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

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

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

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

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

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-Three: The Fugitive, pp. 544-563*

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

*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-One: The Prisoner, pp. 305-321

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 Thirty-Five, The Prisoner, pp. 35-46

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-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 480-496

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 Sixteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 230-248

Part II, Chapter II, from "Calmed by my discussion with Albertine, I began..." to "...whom Albertine had perhaps loved was in any case about abruptly to cease."

_____

The narrator's mother encourages him to read more, but he can't resist spending his time with Albertine and her old gang of girls. Chiefly, he's concerned with keeping an eye on Albertine because of his suspicion that she may be a lesbian. Every time he spots a new girl on the beach, he feels "uneasy and proposed the most distant excursions to Albertine, so that she might not make the acquaintance of, or even, if it were possible, set eyes on, the new arrival." He is even nervous that the lady's maid to Mme. Putbus whom Saint-Loup told him about, mentioning that she also liked women, will "try to corrupt her." 

Meanwhile, Bloch's sister has caused a scandal at the hotel by a public demonstration of affection for her actress girlfriend. (Proust had earlier said it was Bloch's cousin in the relationship with an actress.) But she has a protector in the person of M. Nissim Bernard, who keeps a young man who works at the hotel. M. Nissim Bernard takes his lunch at the hotel every day just to see the young man, a habit that Bloch père attributes to "a poetic liking for the beautiful light, the sunsets along this coast" and to "the inveterate idiosyncrasy of an old bachelor." 


The narrator then digresses into a portrait of "two sisters who had accompanied an old foreign lady to Balbec, as lady's maids," Mlle. Marie Gineste and Mme. Céleste Albert. (Sturrock's note identifies them as actual people; Céleste Albert was Proust's housekeeper from 1914 to his death in 1922.) They give us one of the few physical descriptions of the narrator, Céleste referring to him as a "little black devil with hair like a jay," "just like a bird," as fastidious, as having "cool and friendly cheeks like the inside of an almond, little satin hands all plush, nails like claws," and "pretty skin." Françoise is shocked at his friendship with servants, and even the hotel manager "pointed solemnly out to me that it was undignified for a guest to talk to" them. 

Returning to the subject of Bloch's sister's misbehavior, we learn that "everything that concerned M. Nissim Bernard was 'taboo' for the manager of the Balbec hotel," so that the manager doesn't bring the subject up to him but only asks her to maintain "a certain circumspection." Nevertheless, one evening, as the narrator, Albertine, and Bloch are leaving the casino the sister and her lover "came past, intertwined, kissing without stopping, and, having drawn level with us, gave vent to giggles, laughter, and indecent shouts. Bloch looked down, so as to appear not to have recognized his sister, while I was in torments at the thought that this private and atrocious language was perhaps directed at Albertine." 

And then the narrator sees a newcomer, a beautiful young woman, in the casino where "she never stopped letting the alternating and revolving light from her glances rest on Albertine." The narrator suspects that Albertine knows the young woman, but she doesn't acknowledge her. And a few days later he witnesses a flirtation between the young woman and Bloch's cousin.

Words followed, a conversation got under way, and the young woman's innocent husband, who had been looking for her everywhere, was astonished to find her making plans for that same evening with a girl he did not know. His wife introduced Bloch's cousin to him as a girlhood friend, under some unintelligible name, for she had forgotten to ask her what her name was. But the presence of the husband advanced their intimacy by a step, for they addressed each other as tu, having met at the convent, an incident at which they laughed heartily later on, as well as at the deluded husband, with a merriment that was an opportunity for further intimacies.

But the section ends with the narrator's assurance that "the jealousy caused in me by the women whom Albertine had perhaps loved was in any case abruptly to cease."    

Day Ninety-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 390-412

Part II, Chapter II, from "I have already said (and it was..." to "...the day after my evening with Saint-Loup"

_____

The narrator begins with a dismissal of the concept of friendship, "which is totally bent on making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (except through art) to a superficial self that ... finds ... a vague, sentimental satisfaction at being cherished by external support ... and marvels at qualities it would castigate as failings and seek to correct in itself." But he does admit that it can, "in certain circumstances [provide] us with just the boost we needed and the warmth we are unavailable to muster of our own accord." 


