Day One Hundred Six: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 59-78

Part II, Chapter I, from "I caught sight of Swann, and wanted..." to "...snatch the fateful palm and march at the head." 

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The narrator sees Swann greeting the Prince de Guermantes in the garden, but,  "with the force of a suction pump," being taken away by the Prince, "certain persons informed me, 'in order to show him the door.'" But as surprised as the reader might be by this incident, the narrator makes no further comment on it at this point, instead turning his characteristically minute attention to "Hubert Robert's celebrated fountain," and to the drenching Mme. d'Arpajon receives when a gust of wind blows it her way.

He is then pulled aside by Charlus, who offers his hand and says, "It's nice to see you here." And then he adds, "but above all it's very comic." His "roars of laughter" draws attention from people who, "knowing both how hard of access he was and how liable to insolent 'outburst,' approached in curiosity and then, with an almost indecent haste, took to their heels." 

The narrator leaves the garden and returns to the house, where he is met by the Princesse, who notes that he will be dining with her and the Duchesse at the Queen of Italy's, where there will be all sorts of royalty. She says, "'It'll be most intimidating,' out of sheer silliness, which, among society people, even outweighs their vanity." Then the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes arrive, but the narrator is prevented from going to see them by the Turkish ambassadress, who had previously assured him that the Duc was gay and who now praises the Princesse after having scorned her at the Duchesse's dinner party. Her hypocrisy annoys the narrator.

Again, he observes the façade of egalitarianism that the Guermantes are capable of assuming:

"But you are our equal, if not better," the Guermantes seemed, by all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, so as to be liked and admired, but not so as to be believed; to tease out the fictitious nature of this amiability was to have been what they called well brought up; to believe that amiability to be real was to lack breeding.

The narrator proves this point for himself on another occasion when, seeing the Duc beckoning to him across the room, he responds only with a deep bow and doesn't join him. "I might have written a masterpiece, and the Guermantes would have done me less honor than for that low bow," for the Duchesse makes a special point of mentioning to the narrator's mother how impressed the Duc had been by it.
 

He now overhears M. de Vaugoubert and Charlus in a conversation about which guests might be gay. Not that Vaugoubert is likely to act on the information: "The diplomatic career had had the same effect on his life as if he had taken holy orders." Then the narrator and the Duchesse are approached by Mme. Timoléon d'Amoncourt, who had a sort of literary salon and who now makes her way in society by distributing among its members letters and manuscripts she has been given by famous authors. She tells the Duchesse that she has a letter in which D'Annunzio praises her beauty and that she has some manuscripts by Ibsen she wants to give her. She also claims to have met the narrator at the Princess of Parma's, where he has never been, and that "The Russian Emperor would like your father to be sent to Petersburg." He learns that "She always had a state secret to reveal to you, a potentate whom you must meet, a watercolor by a master to offer you. There was an element of falsehood certainly in all these futile attractions, but they made of her life a comedy of scintillating complexity, and it was a fact that she had secured the appointment of precepts and generals." 

The Duchesse's status in society is demonstrated as they walk "between a double hedge of guests who, aware that they would never get to know 'Oriane,' wanted at least, as a curiosity, to point her out to their wives." The narrator notes that the Duchesse's salon included people whom the Princesse would never have been able to invite, because of the Prince's anti-Semitism. The Princesse could not invite Mme. Alphonse de Rothschild or Baron Hirsch, "whom the Prince of Wales had brought to [the Duchesse's] house but not to that of the Princesse." And here we get a hint of what may have happened between the Prince and Swann earlier: 

His anti-Semitism ... made no concessions to the fashionable, however highly accredited, and if he received Swann, whose friend he had been from a long way back, ... it was because, knowing that Swann's grandmother, a Protestant married to a Jew, had been the mistress of the Duc de Berry, he tried, from time to time, to believe in the legend that had it that Swann's father was an illegitimate son of the Prince. On this hypothesis, which was, however, false, Swann, the son of a Catholic, who had himself been the son of a Bourbon and a Catholic woman, was Christian through and through.

Next, the Duchesse sights Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who has, through a careful process of elimination, created a celebrated salon. "But the fact was that the pre-eminence of the Saint-Euverte salon existed only for those whose social life consists merely in reading the accounts of matinées and soirées in Le Gaulois  or Le Figaro, without ever having been to any of them." Such readers imagined "the Saint-Euverte salon to be the first in Paris, whereas it was one of the last." The Duchesse wonders why the Princesse "should invite us here with all these dregs." 

Day One Hundred Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 37-59

Part II, Chapter I, from "As I was not in any hurry to arrive..." to "...moved away to let him welcome the new arrivals." 

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And so the narrator goes to the reception at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes's, still uncertain whether he has been invited or been the victim of a practical joke.

