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-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?)"

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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 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."

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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-Six: The Prisoner, pp. 218-236

From "To our great astonishment, when Brichot said how sad..." to "...transposition, into the realm of sound, of profundity."

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Mme. Verdurin surprises them with her open indifference to the death of the Princess Sherbatoff, even claiming that the Princess had a bad reputation. Her attitude "had a curiously modern, 'problem-play' sound to it, and also it was gloriously convenient; for want of feeling or immorality, once confessed, simplify life as effectively as loose morals: they remove the need to find excuses for blameworthy actions, and transform them into obligations of sincerity." But Charlus puts his foot in it by saying, "I'm glad the evening wasn't cancelled, because of my own guests."

The narrator notes that Mme. Verdurin has about her a "rather disagreeable smell of nose-drops," which she explains by saying they were prescribed to her because of her tendency to cry while listening to Vinteuil's music. "My nose gets all congested, and two days later I look like an old drunkard and to get my vocal cords working again I have to have days of inhalations." And here we learn that another member the little group has died: Cottard. And Mme. Verdurin's response to his death is similarly callous: "Well, there you are, he's dead, we all die, he'd killed patients enough, it was time to take his own medicine." (This is one of the inconsistencies Carol Clark notes in her preface: Proust has Cottard at the party talking with Mme. Verdurin and Ski only 11 pages earlier, and he is spotted again at the party later.)

The narrator asks her if Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are present. "No, I've just had a telegram, said Mme Verdurin evasively, they've had to stay in the country." When Morel comes over to say hello, he asks him about their absence, but he seems "to know very little about it." And, apropos Charlus's attitude toward Morel, we get another of the narrator's little observations about homosexuality:

The invert who has been able to nourish his passion only with a literature written for men who love women, who thought of men as he read Musset's Nights, feels a need to share, in the same way, all the social roles of the man who is not an invert, to keep someone as the admirer of chorus-girls does, or the old habitué of the Opéra, and also to settle down, to marry or live with a man, to be a father.

The narrator continues to establish his heterosexuality by commenting on his eye for the single women at the party, and contrasting it with "the furtive messages" that Charlus and the other gay men at the party -- who include "two dukes, an eminent general, a famous writer, great doctor and distinguished lawyer" -- are exchanging, in which they comment on young men as "she." He also comments on Mme. Verdurin's tolerance of homosexuality, which he refers to as "Charlisme": "Like every ecclesiastical power, she regarded mere human weaknesses as less serious than anything that could weaken the authority principle, damage orthodoxy, alter the ancient creed, in her little church." Unfortunately, Charlus is about to do just that: "What doomed M. de Charlus on that evening was the bad manners -- so common among society people -- of his guests, who were now beginning to arrive." They are determined to snub their hostess, referring to her as "old Mother Verdurin."

And M. de Charlus, as his guests pushed their way through the crowd to come and congratulate him, to thank him as if he had been the host, did not think to ask them to say a word to Mme Verdurin. Only the Queen of Naples, in whose veins ran the same noble blood as in her sisters, the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchesse d'Alençon, began to talk to Mme Verdurin as if she had come to the house for the pleasure of seeing Mme Verdurin, more than for the music or to see M. de Charlus. 

The rudeness is stilled when the concert begins: "respect for the music -- thanks to the prestige of Palamède -- had suddenly been instilled into a crowd as ill-mannered as it was smart." Mme. Verdurin also assumes her role in the concert, "a divinity presiding over the musical solemnities, a goddess of Wagnerism and migraine, a kind of almost tragic Norn, summoned up by genius in the midst of all these bores." 

And here begins one of the narrator's lengthy internal monologues, Proust's attempt to re-create the experience of listening to a concert, with the narrator's thoughts not only about the music but also about the images and feelings it elicits from him. The piece by Vinteuil is unfamiliar to him because it has not previously been performed, but in the midst of it,  "more wonderful than any girl, the little phrase, wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and still as scarves, came towards me, still recognizable under these new ornaments." (The "little phrase," of course, is the one that Swann adopted for him and Odette; here the narrator, in one of those fusions of himself with Swann, has made it his own.) But as caught up as he is in the music, he is distracted enough from it to notice Mme. Verdurin's usual poses as she listens to it. "And I stopped listening to the music to wonder again whether Albertine had seen Mlle Vinteuil in the past few days or not, as one reinvestigates an inward pain from which one has been for a moment distracted. For it was inside me that all Albertine's actions took place." But he returns to the music for an extended impression of its effect on him.  

Day One Hundred Twenty-Nine: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 449-460

Part II, Chapter III, from "Meanwhile, and as if he were dealing with..." to "...at the top of his voice, raising his hands, 'Alleluia!'" 

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Charlus's relationship with Morel takes an even odder turn one evening when, as they are returning from an evening at the Verdurins', Morel takes his leave from the Baron, the narrator, and Albertine. Charlus, who has expected to spend the rest of the evening with Morel, is so distraught that the narrator proposes to stay with the Baron, sending Albertine away. He goes with Charlus to a café, where the Baron demands paper and ink and writes an eight-page letter to Morel which he gives to the narrator to deliver and to say "that you thought you caught something about sending seconds -- I am fighting tomorrow indeed."

Morel is in high spirits when the narrator arrives with the letter, which he initially refuses to read: "No, a hundred times over; you don't know that old crook's lies, his infernal stratagems. It's a device to get me to go and see him. Well, I'm not going; I want a peaceful evening." When the narrator says he thought it was something about a duel, Morel replies, "I don't give a damn, that disgusting old man can happily go and get himself massacred if he wants." But he changes his mind and decides to read the letter, whereupon he rushes to see Charlus.

Being in a mood that evening not to be able to do without Morel, he had invented that it had been reported to him that two of the regimental officers had slandered him in connection with the violinist, and that he was going to send his seconds to them. Morel had glimpsed the scandal, his life in the regiment made impossible, and had come running.

