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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIN

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

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 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-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 211-226

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*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: The Prisoner, pp. 285-305

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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