, "I see no objection to our meeting the girl. You know perfectly well that I have never had anything against her.... Everyone knows that we were great friends of Swann. Everyone will find it perfectly normal."

Day One Hundred Sixty-One: The Fugitive, pp. 499-522*

2010-04-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, concluded, from "In certain ailments there are secondary infections...."

_____

Proust gives us a nice Proustian definition of "man" in this section: "one of those amphibious creatures plunged simultaneously in the past and in present reality."

The narrator's past with Albertine is receding: "what provoked my astonishment was not, as it had been during the first few days, that the Albertine so alive within me could no longer exist on this earth and could be dead, but that the Albertine who no longer existed on earth, who was dead, could have stayed so alive within me." Yet he begins to feel a sense of release, "the youthful freshness of a bud starting to open and burst through its leaves into flower." He begins to accept "the idea that she was guilty" of relations with other women.

Just as the name of Guermantes had lost the charm and significance of a road bordered with water lilies and of Gilbert le Mauvais's stained-glass window, so Albertine's presence had lost those of the blue valleys of the sea, the names of Swann, the liftboy, the Princesse de Guermantes and so many others, a charm and a significance each entrusted to a single word which they judged mature enough to live on its own, as someone who wants to train a servant will show him the ropes for a couple of weeks and then withdraw, so the painful power of Albertine's guilt would be expelled outside me by habit.

He shares with us his "periods of temporary madness that we call dreams," or rather the ones in which Albertine figures. Reading a novel by Bergotte, he realizes that he is moved by the plight of the characters "who only ever existed in Bergotte's imagination," which confuses him about how he should feel about Albertine, who once existed and no longer does. Habit, he realizes, "stultifies us and ... during the whole course of our existence hides more or less the whole universe from us, and under cover of utter darkness, without changing their labels, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne which procures no delight." We can't completely bury the past: "Our selves are composed of our successive states, superimposed. But this superimposition is not immutable like the stratification of a mountain. A tremor is liable at any moment to throw older layers back up to the surface."

The one thing he still can't purge is his jealousy, which makes us "try out all types and scales of suffering before we settle for the one that seems to suit us." His jealousy of Albertine is particularly painful, he thinks, because of what she did with women, who could "give her sensations that we are unable to give her.... Oh! If only Albertine had been in love with Saint-Loup! How much less I would have suffered, or so it seemed to me!" When Andrée comes to visit him, he believes he can see in her what Albertine did. Andrée admits, when he questions her, that she has her own inclinations toward women, but denies that she ever did anything with Albertine, which he doesn't believe. He also fancies "a certain resemblance between myself and Andrée," which may have attracted Albertine to him. He tries to persuade Andrée to let him watch her with other women, such as the members of the little gang from Balbec, but she denies that any of the others were so inclined. So he takes two laundry-maids to "a house of ill-fame," where he watches them.

He comes to a realization about his desire to possess Albertine: "it is only in our minds that we ever possess anything, and we do not possess a painting because we have it in our dining-room, if we do not understand it, nor a country because we merely reside in it without ever looking at it."

Of course what was starting partially to revive within me was the immense desire that my love for Albertine had been unable to assuage, that immense desire to know life which I used to feel on the roads near Balbec or the streets of Paris, the desire which had so made me suffer when, supposing that it also existed in Albertine's heart, I had attempted to deprive her of the means of satisfying that desire with anyone other than myself.

And he concludes that "thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine's room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte's."

Day One Hundred Sixty: The Fugitive, pp. 479-499*

2010-04-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from "I had not yet received any news from Aimé...." to "...the last phase of a love affair might not be rather the onset of a cardiac disease."

_____

Aimé writes the narrator from Balbec, confirming his suspicions that Albertine was lying when she said she had never had relations with other women. A bath-house attendant recalls her meeting with "a lady in grey" who tipped the attendant generously: "As the latter person said to me, you can guess that if they had spent their time making daisy chains they wouldn't have given me a ten-franc tip." So now for the narrator, it has become "a question of essence: who was she deep down, what were her thoughts, whom did she love, had she lied to me, had my life with her been as lamentable as that of Swann with Odette?" Adding to his pain is the realization that "what Aimé had learned from the bath-house girl was of little importance, since Albertine would for ever be unaware that he had told me about it." The information is of no use in resolving his emotions about her.

I needed to see her by my side and to hear her answering kindly, to see her cheeks fill out, her eyes lose their mischief and fill with sadness, that is, to love her still and forget my jealous rage in the despair of my solitude. The painful mystery of the impossibility of ever letting her know what I had learned and of establishing a new relationship based on the truth which I had only just discovered (and which I might perhaps have been able to discover only because she was dead) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery of her conduct.

But then he begins to doubt this new evidence: "How much credit could I give to what the bath-house girl had told Aimé? Especially since in fact she had never seen anything." So, even though he knows that evidence of Albertine's "guilt" will not satisfy him and will only cause him further pain, he decides he needs further proof of it, and sends Aimé on a further mission: "to Touraine, to spend a few days in the neighbourhood of Mme Bontemps's villa." In short, "during that whole year my life continued to be filled with love, with a real relationship. But the object of that relationship was dead."

Aimé reports from Touraine that he met a "young laundry-maid" who had tales about making out with Albertine. And that he went to bed with the laundry-maid himself: "And I understood Mlle Albertine's enjoyment, for the young wench is really talented." Punished for his curiosity, the narrator likens himself to "a man who has forgotten the enchanted nights he had spent in the woods beneath the moonlight [but] still suffers from the rheumatism which he contracted there." He is aroused by visions of Albertine taking her pleasure with other women, despite urging himself to stop the self-torture.

I wished I could have a great love, or I wanted to find someone to live with me, which seemed to me to be a sign that I was no longer in love with Albertine, when it was a sign that I was still in love with her.... Only when I had forgotten her would I be able to realize that I would be wiser and happier living without love.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Nine: The Fugitive, pp. 465-479*

2010-04-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from "How she would hurry to visit me in Balbec...." to "...the ceaseless hope of seeing her walk through the door."

_____

Let's begin with one of those marathon sentences:

Perhaps my wealth and the prospect of a dazzling marriage had attracted her; my jealousy had retained her; her kindness, her intelligence, her feelings of guilt or her sheer skill and cunning had led her to accept, and led me to render increasingly harsh, a captivity forged simply by the progress of the inner workings of my mind, but which had none the less had repercussions on Albertine's life, destined through their backlash to pose my psyche new and increasingly painful problems, since it was from my prison that she had escaped in order to kill herself riding a horse which without me she wound have never owned, leaving me, even after her death, with suspicions whose truth, if confirmed, would perhaps be crueller for me than the discovery at Balbec that Albertine had known Mlle Vinteuil, since Albertine would no longer be there to soothe me.

Whew! The sentence itself is a chain of causalities, spun out of the narrator's feeling of guilt.

Increasingly, the narrator speaks of the life and death of Albertine as an analogue to fiction: "any single life resembles an improvised experiment in subjective psychology" -- which is an apt description of any work of fiction -- "yet one which at a distance provides the 'plot' of a purely realist novel belonging to to a different reality, a different existence, whose reversals of fortune intervene one after the other to inflect the curve and change to direction of the psychological experiment."

And while the narrator assumes most of the guilt for Albertine's death, he's also willing to trace another chain of causality, starting with his reading a description of the church at Balbec and Swann's praises of it, and even the construction of the hotel in which he stayed. Balbec had not been as he had imagined it. "But in exchange for what the imagination leads us to expect and what we take so much trouble to try to discover, life gives us something that we were far from being able to imagine." And once again, he links Albertine's death to the very beginning of Proust's novel: "it was on account of that good-night kiss from such a stranger that, some years later, I was to suffer just as much as I did as a child when my mother did not come to see me."

He continues to compare his experience with Albertine to his experience with Gilberte, both of whom "were the kind of women who would not have caught the attention of some men who, on the other hand, would have done anything, however crazy, for another kind, who 'left me cold.'" And yet, the experiences with the two of them were quite different: "Starting out from Gilberte, I could have as little imagined Albertine, or the fact that I would love her, as the memory of Vinteuil's sonata could have enabled me to imagine his septet."

He drifts into the realm of might-have-been, recalling the experience with Mme. de Stermaria that helped precipitate him into the relationship with Albertine: "I had suffered so much that I would have given anything to see her again, and it was one of the greatest anxieties which I had ever known that Saint-Loup's arrival had assuaged." And he finally sees the futility of his attempt to possess Albertine -- or, in fact, anyone: "Albertine was poor and obscure, and ought to want to marry me. And yet I had not been able to possess her exclusively. Whatever social conditions prevail, however wise the precautions we take, we can never truly control another person's life."

He finds a particular shock in recognizing that the dead become like fictional characters, that "it is as difficult to return to the idea of what that person's being had experienced as it is difficult, even while memories of their life are still fresh, to think that this person is assimilable to the insubstantial images and memories left by the characters of a novel that we have read."

And he continues to berate himself over his attitude toward her lesbian experiences: "Why had she not told me, 'I do have those inclinations'? I would have yielded, I would have let her indulge them, and even then I would still have embraced her." This passage is almost identical to one that appeared two pages earlier: "Why had she not said to me, 'I am that way inclined'? I would have yielded, I would have allowed her to indulge her inclinations." This is possibly a reflection of the somewhat inchoate state of the manuscript Proust left behind. (In his notes, Peter Collier has just pointed out his deletion of a repeated sentence.) But it can also be intentional: Certainly the narrator has been more intensely obsessed by Albertine's same-sex tendencies than by almost any other aspect of her personality. Here, he is provoked by memories of Albertine's lies about her relationship to Mlle. Vinteuil and his harsh condemnation of lesbianism to her when he first suspected that she and Andrée might have been more than just friends.

Finally, grief betrays him into superstition: "I started to read books about turning tables, I started to believe in the possible immortality of the soul." And he lets himself imagine that she isn't dead, that "like a character in some novel..., she had not wanted me to learn that she had recovered.... I felt coexist within me the certainty that she was dead, and the ceaseless hope of seeing her walk through the door."

Day One Hundred Fifty-Eight: The Fugitive, pp. 450-465*

2010-04-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from "Of course these very short nights cannot last long...." to "...even the approach of death would not have disturbed."

_____

The narrator's grief is so deep that he even anticipates how he will feel in the future:

And when I thought that I would once again see the start of the cold weather, which had always seemed so sad to me since the days of Gilberte and our games on the Champs-Élysées ... I told myself that the hardest period for me to get through would probably be the winter.

(Notice here that his memory of Albertine is overlaid with his memories of Gilberte.) And indeed, he tells us how he did in fact feel at a future date, about the time when he sent Françoise to bring Albertine home from the Trocadéro, an event that in his immediate grief gives him pain:

I at last remembered it while no longer adding suffering to it, but on the contrary, rather as we remember certain summer days which we found too hot at the time, and where it is only after the event that we extract from their alloys the pure, hallmarked gold and the indelible lapis lazuli.

Once again, the theme is memory, of events which leave us but "find secret ways of returning within us."

Many of the sentences in this section end with a sharp reminder: "...she was dead." "...for Albertine was dead." "...unbelievable that Albertine could be dead." For while he finds it "difficult to accept that Albertine, who was so alive within me, was dead," it's because his old suspicion and jealousy is also alive: "During her last few months I had kept her locked up in my house. But now in my imagination Albertine was free; she used this freedom ill, she prostituted herself to all and sundry."

In his morbid obsession with the things she had done while she was alive, he sends Aimé to Balbec to "make enquiries" about her. But soon afterward, "What now filled my heart, instead of suspicion and hatred, was the tender memory of hours of affectionate intimacy." Suffering, he observes, "is able to imbue the most insignificant things with charm and mystery."

One morning I thought that I glimpsed the oblong shape of a hill surrounded by mist, and felt the warmth of a cup of chocolate, while my heart was horribly wrung by the memory of the afternoon when Albertine had come to see me and when I had kissed her for the first time: it was because I had just heard the boiler gurgle as it was relit.

He resents the fact that "Albertine was dead so young, while Brichot continued to dine with Mme Verdurin, who was still entertaining guests and would perhaps continue to do so for years to come!" And he feels guilt, a "great shame in surviving her."

In such moments, connecting my grandmother's death with that of Albertine, it seemed to me that my life was besmirched with a double murder for which only the cowardice of society could forgive me.

And he returns to thoughts of Swann and Odette, which has been one of his touchstones in assessing relationships:

And finally I had experienced a happiness and an unhappiness which Swann had not known, precisely because, during all the time that he had loved Odette and had been so jealous of her, there were days when he had hardly seen her at all, since it was virtually impossible for him to go and call on her whenever she called off their appointment at the last moment. But afterwards he had had her to himself, as his wife, until he died. Whereas I, on the other hand, even while I was so jealous of Albertine, was happier than Swann, for I had her at home with me.... But ultimately I had not kept Albertine as he had kept Odette. She had fled, she had died.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Seven: The Fugitive, pp. 429-450*

2010-04-24T16:08:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from "Time passes, and gradually all the things which we have falsely alleged..." to "...the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this."

_____

The narrator learns that in the course of forgetting, the first things one forgets are the bad parts: "the unpleasant sides to Albertine's character and the hours of boredom that I had endured at her side." Consequently, "forgetting, although still working within me to accustom me to our separation, only made me see Albertine as sweeter and more beautiful than ever, and made me desire her return all the more."

Françoise seems to the narrator to take an "odious relish" in being rid of Albertine, and when, in the course of cleaning up her room, Françoise discovers some rings she had left behind in a drawer, an argument develops between her and the narrator. The narrator denies having given them to Albertine, and Françoise says it must have been "somebody rich who has good taste." He counters that the rings "did not come from the same person, one was given her by her aunt and she bought the other herself" -- though he fears that they were given her by a secret lover. Françoise persists in arguing that the rings are identical, and shows him that they both bear the same image of an eagle and Albertine's initials. She even produces a magnifying glass to prove her case. Finally, the narrator orders Françoise out of the room and broods on yet another discovery about Albertine: "My revulsion at her falsehood and my jealousy of someone unknown were augmented by my pain at learning that she had accepted presents in this way."

He is also nettled by Françoise's hope that Albertine won't return, and takes pleasure when a letter from her arrives in "momentarily studying Françoise's eyes, drained of all hope as they read in this augury the imminent return of Albertine." But the letter simply says she will cancel the order for the Rolls-Royce and asks for the name of the agent, and concludes with a reference to their last outing together, which, she says "will never be erased from my mind until blackest night finally invades it." The narrator takes this last sentence (a rather heavy-handed bit of ironic foreshadowing) as "purely rhetorical" because "Albertine could not have kept until her dying day such a sweet memory of an outing which had certainly given her no pleasure, since he had been impatient to leave me."

In his reply, the narrator tells Albertine that he has asked Andrée to come live with him in her place and to marry him, that Andrée is "less charming, but one whose greater compatibility of character ought perhaps to allow her to be happier with me." He means the letter to provoke Albertine's jealousy, but once he sends it he's afraid it will have the opposite effect of making her "pleased to know that Andrée was living with me and was to become my wife, provided that she, Albertine, remained free."