Charlus is, of course, "delirious with joy" at Morel's arrival. He has even persuaded himself that he wanted to fight and that he "felt regret at giving up this duel, originally contrived only to get Morel to come." And there is a hilarious, almost Falstaffian moment in which Charlus starts to mime sword-fighting maneuvers, "leading us to move our beer glasses closer for safety, and to fear that the first clash of blades might wound the adversaries, the doctor, and the seconds." He has already sent for Cottard to act as a second and tries to persuade the narrator to summon Elstir to paint the scene.

But if M. de Charlus was enchanted by the prospect of a fight that he had at first thought purely fictitious, Morel was reflecting in terror on the rumors that, thanks to the stir that the duel would make, might be hawked all the way from the regimental band to the temple on the rue Bergère. 

Cottard arrives in a state of high excitement that swiftly turns to disappointment and then discomfort when Charlus displays affection toward him for his support, holding Cottard's hand and stroking it. He feels a moment of homophobic panic, imagining "that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to a rape, for the accomplishment of which, the duel having served merely as a pretext, he had been drawn into an ambush and led by the Baron into this lonely hall, where he was about to be taken by force." Fortunately, Mme. Cottard is also there, and the scene -- one of the funniest in the novel -- ends with Charlus triumphant and Morel re-ensnared.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Eight: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 434-449

Part II, Chapter III, from "A great musician, a member of the Institute,..." to "...no one I have to say a single thank-you to."

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Charlus's ignorance of the talk about his relationship with Morel continues when the Verdurins are visited by a famous musician. Morel urges the Baron to flatter the man, for the sake of Morel's career, which he does. But as the narrator notes, Charlus is unaware that the musician "had asked Ski, referring to M. de Charlus and Morel, as he might have done to a man and his mistress: 'Have they been together long?'" The musician is a "man of the world," however, and means no malice toward Morel or Charlus. The narrator compares Charlus to a fish swimming in a tank, which lives in ignorance of "the amused passerby who is following his antics, or the all-powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, deferred at this moment in the case of the Baron (for whom the pisciculturalist, in Paris, will be Mme Verdurin), will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one."

There follows several pages of dense and allusive literary talk, centering mostly on Balzac, between Charlus and Brichot, with occasional contributions from Cottard, in the midst of which Charlus refers to the "pederasty" of some of Balzac's characters. When he utters the word, "Ski, Brichot, and Cottard had looked at one another with a smile that was less ironic perhaps than imbued with the satisfaction that dinner guests might feel who had succeeded in getting Dreyfus to talk about his own Affair, or the Empress about her reign." But when Ski tries to get him to elaborate on the subject, "the Baron assumed the annoyed, mysterious, and finally (seeing they were not listening to him) severe and judicial expression of a father hearing improprieties being spoken in front of his daughter." He tries to change the subject to "things that might interest this young lady" -- indicating Albertine but, the narrator observes, clearly meaning Morel. In fact, Charlus later confirms this for the narrator:

"You know," he said to me, referring to the violinist, "he's not at all what you might think, he's a very decent boy who's always stayed very sensible, very responsible." And you felt from these words that M. de Charlus looked on sexual inversion as a danger equally as threatening for young men as prostitution is for women, and that, if he used the epithet ''responsible" in connection with Morel, it was in the sense that it acquires when applied to a young working girl. 

Charlus is also concerned that, when he returns to Paris with Morel, "the latter's family might step in and his happiness be put in jeopardy."

As for Morel, it's clear to the narrator that he's simply using the Baron for advancement. Morel talks to the narrator "exactly as Rachel, Saint-Loup's mistress, had once done," and "judging by what M. de Charlus repeated to me, said the same things about me in my absence as Rachel had said about me to Robert." But he also treats the Baron cruelly when he's in the company of other soldiers, greeting him with "a shrug of the shoulders" and "a wink to his comrades," pretending to be asleep, or coughing as a signal to the others to "jokingly adopt the mincing speech of men of M. de Charlus's kind." He would finally return, "as though having been forced," to the Baron, "whose heart had been pierced by all these arrows." 

Charlus even tries to get Morel to change his name to something that echoes his, such as "Charmel." But he doesn't understand that "the name Morel was indissolubly linked to his first prize for violin, hence any modification was out of the question." Morel also doesn't like to be reminded of the difference in social status between them: 

"There was a time when my forebears were proud of the title of valet de chambre, of maître d'hôtel to the King." "There was another time," answered Morel haughtily, "when my forebears cut the throats of yours." 

As the narrator anticipates, this relationship doesn't work out well.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 419-434

Part II, Chapter III, from "I was naturally most surprised to learn..." to "...and has never acknowledged me since."

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Morel's success in getting the coachman fired and the chauffeur hired to replace him coincides with a change in his attitude toward the narrator, who notes that Morel had not only "ceased to keep his distance from me" but would even "literally bound toward me in an effusion of delight." The narrator assumes that Charlus had a hand in this change, but he adds a bit of foreshadowing: 

How at the time could I have guessed what I was told afterward (and of which I have never felt certain, Andrée's assertions concerning anything connected with Albertine, later on especially, having always struck me as needing to be taken with caution, for, as we saw earlier, she was not genuinely fond of my loved one but was jealous of her), what in any event, if it were true, had been remarkably well hidden from me by the two of them: that Albertine knew Morel well?

The narrator then attempts an analysis of Morel's character, which "was full of contradictions." Morel would do anything for money, except that he was "truly a past master" of the violin, having "put ahead of money his diploma as first-prize-winner at the Conservatoire." Morel trusts no one, and had recognized in the chauffeur "one of his own kind, ... a man mistrustful in the proper meaning of the word, who remains stubbornly silent when with decent people but at once sees eye to eye with a debauchee" -- again, a foreshadowing of what is to happen after the narrator returns to Paris. "In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are."