So however misanthropic the narrator might eventually become, when Saint-Loup arrives after the narrator has been dumped by Mme. de Stermaria and is weeping into the rolls of carpet that are to be laid before his parents' return, he feels some gratitude. Though he wants to be taken to Rivebelle and the women he remembers from the restaurants there, he settles for one in Paris, which is smothered by a thick fog. 


The fog arouses a "dim memory of arrival in Combray by night" -- but it is only a dim memory, not the transformative one produced by the taste of the madeleine. It does, however, arouse in him a sense of "inspired exhilaration, which might have resulted in something had I remained alone and so avoided the detour of the many futile years I was yet to spend before discovering the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book." In other words, this dim memory of Combray is not enough to set him off in search of lost time. If it had, he observes, "the carriage I found myself in would have deserved to rank as more memorable than Dr. Percepied's, in which I had composed the little descriptive piece about the Martinville steeples, recently unearthed, as it happened, which I had reworked and offered without success to the Figaro." So his rejection of friendship, it seems, is a way of blaming it for his setting aside his career as a writer. 

In the carriage, he's surprised and angry when Saint-Loup confesses that he has badmouthed the narrator to Bloch: "'I told Bloch you weren't very fond of him, that you found him rather vulgar. You know me, I like things to be clear-cut,' he concluded smugly, in a tone of voice that brooked no argument." The narrator regards this as a betrayal of their friendship, and observes that "his face was marred, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a horribly twisted expression, which I encountered only once or twice in all the time I knew him." He is at a loss to explain Saint-Loup's callousness. 


At the restaurant, the narrator enters alone, while Saint-Loup stays to give the driver instructions. The place is divided into two areas, one of which is dominated by a group of young aristocrats, anti-Dreyfusards, and the other by the Dreyfusards. The narrator takes a seat in the area reserved for the aristocrats, and is rudely ushered into the other area, facing the drafty "door reserved for the Hebrews." He observes the behavior of the aristocrats, who include the Prince de Foix. 


And then there's an ambiguous passage about the Prince de Foix and Saint-Loup, who, the narrator tells us, belonged to a "closely knit group of four" who were "known as the four gigolos," "were never invited to anything separately" and at country houses were always given adjoining bedrooms:

as a result, especially since the four of them were extremely good-looking, rumors circulated about the nature of their intimacy. As far as Saint-Loup was concerned, I was in a position to denounce such rumors categorically. But the curious thing is that, if it eventually came to light that the rumors were true of all four of them, then each one had been utterly unaware of the facts in relatin to the other three. Yet each had done his utmost to inform himself about the others, either to gratify a desire or, more likely, a grudge, to prevent a marriage, or to have the upper hand over the friend whose secret he had uncovered. A fifth member (for in groups of four there are always more than four) had joined this Platonic quartet, a man far more suspect than the others. But religious scruple had held him back until long after the group had broken up and he himself was a married man, the father of a family, one minute rushing off to Lourdes to pray that the next baby might be a boy or a girl, and the next flinging himself at soldiers.

Considering Saint-Loup's previous overreaction to being propositioned by a man on the street, and his apparent jealousy of the narrator's friendship with Bloch, it seems safe to say that we haven't learned everything about Saint-Loup yet. 


Saint-Loup's arrival, and his discovery of the narrator sitting in front of the drafty door, causes a flurry of apologies from the management. It also causes a renewal of admiration of Saint-Loup from the narrator, who compares him to the "foreigners, intellectuals, would-be artists" in the café, who are mocked by the aristocrats for their awkwardness and lack of style but are nevertheless "highly intelligent and goodhearted men who, in the long run, could be profoundly endearing." Saint-Loup has style and grace and wealth in addition to intelligence and good-heartedness, which impresses the narrator because of his background. 