Outside, he encounters the Duc de Châtellerault, who has been "outed" to him by yesterday's conversation between Jupien and Charlus. Somehow, the narrator has learned of a liaison between the Duc and the Princesse's doorman, in which the Duc managed to keep his identity secret by pretending to be an Englishman. So when the Duc and doorman meet again at the entrance to the reception, there's a comical recognition scene: "As he asked his 'Englishman' of two days before what name he should announce, the doorman was not merely moved, he judged himself to be indiscreet, tactless.... On hearing the guest's reply, 'the Duc de Châtellerault,' he felt so overcome with pride that he remained speechless for a moment." 

The narrator, on the other hand, expects social ruin when his own name is "roared out, like the sound preceding a possible cataclysm," fearing that the Princesse will order the footmen to haul him away. Instead she rises and approaches him graciously, then dismisses him with the words, "You'll find the Prince in the garden." But now he faces another dilemma: finding someone who will introduce him to the Prince. He sees Charlus, who could have done so, but is afraid that the Baron will not forgive him for arriving at the reception without his prior intercession -- he had earlier assured the narrator, "The only entrée to those salons is through me."
 

Then he's stopped by someone else he knows, "Professor E--," the physician he encountered when his grandmother suffered her stroke, and who seemed more interested in getting ready for his dinner with the minister of commerce than in helping the ill woman. Now, Professor E--, who knows no one at the reception, having been invited because of his recent successful treatment of the Prince, wants to cling to the narrator. But the latter manages to shrug him off to talk to the Marquis de Vaugoubert, who "was one of the few men (perhaps the only man) in society who found himself in what is known in Sodom as 'confidence' with M. de Charlus." That is, Vaugoubert had committed youthful homosexual indiscretions known to Charlus. But ambitious to make his way in the Foreign Ministry, Vaugoubert has devoted himself to chastity: 

Having gone from an almost infantile debauchery to absolute continence on the day his thoughts turned to the Quai d'Orsay and the desire to make a great career, he wore the look of a caged beast, casting glances in all directions expressive of fear, craving, and stupidity.

He has married, but Mme. de Vaugoubert is as masculine as her husband is effeminate. "I felt, alas, that she looked on me with interest and curiosity as one of the young men who appealed to M. de Vaugoubert, and whom she would have so much liked to be, now that her aging husband preferred youth."

However, the narrator still hasn't persuaded anyone to introduce him to the Prince. Next he sees Mme. d'Arpajon, and his inability for a moment to remember her name sends him off into a reverie about how we remember names. And here Proust begins to craft a dialogue between the narrator and the reader, playing off the latter's frustration with his seeming ability to move his story forward: 

"All of which," the reader will say, "teaches us nothing about this lady's disobligingness; but since you've been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l'Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well." It is very regrettable, you are right, M. le Lecteur.

And he goes on with more reflections on the topic of remembering things until the reader interrupts again: "'So Mme d'Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?' No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again." This bit of authorial raillery perhaps reflects Proust's interest in English fiction, where such author-reader interchanges often take place, and it also raises the question of the narrator's identity, on which Proust had no doubt already been challenged by readers and critics.

In any case, Mme. d'Arpajon doesn't introduce him to the Prince, leaving him venturing to approach Charlus again, only to be interrupted by Mme. de Gallardon, who wants to introduce her nephew, Adalbert, Vicomte de Courvoisier, to Charlus. The Baron responds to her with his customary surliness, but the narrator persists with his own request. 

[P]erhaps -- in spite of his ill-humor against me -- I would have succeeded with him when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not had the unhappy idea of adding, out of scrupulousness, and so that he should not suppose me tactless enough to have entered on the off chance, relying on him to enable me to stay, "You know that I know them very well, the Princesse has been very kind to me." "Well, if you know them, what need have you of me to introduce you?" he snapped at me and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game of cards with the nuncio, the German ambassador, and a personage whom I did not know. 

Finally, he succeeds when he encounters M. de Bréauté, who obligingly effects the introduction. He finds the Prince aloof, in contrast with the agreeableness of the Duc de Guermantes, but paradoxically "realized at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit 'as an equal,' and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince."

Day One Hundred One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 480-494

Part II, Chapter II, from "Meanwhile, as she took her place at table..." to "...like a lamb and refraining from fisticuffs."

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We finally get to the dinner table, but the exposition of the character of the Duc and Duchesse doesn't cease. When M. de Grouchy arrives late, he offers, perhaps partly as an apology, to send six brace of pheasant to the Duchesse. She insists on sending the footman Poullein to pick them up, telling him to switch with another servant because it's his day off tomorrow. The narrator knows, however, from a conversation with Poullein in the hallway after seeing the Elstirs, that he's planning to see his fiancée tomorrow. 