Meanwhile, Charlus has become "the most faithful" of Mme. Verdurin's set, even though he has been at least partially "outed" among them, and Cottard frets to Ski "whether I can allow him to travel with us after what you've told me." Mme. Cottard, overhearing this conversation, decides that Charlus must be Jewish, which leads to some comic misunderstanding between her and Charlus. Moreover, the others in the group, not knowing of Charlus's social status, conclude that they're doing him a favor by accepting him into their set, and they pride themselves in their tolerance: 

In fact, ... if M. de Charlus did not come, they felt disappointment almost at traveling only among people who were like everyone else and not to have next to them this bedizened, potbellied, and impenetrable personage, reminiscent of a box, of some suspect and exotic provenance, that gives off a curious smell of fruit, the mere thought of sampling which would turn the stomach.

Charlus, the narrator tells us, still believes that only a very few people know that he's gay, "and that none of them were on the Normandy coast." He doesn't know that "on a day when he and Morel were late and had not come by the train," Mme. Verdurin had announced to the group, "We won't wait for the young ladies any longer!" And he evidently doesn't get her true meaning when, on the nights when he and Morel stay over at La Raspelière, she gives them adjoining rooms and announces, "If you feel like making music, don't hesitate; the walls are like that of a fortress, you've no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like the dead."


Meanwhile, the narrator is still struggling with his feelings for Albertine, still persuading himself that he "no longer felt jealousy or scarcely any love for her, and gave no thought to what she might be doing on the days when I did not see her." But if, on the train to the Verdurins, she goes into another compartment with the other women in the group, he can't sit still. He has to get up and check "too see whether something abnormal might not be going on." 

He also manages to alienate the Princesse Sherbatoff when, one day on the train, he sees Mme. de Villeparisis and talks to her in the Princesse's presence. "I had absolutely no idea, however, that Mme de Villeparisis knew very well who my companion was but had no wish to meet her.... When I said goodbye to the Princesse, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not even offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since." 

Day One Hundred Twenty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 344-368

Part II, Chapter II, from "The piece having finished, I took the liberty..." to "...imploring heaven, beneath his monocle, for a martyr's crown."

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The narrator's request that Morel play something by César Franck is met with dismay by Mme. Verdurin, who requests Debussy's Fêtes instead. As Sturrock's note points out, these are orchestral pieces not readily transcribable to a solo violin. Morel knows only the beginning in any case, so he segues from that to a Meyerbeer march -- musically about as far away from Debussy as one can get. But "everyone thought it was still Debussy, and they went on calling out, 'Sublime!' By revealing that the composer was that not of Pelléas but of Robert le Diable, Morel cast a certain chill."

The rest of the evening is full of the same kind of comedy -- the whole "Wednesday" is one of Proust's funniest scenes. Ski informs the hostess that Charlus is not really a prince, "his family's bourgeois merely, of minor architects." When the narrator corrects him, Ski shrugs off the correction, "no more apologizing for his mistake than a few hours earlier for that which had almost caused us to miss the train."

Mme. Verdurin, who used to respond to anything funny by burying her face in her hands, now, on hearing a witticism from Brichot, "the Patronne would clutch at the Princesse's armpit, digging in her nails, and hide her head there for a moment or two like a child playing hide-and-seek." Once her phony spasm of laughter ends, "she could now let go of the Princesse's bruised shoulder, and she allowed her face to reappear, not without pretending to wipe her eyes and to catch her breath two or three times." 

Saniette remains the butt of every Verdurin joke, and when he admits that he doesn't know how to play whist, spoiling M. Verdurin's desire to play the game, "M. Verdurin, furious, marched on Saniette wearing a terrible expression: 'You don't know how to play anything, then!' he shouted, furious at having lost an opportunity for a game of whist, but overjoyed at finding one for insulting the former archivist." 

The Marquis de Cambremer, listening to Cottard's lame puns, demands of Verdurin, "Who is that gentleman playing cards? What's his occupation in life? What does he sell? I rather like to know who I find myself with, so as not to become intimate with just anyone at all." Verdurin seizes the opportunity to aggrandize himself, asserting that the man is "our family doctor," the more to astonish the Marquis when he reveals that this is the famous Professor Cottard. As for Cottard, he's annoyed when his wife drops off to sleep in her armchair. He succeeds in waking her: 

"My bath is just the right temperature," she murmured, "but the feathers of the dictionary..." she exclaimed, coming upright. "Oh, good heavens, I'm so silly! What am I saying? I was thinking about my hat, I must have said something foolish, I was just about to doze off, it's that wretched fire." Everyone started to laugh, for there was no fire.

Charlus, who is watching Morel play cards, "could not restrain himself from pinching the violinist's ear" and saying, "This young man is astonishing.... He plays like a god." When Mme. Verdurin suggests that they stay the night, Charlus replies that Morel's leave from Doncières extends only till midnight. "'He must go back there to sleep, like a very good, very obedient little boy,' he added, in a voice at once self-satisfied, affected, and insistent, as though he were deriving a sadistic and voluptuous pleasure from employing this chaste comparison, as well as letting his voice dwell in passing on what concerned Morel, from touching him with, for want of a hand, words that seemed to be palpating him." 

The narrator observes that Charlus's voice and mannerisms have become more effeminate. At the same time, the Baron has begun to utter witticisms at Mme. Verdurin's expense. "This was the first of the skirmishes between them.... There were, alas, to be others in Paris." But the Baron is still on guard against having his homosexuality exposed, and when Mme. Verdurin, referring to a little trip her husband is planning, says, "'I'm none too sure who he's invited. M. de Charlus, are you one of them?' The Baron, who heard only these final words and did not know they had been talking about an excursion to Arembouville, gave a start." 

Meanwhile, Mme. Verdurin has begun trying to sink her hooks into the narrator. She has invited him to bring Albertine -- whom the narrator is pretending is his cousin -- to her Wednesdays, and she makes disparaging remarks about Swann, partly because Swann had been part of the Duchesse de Guermantes' circle. "'And who's this Robert de Saint-Loup you were talking about?' she said anxiously, for she had heard that I was due to go and visit him in Doncières and was afraid he might cause me to default." She claims to have heard about Saint-Loup from Morel, "a complete lie, because Saint-Loup and Morel did not even know of each other's existence." 

