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 Four: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 3-33

Part I, from "As we know, well before going that day..." to "...fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." 

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Actually, Part I in the Penguin/Viking edition begins with a portentous phrase: "First appearance of the men-women, descendants of those inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven." And then comes an epigraph: 

Woman will have Gomorrah and man will have Sodom.

--Alfred de Vigny

Still, we can't much blame Proust for laying it on a bit thick. He knew that the book was bound to attract bluenoses and censors, and that it had to have at least the appearance of moralizing if it had any hope of attracting even partly sympathetic heterosexual readers. Hence the long, dense, occasionally obscure portrait of the underground gay network, an embryonic version of what today is a community.

The section is a flashback to the concluding section of The Guermantes Way, and was originally written as a part of it. The narrator is lurking, on the lookout for the Guermantes carriage, so he can go ask the Duc and Duchesse if he really was invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's reception. And so he sees a startling encounter between Charlus, "potbellied, aged by the full daylight, graying," and Jupien.

Jupien ..., at once shedding the humble, kindly expression I had always seen him wear, had -- in perfect symmetry with the Baron -- drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence, and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.

The botanical metaphor, based on a conversation at the dinner party in The Guermantes Way that the Duchesse had with the Princess of Parma about the pollination of a particularly beautiful plant which bore only female flowers, continues throughout the section. Meanwhile, Jupien leaves the courtyard, throwing flirtatious come-hither looks at Charlus, and is pursued by the Baron, who returns with him and disappears into his shop. 

The narrator has "lost sight of the bumblebee," but he realizes that he has just witnessed "the good fortune reserved for men of the Baron's kind by one of those fellow creatures who may even be, as we shall see, infinitely younger than Jupien and better-looking, the man predestined so that they may receive their share of sensual pleasure on this earth: the man who loves only elderly gentlemen." He is self-conscious about his voyeurism, recalling "the scene in Montjouvain, hidden in front of Mlle Vinteuil's window," but he persists in it nevertheless -- to an almost absurd extent, sneaking into the empty shop that adjoins Jouvain's, listening through the "exceedingly thin partition" and climbing a ladder to peer through a transom. "From which I later concluded that if there is one thing as noisy as suffering it is pleasure, especially when there is added to it ... an immediate concern with cleanliness." 

He also overhears the conversation between Charlus and Jupien, in which the former uses the opportunity to network, to explore with Jupien the erotic potential of the neighborhood. When Charlus asks him about any gay "young society men" who visit the Duc and Duchesse, Jupien tries to describe one but is unable to give a portrait that Charlus recognizes. To the narrator, however, "the portrait seemed an accurate reference to the Duc de Châtellerault" -- the one who seemed to take delight in the embarrassment of the footman serving him at the Duchesse's dinner party. 

The incident has obviously put Charlus in a whole new light for the narrator: "Until now, because I had not understood, I had not seen.... an error dispelled lends us an extra sense." He understands the need for concealment, for fear of suffering the fate of Oscar Wilde, "the poet who was yesterday being fêted in every drawing room and applauded in every theater in London, only to be driven on the morrow from every lodging house, unable to find a pillow on which to lay his head." And he launches into a lengthy account of the "freemasonry" of gays that "rests on an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeship, of knowledge, of commerce, and of vocabulary, ... all of them obliged to protect their secret." He also touches on the closeted, the self-denying, the young men ignorant of the meaning of their own desires. 

And then he realizes what his recent encounter with Charlus had been.

There were indeed certain individuals that he found it enoiugh to have come to him, and to hold them for a few hours under the sway of his tongue, to appease the desire kindled in him by some encounter.... On occasions, as had no doubt transpired in my own case one the evening when I had been summoned by him after the Guermantes dinner party, assuagement came about thanks to a violent dressing down cast by the Baron into his visitor's face.... M. de Charlus had passed from being the dominated to the dominator, and, feeling himself calmed and purged of his anxiety, dismissed the visitor he had at once ceased to find desirable.

Part I ends with the narrator regretting that his voyeurism has perhaps made him miss "the fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." It's an effective overture to the novel.

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.