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

*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

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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: The Fugitive, pp. 479-499*

*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."

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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-Eight: The Fugitive, pp. 450-465*

*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."

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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 Thirty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 67-82

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

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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 Twenty-Three: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 369-382

Part II, Chapter III, from  "I could not keep awake. I was taken up..." to "...difference in status between M. de Charlus and Aimé." 

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Chapter III begins with an extended passage on some familiar themes in the novel: sleep, memory, and time. Exhausted from his visit to the Verdurins, the narrator can hardly stay awake as he's taken up to his room by an elevator operator who chatters on about his sister, who is the mistress of a rich man and who "never leaves a hotel without relieving herself in a wardrobe or a chest of drawers, so as to leave a small memento for the chambermaid who'll have to clean it up." He seems inordinately proud of this.

The narrator observes that in dreams there are two kinds of time, but then narrows it to "only one, not because that of the waking man holds good for the sleeper, but perhaps because the other life, that in which we sleep is not -- in its profound part -- subject to the category of time.... On these mornings (which is what makes me say that sleep perhaps knows nothing of the law of time), my attempt to wake up consisted above all in an attempt to introduce the obscure, undefined block of sleep that I had just been living into the framework of time." 

As for memory, the narrator comments on "the great Norwegian philosopher" he had met at the Verdurins and his endorsement of Bergson's theory that "We possess all our memories, if not the faculty of recalling them." The narrator (or the Norwegian philosopher -- Proust doesn't quite make it clear) objects, 

But what is a memory that we cannot recall? Or let us go further. We do not recall our memories of the last thirty years, but we are totally steeped in them; why, then, stop at thirty years, why not continue this previous existence back before our birth?... If I can have, in me and around me, so many memories that I do not remember, this oblivion (a de facto oblivion at least, since I do not hae the faculty of seeing anything) may apply to a life that I have lied in the body of another man, or even on another planet.... The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man that I have been since my birth than this latter remembers what I was before it.

The arrival of the valet de chambre interrupts these metaphysical speculations, and the narrator's thoughts turn to Charlus, about whom he had dreamed that he "was 110 years old and had just twice slapped him mother, Mme Verdurin, in the face for spending five billion on a bunch of violets." Charlus had recently dined in a private room at the hotel with "none other than the footman of a cousin of the Cambremers." All of the servants at the hotel, even Françoise, had recognized the footman, but his "playacting" had fooled the guests. The occasion allowed the narrator to identify Charlus to Aimé, who was surprised to learn his identity. The narrator learns that Charlus had been smitten with Aimé and had written him a long letter commenting, among  other things, on his resemblance to a dead friend of Charlus's. The narrator speculates that Charlus's relationship with Morel is "perhaps Platonic," leading the Baron to "now and again seek out company for an evening such as that in which I had just met him in the hall."  

Day Eighty: The Guermantes Way, pp. 148-160

From "After we left Paris..." to "...'one of the world's biggest scoundrels.'" 

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The narrator joins Saint-Loup on the trip to see his mistress in the suburbs, where spring is further advanced than in the city. The cherry and pear trees in full bloom dazzle the narrator, whom Saint-Loup leaves to admire them -- "I can see you want to look at all this and play the poet," he says -- while he goes to fetch his mistress, of whom he has been talking endlessly on their journey. 

When Saint-Loup arrives with her, the narrator recognizes her immediately as "Rachel, when of the Lord," a prostitute who had been shown to him by a madam when he first started visiting brothels. (We see why Proust had not given Saint-Loup's mistress a name until now.)

I saw that what had seemed to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in a brothel, where I had simply seen it as a woman wanting to earn twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than family, more than the most coveted position, if I had started to imagine her as an intriguing being, interesting to know, difficult to seize and to hold.

The repetitions of "twenty francs" and the reference to Rachel as "it" are telling. The narrator's reaction to the revelation that his friend is so deeply involved with a prostitute (he later refers to Rachel as a "tart" and a "whore") seems excessive from a man who has lately been infatuated with Odette Swann, whose background is not so very different. His disgust with Saint-Loup's mistress suggests more than concern for his friend; it suggests jealousy -- that narrator is himself in love with Saint-Loup. And his mood changes accordingly:

We cut across the village. The houses were sordid. But beside the most dilapidated of them, the ones that looked as if they had been scorched by a shower of brimstone, a mysterious traveler, making a day's stay in the cursed city, a resplendent angel, stood over it, stretching the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in blossom: a pear tree. 