Finally, the carriages arrive and the little group disperses.                                                                 

Day One Hundred Twenty-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 318-344

Part II, Chapter II, from "Even as I replied to the questions..." to "...And this may have been true."

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While talking with Mme. de Cambremer, the narrator recalls his conversation with his mother earlier that day in which she revealed that she has heard that Mme. Bontemps has said that a marriage between Albertine and the narrator "would be her aunt's dearest wish." He is inclined to "wait a little ... to try and find out whether I truly loved her," and thinks of bringing her to one of the Verdurins's "Wednesdays." Meanwhile, Mme. de Cambremer says that "everyone's talking about" Saint-Loup's "marriage with the Princesse de Guermantes's niece." The narrator, who knows of no such arrangement, is "seized by a fear of having spoken unsympathetically in front of Robert about a girl whose originality was false and whose mind was as second-rate as her character was violent." 

Brichot is still going on about place-name etymologies, dominating the dinner-table conversation, which is a relief to Saniette, who is nervously anticipating some attack from M. and Mme. Verdurin, who use him as a kind of whipping boy. Saniette "had been touched to hear M. Verdurin ... telling the maître d'hôtel to set a jug of water beside M. Saniette, who drank nothing else. (The generals who get the most soldiers killed insist that they be well fed.)" Also at the table is "an illustrious Norwegian philosopher" who speaks French so slowly and carefully that he can barely get a complete sentence out. 

The narrator, who has come to the soirée in part to get information about Mme. Putbus and the lady's maid he fears might be a potential seducer of Albertine, learns from Mme. Verdurin that she "tried hard to divert her holidays to Venice, we're rid of her for this year." He also overhears a conversation between Cottard and Ski that reveals they know of the rumors about Charlus's sexual orientation. 


Saniette falls into a trap with an innocent remark that allows the Verdurins to make fun of him. "Hardly one of the faithful could forbear from guffawing, and they looked like a band of cannibals whose taste for blood has been reawakened by a wound inflicted on a white man." And even when Saniette tries to redeem himself with a little pun, Verdurin claims to have heard the joke "a hundred times," when in fact he heard it once from Ski, who pretended it was his own invention. (It's worth noting that, throughout this episode at the Verdurins', Proust makes no effort to stick to the narrator's point of view, instead providing information about the characters' thoughts and their past history which would likely have been unavailable to his narrator.)


The narrator mentions some sketches he has seen at Elstir's, which allows Mme. Verdurin to reveal her former acquaintance with the painter they called Tiche, and that she doesn't "like at all, not at all" the paintings he has done since he broke with the "little set." "Basically a second-rater. I can tell you, I sensed that right away. All in all, he never interested me." When Cottard asks why Mme. Verdurin doesn't invite Elstir and his wife,

"No prize tart enters my house, M. le Professeur," said Mme. Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done her very best to get Elstir to return, even with his wife, but before they got married she had tried to come between them, she had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, and had stolen. Instead, Elstir had broken with the Verdurin salon.

As they leave the dinner table, there's another moment when, as with Cottard earlier, Charlus wonders if his secret is being alluded to. Verdurin says to him, "'I realized you were one of us from the very first words we exchanged!' M. de Charlus, who had placed a very different interpretation on this expression, gave a sudden start." But it quickly turns out that Verdurin was referring to the preference given to the Marquis de Cambremer because Charlus is "only a baron." This naturally raises Charlus's hackles, and he goes on to inform Verdurin that he is "also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, and Prince d'Oléron, de Carency, de Viareggio, and des Dunes." But then he reassures Verdurin that he's not offended, while at the same time condescending to him. 


While Mme. Verdurin is showing the narrator her painting by Elstir, and proclaiming that "the man was finished" the moment he broke with "the little nucleus," the Cambremers are inspecting the redecorating that the Verdurins have done with the property they are renting from them and pronouncing the Verdurins' taste bad. Charlus and Cambremer do a little one-upping and name-dropping with each other. ("The dukedom of Aumale was in our family for a long time before entering the House of France," M. de Charlus was explaining to M. de Cambremer, in front of an open-mouthed Morel, for whom this whole discourse was, if not addressed to him, intended.") And the narrator finds that his praise of Brichot's etymologizing has made him "appear stupid in the eyes of Mme Verdurin, who could see that I had 'swallowed' Brichot." 


The selection ends with Charlus accompanying Morel in Fauré's sonata for piano and violin, and with the narrator's comment about the decadent Baron: 

His sadness following the death of his wife did not, thanks to his habit of lying, debar M. de Charlus from a way of life that was out of keeping. Later on, he stooped so low as to let it be understood that, during the funeral ceremony, he had found a means of asking the altar boy for his name and address. And this may have been true.

Day One Hundred Twenty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 288-318

Part II, Chapter II, from "The coachman, though very young..." to "...if only in order to pass it on to his sister."

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Brichot and Cottard are disturbed to hear the news of Dechambre's death, fearing that Mme. Verdurin will be so upset that the Wednesday will be spoiled. But the narrator observes that "Like almost all society people, Mme Verdurin, precisely because she had need of the company of others, never gave them another thought after the day they died." And that "M. Verdurin would pretend that the death of the faithful so affected his wife that, in the interests of her health, it was not to be mentioned." Which is precisely what happens when they arrive at La Raspelière. 

The journey from the station is filled with such spectacular scenery that the narrator is "intoxicated" by it, unlike the rest of the travelers. The Princesse "later confessed to Cottard that she found me very enthusiastic; he replied that I was too emotional, that I would have needed sedatives and to take up knitting." 