He waits on the staircase for Saint-Loup's arrival, and accidentally hears something that he thinks uncharacteristic of his friend: Saint-Loup advising one of the Duchesse de Guermantes' footmen on how to get rid of a fellow servant the footman dislikes. The narrator is "struck dumb with stupefaction" at the "cruel, Machiavellian" advice from someone whom "until then I had always considered ... fundamentally kind, so sympathetic to those who suffer." He wonders if Saint-Loup "might not have acted treacherously towards me in his mission to Mme Bontemps." He dispels the thought when Saint-Loup enters to talk to him, but is struck with another pang when Saint-Loup mentions that on arriving at the Bontemps, he "went through a kind of outhouse which led into the house, and they took me down a long corridor into the lounge." It's the specificity of the details that bother the narrator so much: Until then he has not been able to visualize the place Albertine has escaped to. "In an outhouse, you can hide with a girlfriend." (The word "outhouse" has an unfortunate connotation for American readers, but here it just means something like an annex.) "And in that lounge, who knows what Albertine did when her aunt was not there?"

I still had not seen the house; never could I have conceived the frightful idea of a lounge, an outhouse and a corridor, which I now saw staring out at me from Saint-Loup's retina, which had seen them, and appearing in the guise of the rooms which Albertine walked into, passed through and lived in; these specific rooms and not an infinity of other possible rooms which had neutralized one another.... Alas! when Saint-Loup told me in addition that while in this lounge he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in the next room, and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realized with despair that, once rid of me, she was happy!

Saint-Loup goes on to mention that when he was leaving, he met some other young women entering the house, and that while in the area he had met a friend of Rachel's. The idea that there are other young women in the vicinity of Albertine is "enough to make me see Albertine flushed and smiling with pleasure, held in the arms of a woman whom I did not know."

And so he's tormented by jealousy of an imaginary woman, with the additional touch of paranoia from the revelation that Saint-Loup is not quite the paragon he believed him to be. He even suspects that Saint-Loup might have "devised a whole conspiracy to keep me away from Albertine!" He recalls what he knows of Swann's state of mind during his infatuation with Odette:

If Albertine could have fallen victim to an accident and had lived, I would have had an excuse to rush to her bedside; if she had died, I would have recovered what Swann called the freedom to live. Did I believe this? Swann, who was so refined and thought he knew himself so well, had believed it.

But he is about to learn that Swann was wrong, "that the death of the woman he loved would have liberated him from nothing!" For just as he sends a telegram to Albertine begging her to return, he receives a telegram from Mme. Bontemps informing him that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident.

Proust piles irony on irony here, as Françoise, ignorant of what has happened, enters with two letters from Albertine, one praising Andrée and offering to intercede if she should be reluctant to marry him, the other expressing a second thought and asking "Would it be too late for me to return to you? ... If it were favourable, I would take the next train."

For Albertine's death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive.

He learns from her death the dark side of involuntary memory, "the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past called forth by identical moments." Everything -- the rain, the sun's rays, the morning sounds -- serves to evoke a memory of their time together.

"Françoise must have been pleased that Albertine was dead, and to be fair I must acknowledge that from a kind of decorum and tact she did not pretend to be sad." She tries to stop the narrator from crying himself sick. "And she added: 'It was bound to happen, she was too happy, poor thing, she didn't know how happy she was." But there's no stopping the narrator's descent into depression.

If an illness, a duel or a runaway horse bring us face to face with death, we realize how richly we would have enjoyed the life, the sexual pleasure and the unknown lands that we are about to be deprived of. And once the danger is past, what we fall back on is the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 410-429*

2010-04-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from "Saint-Loup could barely have caught the train when..." to "...the long-lost sweetness of having her by my side."

_____

Bloch stops by to tell him that he has dined with M. Bontemps and, having seen Albertine and the narrator quarreling, has told Bontemps "that he ought to implore her to address this issue." The narrator is furious, but Bloch seems only amused at his anger. Then Françoise informs the narrator that a policeman is there: The parents of the little girl he took home with him have filed a complaint "for seducing a minor." The narrator reacts to this as yet another of "Wagnerian motifs" in his life. After a confrontation with the furious parents and a grilling by the police, he is let off for lack of evidence. But Françoise informs him that the concierge, when asked if the narrator was "in the habit of inviting young girls home," had told the inspector about Albertine, and that the house was now under surveillance. The experience gives him a guilty conscience:

I thought that "the seduction of minors" could also refer to Albertine. Thus my life seemed walled in on all sides. And at the thought that I had not lived a chaste life with her, I found in the punishment inflicted on my for having cradled an unknown little girl in my arms the balance which always occurs in human punishment, suggesting that there is hardly ever either a just condemnation or a judicial error, but a kind of harmony between the false notion of an innocent act entertained by the judge and the culpable acts which he has ignored.

The spring weather soothes him into "a few moments of pleasant calm, imagining Venice and meeting beautiful, unknown women," but this gives way to panic. He recognizes that this mood "would later become a permanent state for me, a life where would no longer suffer because of Albertine, where I would no longer love her." And this in itself, the prospect of forgetting, is enough to torment him.

After four days have elapsed, Saint-Loup telegraphs that Albertine and her aunt "have gone away for three days." In the meantime, he is approached by the Duc de Guermantes about the prospect of marrying one of his nieces, "reputedly the prettiest young lady in Paris," who has set her sights on him. Her parents were "resigned in the interests of their daughter's happiness to such a misalliance and with such an unequal party." But the narrator finds the idea too painful to contemplate.

Another telegram from Saint-Loup informs him that "despite his precautions," Albertine was present when he met with Mme. Bontemps. The narrator is stung by this blow to "the last shred of pride surviving from my love for Gilberte." He telegraphs Saint-Loup to return "to avoid at least the appearance of aggravating through added persistence the intervention which I had so wanted to keep secret." And then Albertine telegraphs to say that if he had written her directly, "I WOULD HAVE BEEN ONLY TOO PLEASED TO RETURN: DO NOT TRY ANY SUCH ABSURD APPROACH AGAIN." As a result, he writes her to say that he won't ask her to return, but mentions that "The yacht was already almost fitted out" and that he would keep it and the Rolls-Royce, even though he will not use them. For him it is a "bogus letter, which I wrote so as to seem detached from her." He thinks that the letter will "make Albertine return as soon as possible," but once he has sent it he begins to regret doing so: "I hoped that she would refuse to return."

He opens a newspaper and learns of the death of La Berma, which inspires him to thoughts of how his renunciation of Albertine resembles Phaedra's parting from Hippolytus.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Five: The Fugitive, pp. 387-410*

2010-04-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, through "...saying to myself, 'I have returned her shot, on the volley.'"

_____

The narrator predictably goes through an emotional meltdown on hearing that Albertine has left, beginning with denial, in which "feeling as gentle with myself as my mother had been with my grandmother on her deathbed," he tells himself, "None of this is of any importance." He reads her farewell note and tries to persuade himself that "she does not believe a word of all this" and will be home by evening. "And at the same time I was calculating whether I would have time that morning to go out and buy the yacht and the Rolls-Royce that she desired, and, abandoning all hesitation, did not consider for a moment that I had thought it rather unwise to make her this gift."

He reflects, not for the first time, on the nature of habit:

I suddenly saw Habit in a completely new perspective. Until now I had considered it above all as a negative force suppressing the originality and even our awareness of our perceptions; now I saw it as a fearsome goddess, so attached to us, with her inscrutable face so grafted on to our hearts that if she detaches herself and turns away from us, this deity, whose presence we were barely able to discern, inflicts upon us the most terrible suffering, and then she is as cruel as death.

He berates himself for not taking notice of the warning signs, including "the sound of a suddenly opened window," but instead rationalizing away her discontent: "It is life which little by little, case by case, allows us to realize that what is most important for our hearts or our minds is taught us not by reason but by other powers." Even when he had imagined her leaving him, he could not have foreseen "the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, 'Miss Albertine has left.'"

all the worries that I had felt since I was a child ... had been solicited by this new source of anxiety and had rushed to reinforce it, amalgamating themselves with it into one homogeneous mass which suffocated me.

The experience is worse than his with his previous infatuations, with Mme. de Guermantes and Gilberte, because he "had never tasted sensual pleasure" with them, and his "love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit." But this experience also brings out his pride: "I did want her to return, but did not want to be seen to care."

He now remembers that he had been experiencing panic attacks that he had been trying to deny, and that although he had been able to talk himself out of the idea that she might leave him, "when I found her still there when I rang for her in the morning, I had breathed an enormous sigh of relief." Which made the news of her leaving harder to bear because it was "the one unthinkable event, a departure somehow sensed several days in advance, despite my logical reasons for being reassured." As intricate the narrator's self-analysis here may be, it is nonetheless one of the most acute and finely observed accounts of the emotions and rationalizations surrounding such an experience that can be found in literature.

On the street, he sees a little girl and takes her home with him, where he "rocked her for a while on my knees." But the experience only heightens the pain of Albertine's absence and he sends her home with five hundred francs. Having learned that Albertine has left for Touraine, where her aunt lives, he enlists Saint-Loup in his efforts, sending him to put pressure on Mme. Bontemps, even bribing her, to make Albertine return. Saint-Loup is surprised to learn that Albertine has been living there all this time, and when the narrator shows him her picture, "His face registered a surprise that bordered on stupefaction. 'Is this the girl that you love?' he said finally, in a voice whose astonishment was muted by the fear of offending me." He recalls that he was similarly unimpressed by Rachel:

It is ... likely perhaps that the person whose every move is anxiously anticipated by her lover, with all the awe that would be due to a deity, appears as an inconsequential person, only too pleased to do anything required, in the eyes of a man who does not love her, as did Saint-Loup's mistress for me.

The plan is for Saint-Loup to offer Mme. Bontemps "thirty thousand francs for her husband's electoral committee." Saint-Loup protests that if she's that dishonest, "three thousand francs would be enough," but the narrator is not willing to low-ball on anything so important to him. Saint-Loup gives in:

"And although I find it rather odd to set up such a blatant deal, I know well that even in our own circles there are duchesses, even the most strait-laced, who would do more embarrassing things for thirty thousand francs than tell their nieces not to stay in Touraine."

Day One Hundred Fifty-Four, The Prisoner, pp. 358-384

2010-04-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

From "Meanwhile winter was coming to an end..." to "...I shall ring for you presently."

_____

Springtime brings fantasies:

I was sure that the next day I should be able to begin work and at the same time start getting up, going out, preparing for our departure to some country house which we should buy, where Albertine would be more free to live the country or seaside life, sailing or hunting, which she would enjoy.

But of course, this is only a fantasy: "Reality is the cleverest of our enemies. It directs its attacks at those points in our heart where we were not expecting them, and where we had prepared no defence." And the reality of his relationship with Albertine continues to be his chief antagonist. He recognizes in her two traits: "the comforting one, was her habit of using a single action to give pleasure to more than one person." So she came to Paris to please not only the narrator but also Andrée, while making each think that he or she was the reason for the move. The character trait he finds more difficult to deal with is "the alacrity with which she seized upon any opportunity of pleasure."

Moreover, he is finding himself trapped in the relationship:

I felt life and the world which I had never explored slipping away from me, exchanged for a woman in whom I could no longer find anything new. I could not even go to Venice where, while I was in bed, I would be tortured by the thought of the advances the gondolier might be making to her, or the people in the hotel, or the Venetian women.

His life as he sees it is bounded by "on the one hand, when I was not jealous, boredom, and on the other, when I was, suffering." Yet he continues to lavish presents on her, including a Fortuny dress that, "calling up images of Venice, ... made me even more conscious of everything I was giving up for Albertine."

She begins to withdraw from his demonstrations of affection: "instead of returning my kiss, she drew away with the kind of instinctive, sinister stubbornness of animals that feel death upon them." Images of death, as with his watching her sleep, begin to prevail in his thoughts of her. He vacillates "between the fear that Albertine might leave me and a relative calm." He suffers from "anxiety, which, presenting us ... with only two alternatives, [has] something of the appallingly limited character of straightforward physical pain."

For her part, Albertine displays signs of the coming split. One night he hears her "window being violently thrown open" in defiance of his order that windows not be opened at night. He fears that her breaking this rule means that she was ready to break all the agreements they had made between them. And in his nervous state he begins to fear that he is going to die.

They go out together to Versailles, and on the trip he hears "a sound which I did not recognize at first and which my grandmother would also have loved. It was like the buzzing of a wasp. 'Look, said Albertine, there's an aeroplane, it's high, high up.'" The sound stirs in him "a longing for my lost freedom." Even the smell of gasoline from a car driving under his window awakens this longing for freedom. It is

a scent at the appearance of which roads receded in front of me, the look of the ground changed, châteaux appeared from nowhere, the sky turned pale, my strength grew tenfold; this was a scent which seemed to symbolize leaping forward, power, and which renewed the desire I had felt at Balbec to get into the cage of glass and steel, not this time to go and pay visits in familiar houses with a woman I already knew too well, but to go and make love in new places with a woman I did not know at all.

And so he begins to make plans, "forgetting that there was another such desire which I had fulfilled without any pleasure at all, the desire for Balbec, and that Venice, being another visible phenomenon, would probably be no more successful than Balbec in realizing an inexpressible dream." His inability to adjust his fantasies to actuality, to forestall disillusionment, continues.

And then, when he summons Françoise to ask her to fetch a guidebook and a train time-table, she enters with the word that Albertine has gone, having called for her boxes and left at nine o'clock. Françoise says she wanted to inform him, but she was afraid to go against the strict orders he had made not to enter his room before called for.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 333-358

2010-04-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

From "It was so late that the next morning..." to "...sending the thirst-quenching juice squirting into one's mouth."

_____

Françoise, "convinced that we had spent the night in what she called orgies, duly warned the other servants, in an ironic tone, not to 'wake her highness'." She brings a brisk note of comedy to the narrator's endless mad obsession, though he "fears, that one day Françoise would lose her self-control and speak insolently to Albertine, thus facing me with complications in our life together." Which is pretty ironic in itself, as their life together is already full of complications, largely of the narrator's own feverish imagining. He begins to see their relationship in diplomatic and military terms: "Albertine had never voiced any threat to break with me; but a system of impressions had led me to believe that she was thinking of doing so, just as the French government had believed of the Germans."

Preparations for war, which the most false of all proverbs recommends as a way of ensuring peace, in fact create the belief in each of the adversaries that the other wants to break off relations, a belief which brings about that very breakdown, and then, once it has taken place, the further belief on each side that it was the other side who wanted it.

He still clings to the fantasy of possession, looking in on the sleeping Albertine and reflecting "that this motionless, living semicircle, in which a whole human life was suspended, was the only thing that held any value for me, and that it was there, under my power, in my possession." But at other times he acknowledges the futility of possession, for it deprives her of the vitality that made him want to possess her, turning her into "a dutiful and tedious captive." He recalls her freedom in Balbec, and observes, "Because the wind no longer billowed in her garments, because, above all, I had cut her wings, she had ceased to be a Victory, she was a heavy slave of whom I wished to be rid."