Among the Jews especially, there were few whose parents did not have a kindness of heart, a broad-mindedness, an honest, in comparison with which Saint-Loup's mother and the Duc de Guermantes came across as the sorriest of moral figures in their desiccated emotions, the surface religiosity they cultivated only to condemn scandal, and their clannish apology for a Christianity which never failed to lead ... to colossally wealthy marriages. But, for all this, Saint-Loup, in whatever way the faults of his parents had combined to create a new set of qualities, was governed by a delightful openness of mind and heart.

And he is further endeared to the narrator when he goes to borrow the Prince de Foix's vicuña cloak to keep the narrator warm in the drafty room, and on his return negotiates the crowded room with a graceful balancing act along the banquettes that line the wall. It resembles the act of a lover more than that of a friend. Meanwhile, the waiters have been kowtowing to the narrator, and the proprietor addresses him as "M. le Baron" and then, on being corrected, "M. le Comte." "I had no time to launch a second protest, which would almost certainly have promoted me to the rank of marquis." 


When he's seated again, Saint-Loup tells the narrator that Charlus wants to see him tomorrow evening. The narrator replies that he's dining with the Duchesse de Guermantes that evening. Saint-Loup, who calls it a "fabulous blowout," tries to persuade him that he should "get out of it" and that Charlus doesn't want him to go, but they agree that the narrator will see Charlus afterward at eleven. 


They also talk about the threat of war in Morocco, to which Saint-Loup is scheduled to return and from which he's trying to get transferred, with the Duchesse's help: "she can twist Général de Saint-Joseph round her little finger." He tells the narrator that he doesn't think there will be war with Germany over Morocco, but adds with semi-prescience: "You need only to think what a cosmic thing a war would be today. It would be more catastrophic than the Flood and the Götterdämmerung put together. Only it wouldn't last so long." 


After the earlier anger, the narrator regains his admiration for Saint-Loup: 

Our rare conversations alone together, and this one in particular, have assumed, in retrospect, the status of important turning points. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (with some remorse), what he would have liked to inspire. Still in the throes of the pleasure it had given me to see him come cantering toward me and gracefully reaching his goal, I felt that this pleasure arose from the fact that each of his movement as he had moved along the wall bench possibly derived its meaning from, was motivated by, something very personal to Saint-Loup himself, but that what really lay behind it was something he had inherited, by birth and upbringing, from his race. ... In the same way that Mme de Villeparisis, on an intellectual level, had needed a great deal of serious thought in order to convey a sense of the frivolous in her conversation and in her memoirs, so, in order for Saint-Loup's body to carry so much nobility, all ideas of nobility had first to leave his mind, which was intent on higher things, before returning to his body to re-establish themselves there as noble attributes of an utterly unstudied kind.

Day Ninety-Four: The Guermantes Way, pp. 366-379

Part II, Chapter II, from "After the departure of this young Picarde..." to "...did not speak to me again for six months." 

_____

It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined -- a dummy creation that little by little to our detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble. 

That doesn't bode well for the narrator's coming dinner with Mme. de Stermaria, the invitation to which arrives just after the departure of one woman whom he assures us he is not at all in love with anymore and just before his encounter with another woman whom he also assures us that he doesn't love anymore. For, arriving late at Mme. de Villeparisis's (delayed by the scene with Albertine that we have just witnessed), he finds the guests leaving the room where the play has just taken place. One of them is the Duchesse de Guermantes. 

His mother has rebuked him for stalking the Duchesse on his daily walks, and has thereby "woken me up from a dream that had gone on for too long." And so he has come to his senses. "But it had never entered my mind that my recovery, by restoring me to a normal attitude toward Mme. de Guermantes, would effect a similar change in her and open up the possibility of a friendliness, even a friendship, which I no longer cared about." For to his surprise, when the Duchesse enters the room, she asks if she may sit down beside him. 

He has heard the rumor that the Duc and the Duchesse are separating, and when Mme. de Villeparisis sees them together, she invites the narrator to dinner there with the Duchesse on Wednesday, "for the good offices of a procuress are among the duties of a hostess," observes the narrator, who has lately, thanks to Charlus, grown disillusioned with Mme. de Villeparisis. He declines because of his invitation to dine with Mme. de Stermaria. And when the Marquise invites him for Saturday instead, he declines because his mother is returning on that day or the next. 