As for any suspicions we might have about the identity of the missing violinist, they're confirmed when they arrive and M. Verdurin reports that they will be entertained by "a youngster my wife discovered, just as she discovered Dechambre, and Paderewski and the others: Morel." And that he will be accompanied by "an old friend of his family's who he's met again and who bores him to death...: the Baron de Charlus." Ski, the sculptor, is "surprised to learn that the Verdurins had consented to receive M. de Charlus." But it turns out that outside the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Baron has "been confused with a certain Comte Leblois de Charlus, who was not even faintly, or only distantly related to him, and who had been arrested, perhaps in error, during a police raid that was still talked about." So it turns out that although the Baron deserves his reputation, he has achieved it falsely. And when Ski brings it to Mme. Verdurin's attention, she dismisses it as rumor and says that even if it's true, it wouldn't compromise her in any way. She is "furious" with Ski because "Morel being the principal ingredient of her Wednesdays, she was anxious before all else not to upset him." 

When Morel and Charlus arrive, the latter is "as self-conscious as a schoolboy entering for the first time into a brothel and overdoing his respects to the madam." He adopts an effeminate manner, "fluttering affectedly, and with the same ampleness to his waddlings as though they were hobbled and made broader by his being in a skirt, that he made for Mme Verdurin, wearing so flattered and honored an expression that you might have thought that to be introduced to her was for him a supreme favor." 

But the narrator is more surprised by Morel, who had previously treated him "condescendingly." This time he fawns on the narrator, asking him to conceal from Mme. Verdurin the fact that his father had been the valet to the narrator's uncle, and "to say that, in your family, he was the steward of estates so vast that it made him the equal practically of your parents." The narrator is annoyed by the request, "But so unhappy and so urgent was his expression that I did not refuse." As it turns out, Mme. Verdurin had known the narrator's family and responds with a story about his great-grandfather's stinginess. And after he has accomplished this task, Morel reverts to his original "disdainful familiarity" toward the narrator, "and for a time he avoided me even, contriving to make it look as though he despised me.... I concluded ... from that first evening that he must be base by nature, that he would not shrink when need be from obsequiousness and knew nothing of gratitude." We also learn that Charlus becomes a manager of Morel: "You are to imagine some merely skillful performer from the Ballets Russes, trained, taught, and brought on in every sense by M. de Diaghilev." 

Charlus does make a powerful impression on one member of the gathering:  When Mme. Verdurin says, "The Baron was just saying...," Cottard responds with "'A baron! Where, where's a baron? Where's a baron?' he exclaimed, looking around for him with an astonishment bordering on incredulity." 

Meanwhile, the Cambremers arrive, and the narrator treats us to a description of the Marquis's nose: "not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; ... the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most readily." We also learn that, in the army, he had been given the nickname "Cancan." As for Mme. de Cambremer, "She was furious to be jeopardizing her reputation this evening at the Verdurins' and had done so only at the entreaties of her mother-in-law and husband, for the sake of the tenancy." But she brightens when she sees Charlus there, because she has not yet managed to be introduced to him. Charlus "had given Odette -- and kept -- his word that he would not allow himself to be presented to Mme de Cambremer." 

At the dinner table, the Baron finds himself seated by Cottard, who is so smitten with Charlus's title that there is a moment of misinterpretation: "The Baron, who was quick to find men of his own kind wherever he was, did not doubt that Cottard was one such, and was giving him the eye." The narrator gives us some reflections on the usual course of events when one "invert," as he calls them, meets another, but 

M. de Charlus's error was short-lived. A godlike discernment showed him a moment later that Cottard was not of his own kind and that he had no need to fear his advances, either for himself, which would merely have exasperated him, or for Morel, which would have seemed to him more serious.

Day One Hundred Nineteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 273-288

Part II, Chapter II, from "Cottard was far more inclined to say, 'I'll see..." to "...there got the doctor, Saniette, and Ski."

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Cottard is so devoted to the Verdurins and their "Wednesdays" that nothing, not even an emergency demanding his professional attention, can deter him: 

For Cottard, kindly man though he was, would renounce the comforts of a Wednesday not for a workman who had had a stroke but for the headcold of a minister. Even in this last instance he would say to his wife: "Make my sincere apologies to Mme Verdurin. Warn her I'll be late getting there. His Excellency might well have picked another day to catch cold." One Wednesday, their elderly cook having cut the vein in her arm, Cottard, already in a dinner jacket in order to go to the Verdurins', had given a shrug when his wife timidly asked him whether he could not dress the wound. "But I can't, Léontine," he had exclaimed with a groan, "you can see I've got my white waistcoat on."

Cottard is convinced that the Verdurins, because Mme. Verdurin inherited "thirty-five million," are the cream of society, and that in comparison to the Duchesse de Guermantes, "Mme Verdurin is a great lady, the Duchesse de Guermantes is probably on her uppers." 

At a station, a beautiful girl gets on the train and attracts the narrator's eye. "I have never again met, nor identified, the beautiful girl with the cigarette.... But I have never forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing." And the experience induces a meditation on time and memory, for he realizes that the beautiful girl would, ten years later, have "faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time." This experience with an anonymous girl precedes the mention of the fact that the Verdurins are upset because their favorite violinist has disappeared. We are told here only that he has been "doing his military service near Doncières" and that he had not met them at the station the last time they expected him. The attentive reader will remember another musical soldier recently spotted at a train station. 

It will be especially unfortunate if the violinist doesn't show up tonight, Brichot observes, because Mme. Verdurin has invited the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer, from whom they are leasing La Raspelière. Cottard is delighted, and says to the narrator, "What did I tell you? The Princesse Sherbatoff, the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer." The Verdurins have had some concern about whether the anti-Dreyfusism of the Cambremers will put them at odds with the overwhelmingly Dreyfusard view of their little set, but they resolve to seat them next to Brichot, "the only one of the faithful who had taken the side of the General Staff, which had lowered him greatly in Mme Verdurin's esteem."