She has become so docile that thoughts of her relationship to Léa and Mlle. Vinteuil trouble him less, so that he "often asked Albertine to play for me, without its making me suffer, some of Vinteuil's music." And he finds in the music a reproduction of "that inner, extreme point of sensation which is the thing that causes us the specific ecstasy from time to time," a "higher, purer, truer" emotion that evokes "the particular pleasure which I had sometimes experienced in my life, before the spires of Martinville, for example, or certain trees on a road at Balbec, or more simply, as at the beginning of this work, when drinking a certain mouthful of tea." And yet this is the Proustian moment artificially induced -- the pleasure without the mystery.

I said to myself that after all it might be that, even though Vinteuil's phrases seemed to me to be the expression of certain states of the soul -- analogous to the one I had experienced on tasting the madeleine soaked in tea -- nothing proved that the vagueness of these states was a sign of their profundity, rather than of our inability, so far, to analyse them: there would therefore be nothing more real in them than in others. Still, the happiness, that feeling of certainty in happiness, while I drank the cup of tea, or as I breathed in a certain scent of old wood in the Champs-Élysées gardens, was not an illusion.

Vinteuil's music also evokes for him the romance of Swann and Odette, and brings Gilberte to mind, so that he quizzes Albertine on her acquaintance with Gilberte. She tells him that Gilberte kissed her and asked her if she liked women, "But we didn't do anything." The narrator, of course, has his doubts about her truthfulness.

They talk about literature, including Thomas Hardy and Dostoevsky, although in fact it is mostly the narrator who does the talking. When she recalls something he had said earlier about Dostoevsky and Mme. de Sévigné, he says, "Come here little girl, and let me give you a kiss for being so good at remembering what I say."

He recognizes that his infatuation with her has come with a price:

even though when I came into my inheritance from Aunt Léonie I had promised myself I would be a collector like Swann, buying pictures and statues, in fact all my money went on horses, a motor-car, dresses for Albertine. But then, did not my room contain a work of art more precious than all those others? It was Albertine herself.

But then he changes his mind: "But no, Albertine was not at all a work of art for me." When he begins to see her that way, as "a wonderfully patinated statue, I soon became indifferent to her, presently I was bored in her company, but these moments did not last for long." He sees the truth: "we love only what we do not possess, and soon I began once more to realize that I did not possess Albertine." But will he hold fast to this truth?

He returns to his obsession with lesbianism, telling himself that he would not have been so tormented by jealousy if she had been attracted, as he once thought she was, to Saint-Loup. It is his ignorance of "love between women" that bothers him: "nothing could allow me to picture with confidence, with precision, its pleasures, its very nature." And once again, he is frustrated by his inability to truly possess her:

I could take Albertine on my knees, hold her head in my hands, I could stroke her, run my hands all over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone enclosing the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching only the closed outer casing of a being which on the inside was in touch with the infinite.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Two, The Prisoner, pp. 321-333

2010-04-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

From "The vague fear I had felt at the Verdurins'..." to "...Then I slipped away so as not to wake her."

_____

So the narrator's telling Albertine to leave was all a trick. "Arriving home, I had had the feeling of being a prisoner, not at all of returning to a female captive," he says, but her pique at the information that he had been to the Verdurins' bothered him. "I had thought it best to give her the impression that her slavery would not last for ever, and that I myself wished to bring it to an end." But then comes an admission from her that she once spent three weeks with Léa. "And that morning she had told me she did not know Léa at all!" The impact this confession makes on the narrator is a significant one: "I watched as sudden flames tore through a novel I had spent ten million minutes composing." The narrator, in short, is treating his life -- and more important, Albertine's -- as if it were a fiction of his own creation. (Try not to linger on the metafictional hall-of-mirrors effect here: Proust writing a novel whose narrator is writing a novel in which....)

He decides that Albertine's confession comes out of her fear that Léa herself had revealed this fact to him. And here he goes into yet another discussion of homosexuality: "Lesbians are rare enough but also common enough that wherever they go, in whatever crows, they cannot fail to spot another of their kind." And he tells the story of two women who met when they accompanied two men to a restaurant and immediately fell for each other: "The two girls became great friends, were seen everywhere together, one dressed as a man and went around picking up little girls and taking them home to the other to initiate them. The other had a little boy and used to pretend to be angry with him so that the other could punish him, with a heavy hand."

This is one of the more distasteful passages in Proust's novel, based as it is on the myth of the predatory, male-hating lesbian. We can, of course, ascribe it to the narrator and not to the author, as another instance of the narrator's neurotic obsession with possessing the love object, and his fear of her being lured away, not just by another man, but by another woman. Once again he sees "the unburnt portion of the novel ... slowly crumbling into ashes." Tormented by "the thought of the orgiastic life Albertine must have lived before she knew me," he concocts his complicated plan to pretend to break with her in order to keep her. "I suddenly felt I must keep Albertine because I felt her being was dissipated among various other people whom I could not prevent her from joining." He sees it as a battle for possession. And

so that Albertine would not think I was exaggerating and to keep her for as long as possible in the belief that we were going to separate, I had begun to plan the time which was to begin the following day and last for ever, the time when we should be apart, making all the same recommendations to Albertine as if we were not going to end our quarrel in a moment.... This scene of fictitious separation in the end caused me almost as much unhappiness as if it had been true, perhaps because one of the actors, Albertine, believed that it was, and so added to the illusion for the other.

The faux separation "turned out to be like those medicines that are to cure our sufferings in the long run, but whose first effect is to make them worse."

He feels "a kind of hatred for her which only made me the more desperate to keep her with me" when he thinks that "while she had given up the Verdurins and gone to the Trocadéro to please me, all the same, Mlle Vinteuil was supposed to have been at the Verdurins', and at the Trocadéro, which she had also given up in order to come out with me, there had been, as a reason to bring her back from there, Léa, that same Léa about whom I seemed to be worrying needlessly but whom, in words that I had not forced out of her, Albertine said she knew." Lesbians to the left of him, lesbians to the right of him.

So then he calls off her expulsion:

'Listen, Albertine, you say you're happier here this [than?] elsewhere, that you're going to be unhappy if you leave. -- Of course I am. -- That makes me wonder; do you think you'd like us to try to go on for a few more weeks after all? You never know, a week at a time, we might manage to go on for a good long time, you know some temporary things can go on for ever. -- Oh, that would be lovely!

And so she stays. And he looks in on her when she's fast asleep, not so much as her lover as her murderer: "And it was a dead woman that I saw when I went into her room a moment later. She had fallen asleep the minute she lay down; her sheets, wrapped around her body like a shroud, had fallen into fine folds with the apparent hardness of stone." Her body is now "meaningless," "twisted," an "allegorical figure of what? Of my death? Of my love?" Chilling.

Day One Hundred Fifty-One: The Prisoner, pp. 305-321

2010-04-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

From "We had arrived at my door...." to "...it is difficult for me now to say."

_____

From the moment the narrator returns, it's as if he and Albertine had been spoiling for a fight. She is angry when he tells her that he has been to the Verdurins', and he is provoked when she asks, "Wasn't Mlle Vinteuil supposed to be there?" He brings up a trip she made to Balbec with the chauffeur, the postcards from which arrived much later, and she says she really went to Auteuil to see some friends and arranged for the chauffeur to have the postcards mailed from Balbec:

"I didn't even dare go out in Auteuil for fear someone would see me. I only went out once and then I was dressed as a man, just for a laugh. And with my luck, of course the first person I bumped into was your sheeny friend Bloch. But I don't think he can have been the one who told you that our trip to Balbec only ever existed in my imagination, for I don't think he recognized me."

This incident, which looms so large here, seems not to have been mentioned before. Did Proust intend to revise the incident at Versailles into one involving Balbec?

Then the narrator begins to talk about Mlle. Vinteuil and her partner, intending to reveal to Albertine that he knows about their relationship, but she interrupts him to confess that she had made up her friendship with them: "I saw you getting so passionate about this fellow Vinteuil's music that, seeing one of my friends -- this is really true, I swear -- had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, I had the silly idea of making myself more interesting to you by pretending that I'd know those two girls very well."

The narrator is touched by her revelation and by her feeling "insignificant in the Verdurin circle," and he offers to give her the money to "give a grand dinner and ask M. and Mme Verdurin." But she is offended by the condescension, and says, "Thanks a lot! Spend money on those old gargoyles, I'd much rather you left me alone for once, let me go out and get ..." Then she breaks off in evident embarrassment. He presses her to continue what she was saying, but she says she was on the brink of saying "something horribly vulgar" that she had ''heard the most terrible people saying in the street." He is convinced she's lying, and begins to try to puzzle out what she must have been about to say. Here there's a bit of a translation problem, because the word in the French before she interrupted herself was casser, which means "break," though Clark has translated it as "get," probably because "let me go out and break..." would have made no sense. (Is the translator's interpretation "get laid"?) So the narrator has to run through several idiomatic expressions involving the word casser before he hits on one referring to anal sex.

Horrors! That is what she would have preferred. Horror upon horror! For even the lowest prostitute, who lends herself to that activity, or even welcomes it, will not use in speaking to the man who performs it such a revolting expression. She would feel herself too humiliated. Only with another woman, if she prefers women, will she use it, as if to excuse herself for yielding to a man.

And the inference, whether or not it's correct, is enough to cause the narrator to make this proposal:

Darling Albertine, I said gently, with deep sadness, you must see that your life here is depressing for you, we should separate, and as the quickest separations are the best, I will ask you, to make my suffering a little less, to say good-bye this evening and leave tomorrow morning before I wake up, so that I do not have to see you again.

He proposes to ask Bloch to send his cousin Esther to stay with her, which puzzles her. He does it "to try to force a confession from Albertine," but it doesn't work.

Truthfully, I find this scene something of a muddle, not only because of the translation problem, but also because Proust has not fully externalized the drama, relying instead on the narrator's internal musings and giving us no clear glimpse of what's going on inside Albertine. While Proust has no reluctance to violate point of view elsewhere, and give us the thoughts of characters like the Verdurins, the veil he draws around Albertine's inner life keeps her something of a mystery to us -- which of course is what she is to the narrator -- at some sacrifice to dramatic effect.

Day One Hundred Fifty: The Prisoner, pp. 285-305

2010-04-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

From "While we were talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife..." to "...still the best place to pursue the dream of life."

_____

The Verdurins accomplish their coup: "drunk on melodrama, Mme Verdurin had impressed on her husband that he must take the violinist on one side and, at all costs, speak to him." Once he has done so, she continues to pour salt into Morel's wounds: "I believe that you should no longer accept this shameful familiarity with a disgraced creature who is not received anywhere, she added, quite unconcerned that this was a lie and forgetting that she herself received him in her house almost daily." More lies follow: She tells Morel that Charlus is "mixed up in all sorts of scandals" and that he's almost bankrupt, that "everything is mortgaged to the hilt, his town house his country estate, etc." And Morel believes them all. "'I don't know how to thank you,' said Charlie in the tone one uses to a dentist who has just been causing one excruciating pain to which one does not want to admit."

Mme. Verdurin, "not wishing to disrupt the inner circle," reassures Morel that he doesn't have to stop meeting the Baron, that he can continue to see him at her salon. But she sinks her hooks in: "But insist on your independence, and don't let him drag you to all those two-faced old trouts' houses; I wish you could have heard what they said behind your back." She assures him that the artists who come to her house "know they can trust me, she said in the sweet, simple tone she knew how to assume at a moment's notice." And she claims that Charlus's efforts to get Morel the cross of the Légion d'honneur -- which he has been pursuing this very evening -- was a joke: "his recommendation would be enough to make sure you didn't get it." And then the coup de grâce:

Like the way he laughed aloud when he sid that you really wanted the decoration to please your uncle, and your uncle was a flunkey. -- He said that!' cried Charlie, convinced by these carefully remembered last words that everything Mme Verdurin had said was true.

Charlus, Brichot and the narrator return to the drawing-room, where Charlus walks right into the trap by proclaiming to Morel that he will soon be Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. "'Leave me alone, don't you dare come near me, cried Morel to the Baron. I bet this isn't your first time, you must have tried to corrupt other people before me.'"

The narrator expects to "see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus, I had had to face his insane rages for a thousand times less than this, no one was safe from them, a king would not have intimidated him." Instead, Charlus collapses before them.

And the gestures expressive of panic terror have changed so little, that the old gentleman to whom something unpleasant was happening in a Paris drawing-room struck again, without knowing it, the small number of stylized attitudes which in archaic Greek sculpture indicated the alarm of nymphs being pursued by the god Pan.

Charlus does receive one gesture of support, however, when the Queen of Naples, whom Morel has been wanting to meet, returns to pick up a fan she had left behind. Made aware of the situation, the queen snubs Morel and the Verdurins out of "an unshakeable attachment to people whom she loved, to her relations, to all the princes of her family, one of whom was M. de Charlus, then to all the middle-class or humbler people who showed respect to those she loved, who had the proper feelings towards them." And so Charlus leaves with the queen, "without having let Morel be presented to her."

A few days later, Charlus, the narrator tells us, "contracted one of those infectious pneumonias that were so common at the time, was judged by his doctors and judged himself to be at death's door, and then spent several months suspended between life and death.... It exhausted the Baron so completely that it left him little chance to think about the Verdurins. He was half-dead."

Then there's one of those "continuity errors," as Carol Clark calls them in her introduction, in which we are told that Cottard wasn't at the party (even though we have had both a reference to his death and several sightings of him there) because he was tending to Saniette (whom we have also seen there, being berated by Verdurin and suffering a stroke) because "Saniette had some kind of a stroke" resulting from his losses in the stock market. The purpose of the scene seems to be to soften our judgment of the Verdurins, because they decide to become anonymous benefactors of Saniette, setting up a fund for his support to be overseen by Cottard. The narrator says that Cottard told him "about the whole thing some years later, at Saniette's funeral in fact." (Earlier, when Saniette suffered his stroke outside the party, we were told that he "lived for some weeks more.") And he adds, "by changing my opinion of M. Verdurin, whom I was coming to think the very worst of men, Cottard's revelation, if he had made it earlier, would have dispelled the suspicions I had about the role the Verdurins might play in my relationship with Albertine." In short, it's all very much of a muddle.

Brichot and the narrator share a carriage on the ride home from the Verdurins, in which Brichot expresses his regret at what had happened to Charlus and his surprise at how violently Morel had reacted to the Verdurins' lies.

Day One Hundred Forty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 271-285

2010-04-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

From "'But what's wrong with him? That's my overcoat....'" to "...going into the room to ask 'May we come in?'"

_____

When Brichot returns with Charlus's overcoat instead of the narrator's, Charlus drapes it around him and says, flirtatiously, "You know that's very compromising, dear boy? It's like drinking out of the same glass, I shall be able to read your thoughts." And he strokes the narrator's chin. When Brichot suggests that Charlus should kiss the narrator on both cheeks, too, "'Kiss him on both cheeks, really! cried the Baron with shrill delight. I tell you, dear boy, he thinks he's still at a school prize-giving, he's dreaming of his little pupils, I bet he sleeps with them." And Charlus is off on a kind of verbal fan-dance, coyly revealing and concealing his gayness. Brichot eggs him on, with a mention of a recent discovery of a letter by Michelangelo about his love for a woman, which counters his homosexual reputation.

From the moment Brichot had begun talking about men's reputations, M. de Charlus's whole face had betrayed the particular kind of impatience that we see in an expert on medical or military matters, when lay people who know nothing about them begin to say foolish things about therapeutics or strategy.

