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 Forty-Five: The Prisoner, pp. 206-218

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Ten: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 137-150

Part II, Chapter I, from "I made a pretense of being busy writing...." to "...a state of euphoria whose source she never divined."

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When Albertine enters, the narrator pretends to be writing his note to Gilberte, and when she admires the slipcase that Gilberte had given him, he presents it to her. "The slipcase, Gilberte's agate marble, all that had once derived its importance from a purely internal state, since now, for me, they were just any old slipcase, any old marble." When Albertine leaves, he resumes writing the letter. 

Then he reports that, after returning from a visit to a spa, the Duc de Guermantes, influenced by some Italian "women of superior intellect" he had met, has become "a rabid Dreyfusard," following the pattern of the Prince de Guermantes. This seems to be a prelude to a seismic shift in the Guermantes's social standing, for the narrator notes that Mme. Verdurin, through her association with the Princess Yourbeletieff, a patron of the Ballets Russes, which were taking Paris by storm, has risen in social prominence. Moreover, so has Odette Swann: "Her salon had crystallized around a man, a dying man, who had passed almost overnight, at a time when his talent was running dry, from obscurity to great fame. The infatuation with the works of Bergotte was immense." 

Odette has a reputation as an anti-Dreyfusard, which has drawn others to her, such as Mme. d'Épinoy who, visiting Odette to ask for a contribution to the right-wing Patrie Française, is surprised to find her salon filled with fashionable people. "Since, without her being aware of it, the Princesse d'Épinoy saw people's place in society as internal to them, she was obliged to disincarnate Mme Swann and reincarnate her in a fashionable woman." So now Odette is seen in the company of "Mme de Marsantes and the woman who, thanks to the progressive effacement of the Duchesse de Guermantes (sated with honors, and annihilating herself by putting up no reisistance), was on the way to becoming the 'lioness,' the queen of the hour, the Comtesse Molé." 

Even the narrator's role in society has begun to change: "Mme Swann was able to believe I was making up with her daughter out of snobbery." Adding to this is Gilberte's inheritance of "nearly eighty million francs" from "an uncle of Swann's." As for Swann himself, his Dreyfusism does no harm to Odette's standing, "because they said, 'He's senile, an idiot, no one pays him any attention, only his wife counts and she's charming.'" Odette's reputation as an "intellectual," though wholly undeserved, also counts in her favor: "to prefer Mme Swann was to prove that you were intelligent, like going to a concert rather than a tea party." The narrator is surprised to hear Mme. de Montmorency compare Odette to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to the latter's disadvantage, saying that if the Duchesse had "stuck at it more, she'd have managed to create a salon." He comments, "If Mme de Guermantes did not have a 'salon,' what, then, was a 'salon'?"