Ski launches into praise of Mme. de Cambremer's intelligence and prettiness. "Since I thought the complete opposite of what Ski had expressed..., I contented myself with saying that she was the sister of a very distinguished engineer, M. Legrandin," the narrator comments, and he admits to the others that he has already met her. He adds that he is looking forward to seeing her so that he can remind her he wants to borrow a book they had talked about: the former curé of Combray's volume on the etymology of local place-names. Brichot immediately launches into an extended monologue about the errors in the curé's book that takes up almost four pages in the novel. 

We are rescued from Brichot's philology by his realization that they have passed the stop where they were to meet the Princesse Sherbatoff. The group launches a search for the Princesse and finds her in an empty carriage reading the Revue des deux mondes: It is "the lady who, in this same train, two days earlier, I had thought might be the madam of a brothel." (Again, never ignore even the anonymous walk-on characters in Proust.) The Princesse has some good news for the group: The missing violinist has been found. "He had kept to his bed the previous day on account of a migraine, but would be coming this evening and bringing an old friend of his father's whom he had met again in Doncières." Now who could that be? 

The affair of the violinist reminds Brichot of something: "our poor friend Dechambre, formerly Mme Verdurin's favorite pianist, has just died." And Brichot and Cottard argue about whether Dechambre had played the Vinteuil sonata at Mme. Verdurin's when Swann was there. (He did.)

Day One Hundred Eighteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 259-273

Part II, Chapter II, from "Two days later, on the famous Wednesday..." to "...the Princesse lived strictly confined in the midst of the faithful."

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Cottard meets the narrator at the train station for the Verdurins' "Wednesday," and we are treated to several portraits of the Patronne's followers. Cottard himself has changed somewhat since his ascension to celebrity: "these days he oozed self-assurance, but out of self-satisfaction." Saniette, however, remains much the same: "often boring" and desperately unable to do anything about it, usually making matters worse in the process so that his attempts at conversation "merely succeeded in seeming interminable." 

A new member of the Verdurin circle is "the sculptor Ski, so called because of the difficulty they found in pronouncing his Polish name." He is "forty-five and extremely ugly," but "Mme Verdurin claimed he was more artistic than Elstir." But Elstir regards Ski with "that profound repulsion that is inspired in us ... by those who resemble us only on our worst side, in whom are displayed what is least good about us, the faults which we have cured, unfortunate reminders to us of how we may have appeared to some before we became what we are." Mme. Verdurin's admiration of Ski is heightened by his "laziness" which "seemed to the Patronne to be one more gift, being the opposite of hard work, which she thought was the lot of those without genius." 

But the pride of the Verdurin salon is the Princesse Sherbatoff, who has "quarreled with her family" and is "an exile from her homeland, no longer knowing anyone except the Baronne Putbus and the Grande Duchesse Eudoxie, to whom, because she had no wish to meet the women friends of the first, and because the second had no wish for her women friends to meet the Princesse, ... went only at those morning hours when Mme Verdurin was still asleep." The Princesse says, "'I frequent only three houses,' like those authors who, afraid of being unable to stretch to a fourth, announce that their play will have only three performances." The Verdurins had managed to persuade their little set that "the Princesse, out of the thousands of connections available to her, had chosen the Verdurins alone, and that the Verdurins, solicited in vain by the whole of the upper aristocracy, had consented to make only one exception, in favor of the Princesse."                                                                            

Day One Hundred Fourteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 192-211

Poussin, "Landscape With Calm"

Part II, Chapter II, from "It was not even on that evening, however that my cruel mistrust..." to "...continuance. But that time had not yet come."

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The narrator decides to pay a call on Mme. Verdurin, but the train breaks down in Incarville, where he meets Dr. Cottard in the station. While waiting for the repairs to take place, they enter a little casino to which Albertine, Andrée and several of their friends have gone. Because of the lack of male partners, several girls were dancing together. Cottard and the narrator watch Albertine and Andrée waltzing, and Cottard remarks that "the parents are very unwise who let their daughters pick up such habits.... I've forgotten my eyeglass and I can't see properly, but they're certainly at the height of arousal. It's not sufficiently well known that it's chiefly through the breasts that women experience it." And to the eyes of the susceptible narrator, Cottard's observation seems to be correct: "Albertine seemed to be demonstrating, to be making Andrée acknowledge, some secret and voluptuous tremor."

The narrator's suspicions and jealousy increase. They have an argument one day because she wants to leave him to "call on a lady who was 'at home,' it seemed, every day at five o'clock in Infreville." They argue back and forth until the narrator declares that he will go with her, whereupon "Albertine looked as if she had received a terrible blow" and resorts to "an abrupt change of tack," deciding that they should go to dinner on "the other side of Balbec." He turns the argument around, insisting that she should stick to her original plan. 

I sensed that Albertine was giving up on my account something she had arranged that she did not want to tell me about, and that there was someone who would be as unhappy as I had been. Finding that what she had wanted was not possible, since I wanted to go with her, she gave it up unhesitatingly.

A few days later, they see Bloch's sister and cousin in the casino at Balbec. The cousin is openly in a lesbian relationship with an actress. Andrée tells the narrator that she and Albertine disapprove: "there's nothing the two of us find more disgusting." But the narrator senses something different in Albertine's attitude toward Bloch's cousin and, "perhaps on the hypothesis, though I did not as yet consciously entertain it, that Albertine liked women," he tells her that Bloch's sister and cousin paid them no attention. Whereupon, "unthinkingly," Albertine contradicts him. And he realizes that, although she had her back to them, she had been watching them in a mirror.

His suspicions about Albertine cause him to grow angry. 

I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann's love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine's whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped me to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.