Charlus startles them with an estimate that only "between thirty and forty per cent" of men are truly heterosexual, ascribing "inversion to the great majority of his contemporaries, excepting only those with whom he had himself had relations; their case -- provided the relations had been in the smallest degree romantic -- he regarded as more complex."

When Brichot learns that Charlus had been a friend of Swann's, he asks, "Was he one of them?" Charlus replies, "No, I don't think so." And then talks about introducing Swann to Odette: "She caught my eye in a semi-breeches part, when she was playing Miss Sacripant." And he claims, "She used to force me to organize the most dreadful sessions for her, four, five people at a time." He talks about how Swann was "as jealous as a tiger," and had called on him to be second in a duel.

Brichot next asks about Ski, whom Charlus dismisses as "just people's idea of that sort of man, people who don't know anything about it." Called on to produce names, Charlus claims to "live in a world of abstraction, these things only interest me from a transcendental point of view." The narrator comments,

But these moments of annoyed reaction in which the Baron tried to hide his real life were few and fleeting as compared with the hours during with he constantly let it show through, or displayed it with an irritating self-satisfaction, the need to confide being much stronger in him than the fear of self-revelation.

In the midst of a discussion of homosexuality in the court of Louis XIV, Charlus says, enigmatically, "I have a young friend in the army who is making quite a name for himself, who has done great things; but let me not gossip...." If the "young man" is Morel, it's certainly an odd reference, since Brichot and the narrator know about him. Could he be referring to Saint-Loup? And in commenting on the way society has changed, Charlus says,

But I will admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality*. Good heavens, in my day, if one set aside the men who simply hated women, and those who, while actually preferring them, did other things for money or their careers, homosexuals were good family men and really only kept mistresses as a blind.

Charlus then surprises Brichot by revealing the Prince de Guermantes' homosexuality. And Brichot proposes, "if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once."

Throughout all this, the narrator has been chafing with the urge to get home to see Albertine: "I now had only one wish, to escape from the Verdurins' before the execution of Charlus was carried out."

*The first recorded appearance of the word "homosexuality"was in Austria in 1869; Richard von Krafft-Ebing popularized the term in Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886.

Day One Hundred Forty-Eight: The Prisoner, pp. 256-271

2010-04-15T15:50:00.000-07:00

From "'Ah! My dear General,' M. de Charlus suddenly exclaimed,..." to "...valuable sayings that they would disdain to originate themselves."

_____

Charlus greets General Deltour, who has just finished talking with Cottard (even though the latter has been reported as dead), and while Charlus is talking to him Mme. Verdurin summons Brichot and commands, "Take him out to smoke a cigarette with you, so that my husband can take his inamorata on one side without old Charlus seeing, and show him the danger he is falling into." And she proceeds to slander Charlus, claiming that "he's been mixed up in some dirty business, and the police are watching him," that "he's been in prison," and that "someone I know who lives in his street says you can't imagine the characters that go up to his house."

As they walk away, Brichot praises Mme. Verdurin to the narrator, but adds, "I must admit, however, to great sadness at the thought that the poor Baron does not yet know of the blow that is going to fall upon him. He is quite mad about that boy. If Mme Verdurin succeeds, he is going to be a very unhappy man." They join Charlus, who takes the opportunity to show the narrator about the house and its store of possessions. Charlus is still bubbling over with the triumph of the concert, even dwelling on a moment when a lock of hair fell across Morel's forehead: "Did you notice the moemtn when his forelock came adrift? No? Ah then, my dear chap, you didn't notice anything.... And at that moment, the graceful entry, like little country-dance, of the allegro vivace. You know, that lock was the signal for revelation, even to the most slow-witted." But the Baron notices that the narrator is tiring and sends Brichot to fetch his greatcoat.

The narrator is puzzled by Charlus' friendship with Brichot, whose conversation even "the least discerning of Mme de Guermantes's guests would have found laboured and dull," but concludes that it's because "not only was he friendly to Morel, but he could collect from the Greek philosophers, the Latin poets and oriental storytellers texts which furnished the Baron's taste with strange and charming garlands." And the narrator has been feeling a "great, affectionate pity" for Charlus "ever since Mme Verdurin had unveiled her plan before me."

I had no opinion about the extent to which right and wrong might be involved in the relations between Morel and M. de Charlus, but the idea of the suffering that was being prepared for M. de Charlus revolted me. I wanted to prevent it, but I didn't know how.

But he is embarrassed when Charlus reminds him of the offer he once made to him when they were leaving Mme. de Villeparisis's together, and he tries to change the subject by talking about Mme. de Villeparisis's apparently recent death. Swann, Princess Sherbatoff, Cottard, Saniette, Mme. de Villeparisis ... who's next? It's as if Proust is cleaning house.

Day One Hundred Forty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 236-256

2010-04-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

From "It is not that musicians can remember this lost homeland..." to "...they had been less friendly to her than she had hoped."

_____

The andante of the Vinteuil septet (which for some reason has ten musicians) draws to a close and there is a pause in the concert. The narrator reflects,

The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

Art is the vehicle of the imagination in which all may ride.

As Swann did with Odette, so the narrator connects a phrase from Vinteuil's music with Albertine, in this case the final phrase of the andante. But when the music resumes, it seems to transcend his relationship with her:

Then the phrases faded away, except one which I saw pass by again up to five or six times, not letting me see her face, but so tender, so different -- as the little phrase from the sonata no doubt was for Swann -- from anything that any woman had yet led me to desire, that that phrase, offering me in such a gentle voice a kind of happiness which would have truly been worth attaining -- that invisible creature whose language I could not understand and yet whom I understood so well -- was perhaps the only Unknown Woman it has ever been granted to me to meet.

The irony is that he would not have been listening to this music at all if one of the women he most fears coming in contact with Albertine, Mlle. Vinteuil's friend, hadn't rescued it from the chaotic and indecipherable notes left by the composer. The narrator ingeniously finds ways to reconcile the desecration he had witnessed of Vinteuil's image by Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as "a form of madness." And for a moment, all the threads of his past seem to be coming together:

the memories connected with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, especially, spoke to me of Combray and also of Albertine, that is to say of Balbec, since it was because I had once seen Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain and then learned of her friend's association with Albertine, that I would be going home in a moment to find not solitude but Albertine awaiting me; and my memories of Morel and M. de Charlus's first meeting on the platform at Doncières, spoke to me of Combray and its two walks, for M. de Charlus was one of those Guermantes who lived in Combray without having a house there, half-way to heaven like Gilbert the Wicked in his stained-glass window, while Morel was the son of the old valet who had let me in to meet the lady in pink and had been the means of my recognizing her, so many years later, as Mme Swann.

But we return to the party, where Saniette, whom M. Verdurin has ordered to leave because of his inability to "form a considered judgment" on the music they have heard, apparently has a stroke outside. Verdurin's first thought is not to spoil the party, like "those grand hotels where sudden deaths are swiftly concealed so as not to frighten the guests, and where the dead man may be hidden in a larder ... until he can be smuggled out of the back door." The matter is hushed up, and Saniette "lived for some weeks more, but without regaining consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time."

As the guests start to leave, Charlus becomes the head of a receiving line formed by the people he has invited. "No one would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme Verdurin, any more than to an old usherette at a theatre where some great lady has invited the whole aristocracy for one evening." One of the guests even asks the narrator if Mme. Cottard is Mme. Verdurin. Several of them take the opportunity, while talking to Charlus, of booking Morel to play at their homes, "but none of them dreamed of inviting Mme Verdurin to hear him. She was consumed with rage, when M. de Charlus, floating on a cloud and unable to register her fury, magnanimously chose to invite the Patronne to share his joy." Charlus is unaware that Mme. Verdurin is intensely jealous of any outside relationships her "little set" may form: "Every suppressed laugh from Odette as she sat next to Swann had formerly gnawed at her heart, as had, recently, every private conversation between Morel and the Baron; she could find only one consolation for her pain, which was to destroy the happiness of others." And so Mme. Verdurin begins to plot to separate Morel from Charlus, and to have the violinist for her own.

Day One Hundred Forty-Six: The Prisoner, pp. 218-236

2010-04-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

From "To our great astonishment, when Brichot said how sad..." to "...transposition, into the realm of sound, of profundity."

_____

Mme. Verdurin surprises them with her open indifference to the death of the Princess Sherbatoff, even claiming that the Princess had a bad reputation. Her attitude "had a curiously modern, 'problem-play' sound to it, and also it was gloriously convenient; for want of feeling or immorality, once confessed, simplify life as effectively as loose morals: they remove the need to find excuses for blameworthy actions, and transform them into obligations of sincerity." But Charlus puts his foot in it by saying, "I'm glad the evening wasn't cancelled, because of my own guests."

The narrator notes that Mme. Verdurin has about her a "rather disagreeable smell of nose-drops," which she explains by saying they were prescribed to her because of her tendency to cry while listening to Vinteuil's music. "My nose gets all congested, and two days later I look like an old drunkard and to get my vocal cords working again I have to have days of inhalations." And here we learn that another member the little group has died: Cottard. And Mme. Verdurin's response to his death is similarly callous: "Well, there you are, he's dead, we all die, he'd killed patients enough, it was time to take his own medicine." (This is one of the inconsistencies Carol Clark notes in her preface: Proust has Cottard at the party talking with Mme. Verdurin and Ski only 11 pages earlier, and he is spotted again at the party later.)

The narrator asks her if Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are present. "No, I've just had a telegram, said Mme Verdurin evasively, they've had to stay in the country." When Morel comes over to say hello, he asks him about their absence, but he seems "to know very little about it." And, apropos Charlus's attitude toward Morel, we get another of the narrator's little observations about homosexuality:

The invert who has been able to nourish his passion only with a literature written for men who love women, who thought of men as he read Musset's Nights, feels a need to share, in the same way, all the social roles of the man who is not an invert, to keep someone as the admirer of chorus-girls does, or the old habitué of the Opéra, and also to settle down, to marry or live with a man, to be a father.

The narrator continues to establish his heterosexuality by commenting on his eye for the single women at the party, and contrasting it with "the furtive messages" that Charlus and the other gay men at the party -- who include "two dukes, an eminent general, a famous writer, great doctor and distinguished lawyer" -- are exchanging, in which they comment on young men as "she." He also comments on Mme. Verdurin's tolerance of homosexuality, which he refers to as "Charlisme": "Like every ecclesiastical power, she regarded mere human weaknesses as less serious than anything that could weaken the authority principle, damage orthodoxy, alter the ancient creed, in her little church." Unfortunately, Charlus is about to do just that: "What doomed M. de Charlus on that evening was the bad manners -- so common among society people -- of his guests, who were now beginning to arrive." They are determined to snub their hostess, referring to her as "old Mother Verdurin."

And M. de Charlus, as his guests pushed their way through the crowd to come and congratulate him, to thank him as if he had been the host, did not think to ask them to say a word to Mme Verdurin. Only the Queen of Naples, in whose veins ran the same noble blood as in her sisters, the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchesse d'Alençon, began to talk to Mme Verdurin as if she had come to the house for the pleasure of seeing Mme Verdurin, more than for the music or to see M. de Charlus.

The rudeness is stilled when the concert begins: "respect for the music -- thanks to the prestige of Palamède -- had suddenly been instilled into a crowd as ill-mannered as it was smart." Mme. Verdurin also assumes her role in the concert, "a divinity presiding over the musical solemnities, a goddess of Wagnerism and migraine, a kind of almost tragic Norn, summoned up by genius in the midst of all these bores."

And here begins one of the narrator's lengthy internal monologues, Proust's attempt to re-create the experience of listening to a concert, with the narrator's thoughts not only about the music but also about the images and feelings it elicits from him. The piece by Vinteuil is unfamiliar to him because it has not previously been performed, but in the midst of it, "more wonderful than any girl, the little phrase, wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and still as scarves, came towards me, still recognizable under these new ornaments." (The "little phrase," of course, is the one that Swann adopted for him and Odette; here the narrator, in one of those fusions of himself with Swann, has made it his own.) But as caught up as he is in the music, he is distracted enough from it to notice Mme. Verdurin's usual poses as she listens to it. "And I stopped listening to the music to wonder again whether Albertine had seen Mlle Vinteuil in the past few days or not, as one reinvestigates an inward pain from which one has been for a moment distracted. For it was inside me that all Albertine's actions took place." But he returns to the music for an extended impression of its effect on him.

Day One Hundred Forty-Five: The Prisoner, pp. 206-218

2010-04-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

From "As we were about to enter the courtyard of the Verdurins' house..." to "...she immediately stopped speaking."

_____

Entering the Verdurins', they are joined by Saniette, who brings word that the Princess Sherbatoff has just died. As usual, M. Verdurin treats Saniette brutally, making him wait in the drafty vestibule while others have their coats checked, just because Saniette has been affecting an archaic manner of speaking. When the others offer condolences on the Princess's death, Verdurin insists that she is just very ill, and in response to Saniette's insistence that she had died at six o'clock: "'You're always exaggerating,' said M. Verdurin brutally, for, the party not having been put off, he preferred to stick to the story of illness."

Tension has arisen between Charlus and Mme. Verdurin, partly because of Morel and "the ridiculous and distasteful part which M. de Charlus was making him play." She still relies on Charlus to supply Morel for concerts, and she resents the fact that he continues to hold sway over the invitation list. Charlus

at the first mention of names that Mme Verdurin put forward as possible guests, pronounced the most categorical sentence of exclusion, in a peremptory tone in which the vindictive pride of the testy great noble mingled with the dogmatism of the expert party organizer who would take off his play and refuse his collaboration sooner than descend to concessions which, according to him, would spoil the overall effect.

But Mme. Verdurin has risen in social stature thanks to her support of artists, and as a consequence is able to challenge Charlus's authority. Charlus's propensity to quarrel with people means that certain people were excluded from Mme. Verdurin's only because of his whim. "Now these outcasts were often people at the top of the tree, as they say, but who in M. de Charlus's eyes had fallen from that position as soon as they fell out with him." One of these victims of Charlus was the Countess Molé, whom Mme. Verdurin wanted to welcome to her circle. And Charlus's lofty idea of aristocracy, to which he was entitled as a Guermantes, meant that he snubbed "some of the smartest people whose presence would have made Mme Verdurin's salon one of the foremost in Paris.

The Dreyfus affair also continues to have its effect on society:

Because they were nationalists, the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain fell into the habit of receiving ladies of another social milieu; when nationalism disappeared, the habit persisted. Mme Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her salon some good writers who at that time were no value to her social schemes because they were Dreyfusards. But political passions, like other passions, wane. New generations spring up who no longer understand them, even the generation which first felt them changes, experiences new political passions which, as they do not correspond exactly to the earlier ones, rehabilitate a certain proportion of the excluded, the reasons for their exclusion having altered.

During the Dreyfus affair, then, Mme. Verdurin, by gathering Dreyfusard artists to her salon, built the foundation of her post-affair success: "The Dreyfus Affair has passed, she still had Anatole France."