When Mme. de Villeparisis moves on, however, it is the Duchesse who invites him to dine with her and the Princess of Parma on Friday. He observes that when several guests see them sitting together, they "though they had been misinformed, and that it was not the Duchesse but the Duc who was seeking a separation, on my account, at which point they lost no time in making the fact known." He reflects that his sudden appeal to the Duchesse may stem from his lack of interest in society: "Society people are so used to being sought after that anyone who shuns them becomes a rare bird and monopolizes their attention." 

When she mentions that her nephew, Saint-Loup, has spoken highly of him, he adds that he's also acquainted with her cousin, Charlus, which surprises her. She calls Charlus by his given name, Palamède, and by his nickname, Mémé, both of which Charlus detests. She also observes that Charlus is "a little bit mad at times." 

I was particularly struck with the word "mad" used of M. de Charlus, and it occurred to me that this semi-madness might perhaps account for certain things, like his apparent delight at the idea of asking Bloch to beat his own mother.

And the reference to Charlus then brings to mind "one of those curious anomalies" regarding both Charlus and Bloch the narrator promises to explain "at the end of this volume" (which the editor notes actually occurs in the first section of Sodom and Gomorrah, because that section was originally appended to the end of The Guermantes Way). Bloch had mentioned to the narrator that Charlus was in the habit of looking at him in a "friendly manner" when they passed on the street. The narrator assumes that Charlus was doing so because he had heard Bloch was his friend. But at the theater, the narrator offers to introduce Bloch to him, and when he brings Bloch to him for the introduction, "the minute M. de Charlus set eye on him, a look of astonishment appeared on his face, where it was instantly repressed to become one of blazing fury." And Charlus's "insolent" behavior at the introduction led Bloch to assume that it was because the narrator had "spoken ill of him" to Charlus, so Bloch "did not speak to me again for six months."                    

Day Ninety-Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 321-341

Part II, Chapter I, from "He had always liked to come regularly and spend..." to "...laid her to rest with the face of a young girl."

_____

If I were asked to pick a section from In Search of Lost Time for an anthology that would represent Proust at his best, I think it might be this chapter, for its miraculous blend of genuine feeling and wry humor. I would call it "Dickensian" except that I fear Dickens would have treated the grandmother's death far more lugubriously, and thus less touchingly, than Proust does. 

We begin with a visit from Bergotte, who is ill and aging, and with the revelation that the author has lost some favor with the narrator. He has always admired Bergotte's clarity, but he has lately become fascinated by a new writer in whose work "the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming." It's a pretty apt description of the reaction of some early readers to Moderns like Joyce and Kafka and, of course, Proust. He elaborates on the transformative power of new visions in art with a reference to painting: "Women pass us in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women." Or as Oscar Wilde put it, Nature imitates Art. But Bergotte manages to undercut the narrator's interest in the new writer "not so much by assuring me that his art was unpolished, facile, and hollow, as by telling me that he had seen him and very nearly mistaken him for Bloch. The image of Bloch then started to loom over the pages I read, and I no longer felt any compulsion to take the trouble to understand them." 

The grandmother's condition worsens, and Cottard decides to treat her with leeches.

I knew the disgust my grandmother felt at the sight of certain creatures, not to mention being touched by them. I knew it was out of respect for the advantageous relief they would bring that she endured the leeches. And so it infuriated me to hear Françoise chuckling at her as to a child who has to be humored, and repeating, 'Oh, look at the little beasties crawling all over Madame!' Furthermore, this was to treat our invalid with a lack of respect, as though she had in fact slipped into her second childhood. But my grandmother, whose face now wore the calm forbearance of a stoic, did not even seem to hear.

When the final stage arrives, the narrator's parents wake him in the middle of the night, and his mother says, "Poor boy, you have only your papa and mama to rely on now." Word spreads that the grandmother is on her deathbed, and the Duc de Guermantes pays a call, demonstrating his customary noblesse oblige: "M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to go off somewhere. But he was so conscious of the importance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to everything else, and he insisted on being shown into the drawing room." And when Saint-Loup arrives, the Duc shows a wholly inappropriate delight: "'Well, what a pleasant surprise!' cried the Duc joyfully, ... heedless of the presence of my mother." 