But before we enter into another extended passage of obsession, of the narrator's desire to possess and control, we take a break with the arrival of the dowager Marquise de Cambremer and her daughter-in-law, Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin. (It gets a little hard to follow which of the Mmes. de Cambremer is talking or being talked about at any given moment.) They have come to call on the narrator at the hotel, having been urged to do so by Saint-Loup. "You know he's due shortly to come and spend a few days locally," the dowager tells the narrator. "His uncle Charlus is staying in the country at his sister-in-law's, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de Saint-Loup will take the opportunity to go and greet his aunt and to revisit his old regiment, where he is greatly loved, greatly esteemed." The narrator is accompanied by Albertine and her friends, and introduces them to the dowager Marquise, who then presents Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin to them. 

The conversation that ensues is largely about art, with the younger Mme. de Cambremer determined to impress them with her enthusiasm for Monet and Debussy. "Mme de Cambremer liked to 'get the blood coursing' by 'squabblng' about art, as others about politics." When she dismisses Poussin as "an untalented old hack," the narrator takes delight in "rehabilitating Poussin" by telling her, 

"M. Degas assures us that he knows of nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly." "Oh yes? I don't know the ones at Chantilly," said Mme de Cambremer, who did not want to be of a different opinion from Degas, "but I can talk about those in the Louvre, which are horrors." "Those, too, he admires enormously." "I shall have to look at them again. It's all a bit old in my head," she replied after a moment's silence, and as if the favorable judgment she would certainly soon be delivering on Poussin must depend, not on the news I had just conveyed to her, but on the supplementary and this time definitive examination to which she was relying on subjecting the Poussins in the Louvre so as to facilitate the reversing of her verdict.

The narrator reflects to himself on the vicissitudes of taste: "The day was coming ... when, for a time, Debussy would be declared to be as fragile as Massenet, and the joltings of Mélisande demoted to the rank of those of Manon. For theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour one another and, by their struggles, ensure life's continuance."               

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Ninety-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 309-321

Part II, Chapter I, from "We made our way back along the Avenue Gabriel..." to "... Bergotte came every day and spent several hours with me."

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Suddenly, in the middle of the third volume, Proust has decided to break the narrative into chapters and provide a synopsis at the start of each chapter: "My grandmother's illness -- Bergotte's illness -- The Duc and the doctor -- My grandmother's decline -- Her death." Well, it's not like In Search of Lost Time is one of those books for which you want to avoid "spoilers." 

Grandmother's fatal illness, which we learn is uremia, brings the narrator's thoughts on illness and death to the forefront. 

We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might mean that death -- or the first signs of its partial possession of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again -- will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon, with its hourly activities prescribed in advance.

Nevertheless, the account of the grandmother's last days is leavened with humor, some of it embodied in "the famous Professor E---," a physician whom the narrator encounters on the street and whom he asks to help his grandmother. He tells the narrator, "that is unthinkable. I'm dining with the minister of commerce." And he's far more concerned that the tailcoat he has to wear "has no buttonhole for my decorations," than with the state of the narrator's grandmother. Nevertheless, he does see her, and delivers the bad news that "this seems a hopeless case to me." 

The narrator sees his grandmother slumped in the carriage as they ride home, "slithering into the abyss," but he's nevertheless aware of other things, such as the fact that they pass Legrandin on the street, who "doffed his hat to us, and stopped with a surprised look on his face." Aware "how touchy he was," the narrator is concerned that his grandmother failed to acknowledge his greeting, but she "raised her hand in a gesture that seemed to convey, 'What does it matter? It's of no importance whatsoever.'" 

His mother is "stricken with a paroxysm of despair" when they arrive home, but she can't bear to look at her mother's face, contorted by the stroke. "All this time, there was one person who could not avert hers from what could be glimpsed of my grandmother's altered features, at which her daughter dared not look, someone whose eyes were fixed on them dumbfoundedly, indiscreetly, and with an ominous stare: this was Françoise." And Françoise, as usual, becomes the mainstay of the family through this ordeal. 

Cottard is called in, and prescribes morphine for her pain, but it raises her albumin count, so he is forced to stop it. The narrator comments that "this unprepossessing, commonplace man assumed something of the impressiveness of a general who, though unexceptional in all other respects, is a gifted strategist." 

The effect of the disease on his grandmother shocks the narrator, who nevertheless has the strength to observe it:

her face, eroded, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rough, purplish, ruddy, desperate face of some fierce guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture. But the work was not yet completed. Later, the sculpture would have to be smashed, then lowered into the tomb that had been so painfully guarded by those harshly contracted features.

And still the element of humor rises through the narrative, as when the family summons a specialist because the grandmother seems to have contracted an upper respiratory problem: "a relative ... assured us that if we brought in the specialist X the trouble would be over in a matter of days. This is the sort of thing society people say about their doctors, and we believe them, just as Françoise believed newspaper advertisements." But the grandmother refuses treatment so "we, in our embarrassment at having called out this doctor for nothing, deferred to his desire to examine our respective noses, although there was nothing wrong with them." And as a result, everyone in the family comes down with "catarrh."           

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Day Forty: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 138-150

From "Gilberte, who had already been asked..." to "...expected to take in to lunch."

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Gilberte, we learn, is "golden-skinned" with "fairish hair," unlike Odette, who is "dark." She "resembled a portrait of her mother, verging on a good likeness, but done by a fanciful colorist who had made her pose in semi-disguise." Sometimes, she has "the frankness of her father's fine, open gaze on the world." But "if you inquired about what she had been doing, those same eyes filled with the devious, forlorn embarrassment that used to cloud Odette's as, in answer to a question from Swann about where she had been, she told one of those lies which had once reduced her lover to despair, but which now made her husband, a prudently uninquiring man, quickly change the subject."

Swann was one of those men whose lives have been spent in the illusions of love, who, having afforded comforts and, through them, greater happiness to many women, have not been repaid by gratitude or tenderness toward themselves; but in their child they believe they can sense an affection which, by being materialized in the name they bear, will outlive them.