Mme. Verdurin is now credited with a genuine interest in the arts, and she has become a chief patron of the Russian ballet, being seen by the crowd at the Opéra "in a grand circle box, ... flanking the Princess Yourbeletieff." Her suppers,

jointly presided over by Princess Yourbeletieff and the Patronne, brought together the dancers who had not yet eaten, so as to be able to jump even higher, their director, the scene-painters, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, an unchanging inner circle around which ... the greatest ladies in Paris and foreign Highnesses did not disdain to go ... to observe close at hand these great men who were revolutionizing taste in the theatre and who, in an art perhaps somewhat more artificial than painting, had produced a renewal as radical as Impressionism.

So Charlus is beginning to lose his usefulness to Mme. Verdurin, "and one day soon the two halves of society that M. de Charlus wanted to keep apart would be brought together, at the cost, of course, of not inviting him that evening."

Day One Hundred Forty-Four: The Prisoner, pp. 180-206

2010-04-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

From "As my carriage went along the embankment..." to "...in a blur which cannot cause real suffering."

_____

On the way to the Verdurins', the narrator meets Brichot, and their conversation introduces the topic of Swann's death. And we have yet another of those curious interminglings of the narrator's and the author's voice, along with a reference to an actual painting that includes the supposed model for Swann, Charles Haas:

Swann ... was an outstanding personality in the artistic and intellectual world, and so, even though he had not "produced" anything, his name was able to survive a little longer. And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Gallifet, Edmond de Polignac, and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Here we have Proust pretending that the narrator is the author of Swann's Way, and that the figure of Charles Haas (above in the doorway on the right) in James Tissot's painting is Swann. Or do we have Proust admitting that he is the narrator and that Swann is Haas?

Arriving at the Verdurins', the narrator and Brichot encounter Charlus, who continues to make Brichot uneasy with his increasingly flamboyant manner. Brichot, the narrator tells us, "reassured himself by repeating pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because ... he could not understand that in those days loving a boy (Socrates' jokes make it clearer than Plato's theories) was like keeping a dancer today, before one becomes engaged and settle down." But, the heterosexual narrator (apparently not to be identified here with the gay Proust) tells us, today "all everyday homosexuality -- that of Plato's young men or Virgil's shepherds -- has disappeared, and all that survives and multiplies is the involuntary kind, the nervous disease, the kind that one hides from others and disguises from oneself." Narrator/Proust continues with the usual stereotyping: gay men seem to have a greater sensibility for the arts and even (when Charlus discusses Albertine's wardrobe with the narrator) "an inborn taste, a passion for the study, the science of female dress."

Certainly Charlus has changed from the man we met earlier in the novel, the one who railed against effeminacy.

In any case, it was not only in the cheeks, or rather jowls, of the painted face, in the plump breasts and bouncing buttocks of the self-indulgent body invaded by fat, that there now floated on the surface, visible as oil, the vice once so carefully hidden away by M. de Charlus in the furthest depths of his being. It now overflowed in his speech.

Charlus even chides the narrator and Brichot for looking "like two lovers. Arm in arm, Brichot, I must say, you are going a bit far!" The narrator wonders if Charlus his lost his grip, if his words were "the sign of an aging mind," or if he is simply showing "the disdain for middle-class opinion that all the Guermantes had underneath." He speculates that "the narrow range of pleasures offered by his vice had come to bore him, and that sometimes "he would go and spend the night with a woman, in the way a normal man might, once in his life, want to sleep with a boy, out of the same kind of curiosity, each the mirror-image of the other, and each equally unhealthy." And he observes that Charlus

now emitted, quite without thinking, something like the little squeals -- involuntary in his case, and therefore all the more revealing -- that homosexuals produce -- in their case deliberately -- when they call out to each other -- "darling!"; as if this purposely "camp" manner, which M. de Charlus had so long avoided like the plague, were nothing but a brilliant, faithful imitation of the intonations that the Charluses of the world inevitably develop when they reach a certain phase of their disease.

It's difficult to read these passages today, with their stereotyping and their references to homosexuality as "vice" or "disease," but in their time they constituted shrewd social analysis.

But in the context of the novel, this analysis is really heading toward a crisis in the relationship of Charlus and Morel, which the narrator anticipates by skipping ahead "several weeks" to Charlus's opening of a letter to Morel from the actress Léa, "known for her exclusive attraction to women." In the letter, Léa addressed Morel in the feminine, calls him "Dirty girl!" and says that "you are one and no mistake!" The significance of the letter is left to tantalize us, as is the narrator's statement, "We shall see, in fact, in the last volume of this work, M. de Charlus doing things that would have been even more astonishing to his family and friends than the life revealed by Léa was to him." The narrator notes that Charlus could only feel jealous of Morel when he was with men: "Women had no such effect. This is, in fact, nearly always the rule with Charluses. The love that the man they love has for a woman is something else, happening within a different species (lions don't go after tigers), and does not worry them; indeed, it may reassure them." Unless, the narrator adds, they regard heterosexual intimacy as "disgusting" and "a degradation."

There is one further bit of foreshadowing: a reference to the effect of society gossip. "We shall see later how that verbal press could annihilate the power of a Charlus once he had ceased to be fashionable, and elevate above him a Morel who was not worth a millionth part of his former protector."

Meanwhile, the narrator gets a shock: Charlus tells him that Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are to be at the Verdurins, "and they are two young women of dreadful reputation." As if the narrator didn't know that already. And of course, the Pandora's box of suspicion, regarding Albertine's plans to visit the Verdurins and what she and Andrée had been doing when not under his eagle eye, is opened: "Andrée had said to me, 'We walked a bit, here and there, we didn't meet anyone,' and during which in fact Mlle Vinteuil had obviously arranged to met Albertine at Mme Verdurin's."

Day One Hundred Forty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 165-180

2010-04-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

From "I learned that day there had been a death..." to "...was to be once more taken from me."

_____

Bergotte has died, provoking the narrator to thoughts about medicine ("natural diseases can get better, but never medical ones, for medicine knows nothing of the secrets of cure") and to reflections about the author's reclusive character:

Bergotte had not been out of the house for years. He had never liked society, or rather he had once liked it for a single day, only to despise it afterwards as he despised everything, after his own fashion, which was not to despise what one cannot obtain, but what one has obtained, as soon as one has obtained it.

Which, of course, sounds a lot like the narrator himself.

In telling of Bergotte's death, Proust takes one of his most audacious liberties with narrative point of view, having the narrator not only tell us about a death he didn't witness but even report on what was going on in Bergotte's mind as he died. Bergotte supposedly read a critic's comment on Vermeer's View of Delft and, failing to recognize a detail the critic pointed out in the painting, a patch of yellow wall said to be "like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty," he went out to see for himself the painting, which was on loan for an exhibition of Dutch art.

His head spun faster; he fixed his gaze, as a child does on a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I should have written, he said to himself. My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall."

A stroke fells him. "They buried him, but all the night before his funeral, in the lighted bookshop windows, his books, set out in threes, kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."

But while the story stands on its own as a vignette about the artist's quest for immortality, the narrator finds another significance in the writer's death: Albertine claimed that she "had met him the day before, she told me about it that evening, and he had even kept her a little late, for he had talked to her for quite a long time. Probably she had been the last person he spoke to." Except that she is lying: "Albertine had not met Bergotte on that day at all. But I had not suspected it for a moment, she had told me the story so naturally, and it was only much later that I recognized her charming gift for lying with simplicity."

And then the narrator lies to her, telling her that he was going out to see some friends, but not revealing that he was going to the Verdurins'. As he leaves to hail a cab, he finds Morel sitting on a bollard, crying, an aftermath of the earlier quarrel with Jupien's niece that the narrator had overheard. If Morel breaks his engagement to her, he jeopardizes his relationship with Charlus, on whose money he depends.

It is quite possible that the love and then the indifference or hatred Morel felt towards Jupien's niece were both sincere. Unfortunately it was not the first time (and it would not be the last) that he had behaved in this way, suddenly "throwing over" a young girl after swearing to her that he would love her for ever, even showing her a loaded revolver and saying that he would blow his brains out if he sank so low as to leave her.

And so the narrator has had two experiences -- the death of an artist and the dilemma of a lover -- that give him food for thought about his own life.

Day One Hundred Forty-Two: The Prisoner, pp. 151-164

2010-04-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

From "I was thinking that if Albertine had not come out with me..." to "...taken advice from Elstir."

_____

The narrator decides to go to the Verdurins' to find out "who the people were that Albertine had been hoping to meet at their house that afternoon." But meanwhile, he rides through the Bois with her, resenting the fact that if he were alone he could "have got to know the young working-girls who were dotted about in the brilliant sunshine ... for the streets, the avenues are filled with Goddesses.... The disappointment I had experienced with women whom I had known, or in cities to which I had travelled, did not prevent me from giving myself up to the attraction of new ones and believing in their reality."

But these very similarities between desire and travel made me promise myself that one day I would grasp more effectively the nature of this force, invisible but as strong as religious belief, or in the world of physics as atmospheric pressure, which so raised in my estimation cities, or women, for as long as I did not know them, but fell away beneath them as son as I approached them, depositing them on the flat earth of vulgar reality.

Again and again, we have seen the narrator disillusioned by the gap between what he has imagined of a person or a place and the actuality.

He now reflects of Albertine that "the glittering actress of the beach" has "become the gray prisoner, reduced to her dull self." And yet he can't let go of her, or of his jealousy. When he encounters Gisèle, one of the old "gang of girls," she tells him that "there was something she really must tell" Albertine about some friends of theirs. But when he presses her for the information so he can pass it on to Albertine, Gisèle retreats into vagueness and claims she can't even remember the names of the friends, once again arousing his suspicions. Even when he admires Albertine's paintings, she claims never to have had "a single drawing lesson," so, remembering that she had said she couldn't join him one evening at Balbec because she had a drawing lesson, he presses her on that, forcing her to admit that she had been lying. "But I never lie to you now."

He compares his situation to that of Charlus with Morel, however, and derives comfort from the fact that, unlike Morel, "Albertine was not mad."

To make her chains seem lighter, I thought the best idea was to convince her that I meant to break them. But I could not begin to feed her this lie now, when she had just been so good in coming back from the Trocadéro; what I could do, rather than upsetting her with threats of a separation, was to keep silent about the dreams of a permanent life together which were even then forming in my grateful heart.

Once again, which is the possessor and which the possessed, which the prisoner and which the jailer?

Day One Hundred Forty-One: The Prisoner, pp. 136-151

2010-04-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

From "First, I had to be certain that Léa really was appearing..." to "...We arrived at the Bois."

_____

The narrator cooks up a reason to ask Albertine to leave the theater and come home, and sends Françoise on the errand. He admits that Françoise doesn't know that "Albertine's relationship to me was not of her seeking but mine (a fact that I preferred to hide from Françoise out of self-regard, and also to irritate her all the more)." Françoise succeeds in her mission, and they telephone to say Albertine will be home at three o'clock. He is jubilant, without a trace of guilt at having torn her away from the theater, even though he now knows that Albertine "had not gone to the Trocadéro to meet Léa's friends." The successful ruse reveals "that she belonged to me, even for the future, much more completely than I had realized."

I now had a woman of my own who, at one, unexpected word from me, would send a telephone message to say that she was coming straight back, was letting herself be brought back, immediately. I was more of a master than I had thought. More of a master, that is to say, more of a slave.

Which of the two, master or slave, he really is, remains to be seen.

(Incidentally, in the note Albertine sends to him via a courier, she addresses him as "Dear darling Marcel" and exclaims "Oh, Marcel, Marcel!" But I'll stick to "the narrator" for now.)

As he waits for her arrival, he plays music, starting with the sonata by Vinteuil, in which he identifies both a "sexual pleasure motif" and an "anxiety motif." The music carries him back "on the wave of sound towards the old days in Combray" and "the walks towards Guermantes" on which he decided he was going to be an artist: "Having in practice abandoned this ambition, had I given up something real? Could life make up to me for the loss of art, or was there in art a deeper reality where our true personality finds an expression that the actions of life cannot give it?" He switches to Wagner and muses on "that incompleteness which characterizes all the great works of the nineteenth century; the nineteenth century, whose greatest writers failed in their books, but, watching themselves at work as if they were both worker and judge, drew from this self-contemplation a new beauty, separate from and superior to their work, conferring on it retrospectively a unity, a grandeur which it does not have in reality."

He also notes that Wagner's phrases "soar ... freely above the earth, like ... the aeroplane I had seen at Balbec turning its energy into elevation, gliding above the waves and disappearing into the sky." He notes also that "however high one soars, one's appreciation of the silence of space is somewhat impeded by the powerful rumble of the engine!" I know that Proust bought Agostinelli an airplane, but did he ever go up on one himself?

As time draws near for Albertine's return, he goes to the courtyard and waits for her, overhearing Morel berating "the girl I imagined he was soon to marry" -- presumably a reference to Jupien's niece, although Proust curiously doesn't specify her." The scene dispels some of his happiness: "despite the blessed calm which I felt at the thought that Albertine, instead of staying at the Trocadéro, was coming home to me, my ears were still full of the sound of those constantly repeated words, 'great slut, great slut,' which had so upset me."

Albertine finally arrives and they set out by car to the Bois.

Day One Hundred Forty: The Prisoner, pp. 117-136

2010-04-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

From "In any case, I was pleased that Andrée was going..." to "...without thereby giving any more reality to my love."

_____

You know when the narrator is happy that Albertine is doing something that it's bound to end badly. So he's all chirpy about Andrée and Albertine going to the Trocadéro instead of to the Verdurins'. It seems to have something to do with the chauffeur's not keeping an eye on her when he drove her to Versailles recently, letting her go off in an carriage on her own. Has he become so obsessed with Albertine's possible homosexuality that he doesn't feel jealousy of the "handsome young" chauffeur of carrying on with her? The narrator reveals that he didn't know then that the chauffeur "was a friend of Morel's" because "he was so superior to the violinist in intelligence and taste." But not to have suspected that she and the chauffeur could have gotten together to make up a story that explained what she had been doing during the seven hours they were supposedly apart in Versailles? He has recently discovered, from talking to Gilberte's maid, that she had been seeing someone else during the time that he was obsessed with her, so he decides that he "would only let her go out escorted by Andrée, whereas before I had thought the chauffeur was protection enough."

Meanwhile, he has developed one of his little fascinations with a girl who works in the dairy: "extravagantly blond in colouring, very tall though still childish-looking, and who, among the other errand girls, seemed to be far away, with a proud, dreamy look." He has Françoise send this girl to his room to run an errand for him:

If one wanted to reduce to a formula the laws of amorous curiosity, one would have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman seen and a woman caressed.... [W]e cannot rest until we have tried to see whether the haughty seaside girl, the shop-girl with her worries about what people will think, the preoccupied fruit-seller cannot be persuaded, by crafty manoeuvres on our part, to soften their unbending attitude, to wind round our neck the arms that carried the fruit, to turn upon our mouth, with a smile of consent, those hitherto chilly or faraway eyes.

But this little experiment in Don Juanism ends badly for the narrator when, asking her to hand him a copy of the Figaro so he can find the address to which he wants her to deliver a message, he sees an article in it revealing that Mlle. Léa is to appear in the program Albertine is attending at the Trocadéro. "Léa was the actress who as friendly with the two young girls whom Albertine had looked at in the glass that afternoon at the casino, without seeming to see them." He dismisses the dairy girl and resolves "to stop Albertine going to the Trocadéro and meeting those friends of Léa's" -- even though he doesn't know whether the friends will be there. And so the obsession returns.