The village has turned into one of the cursed cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. 

The narrator remembers -- or perhaps imagines -- "that Robert was able to stand aside for a second from the woman he had gradually created out of layer upon layer of affection, and suddenly distance himself enough to glimpse another Rachel, identical yet entirely different, whose behavior was clearly that of a little tart." At the station where they take the train back to Paris, Rachel meets "a pair of common little tarts like herself," Lucienne and Germaine. He sneers at their "imitation otter-skin collars," and once again reminds himself that such "women were available for a louis, whereas Rachel cost [Saint-Loup] more than a hundred thousand francs a year." He fancies that Saint-Loup's eyes have been opened by the encounters, but when they're on the train, "Rachel's magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price." 


In the restaurant, Rachel (whom Saint-Loup calls "Zézette") does win over the narrator a little by criticizing Saint-Loup's family, by warning him that he's drinking too much wine, and by revealing herself as a passionate Dreyfusard. But Saint-Loup begins showing signs of jealousy, particularly toward their waiter, who is Aimé, the headwaiter from the hotel in Balbec: "Aimé had a certain distinction and exuded, quite unconsciously, the romantic appeal that stems, for a few years at least, from a head of fine hair and a Grecian nose, which is what made him stand out among the crowd of other waiters." He recognizes them and chats with the narrator about his grandmother. But Saint-Loup notices that Rachel seems to be paying "special attention" to Aimé, and his jealousy flares up: "'Is there anything particularly interesting about the waiter, Zézette?' he asked his mistress when he had dismissed Aimé somewhat abruptly. 'You seem to be making quite a study of him.'" 

Day Fifty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 380-391

From "I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert..." to "...the waiters who were about to serve us."

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Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.

Day Fifty: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 271-285

From "My life in the hotel was now..." to "...'They're so much more interesting.'" 

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Today's dissection of snobbery begins with Françoise, whose confidence in her own status in the world is unassailable, which is why she's one of the book's most endearing and memorable characters. Even the people she works for have to know their place, and after she befriends the staff of the hotel, Françoise has no qualms about letting the narrator and his grandmother know where they stand in the scheme of things. "The long and the short of it was that we had to make do without proper hot water because Françoise was a friend of the man whose job it was to heat it."

The peculiar and sometimes artificial relationships of resort life extend to the grandmother as well. After she pretends not to see Mme. de Villeparisis in the dining room, which the marquise returns in kind, they meet by accident in a doorway and go through a stagy scene of surprised recognition, "like a air of actors in a scene by Molière who have been standing apart from one anther, each delivering a soliloquy and supposedly not seeing the other, though there is no more than a few feet between them." Mme. de Villeparisis then begins to join them at table, raising their status in the eyes of the headwaiter.

To bring this look of happiness to Aimé's face, one needed only to speak the name of a titled person; and in this he was the opposite of Françoise, in whose hearing one could not mention "Count This" or "Viscount That" without her expression's turning dark and her voice's sounding curt and sour, which actually meant she cherished the nobility not less than Aimé but more.... But once she had unmistakably registered Mme de Villeparisis's countless little acts of considerateness toward us, and even toward herself, Françoise forgave her for being a marquise; and since she had never ceased being grateful to her for being a marquise, Mme de Villeparisis was her favorite of all the people we knew.

And then a more elevated member of the aristocracy enters their lives, the Princess of Luxembourg, to whom they are introduced by Mme. de Villeparisis. But this doesn't at all raise their status in the eyes of the local gentry, used to being the most kowtowed-to of the visitors to the hotel. These include the First President from Caen, the bâtonnier from Cherbourg, and an eminent notary from Le Mans, and especially their wives: "Each time Mme de Villeparisis walked through the vestibule, the wife of the First President, always on the lookout for loose women, set aside her embroidery and inspected her in a way that moved her two friends to irresistible laughter." She vows to make inquiries about Mme. de Villeparisis, unwilling to believe she's a genuine marquise. And the same holds true for the Princess of Luxembourg, who, she reports to the other women, is "a female with dyed hair, if you don't mind, made up to the eyeballs, and with a carriage that smacked of 'immoral earnings' a mile away, the kind that sort of woman always has, and who turned up a while ago asking to see our alleged marquise!"

This is great stuff, but there's one flaw in it for those who insist that authors stick to the conventions of fiction: How could the narrator have been present at the table of these gossips? Proust is not one, however, for sticking to a limited point of view for very long. And the material is so good that he (almost) gets away with it.