The dinner with Bergotte goes well: Swann compliments the narrator for raising the tone of the conversation, which the narrator takes to mean that their usual entertainment of Bergotte is more casual. It makes him realize that he had not been at all shy about sharing his opinions and feelings freely with the writer, and that "both my great attraction to the works of Bergotte and the unaccountable disappointment I had experienced at the theater were sincere, spontaneous reactions of my own mind," and that Bergotte "was very likely not so utterly alien and hostile to my disappointment, or to my inability to articulate it."

Just as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works.

When they share a carriage home after the dinner, Bergotte says he's sorry to hear from the Swanns that the narrator is "not in the best of health.... Although I must say I am not too sorry for you, as I can see you must enjoy the pleasures of the intellectual life." This strikes the narrator as at odds with de Norpois's attitude toward his intellectual and artistic pursuits:

M. de Norpois's words had made me see my moments of idle reflection, enthusiasm, and self-confidence as being purely subjective, devoid of reality. Yet Bergotte, who seemed quite familiar with the situation I found myself in, seemed to be implying that the symptoms to ignore were actually my self-disgust and doubts about my abilities.

Moreover, Bergotte has a radically different view of Dr. Cottard as physician from de Norpois's. Bergotte has met Cottard at the Swanns' and recognized him as "a prize idiot!"

"Cottard will bore you, and boredom alone will prevent his treatment from working. ... With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence. The thing they can't do without is a doctor who's aware of that form of illness. How on earth could Cottard cure you?"

The narrator remains skeptical of this advice, however.

Bergotte also suggests that Swann is in need of a good doctor because "here is a man who married a trollop, who accepts being snubbed every day of the week by women who choose not to know his wife, or looked down on by men who have slept with her."

The narrator decides that one reason Swann has introduced him to Bergotte was to impress his parents, who are among those who have been unwilling to receive Odette. But when he mentions to his parents that the Swanns introduced him to Bergotte, his father is scornful -- the more so when the narrator tells him that Bergotte "had nothing good to say about M. de Norpois." His father says that opinion shows "what a nasty and bogus mind" Bergotte has. Fortunately, the narrator is able to mention that Odette reported to him that Bergotte "thought I was highly intelligent." This of course delights his parents, even causing his father to admit that de Norpois is "not always full of goodwill."

Day Thirty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 107-119

From "Though I did not understand..." to "...'you'll get an invitation.'" 

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Swann, we learn, will apparently always associate Vinteuil's sonata with the Bois de Boulogne, and "the charm of certain nights" there, "about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette." Indeed, we have already seen Odette in her element in the Bois. She proposes that the narrator join them on an outing to the Zoo in the Bois, which also reminds her of Mme. Blatin, giving her occasion to make fun of the narrator's misapprehension that that the Swanns were friends of hers. "Even nice Dr. Cottard, who wouldn't speak evil of a soul, says the woman's a pest." And she tells the story of Mme. Blatin calling a "Singhalese" man a "blackie," to which the man retorted, "'Me blackie,' he bellowed at Mme Blatin, 'you camel!'" For the reader, however, Mme. Blatin remains an odd enigma.

While Gilberte is readying herself for their outing, the Swanns enjoyed "telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter," whose "thoughtful kindness" and "desire to please" he had already observed. He also notes that, "Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents," and that when he mentioned Mlle. Vinteuil to her, Gilberte replies, "She's a person I'll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn't nice to her father -- I've heard she made him unhappy."

His infatuation with the Swanns and their household continues, and he observes,

For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter-hour after I first stepped into her drawing room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her that had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility which has been abolished by the fulfillment of a different possibility.

In the Bois, the Swanns encounter the Princesse Mathilde, whom Swann identifies to the narrator as "the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her." While they are chatting with the Princesse, listening to her say that Hippolyte Taine "behaved like a pig" and that Alfred de Musset once arrived an hour late and "dead drunk" when she invited him to dinner, the narrator's friend Bloch makes an appearance. But Mme. Swann is under the impression that Bloch, who has "been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps" is "on the minister's staff, which was news to me ... and that his name was M. Moreul."

Day Thirty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 93-107

From "In any case, Swann was blind..." to "...foreseen by someone much less gifted."

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Swann's marriage to Odette is built on denial -- on both sides. He "was blind not only to the gaps in Odette's education, but also to her poverty of mind." For her part, her "inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say." It's a marriage of "subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar."

Except that Swann has indulged his own vulgar streak, setting up "experiments in the sociology of entertainment" in which he brings together "people from very different backgrounds." When he announces that he's going to have the Cottards come to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme, he looked "like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves." But by doing so he annoys Mme. Bontemps, who has recently been introduced to the Duchesse and is upset that someone else of her acquaintance also has that privilege.

(Here there seems to be a typographical error: "Would she even have the heart to tell her husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure that she had assured him was unique to themselves?" The not [my italics] in that sentence contracts its apparent meaning -- that the Cottards were going to partake of the same pleasure. I think the intended word must be now. Unfortunately, I don't have another text handy to cross-check.)

We also learn that Swann is no longer jealous of Odette, that he was "now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere." He realizes that when he was jealous in the past, he fell into another kind of denial, determined to believe "that Odette's daily doings were quite innocent." Now he realizes that "she had ... been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe." And now he is carrying on an affair of his own, with

a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette.... And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.

Proust also slips one of his foreshadowings in here, telling us that "the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counterdemonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death."

At the Swanns' the narrator gets -- though he's unaware of it at this time -- another link to the couple's past, when he hears Odette play the theme from the Vinteuil sonata that used to be their theme song. The music allows the narrator to reflect on the interlocked nature of time, memory, and music:

Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. ... What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory.... This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.... Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible toward the unknown depths of the distant future.

This is the shrewd comment of the mature narrator, of course, and not of the young narrator who is willing to capitulate to received opinion rather than to trust his own disappointment at the performance of La Berma. Of course, he also adds, "It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or airplanes had a future, and it is possible to be an acute psychologist yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted."

Is the narrator, who has already demonstrated himself to be "an acute psychologist," talking about himself here?