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."
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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."
From "I, for my part, returned home..." to "...that she had had a slight stroke."
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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.
From "We returned to the drawing room...." to "... off they set at a brisk trot."
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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.
From "Though it was a Sunday..." to "...'her again, one of these evenings.'"
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The narrator goes to two very different social events.
In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."
We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."
I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.
And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which
like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.
When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."
And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?
Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."
The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.
So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.
Bloch père is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet the elder Bloch is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mention of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."
As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double status of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.
Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."