Day One Hundred Thirty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 102-117

2010-04-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

From "The morning after the evening when Albertine..." to "...peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

_____

Proust returns to one of his favorite topics, the interface between sleeping and waking, as the narrator arises in the morning to the musical sounds of street-seller crying their wares. "I had never enjoyed them so much as I did now that Albertine was living with me. They seemed to me the joyous signal of her awakening and, by involving me in the life outside, made me more conscious of the calming power of a dear presence, now as constant as I could wish." It helps, of course, that "she had given up her idea of going to the Verdurins' and would be going instead, as I had suggested to the 'special' matinée at the Trocadéro." First, however, she is going riding with Andrée, and we have a bit of foreshadowing as he warns her "no gymnastics" and tells her how dreadful it would be if she had an accident. On the other hand, he also reflects "how wonderful if, once on horseback, she had ridden off into the blue yonder, liked it there, and never come home! How much simpler it would have been if she could have gone and been happy somewhere else."

As for his thoughts on the waking state, he comments that "the waking world still enjoys the superiority of being able to be continued every morning, unlike dreams which are different every night. But perhaps there are other worlds more real than the waking world. For have we not seen how the 'real world' is transformed by every revolution in the arts, and without waiting for that, by the degree of aptitude or cultivation which distinguishes and artist from an ignorant fool?" He subscribes to the notion of modernists that the dream state provides the artistically inclined with a privileged insight into reality. Before habit and memory set in, "One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack." But he recalls a failed effort to remain in a dream state and concludes that "We constantly have to choose between health and wisdom on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been too much of a coward to choose the second."

Albertine is delighted by the street-sellers, and wants to buy everything they offer, from winkles to carrots. She imagines the various foods, and her thoughts turn to the elaborate ice creations made in Paris at the time, until the narrator is put on edge by the sensuality of her descriptions, particularly of "the physical sensation of imagining something so delicious, so cool in her mouth, which gave her an almost sexual pleasure." He is further disturbed when her recollections turn to her stay "at Mlle Vinteuil's, at Montjouvain," where they would "sit in the garden and travel all round France by drinking a different sparkling mineral water every day." He tries to take her mind off of Mlle. Vinteuil -- or rather his mind off of what they might have done together, and thinks again of the choice between living with Albertine or separating from her: "which sort of peace should one put first (either by continuing one's daily, exhausting activity, or by resuming the pain of separation) -- peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

Day One Hundred Thirty-Eight: The Prisoner, pp. 82-102

2010-04-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

From "What an extraordinary value the most insignificant things..." to "...still silent before the break of day."

_____

Albertine always alarmed me when she said that I was quite right to protect her reputation by saying that I was not her lover, as she said, "you aren't, are you, not really." Perhaps I was not, in the complete sense, but was I then to think that she did with other men all the things we did together, only to say that she had not been their mistress?

The physical nature of the narrator's relations with Albertine continues to perplex readers who can't quite believe that a man who takes pains to dissociate himself from "inverts" could share a bed with a naked woman without actually copulating with her. And continue to be jealous of her. Or that the narrator could claim, "If I did not love Albertine (and I was not sure whether I did or not), her place in my household was not extraordinary: we choose to live only with the thing we do not love, which we have brought to live with us precisely in order to kill off intolerable love, whether the thing in question is a woman, a country, or a woman embodying a country." Certainly, the narrator's endless ruminations about the nature of love -- and of his love for Albertine (or Gilberte, or Mme. de Guermantes) -- come close to exhausting the topic. If not the reader.

He blames it on Albertine, of course:

Her lies were so numerous, because she did not simply lie in the way all human beings do when they believe themselves to be loved, but because she was by nature, quite independently, mendacious and, what is more, so changeable that even if she had told me the truth every time I asked, for example, what she thought of a person, the answer would have been different each time.

Meanwhile, he discovers from talking to Andrée on the telephone that she and Albertine are planning to go to the Verdurins, and when he suggests that he'll join them, Andrée sounds alarmed, further fueling his suspicions that something is going on between them. There follows a little cat-and-mouse game between Albertine and the narrator centering on her plans and what he knows about them, in which each lies to the other.

We learn that one of the things the narrator and Albertine like to do together is watch planes take off. His earlier encounter with an airplane had turned aviation into "a kind of image of freedom," so they "conclude our days out with a visit to one of these aerodromes." Those obsessed with biography will read this as an allusion to Proust's affair with Alfred Agostinelli, who took up flying and was killed in a plane crash.

More and more, the narrator is haunted by the feeling that he is coming to resemble his relatives: "sometimes, as I played the wise man to Albertine, I seemed to hear my grandmother speaking." He is also acutely aware of the differences between Albertine and himself: "After all, the coupling of opposites is the law of life, the principle of fertilization and, as we shall see, the cause of much misery. Normally, we detest what is like us, and our own failings, seen in others, exasperate us." And we return once again to the very beginning of the novel, a kind of da capo:

What I experienced with Albertine on these evenings was not the calming effect of my mother's kiss at Combray, but on the contrary, the anguish of the evenings when my mother said good-night to me only hurriedly, or worse, did not come up to my room at all, whether she was cross with me or kept downstairs by guests.... But though I suffered the anguish of my childhood, the changed being who now inspired it, my different feelings about her, the very changes in my own character made it impossible for me to seek peace from Albertine as I had from my mother.... I came near to thinking Françoise more intelligent than Bergotte or Elstir because she had said to me at Balbec, "That girl will bring you nothing but grief."

Albertine torments him even when she is unconscious of doing so, as when, one time when she is waking, she calls him "Andrée" by mistake. And when he suggests that she did so because she "had once lain like that next to her," she denies it. "Only, just before making me that answer, she had hidden her face in her hands for a moment."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 67-82

2010-04-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

From "That was how I answered her; among the expressions of carnality..." to "...and plans for further, ardent lovers' meetings."

_____

The narrator claims that he is "slowly coming to resemble all my relatives," including, in his reclusiveness and insistence on spending the day in bed, his Aunt Léonie. "Thus, all my past since my earliest years, and beyond those, my relatives' past, mixed into my carnal love for Albertine the sweetness of a love both filial and maternal." But the carnal seems to predominate, especially in his description of Albertine naked, in which he notes "the place which, in men, is made ugly by something like the metal pin left sticking out of a statue when it is removed from its mould." That particular bit of observation isn't ascribed to any of his relatives, and one wonders how many heterosexual men would describe the absence of a penis quite that way.

Their playfulness in bed is characterized as "happy, cheerful moments, innocent in appearance but hiding the growing possibility of disaster: this is what makes the life of lovers the most unpredictable of all, a life in which it can rain sulphur and pitch a moment after the sunniest spell and where, without having the courage to learn from our misfortunes, we immediately start building again on the slopes of the crater which can only spew catastrophe." For catastrophe has loomed for their relationship since its beginning. He recalls the last visit to Balbec, when Aimé reported to him that she was in town and "was looking 'not quite the thing,'" a phrase whose ambiguity led him to imagine that "perhaps he meant a lesbian look" -- whatever that might be. It sent his imagination into overdrive in any case.

For the narrator, "love is an incurable ailment," marked by a jealousy that can strike at any moment, including "after the event, which arises only after we have left the person in question, a 'staircase jealousy' like staircase wit." He reflects that "modern Gomorrah is a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces from the most unlikely places." And that "Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love."

Most often love has for its object a body only if an emotion, the fear of losing the loved object, the uncertainty of finding it again, are fused with that body.... Had not I recognized in Albertine one of those girls under whose fleshly covering there palpitate more hidden beings, not just than in a deck of cards still in its box, in a locked cathedral or a theatre before the doors open, but in the whole vast, ever-changing crowd?

Day One Hundred Thirty-Six, The Prisoner, pp. 46-67

2010-04-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

From "I did not meet M. de Charlus and Morel all that regularly..." to "...so sweet and pink among all that snowy lace."

_____

The narrator begins with "a little incident whose cruel significance escaped me entirely and which I only came to understand much later." He arrives home unexpectedly early one day to find Andrée leaving and when, having forgotten his key, Albertine comes to let him in there is a bit of confusion about finding the light switch and about the fragrant bunch of flowers he is carrying -- Albertine "hates strong scents," as Andrée has reminded him. "I had almost surprised her with Andrée, and she had given herself a breathing-space by switching off all the lights, had gone into my bedroom so that I should not go into hers and see her unmade bed, and pretended to have been writing." The narrator promises that he will explain all this later.

There follows a lengthy analysis of his relationship with Albertine. The real person has grown over-familiar to him, and he appreciates her best when he can work her into his imaginative life, merging his idea of her with works of art and music and literature, "escaping the crushing pressure of matter and floating free in the weightless spaces of thought.... At that moment she seemed like a work of Elstir or of Bergotte, I felt a lofty enthusiasm for her, seeing her distanced by imagination and art." We have seen something similar a long time ago, when the young narrator prioritized the imagination over nature.

He has continued to keep her residence in his home a secret from his friends, for fear that one of them "might take a fancy to her." She in her turn continues to keep secrets from him. "Our engagement was turning into a trial and giving her the timid manner of a guilty prisoner." But she seems agreeable to the arrangement, telling him: "I think it's stupid to let people see who you love; with me it's the opposite, as soon as I'm attracted to somebody, I seem to take no notice of them. That way nobody knows what's going on."

He continues to lavish her with clothes, and "for the final details of several of them I had written to Mme Swann, who had replied in a letter beginning with the words, 'After your long eclipse, when I read your letter asking about my robes de chambre, I thought I was hearing from a ghost.'" Albertine is "developing into a woman of fashion," thanks to his consultations with the Duchesse and with Odette.

The narrator has concluded that "love is often only the association between the image of a girl (of whom otherwise we would very quickly have tired) and the increased heart rate inseparable from a long, futile wait when the young lady has 'stood us up.'" But he notes that Jupien's niece was undergoing a similar problem with Morel, thanks to his relationship with Charlus. The chauffeur "had praised to her the violinist's supposed infinite delicacy of feeling" while Morel was "telling her what a slave driver M. de Charlus was to him." But then she "discovered in Morel (though it did not make her stop loving him) depths of wickedness and treachery ... and in M. de Charlus an astonishing and limitless kindness." So she is as confused about "what, each in himself, the violinist and his protector were" just as the narrator is "about Andrée, whom I saw every day, and Albertine, who lived in my house."

In the end, it all comes down to the narrator's desire to possess Albertine, a possession that would in essence stop time, suspend its changes. He relishes most the times when she is sound asleep, and he can have the illusion of time in suspension: "Having her asleep at my side offered something as sensually delicious as my moonlit nights on the bay at Balbec, when the water was calm as a lake amid scarcely moving branches, and one could lie on the beach forever, listening to the sound of the sea." (A conventional symbol of eternity.) While she sleeps, "Whole races, atavisms, vices slept in her face. Every time she moved her head she created a new woman, often undreamed of by me. I felt that I possessed not one, but innumerable young girls." When he kisses her without awakening her, "It seemed to me at those moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting part of dumb nature."

And then, as she awakens, comes a famous passage:

Now she began to speak; her first words were ''darling" or ''my darling,'' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce "darling Marcel" or "my darling Marcel."

This audacious bit of what might be called metafiction has given many license to refer to the narrator of the entire book as Marcel. I'm of two minds about that: For one thing, "Marcel" is easier to type than "the narrator." On the other hand, to call the narrator Marcel is to fall into the trap of identifying narrator with author, which despite the often intensely autobiographical nature of the Search, is to take the easy way out. Proust has always relied on free indirect style, which as James Wood puts it, allows us to "see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once." To fuse the narrator and author of the Search into one is to deprive us of the authorial point of view on the narrator, to suggest that he endorses the ideas and emotions of the narrator, when it's clear that he often opens his narrator to criticism.

Another thing to remember is that The Prisoner went unpublished during its author's lifetime: It's entirely possible that Proust might have had second thoughts about this casual breaking down of the fourth wall before he went to print with the book. To have the narrator point out that he's just a narrator and not the author of the work is a betrayal of the contract that the reader makes with an author: that his story should be treated as truth, not fiction. We, the readers, have forgiven the author much, including his frequent violations of point of view -- telling of events the narrator couldn't have witnessed, and even entering into the thoughts of other characters. But this is a more major breach of contract. And it comes at a point when Proust is trying to make the intricacies of a strange sexual and psychological relationship as credible as possible. Frankly, I think he made a mistake with the narrator/Marcel identification, so I'm going to ignore it.

Day One Hundred Thirty-Five, The Prisoner, pp. 35-46

2010-04-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

From "Since I tried as far as possible to have left the Duchesse..." to "...related ideas to form a powerful force for break-up."

_____

When he leaves the Duchesse to return home, the narrator often encounters Charlus and Morel on their way to Jupien's, where they took tea every day. Charlus was once offended when Jupien's niece said "I'll treat you to tea," a phrasing that was apparently considered "a vulgar one, particularly in the mouth of someone he was planning to make his almost-daughter-in-law." For Charlus is seeing to it that Morel and Jupien's niece are to be married. Meanwhile, Charlus has been flirting with a pageboy at a gambling club, who has written to him, and he is so delighted with the intimacy that he shows off the letter to M. de Vaugoubert, whom he usually avoids.

For the diplomat, with his monocle stuck in his eye, stared in all directions at the lads passing by. What was more, when he was with M. de Charlus, he grew more daring, and began to use a language which the Baron hated. He put all men's names in the feminine and, as he was very stupid, thought this was the height of wit and was constantly bursting out laughing.

The narrator comments to the reader that it shouldn't be surprising that this kind of "degeneracy" is often found in the upper classes: "As time passes, old families develop peculiarities -- a red, hooked nose, a deformed chin --" and "among these persisting and ever intensifying traits, there are some which are not visible: tendencies and tastes." Proust's references to homosexuality as "degeneracy" and "inversion" are sometimes read as his attempt to cover up his own gayness, but others think that with them he is widening the scope of his satire to include his narrator.

As for Charlus's enthusiasm for marrying Morel to Jupien's niece (despite her vulgar turn of speech, which, after he denounces it to Morel, she never utters again), it is a move to continue his control over his protégé. The reasoning is that "once he was married his fears for his household, for his flat, for his future would give M. de Charlus's wishes a stronger purchase upon him."

Morel has given up his previously expressed desire to seduce and abandon a young virgin, and the prospect of marrying Jupien's niece instead of raping her appeals to him especially after he experiences cramps in his hand that raise the possibility that he will have to give up the violin. "Since, in everything outside his art, he was unbelievably lazy, he would need to find someone to keep him, and he felt he would rather it were Jupien's niece than M. de Charlus." Morel has also borrowed money from Bloch, befriending him during the transaction and then denouncing him after he realizes that he's going to have to repay it: "anti-Semitism was, in Morel, the natural result of having been lent five thousand francs by a Jew."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Four, The Prisoner, pp. 19-35

2010-04-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

From "Françoise came in to light the fire and..." to "...a look this evening and let you know."