It was not that the Duc de Guermantes was bad-mannered. Far from it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others, similar in this respect to undertakers and the majority of doctors, who, after composing their faces and saying, 'This is a very painful time for you,' perhaps even embracing you and recommending rest, then revert to treating a deathbed or a funeral just like some social gathering of a more or less restricted kind, at which, with the joviality they have just momentarily repressed, they scan the room for someone they can talk to about their humdrum affairs or ask to introduce them to someone else or offer a lift home in their carriage.

Similarly, a priest who is a brother-in-law of the grandmother is so self-conscious about showing proper grief that, when he covers his face with his hands, the narrator catches him peering between his fingers "to observe whether my sympathy was sincere.... Priests, like specialists in mental disorders, always have something of the examining magistrate about them." Another relative "was so assiduous in his solicitude for the dying that the families concerned, on the pretext that he was delicate, ... invariably begged him, with customary evasiveness of expression, not to come to the cemetery" and others had given him "the nickname, 'No Flowers by Request.'" 

And then there's Dr. Dieulafoy, who had been urged upon them by the Duc de Guermantes. By this point, the narrator has begun to see the scene surrounding his grandmother's death as taking on the character of a play, so that "when the maid announced 'M. Dieulafoy,' it was like something out of a play by Molière." The doctor is a paragon of dignity and tact -- and unnecessary, since all he can do is confirm what the other doctors have already established, that the grandmother is dying -- and when he takes his leave he makes "a perfect exit, simply accepting the sealed envelope that was slipped into his hand. He did not seem to have seen it, and even we were left wondering for a moment whether we had really given it to him, so dexterously had he made it disappear, like a conjurer, yet without losing a single trace of the gravity -- if anything, it was accentuated -- of the eminent consultant in his long frock coat with its silk lapels, his handsome face weighed down with the most dignified commiseration."

These bits of amused observation are so deftly handled that they only heighten the sense of genuine emotion when the end finally comes and Françoise combs the grandmother's hair and the narrator recognizes that "death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl."             

Day Ninety: The Guermantes Way, pp. 290-306

From "I, for my part, returned home..." to "...that she had had a slight stroke." 

_____

The Dreyfus affair is inescapable: When he gets home the narrator finds his family's butler and the Guermantes's butler in a heated argument about the case, and in just as complicated a manner as the conversation between Bloch and de Norpois or the one between Bloch's father and Mme. Sazerat. Their butler, a Dreyfusard, is arguing that Dreyfus was guilty, while the Guermantes butler, an anti-Dreyfusard, is arguing for his innocence.

They behaved in this manner not to hide their convictions, but out of shrewd, hardheaded competition. Our butler, who was not sure there would be a retrial, wanted to compensate in advance for not winning the argument by denying the Guermantes' butler the satisfaction of seeing a just cause crushed. The Guermantes' butler thought that if a retrial was refused ours would be more incensed by the continued detention of an innocent man on Devil's Island.

But the rest of the section is concentrated on the grandmother's illness, about which the narrator makes this aphoristic comment:

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us, and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

The account of her illness gives us some more glimpses into the medical practices at the turn of the century, including the use of the still fairly novel medical thermometer and the fact that aspirin had "not yet come into use at the time" as a febrifuge. Cottard prescribes his milk diet, which doesn't work, though the narrator blames it on his grandmother's putting too much salt in it. The narrator remembers Bergotte's recommendation of a doctor who would not "bore" him, and calls in Dr. du Boulbon, a "specialist in nervous diseases" who studied with Charcot, the teacher of Freud. 

Du Boulbon does in fact treat the grandmother's illness as at least partly psychosomatic, and recommends that she get out of bed and take walks in the Champs-Élysées, despite her fatigue. He also tries to reassure her that there should be no stigma to being called neurotic: "Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They and they alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art." And noting a book by Bergotte on her table, he says, "Cured of your nervous complaint, you would no longer have any taste for it. Now, what right have I to supplant the pleasure it gives you with a nervous stability that would be quite incapable of giving you such pleasure. The pleasure itself is a powerful remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps."