After Poullein leaves the dining room, "everyone complimented the Duchesse on her kindness toward her servants." She replies, "That one is a trifle irritating because he's in love. He finds it appropriate to go about with a lovesick look on his face." Poullein returns to the room, and M. de Grouchy observes that "he doesn't look very cheerful. One needs to be kind to these people, but not too kind." 

Meanwhile, the Princess of Parma is trying to keep up with the Duchesse's witticisms and unconventional opinions, and compliments her on the "Teaser Augustus" pun. The Duc explains the joke to the narrator, who is reminded of his appointment to see Charlus after dinner. He thinks of mentioning it, but decides it more tactful not to do so. 

The conversation turns to the Duchesse's cousin, Mme. d'Heudicourt, and her dinner parties, with the Duchesse -- who, the narrator observes, "was not too keen that the award of 'best table in Paris' should go to any table but her own" -- making catty remarks about the quantity of food served: "My cousin follows the same pattern as the constipated writers who present us with a one-act play or a sonnet every fifteen years. The sort of things people call little masterpieces, little jewels of nothing -- the sort of thing I really hate, in fact. The food at Zénaïde's place isn't bad, but one would find it more humdrum if she were less parsimonious." 

The narrator, meanwhile, finds himself in conversation with the Comtesse d'Arpajon about the archives of correspondence at Mme. d'Heudicourt's Normandy residence. The Prince d'Agrigente is seated between them. The Comtesse asks the narrator, 

"Have you noticed that an author's letters are often superior to the rest of his work? Who was the man who wrote Salammbô?"

I would have preferred not to have to reply and to curtail this conversation, but I felt it would be rather unkind to the Prince d'Agrigente; he was pretending to know perfectly well whom Salammbô was by and to be leaving it to me to say, whereas he was actually in a painful quandary.

"Flaubert," I ended up saying, but the assenting nods performed by the Prince's head smothered the sound of my remark, with the result that the lady I was talking to was not exactly sure whether I had said Paul Bert or Fulbert, names that did not ring quite right in her ears.

The Duc begins proclaiming rather philistine tastes in literature and music, including the fact that Wagner puts him to sleep. The Duchess intervenes to opine, "Even with his insufferable long-windedness, Wagner had elements of genius. Lohengrin is a masterpiece. Even in Tristan there are occasionally intriguing passages. And the Spinning Chorus in The Flying Dutchman is perfect heaven." (Note to non-Wagnerites: these opinions mark the Duchesse as musically unsophisticated.) The Duc goes on, however, to jumble up Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute) with the now mostly forgotten composer Auber (Fra Diavolo, Les Diamants de la couronne) -- "that's what we call music!" -- and to confuse Balzac with Dumas. 

The narrator characterizes the dinner party as "such an ordinary, humdrum table," when he hears Mme. d'Arpajon denouncing Victor Hugo as "incapable of making the distinction between beauty and ugliness." Meanwhile, the Princess of Parma and the Duchesse are gossiping "in an undertone" about Mme. d'Arpajon, a lately cast-off mistress of the Duc's.

"She's not a dreadful person, but, believe me, she's unimaginably boring. She gives me such a headache each day that I'm forever having to take painkillers. And it's all because Basin took it into his head to go to bed with her behind my back for a year or so. And if that wasn't enough, I've got a footman who's in love with a little slut and goes about sulking if I don't ask the young lady to quit her streetwalking profits for half an hour and come and have tea with me! It's enough to drive one mad!" the Duchess concluded languidly. 

Meanwhile, the footman in question, Poullein, is serving dishes to the Duc de Châtellerault, performing "his task so awkwardly that the young Duc's elbow was constantly coming in contact with his own." M. de Châtellerault "showed no sign of annoyance with the blushing footman," but the narrator suspects "that he was aware of the servant's disappointed hopes and that what he was in fact feeling was perhaps a malicious amusement."

The Duchesse's comments on literature are so middlebrow that the narrator reflects, "Since such tastes were the opposite of my own, she fed me with literature when she spoke to me about the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and never seemed so stupidly Faubourg Saint-Germain as when she talked about literature." The Duc, however, is proud of his wife, and convinced that she is impressing the narrator:  "Oriane is really extraordinary," the narrator imagines him thinking. "She can talk about anything, she's read everything. She couldn't possibly have guessed that the conversation this evening  would turn to Victor Hugo. Whatever the subject, she's ready for it. She can hold her own with the most learned people. This young man here must be quite enthralled." 

Finally, the Princess drops the name of Émile Zola into the conversation: 

At the name Zola, not a single muscle stirred on the face of M. de Beautreillis. The General's anti-Dreyfusism lay too deep for him even to attempt to give expression to it. And his benign silence when such topics were broached touched the hearts of the uninitiated as the sign of the same delicacy that a priest shows in avoiding any reference to one's religious obligations, a financial adviser in making sure that he does not recommend the companies he himself controls, a strong man in behaving like a lamb and refraining from fisticuffs.