_____

The twigs that Françoise tosses on the fire to get it started spark another Proustian moment, a happy one this time. Their "smell, forgotten all through the summer, traced a magic circle around the fireplace in which, seeing myself reading at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as happy, staying in my room in Paris, as if I had been on the point of leaving for a walk toward Méséglise or meeting Saint-Loup and his friends on field exercises.... It was not just the weather outside that had changed, or the smells in my room, but inside me there was a change of age, the replacement of one person by another."

He is still convinced that he doesn't love Albertine, but as in the past, he is in the grip of his fantasy of possession. She "held nothing new for me. Every day I found her less pretty. Only the desire which she excited in others, when I learned of it and began to suffer again, in my desire to keep her from them, could put her back on her pedestal. Suffering alone gave life to my tedious attachment to her." And yet he persists in trying to make her happy by giving her presents, especially buying her expensive clothes. His chief consultant on matters of fashion is the Duchesse de Guermantes, to whom Albertine was indifferent at first, even hostile, out of her "hatred for upper-class people." But "my friend's republican disdain for a Duchess was replaced by an intense interest in a woman of fashion."

And so the narrator visits the Duchesse often, and devotes several pages to further analysis of her character, including her country roots, which reveal themselves in her vocabulary and pronunciation, which he finds not unusual, likening them to those of Françoise. On his latest visit to the Duchesse, he finds the Duc and M. de Bréauté present also. The Duc is still obsessed by the Dreyfus affair, even though it has been over for two years -- "twenty years later people would still be talking about it," the narrator comments. The narrator's comments on a dress the Duchesse once wore, "by an obscure association of ideas" provokes M. de Bréauté to mention the Dreyfus case and the Duc to an anti-Semitic tirade:

"If a Frenchman commits theft or murder, I don't feel I have to say he's innocent, just because he's a Frenchman like me. But the Jews will never admit that one of them could be a traitor, even though they know it's true, and they don't care in the least about the terrible repercussions ... that can result from their friend's crime."

The Duchesse quite sensibly replies, "Certainly if Dreyfus had been a Christian the Jews wouldn't have taken such an interest in the case, but they did, because they realize that if he hadn't been Jew, people wouldn't have been so ready to believe him a traitor." The Duc can only bluster that "Women don't understand anything about politics" and "France should expel all the Jews."

The narrator "saw danger ahead and hurriedly began to talk frocks again."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 3-19

2010-03-31T14:35:00.000-07:00

From "From early morning, with my face still turned..." to "...with the brake on running in neutral."

_____

"It was ... mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me at this period." Hardly a new point of view for our narrator. He has brought Albertine back to Paris with him, and "every evening, very late, before leaving me to sleep, she would slip her tongue into my mouth like my daily bread." He thereby experiences a "kind of spiritual sweetness" which he analogizes to "not the night which Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend at the barracks -- a favour which, after all, cured a mere passing malaise -- but that other night when my father sent Mama to sleep in the little bed next to mine." Sometimes comment on Proust is superfluous.

It is a strange ménage, made stranger by the fact that the narrator has once again changed his attitude toward Albertine, "whom I hardly even found pretty any more, in whose company i was bored and whom I had a clear sense of no longer loving." The arrangement is oddly tolerated by his parents: His mother, "did not want to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, whose place it was, if anyone's, to act, and who did not find the arrangement unsuitable, much to my mother's surprise." His mother is, in any case, preoccupied with her aunt's illness. And the narrator is relieved that she's not there, because it prevents Albertine from mentioning to her that she was friends with Mlle. Vinteuil, which would "have utterly precluded not only a marriage, ... but even a stay in our house by Albertine as a guest."

Andrée visits Albertine at the narrator's, and Albertine reveals to him that Andrée had been in love with him during the first stay in Balbec. The narrator is happiest when the girls go out together, having at least temporarily set aside his fantasies that the two of them are lovers, and he concludes that "I no longer loved Albertine, for nothing remained of the pain, now cured, which I had suffered in the tram at Balbec when I learned what Albertine's adolescence had been, including, perhaps, visits to Montjouvain." Of course, he also reflects that "a chronic illness needs only the smallest pretext to recur." And the narrator has not given up his fantasies about predatory lesbians waiting to seduce young women: "The truth was that in leaving Balbec I had thought I was leaving Gomarrah behind, that I was tearing Albertine away from it; alas! Gomorrah was dispersed to the four corners of the Earth."

He has told Albertine that "the doctor said I had to stay in bed. That was not true." Instead, he finds that it's a matter of out of sight, out of mind. When he's "in public with Albertine" he grows anxious "that she had been speaking to someone or even looking at someone." But when he stays home and she goes out he feels "the elating powers of solitude."

Day One Hundred Thrty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 497-514

2010-03-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter IV, from "I was only awaiting an opportunity..." to "...I absolutely must marry Albertine."

_____

And so the narrator makes a great about-face in the space of a single short chapter.

He announces to his mother, who is leaving Balbec for Combray to stay with her dying aunt, that he has decided not to marry Albertine and will stop seeing her. He plans to tell Albertine that he doesn't love her and to switch his attentions to Andrée. But ... best-laid plans. As they are returning from the evening at Mme. Verdurin's he tells her that he is "beginning to find this life rather stupid" and that he's going to ask the Patronne to have some music played by a musician Albertine probably doesn't know: Vinteuil.

Oops.

It turns out that Albertine has "a girlfriend, older than me, who was like both a mother and sister to me, whom I spent my best years with in Trieste," whom she's meeting in Cherbourg a few weeks from now, "and isn't this extraordinary, is in actual fact the best friend of this Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuil's daughter almost as well."

Cue the Proustian moment, "suddenly rising up out of the depths of that darkness where it had seemed to lie forever entombed and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new life, terrible and deserved, perhaps also to explode before my eyes the fateful consequences to which wicked actions give rise indefinitely." And so on.

Albertine the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of her friend, a practicing and professional sapphist, this, compared with what I had imagined at my most suspicious, was ... a terrible terra incognita on which I had just set foot, a new phase of unsuspected suffering that was opening.

He's so jolted by the news that he asks Albertine to come stay the night at the hotel in Balbec, where, after she goes to her room on another floor, he is racked with sobs. "What I had dreaded, had long vaguely suspected in Albertine, what my instinct had isolated from her whole being, but what my arguments, guided by my desire, had slowly led me to deny, was true! ... For, pretty as Albertine was, how could Mlle Vinteuil, with her proclivities, not have asked her to satisfy them?"

He sends for Albertine and complicates matters more by making up a story about a woman he had left in Paris whom he had been planning to marry, and that he had been thinking of killing himself: "If I was going to die, I'd have liked to say goodbye to you." Albertine falls for this story: "I won't leave you again, I'm going to stay with you." He decides that he must take her to Paris, to prevent her from meeting her old girlfriend in Cherbourg. "True," he reflects, "I might have told myself that in Paris, if Albertine had these proclivities, she would find a great many other people with whom to gratify them." But he asks her anyway, realizing that with his mother in Combray and his father away on "a tour of inspection," they would be alone together in Paris.

He reverts to his old childishness, likening his current emotional torment to "that which used to rise up into my room of old in Combray from the dining room, where I could hear, laughing and talking with strangers, amid the sound of forks, Mamma, who would not be coming up to say good night; like that which, for Swann, had filled the houses where Odette had gone to a soirée in search of unimaginable delights."

Albertine replies that she can't go to Paris now, and urges him to marry the woman there. He replies that he "wouldn't have wanted to make a young woman live with someone so sickly and so tiresome." She protests, of course. But he has revealed a truth about himself: "I was too given to believing that the moment I was in love I could not be loved, and that self-interest alone could attach a woman to me."

After she leaves him, she sends word that "she could, if I wanted, come to Paris that same day." The news reaches the hotel manager, who tries to persuade him to stay. And he has second thoughts on looking around the room:

I two or three times had the idea, momentarily, that the world in which this room and these bookcases were, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my unhappiness something like that which we get from reading a novel, and which a madman alone could make into a lasting and permanent unhappiness, extending into his life.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the strength of will to stay in this reality. He has a vision of Albertine taking the place of Mlle. Vinteuil's friend in the room in Montjouvain where he had spied on on them. And when his mother comes to see him he falls back into the old childishness, which she perhaps unwittingly encourages: "Remember that your mamma is leaving today and is going to be desolate at leaving her darling in this state. All the more, my poor child, because I hardly have time to console you." She has "the look she had worn in Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night beside me, that look which at this moment bore an extraordinary resemblance to that of my grandmother when she allowed me to drink cognac."

And so he tells her: "I absolutely must marry Albertine."

Day One Hundred Thirty-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 480-496

2010-03-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "Despite this breach with the Patronne, the Cambremers..." to "...Marriage with Albertine struck me as foolishness."

_____

As the stay at Balbec winds down, the narrator reflects on the journeys of the little group he has found himself in, and on the nature of his relationship with Albertine. Since their homeward trips after visiting the Verdurins take place in darkness, the two, still posing as "cousins," find opportunities for "taking advantage of the darkness."

His jealousy persists, and it precipitates a break with Bloch. Saint-Loup has come to meet them during their stop at the station in Doncières, and because the narrator is afraid she's too interested in his friend, "I held Albertine captive with my eyes, pointlessly vigilant as it happens." But Bloch is there, too, meeting his father, "who had just inherited from his uncle and, having leased a château called La Commanderie, thought it very much the grand seigneur to travel about only in a post chaise, with postilions in livery." Bloch asks the narrator to come say hello to his father, but the narrator "could not bear to leave Albertine in the train with Saint-Loup." Bloch takes offense: "From that day forward, he ceased to show me the same affection and, what I found more hurtful, no longer had the same regard for my character."

The narrator admits that Bloch "had all the defects that displeased me most, but at the same time, "the young Israelite had had an effect on M. de Charlus that was anything but irritation." The Baron tries to disguise his interest in Bloch, and upon being told that he was not staying in Balbec launches into an anti-Semitic rant about how Jews like to stay in places with Christian associations: "As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a château, he always chooses one called Le Prieuré, L'Abbaye, Le Monastère, La Maison Dieu." All the places called La Commanderie, Charlus points out, "were built or owned by the Knights of the Order of Malta (of which I am one)." And he asks the narrator to show him how to get to Bloch's father's château she he can "see how our ancient domains are withstanding such a profanation." And he demands to know where Bloch lives in Paris: "Since three-quarters of the streets take their name from a church or abbey, there's a good chance of the sacrilege continuing."

The narrator doesn't know Bloch's address, however, which puts him in Morel's good graces:

Morel, who had not failed to observe the impression Bloch had been making, thanked me surreptitiously for having "dispatched him, adding cynically, "He'd have liked to stay, all that's jealousy, he'd like to take my place. Typical of a Yid!"

The narrator concludes the chapter by remembering the people and places around Balbec that he has seen during the summer:

Indeed, such was the degrading influence, and also the charm, of the country around Balbec, that it had become truly familiar ground for me; if their territorial distribution, their being sown along the full extent of the coast in diverse crops, necessarily lent to the visits I made to these various friends the form of a journey, they also now confined the attractions of that journey to the social ones, of a succession of visits.... In this too social valley, to the sides of which I sensed there clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetic cry of evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog but the "How goes it?" of M. de Criquetot, or the "Kaire" of Brichot.

And he concludes: "The benefit that I derived from it, at least, was no longer to see things except from the practical point of view. Marriage with Albertine struck me as foolishness." We'll see about that.

Day One Hundred Thirty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 460-480

2010-03-28T16:41:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "The reconciliation put an end to M. de Charlus's torments..." to "...I realized we had to cut our moorings."

_____

Things are still not going well between Charlus and Morel. When they're separated by Morel's military obligations, the violinist "would write the Baron fond and despairing letters, in which he assured him that he would have to put an end to his life because some frightful affair meant that he needed twenty-five thousand francs." And Charlus would refuse, fearing that he money "would have provided Charlie with the means of dispensing with him and also of enjoying the favors of someone else."

That "someone else" turns out to be "the Prince de Guermantes, who, having come to spend a few days on the coast to pay a visit to the Duchess of Luxembourg, encountered the musician, without knowing who he was and without being known to him, and offered him fifty francs to spend the night together at the house of prostitution in Maineville." Charlus finds out that Morel is meeting someone there, and sends for Jupien to help him spy on Morel and his unknown companion. The result is a farcical scene which makes Morel, who has been tipped off about the Baron's espionage, more wary of the Baron, but leaves Charlus none the wiser. And it's followed by another scene in which Morel goes to see the Prince at a villa he's renting and is startled to discover there a picture of Charlus.

Wild with terror, Morel, recovering from his initial stupefaction, and not doubting that this was an ambush into which M. de Charlus had led him as a test of his fidelity, tumbled down the villa's few steps four at a time and began running as fast as his legs could carry him.

Meanwhile, the narrator has been spending time in the company of the Comte de Crécy, "a poor but extremely distinguished member of the gentry," with whom he has been hitting it off because of his interest in the Guermantes genealogy. And Mme. de Cambremer and Mme. Verdurin have been sparring with one another to see who can establish herself as the dominant figure in local society, using Charlus, Morel, and members of the "little set" as pawns in their game. Brichot in particular gets caught up in this little war because he has something of a crush on Mme. de Cambremer.

It was a day of high emotion at La Raspelière when Mme Verdurin was seen to disappear for a whole hour with Brichot, whom she was known to have told that Mme de Cambremer made fun of him, that he was the laughingstock of her drawing room, that he was about to dishonor his old age and jeopardize his position in academic life.

Thus Brichot is brought to heel.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Nine: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 449-460

2010-03-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "Meanwhile, and as if he were dealing with..." to "...at the top of his voice, raising his hands, 'Alleluia!'"

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Charlus's relationship with Morel takes an even odder turn one evening when, as they are returning from an evening at the Verdurins', Morel takes his leave from the Baron, the narrator, and Albertine. Charlus, who has expected to spend the rest of the evening with Morel, is so distraught that the narrator proposes to stay with the Baron, sending Albertine away. He goes with Charlus to a café, where the Baron demands paper and ink and writes an eight-page letter to Morel which he gives to the narrator to deliver and to say "that you thought you caught something about sending seconds -- I am fighting tomorrow indeed."

Morel is in high spirits when the narrator arrives with the letter, which he initially refuses to read: "No, a hundred times over; you don't know that old crook's lies, his infernal stratagems. It's a device to get me to go and see him. Well, I'm not going; I want a peaceful evening." When the narrator says he thought it was something about a duel, Morel replies, "I don't give a damn, that disgusting old man can happily go and get himself massacred if he wants." But he changes his mind and decides to read the letter, whereupon he rushes to see Charlus.

Being in a mood that evening not to be able to do without Morel, he had invented that it had been reported to him that two of the regimental officers had slandered him in connection with the violinist, and that he was going to send his seconds to them. Morel had glimpsed the scandal, his life in the regiment made impossible, and had come running.

Charlus is, of course, "delirious with joy" at Morel's arrival. He has even persuaded himself that he wanted to fight and that he "felt regret at giving up this duel, originally contrived only to get Morel to come." And there is a hilarious, almost Falstaffian moment in which Charlus starts to mime sword-fighting maneuvers, "leading us to move our beer glasses closer for safety, and to fear that the first clash of blades might wound the adversaries, the doctor, and the seconds." He has already sent for Cottard to act as a second and tries to persuade the narrator to summon Elstir to paint the scene.