And so the narrator takes his grandmother out for a walk on the Champs-Élysées, where they go to "the little old-fashioned pavilion with the green metal trellis-work" that had figured earlier in one of his more memorable encounters with Gilberte. But there his grandmother becomes more ill, and he recognizes that she has suffered a stroke.        

Day Eighty-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 275-290

From "We returned to the drawing room...." to "... off they set at a brisk trot." 

_____

The selection begins with one of Proust's occasional slips that suggest a lack of serious editing: One not-very-long sentence begins "Robert was unaware of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, ..." And the next sentence is: "He was unaware of almost all these infidelities." The repetition may possibly be intentional, a reinforcement of the point, but it's hardly necessary. I think it more likely just a moment of inattentiveness as he launches into a discussion of Saint-Loup's relationship with Rachel, one that more and more seems to resemble Swann's with Odette. 

Mme. de Marsantes bids the narrator "an anxious goodbye" -- although he isn't really planning to leave -- and then switches back to the more formal manner of "a grande dame who knew exactly how to conduct herself." But when Mme. de Villeparisis overhears him telling Saint-Loup's mother that he is in no hurry and is waiting for Charlus, she surprises him by being displeased at his being on "friendly terms" with the Baron, and urges him to go on without Charlus. So, "under the impression that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew," he takes his leave. 

As he's descending the staircase, he hears Charlus call out to him, "So this is what you call waiting for me, is it?" And so the two of them set out together on foot, Charlus saying that he wants to wait until he sees a cab to his liking. On the street, cab after cab passes without being hailed, some of them even stopping, but Charlus says he's waiting for one with the right kind of lamps. He talks to the narrator "with the same sporadic familiarity that had already struck me in Balbec, and which was in such contrast with the harshness of his tone." 

"I have often thought, monsieur, that there was in me, thanks not to my humble gifts but to circumstances that you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth of experience, a kind of secret dossier of inestimable worth, which I have not felt it proper to use for my own purposes, but which would be of priceless benefit to a young man to whom I would hand over, in a matter of months, what it has taken me more than thirty years to acquire, and which I am perhaps alone in possessing."

The narrator has no idea what he's getting at, and is further puzzled when he breaks off this thread to ask him about Bloch and whether "my school friend was young, good-looking, and so forth." When the narrator says Bloch is French, Charlus says, "'I took him to be Jewish.' His assertion of such an incompatibility led me to believe that M. de Charlus was more anti-Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. And yet he went on to protest against the charge of treason leveled against Dreyfus." The narrator's confusion about Charlus's attitude continues when the Baron asserts that Dreyfus "would have committed a crime against his country if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has that got to do with France?" And nothing the narrator can say, such as observing that if there were a war against France, Jews would have to serve, too, can dislodge Charlus from his course of thought. Charlus even pursues a fantasy in which Bloch stages some "biblical entertainment" that involved Bloch as David and Bloch's father as Goliath, and an "excellent spectacle" in which Bloch attacks his mother: "to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving the old cow what she deserves." 

The narrator rightly characterizes these as "dreadful, almost deranged remarks," noting that as he makes them, "M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it hurt," and reflects "that the connections, scantily investigated to date, I felt, between goodness and evil in the same heart, various as they might be, would be an interesting area of study." Then, coincidentally, he sees Bloch's father on the street, and offers to introduce him to the Baron, who takes umbrage at the very idea, citing "the youth of the person making the introduction, and the unworthiness of the person introduced."

But as it happened, M. Bloch was paying no attention to us. He was busy greeting Mme Sazerat effusively, to her great delight. This startled me, for previously, in Combray, she was so anti-Semitic that she had been indignant with my parents for allowing young Bloch into the house. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind, had blown M. Bloch right up against her a few days before this. My friend's father had found Mme Sazerat charming and was particularly gratified by the lady's anti-Semitism, which he saw as a proof of the sincerity of her faith and the authenticity of her Dreyfusard views. 

Clearly, the Dreyfus affair made strange bedfellows. 

Again, we have to wonder how the narrator knows all of this, including the conversation that Bloch père is said to have had with Nissim Bernard about his encounter with Mme. Sazerat, which elicits this wonderful portrait of M. Bernard: 

Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on, for reasons to be revealed in due course, he now looked like a Pre-Raphaelite worm onto which hairs had been indecently grafted, like threads in the depths of an opal. 

Charlus continues with his baffling ramble, mentioning in the course of it the loss of his wife, "the loveliest, noblest, most perfect creature imaginable," and then bristling at the sight of M. d'Argencourt, who "tried to avoid us" but is thwarted by Charlus, who insists on talking to d'Argencourt about the narrator. "I noted that M. d'Argencourt, to whom I had barely been introduced at Mme. de Villeparisis's, and to whom M. de Charlus had now spoken at length about my family, was appreciably colder to me than he had been an hour ago, and subsequently, for a long time, he behaved with the same reserve whenever we met." Clearly, Charlus has an odd effect on people. 

As they walk on, the narrator introduces the topic of the Duchesse de Guermantes, but elicits from Charlus only the demand that he "give up society life. It pained me to see you at that ridiculous gathering." He asks this as part of a kind of Mephistophelian bargain, as a "sacrifice" in return for which he can bestow all manner of gifts on the narrator: "The 'Open Sesame' to the Guermantes mansion, and any others worthy of throwing open their doors to you, lies with me." 

Then the narrator asks about Mme. de Villeparisis and her family, and learns that she gained the name when she married a M. Thirion, who "thought that he could adopt some defunct aristocratic name with impunity," and chose Villeparisis because, "there have been no Villeparisis since 1702." 

The fact that Mme de Villeparisis as merely Mme Thirion completed her downfall in my estimation, which had begun when I saw the uneven gathering of people in her salon.... I continued to visit her occasionally, and from time to time she sent me tokens of remembrance. But in no way did it seem to me that she was part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and if I had needed any information about it, she was one of the last people I should have asked.

Charlus continues with some modified praise for Saint-Loup as a suitable friend for the narrator: "At least he's a proper man, not one of those effeminate creatures one comes across everywhere nowadays, who look just like rent boys capable of bringing their innocent victims to a sorry end at the drop of a hat.' (I did not know the meaning of this slang expression, 'rent boy.')" And with that, Charlus hires a cab driven by a drunken cabbie, gets into the cab beside him and drives the cab himself.  

Day Eighty-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 261-275

From "M. de Charlus was soon seated..." to "...I was the same man."

_____

Charlus has arrived, though Mme. de Villeparisis was not too happy about it, largely because he could be unpredictable and, as the narrator puts it, "was the soul of indiscretion." Charlus has yet to acknowledge the narrator, who observes, "The tuft of his gray hair, the twinkling eye beneath the eyebrow pushed up by his monocle, the red flowers in his buttonhole were like three mobile apexes in a convulsive and striking triangle.... [T]he Baron's roving eyes, like those of a street hawker constantly on the lookout for the 'cops' to appear, had certainly explored every corner of the room and taken in everybody there." 

Odette, too, is somewhat distant, and when the narrator says something nice about de Norpois to her, she tells him that Charlus said that at a dinner recently de Norpois had referred to the narrator as "a hysterical little flatterer." The narrator, realizing that he had once tried to use de Norpois to get an introduction to Odette, changes the subject to the Duchesse de Guermantes. "Mme Swann adopted the pretense of regarding her as a person of no interest, whose presence one did not even notices." 

Then, "in my attempt to form an exact picture of the life of Mme de Guermantes," he asks Mme. de Villeparisis about Mme. Leroi, who refers to her "with affected disdain" as "the daughter of those wealthy timber merchants.... I've known such interesting, such delightful people in my time that I can't really think that Mme Leroi could add anything further to that." She asks de Norpois whether Mme. Leroi isn't "very inferior to all the people who come here," but he responds only with an enigmatic bow. So she says to the narrator, "there are some absurd people about. Would you believe that I was visited this afternoon by a gentleman who tried to persuade me that he found more pleasure in kissing my hand than a young woman's." The narrator knows "immediately that this must have been Legrandin." 