But if M. de Charlus was enchanted by the prospect of a fight that he had at first thought purely fictitious, Morel was reflecting in terror on the rumors that, thanks to the stir that the duel would make, might be hawked all the way from the regimental band to the temple on the rue Bergère.

Cottard arrives in a state of high excitement that swiftly turns to disappointment and then discomfort when Charlus displays affection toward him for his support, holding Cottard's hand and stroking it. He feels a moment of homophobic panic, imagining "that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to a rape, for the accomplishment of which, the duel having served merely as a pretext, he had been drawn into an ambush and led by the Baron into this lonely hall, where he was about to be taken by force." Fortunately, Mme. Cottard is also there, and the scene -- one of the funniest in the novel -- ends with Charlus triumphant and Morel re-ensnared.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Eight: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 434-449

2010-03-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "A great musician, a member of the Institute,..." to "...no one I have to say a single thank-you to."

_____

Charlus's ignorance of the talk about his relationship with Morel continues when the Verdurins are visited by a famous musician. Morel urges the Baron to flatter the man, for the sake of Morel's career, which he does. But as the narrator notes, Charlus is unaware that the musician "had asked Ski, referring to M. de Charlus and Morel, as he might have done to a man and his mistress: 'Have they been together long?'" The musician is a "man of the world," however, and means no malice toward Morel or Charlus. The narrator compares Charlus to a fish swimming in a tank, which lives in ignorance of "the amused passerby who is following his antics, or the all-powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, deferred at this moment in the case of the Baron (for whom the pisciculturalist, in Paris, will be Mme Verdurin), will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one."

There follows several pages of dense and allusive literary talk, centering mostly on Balzac, between Charlus and Brichot, with occasional contributions from Cottard, in the midst of which Charlus refers to the "pederasty" of some of Balzac's characters. When he utters the word, "Ski, Brichot, and Cottard had looked at one another with a smile that was less ironic perhaps than imbued with the satisfaction that dinner guests might feel who had succeeded in getting Dreyfus to talk about his own Affair, or the Empress about her reign." But when Ski tries to get him to elaborate on the subject, "the Baron assumed the annoyed, mysterious, and finally (seeing they were not listening to him) severe and judicial expression of a father hearing improprieties being spoken in front of his daughter." He tries to change the subject to "things that might interest this young lady" -- indicating Albertine but, the narrator observes, clearly meaning Morel. In fact, Charlus later confirms this for the narrator:

"You know," he said to me, referring to the violinist, "he's not at all what you might think, he's a very decent boy who's always stayed very sensible, very responsible." And you felt from these words that M. de Charlus looked on sexual inversion as a danger equally as threatening for young men as prostitution is for women, and that, if he used the epithet ''responsible" in connection with Morel, it was in the sense that it acquires when applied to a young working girl.

Charlus is also concerned that, when he returns to Paris with Morel, "the latter's family might step in and his happiness be put in jeopardy."

As for Morel, it's clear to the narrator that he's simply using the Baron for advancement. Morel talks to the narrator "exactly as Rachel, Saint-Loup's mistress, had once done," and "judging by what M. de Charlus repeated to me, said the same things about me in my absence as Rachel had said about me to Robert." But he also treats the Baron cruelly when he's in the company of other soldiers, greeting him with "a shrug of the shoulders" and "a wink to his comrades," pretending to be asleep, or coughing as a signal to the others to "jokingly adopt the mincing speech of men of M. de Charlus's kind." He would finally return, "as though having been forced," to the Baron, "whose heart had been pierced by all these arrows."

Charlus even tries to get Morel to change his name to something that echoes his, such as "Charmel." But he doesn't understand that "the name Morel was indissolubly linked to his first prize for violin, hence any modification was out of the question." Morel also doesn't like to be reminded of the difference in social status between them:

"There was a time when my forebears were proud of the title of valet de chambre, of maître d'hôtel to the King." "There was another time," answered Morel haughtily, "when my forebears cut the throats of yours."

As the narrator anticipates, this relationship doesn't work out well.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 419-434

2010-03-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "I was naturally most surprised to learn..." to "...and has never acknowledged me since."

_____

Morel's success in getting the coachman fired and the chauffeur hired to replace him coincides with a change in his attitude toward the narrator, who notes that Morel had not only "ceased to keep his distance from me" but would even "literally bound toward me in an effusion of delight." The narrator assumes that Charlus had a hand in this change, but he adds a bit of foreshadowing:

How at the time could I have guessed what I was told afterward (and of which I have never felt certain, Andrée's assertions concerning anything connected with Albertine, later on especially, having always struck me as needing to be taken with caution, for, as we saw earlier, she was not genuinely fond of my loved one but was jealous of her), what in any event, if it were true, had been remarkably well hidden from me by the two of them: that Albertine knew Morel well?

The narrator then attempts an analysis of Morel's character, which "was full of contradictions." Morel would do anything for money, except that he was "truly a past master" of the violin, having "put ahead of money his diploma as first-prize-winner at the Conservatoire." Morel trusts no one, and had recognized in the chauffeur "one of his own kind, ... a man mistrustful in the proper meaning of the word, who remains stubbornly silent when with decent people but at once sees eye to eye with a debauchee" -- again, a foreshadowing of what is to happen after the narrator returns to Paris. "In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are."

Meanwhile, Charlus has become "the most faithful" of Mme. Verdurin's set, even though he has been at least partially "outed" among them, and Cottard frets to Ski "whether I can allow him to travel with us after what you've told me." Mme. Cottard, overhearing this conversation, decides that Charlus must be Jewish, which leads to some comic misunderstanding between her and Charlus. Moreover, the others in the group, not knowing of Charlus's social status, conclude that they're doing him a favor by accepting him into their set, and they pride themselves in their tolerance:

In fact, ... if M. de Charlus did not come, they felt disappointment almost at traveling only among people who were like everyone else and not to have next to them this bedizened, potbellied, and impenetrable personage, reminiscent of a box, of some suspect and exotic provenance, that gives off a curious smell of fruit, the mere thought of sampling which would turn the stomach.

Charlus, the narrator tells us, still believes that only a very few people know that he's gay, "and that none of them were on the Normandy coast." He doesn't know that "on a day when he and Morel were late and had not come by the train," Mme. Verdurin had announced to the group, "We won't wait for the young ladies any longer!" And he evidently doesn't get her true meaning when, on the nights when he and Morel stay over at La Raspelière, she gives them adjoining rooms and announces, "If you feel like making music, don't hesitate; the walls are like that of a fortress, you've no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like the dead."

Meanwhile, the narrator is still struggling with his feelings for Albertine, still persuading himself that he "no longer felt jealousy or scarcely any love for her, and gave no thought to what she might be doing on the days when I did not see her." But if, on the train to the Verdurins, she goes into another compartment with the other women in the group, he can't sit still. He has to get up and check "too see whether something abnormal might not be going on."

He also manages to alienate the Princesse Sherbatoff when, one day on the train, he sees Mme. de Villeparisis and talks to her in the Princesse's presence. "I had absolutely no idea, however, that Mme de Villeparisis knew very well who my companion was but had no wish to meet her.... When I said goodbye to the Princesse, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not even offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since."

Day One Hundred Twenty-Six: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 407-419

2010-03-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "After dinner the car brought Albertine back..." to "...capable on certain days of genuine kindness."

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The narrator describes a romantic evening with Albertine, although his attitude is hardly romantic, since he tells himself "that we must be in love after all, to have spent the night kissing." He is continually prey to jealousy, so that he even restricts visits from Saint-Loup: "I had preferred to forgo seeing Albertine rather than risk his meeting her, jeopardizing the state of contented calm in which I had been for some time now, and reviving my jealousy. I felt easy in my mind only once Saint-Loup had left again." He's afraid that Saint-Loup will ask to be introduced to the Verdurins, which would "mar all the pleasure that I enjoyed there with Albertine," but Saint-Loup has no interest in sets like the Verdurins: "'They're circles,' he said, 'where they play at being tribes, where they play at being congregations and chapels. You're not going to tell me it isn't a small sect; they're all sweetness and light to the people who belong, and couldn't be more contemptuous of the ones who don't.'"

On one of his outings with Albertine, the narrator sees his first airplane: "fifty meters or so above me, in the sunlight, between two great wings of glittering steel that were bearing him away, a being whose indistinct face I fancied resembled that of a man." The sight moves him to tears. Meanwhile, other twentieth century technology is taking hold in his life, as the chauffeur asks Morel to persuade the Verdurins to hire him and replace their coachman. Morel does this by first getting the Verdurins' servants to "steal from the coachman everything he needed to harness up," so that the Verdurins will be angry when he is delayed getting ready to take them places. And then, when the chauffeur puts pressure on Morel by threatening to return to Paris, he gets the servants to beat the coachman up and sabotage the carriage. Morel then tells the Verdurins that the coachman drinks and has several times overturned the carriage. The result, when they see the damaged carriage and the bloodied coachman, is that he's fired and the chauffeur hired in his place.

We get a hint that all this business with the chauffeur and Morel is foreshadowing, when the narrator tells us of the former: "I, all unknowing, employed him by the day in Paris; but I am getting too far ahead of myself, all this will be met with again in the story of Albertine." And as for Morel, "since I have been running ahead, I do not want all the same to leave the reader under the impression that Morel might have been wicked through and through. Rather, he was full on contradictions, capable on certain days of genuine kindness."

Day One Hundred Twenty-Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 394-407

2010-03-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "What I did not, alas, know at that time..." to "...despite their obedient silence, I had not pursued."

_____

The narrator gives us a hint that there's more significance to the hired motorcar than just an ability to speed around the countryside. He will learn much later, he tells us, that the chauffeur also worked for Charlus, and that he was a friend of Charles Morel, who got a kickback for leading him to customers. "Had I known this at the time, and that the confidence which the Verdurins soon felt in this chauffeur had derived, unbeknown to them, therefrom, perhaps many of the sorrows of my life in Paris the following year, many of my misfortunes relative to Albertine, might have been avoided."

The narrator now gives us an account of a meal taken by Charlus and Morel at "a restaurant along the coast" -- an occasion at which he wasn't present but of which he somehow has full knowledge. (Proust increasingly shows little interest in limiting the novel's point of view to its narrator.) The scene reveals how Morel is getting his hooks into the Baron, whom he teases with a fantasy:

"You know," said Morel, anxious to excite the Baron's senses in a manner that he adjudged to be less compromising for himself (although it was in point of fact more immoral), "my dream would be to find a perfectly innocent young girl, make her fall in love with me, and take her virginity."

Charlus is titillated by the fantasy, and by Morel's adding that he would "ditch her the same evening." "M. de Charlus was in the habit, when a fiction was able to produce in him a moment's sensual pleasure, of giving it his approval, while being prepared to withdraw this a few moments later, once the pleasure had worn off." But Charlus is shocked when he realizes that Morel's fantasy centers on Jupien's niece (misidentified by him here as Jupien's daughter). The narrator comments, "The young girl was very hardworking and had not taken any vacation, but I have learned since that, while the violinist was in the neighborhood of Balbec, she could not stop thinking of his handsome face, ennobled by the fact that, having seen Morel with me, she had taken him for a 'gentleman.'"

Still, the point is that Morel has given Charlus a thrill, "that the idea that Morel would have no compunction in 'ditching' a girl he had violated had suddenly caused him to experience total pleasure." It has awakened the sadist in Charlus: Remember his "deranged" fantasy about Bloch beating his mother. But it's a momentary pleasure, and the narrator observes that the sadist soon hands "the floor back to the real M. de Charlus, full of artistic refinement, sensitivity, and kindness." It is, however, a foreshadowing of the way in which the relationship between Charlus and Morel will develop:

Unfortunately for M. de Charlus, his lack of common sense, and perhaps the chasteness of the relationship he probably enjoyed with Morel, made him rack his brains from that time on to overwhelm the violinist with strange acts of kindness that the latter could not understand, and to which his nature, wild in its way, yet also mean and ungrateful, could respond only with an ever-increasing indifference or violence, which plunged M. de Charlus -- once so proud, now quite timid -- into fits of genuine despair.

And meanwhile, the narrator's own relationship with Albertine is also turning stranger. He is realizing "that my fate was to pursue only phantoms, beings whose reality lay in part in my imagination." He recognizes his kinship with Swann, "he who had been a connoisseur of phantoms." He "perhaps felt love for Albertine," but mostly what he experiences is jealousy, not wanting to let her out of his sight. They go to have lunch at Rivebelle, but he grows obsessed with her interest in a young waiter with black hair, busily dashing from table to table.

For a moment I wondered whether, in order to follow him, she might not be going to leave me on my own at the table. But from the days that followed I began to forget this painful impression once and for all, because I had decided never to return to Rivebelle, and had made Albertine promise, who had assured me that this was the first time she had been there, that she would never go back.

He persuades himself that he could break with her, but then he overhears her making an appointment with her aunt or a girlfriend, and "my calm was destroyed." His mother grows concerned with the amount of money he's spending, particularly on hiring the car and chauffeur, and suggests that he's seeing too much of Albertine.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Four: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 382-394

2010-03-22T16:40:00.000-07:00

Part II, Chapter III, from "I went out with Albertine every day. She had..." to "...the beautiful 'measure of the earth.'"

_____

The narrator's daily jaunts with Albertine have one drawback for him: He likes to appreciate things by himself. When she says of a church, "It'd be such a pleasure to see it with you!" he gets spooked. "That was a pleasure I did not feel capable of giving. I felt it in front of beautiful things only if I was alone, or pretended to be so, and was silent." But he gives in, and even orders an automobile -- "such vehicles were something of a rarity in Balbec" -- and a driver for one of their journeys. The narrator is taken aback when "the car leaped forward and in a single bound covered twenty paces of an excellent horse."

They decide to pay an unscheduled visit to the Verdurins, and unfortunately get more attention from Mme. Verdurin, who is attracted by the novelty of touring the neighborhood in a car, than they bargained for. She tries to wheedle her way into accompanying them. "What added to my unhappiness was that Albertine seemed not to share it but to find it fun to drive all around the countryside like this with the Verdurins." Finally, he dissuades Mme. Verdurin from joining them by whispering to her that Albertine had something private that she wanted to discuss with him.

The Patronne assumed a look of fury. "Right, we won't come," she said to me, in a voice quivering with anger. I sensed that she was so angry that, to seem to be giving way a little: "But we might have been able to..." "No," she went on, more furious still, "once I've said no, it's no." I thought I was in her bad books, but she called us back in the doorway to advise us not to "let her down" on Wednesday next, and not to come in that contraption, which was dangerous in the dark, but by the train with all the little group, and she got the car to stop when it was already going down the sloping driveway into the gardens because the new servant had forgotten to put in it the square of tart and the shortbreads she had had packed up for us.

The narrator also finds that "the motorcar is no respecter of mystery." By shortening distances and making remote places more accessible, it begins to deprive the landscape of some of its romance, "leading me to reflect in terror that Mme Bovary and La Sanseverina would perhaps have struck me as creatures like any other had I come across them anywhere except in the enclosed atmosphere of a novel."