Next he talks with Saint-Loup and suggests that they dine together the next day, and discovers that Saint-Loup is dining with Bloch, who has so recently been denouncing him to everyone. Saint-Loup says, "I think it's friendship for life between us, on his part at least." The narrator is not surprised: "To fulminate against someone was often Bloch's way of showing a keen sympathy that he had supposed was not reciprocal." 

And speaking of abrupt reversals, Charlus suddenly invites the narrator to visit him. But their conversation is interrupted by Saint-Loup's departure, after a small quarrel with his mother. She expresses her distress to the narrator, who "was glad not to give her the impression by leaving with Robert that I was involved in the pleasures that deprived her of him." 

At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case, Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend; in the other, his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet, in that interval of a few hours, I was the same man.

The narrator's involvement in society has become much more complicated. 

Day Eighty-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 237-248

From "'You're not going to Mme Sagan's ball...'" to "...and Robert himself entered the room." 

_____

Bloch's bumptiousness continues, but it doesn't seem to bother de Norpois, "who told us afterward, somewhat naïvely, remembering perhaps the few surviving traces in Bloch's speech of the neo-Homeric manner he had largely outgrown: 'He is rather amusing, with that slightly outmoded, solemn manner of speaking he has.'" But the argument about the Dreyfus case persists until the Duc de Châtelleraut, "who could feel that everyone was turning against Bloch, and who, like many society people, was a coward," makes a remark about the fact that Bloch is Jewish. Bloch replies, "'But how did you know? Who told you?,' as though he had been the son of a convict. Yet, given his last name, which was not exactly Christian in flavor, and his face, there was something rather naïve in his startled words." 

Mme. de Villeparisis, in the meantime, had come to the conclusion "that he could be a compromising person for M. de Norpois to know.... So she decided to make it clear to Bloch that he need not come to the house again." She does so by feigning a kind of drowsiness when Bloch comes to take his leave, and by not extending her hand. Bloch persists, in an effort not to lose face, and 

thrust out the hand she had refused to shake. Mme de Villeparisis was shocked. But ... she merely let her eyelids droop over her half-closed eyes.

"I think she's asleep," said Bloch to the archivist.... "Goodbye madame," Bloch shouted. 

The Marquise moved her lips slightly, like a dying woman who wants to open her mouth but whose eyes show no sign of recognition. Then she turned, brimming with renewed vitality, to the Marquis d'Argencourt, while Bloch left the room convinced that she must be soft in the head.

Nevertheless, the narrator tells us, she received Bloch a few days later because she still wanted him to stage the play for her. Meanwhile, her dismissal of Bloch has become society gossip, "but in a version that had already ceased to bear any relation to the truth.

After Bloch's departure, Saint-Loup's mother, Mme. de Marsantes, arrives. She is also, as the narrator tells us, the Duc de Guermantes's sister. "She was especially friendly to me because I was Robert's friend, and also because I did not move in the same world as Robert." 

Then Mme. de Villeparisis informs the Duchesse de Guermantes that she's expecting the arrival of "someone whom you've no desire to know": Odette Swann. Odette, the narrator comments, has become an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, because she was afraid that Swann's Jewish "origins might  turn to her disadvantage." She was also "following the example of Mme Verdurin, in whom a latent bourgeois anti-Semitism had awakened and grown to a positive frenzy." The Duchesse thanks Mme. de Villeparisis for the warning and assures her that since she knows Odette by sight, she'll "be able to leave at the right moment." Mme. de Marsantes, however, tells the Duchesse that Odette is "very nice. She's an excellent woman." 

Mme. de Villeparisis changes the subject to Lady Israels, and Mme. de Marsantes reveals that she has broken off relations with her. 

"It seems she's one of the very worst of them and makes no secret of the fact. Besides, we've all been too trusting, too hospitable. I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we closed our doors to old country cousins, our own flesh and blood, we opened them to Jews. Now we can see what thanks we get for it."

Then she stops, noting that her son, "young fool that he is," has very different feelings on the matter. And shortly after that, Saint-Loup himself arrives.