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

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

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, from "A month later, Swann's young daughter...." to "...the snobbery of royalty with that of a domestic servant."

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Gilberte was still Mlle. Swann when the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes first deigned to receive her, and they treated her with a certain condescension, pretending to have been barely acquainted with Swann, even though they had received him for more than 25 years. "But this is how the Faubourg Saint-Germain speaks to the bourgeoisie about anyone from the bourgeoisie, whether to flatter their listeners with the exception made in their favour for as long as the conversation lasts, or whether, preferably, to humiliate them at one and the same time." But after Forcheville adopts her, it is Gilberte herself who shies away from being identified as Swann's daughter.

Visiting the Guermantes when Gilberte is there, the narrator notices that two of the Elstir drawings that once were upstairs are now in the drawing room -- "Elstir was now in fashion." Gilberte, too, recognizes them as Elstirs, and the Duchesse has to bite her tongue when she almost slips and says that Swann was the one who recommended that she buy them: "it was precisely your ... some friends of ours who advised us to buy them." And when the narrator starts to say something about their once not being on display, "I saw Mme de Guermantes's frantic signals" and likewise covers the slip.

When he casually works his article in the Figaro into the conversation, he learns that neither the Duchesse nor the Duc has read it. The latter sends a servant to fetch the newspaper and reads it while he's there. Meanwhile, the Duchesse receives a visiting card from Lady Rufus Israels, whom Gilberte denies knowing, even though she does: "The fact is that Gilberte had become quite snobbish," even to the point of sometimes pretending that Swann was not really her father.

Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance.

The Duc finishes the article and offers "some rather muted compliments," criticizing "the somewhat hackneyed form of my style" but congratulating him on "having found an 'occupation.'" The Duchesse invites him to join her at the opera, but he turns her down, saying that he has recently lost a friend who "was very dear to me.... It was from that moment that I started to write to everyone to tell them of my great sorrow and to cease to feel it."

The Duc and Duchesse aren't the only ones who, contrary to the narrator's hopes, failed to see the article. In fact, he receives only two letters about it: One is from Mme. Goupil, an old neighbor in Combray, and the other from someone named Sautton, a name he doesn't recognize. "Bloch, whose opinion on my article I would have so liked to know, did not write to me," but later reveals in a rather snide fashion that he had read it. "Bergotte had not written me a word," the narrator says, but that shouldn't be surprising since Proust killed him off in The Prisoner -- another continuity gaffe.

The narrator's thoughts turn to Swann, who would have been happy to see Gilberte received by the Guermantes, but disappointed at her failure to acknowledge him as her real father. "And it was not only where Swann was concerned that Gilberte gradually consummated the process of forgetting: she had hastened this process within me in relation to Albertine.

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

Albertine's death causes a form of phantom pain, but the narrator takes his ability to mention her death at all "without actually suffering much" as a sign that he's a "new person who would be quite able to live without Albertine." 

Meanwhile, he and Andrée have begun "a semi-carnal relationship" -- whatever that may be. He recalls that they were in his room because "I was banned from the rest of the apartment since it was Mama's at-home day." Here there's a curious aside about his mother's visiting Mme. Sazerat and being bored to death, which spurs another memory about his mother being snubbed by the Princess of Parma. The significance of these asides, if any, is unclear. But as he is going to see Andrée, who is waiting in his room, he discovers that he has other visitors, who were waiting in another room: It's Charlus, who is reciting love poems to Morel, who is leaving for his duty in the reserves. "I left them as swiftly as I could, although I felt that to call on friends with Morel gave M. de Charlus great satisfaction, giving him the momentary illusion of being married again." Evidently, Mme. Verdurin's separation of them hasn't fully taken hold.

Day One Hundred 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 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 Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 510-595

Part II, Chapter II, from "In the time that followed, I was continually to be invited..." to "..."'You'll live to see us all in our graves!'" 

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A long stay in a waiting room today left me with nothing to do but read much more than my ten-page minimum, taking me to the end of The Guermantes Way.  In this final section, we learn of the narrator's continued involvement with the social circle to which the Duchesse's dinner party invitation introduced him; of the bizarre behavior of Charlus, who thinks the narrator has been not only showed ingratitude for not taking advantage of the opportunities the Baron has offered him, but also somehow slandered him; and of Swann's terminal illness.  

The narrator describes the dinner party as "a sort of social Eucharist," but insists with florid irony that "the manducation of the ortolan was not obligatory." He continues to comment on the shallowness of the society of which he has become part, sometimes by entering into the characters' heads, as when the Duchesse, in conversation with the Princess of Parma, makes a reference to "'Gustave Moreau's Young Man and Death. Your Highness is of course acquainted with the masterpiece.' The Princess of Parma, who had never even heard of Moreau, nodded in vigorous assent and smiled warmly in order to demonstrate her admiration for this painting." And he once more exposes the Duchesse's hypocrisy. Having previously called Elstir's portrait of herself "ghastly," she now claims, "Elstir has done a fine portrait of me.... It's not a good likeness, but it's intriguing." And yet the narrator continues to forgive her: "That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been a disappointment to me at first; I reacted to it now, with the help of so much fine wine, as something almost wondrous." But he also takes himself to task, recalling "those hours spent in society when I lived on the surface, my hair well groomed, my shirtfront starched -- that is to say, hours in which I could feel nothing of what I personally regarded as pleasure."

At one party, there are some foreshadowings of events to come, when Prince Von, "who could not endure the English" is attempting to advance the idea of an alliance between France and Germany, denouncing Edward VII and the British army, and insisting "it's us you ought to make friends with, it's the Kaiser's dearest wish, but he wants it to come from the heart. He puts it this way: 'What I want to see is a hand clasped in my own, not someone touching their hat to me!' With that you would be invincible." 

But what most attracts the narrator to the company of Ducs and Princes and Barons is the sense of times past, of European history embodied in family pedigrees. The people he meets in society are dull, stupid, and prejudiced, but "these prejudices from the historical past instantly restored to the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry." 

M. de Guermantes had a command of memories that gave his conversation the fine feel of an ancient mansion, lacking in real masterpieces but still full of authentic pictures, of middling interest and imposing, giving an overall impression of grandeur.... Thus does the heavy structure of the aristocracy, with its rare windows, admitting a scant amount of daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar, but also the same massive, blind force as Romanesque architecture, enclose all our history within its sullen walls.

Still, the company he keeps is full of fools, of the misinformed and casually malicious, such as the Turkish ambassadress who warns the narrator that the decidedly heterosexual Duc de Guermantes is "a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son." The narrator notes that "error, gullibly credited untruth were for the ambassadress like a life-sustaining element without which she could not function." But he also credits the inanity of conversation at these affairs to his own presence: "The talk was trivial, no doubt because I was present, and, seeing all these pretty people kept apart, it pained me to think that my presence was preventing them from proceeding, in the most precious of its salons, with the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain." 

As he leaves the Hôtel de Guermantes for his appointment with Charlus, the narrator reflects on the occasion as one of his epiphanies: 

I was prey to this second sort of exhilaration, very different from that afforded by a personal impression, like those I had received in other carriages: once in Combray, in Dr. Percepied's gig, from which I had seen the Martinville steeples against the setting sun; another day in Balbec, in Mme de Villeparisis's barouche, when I tried hard to work out what it was I was reminded of by an avenue of trees. But in this third carriage, what I had before my mind's eye was those conversations that had seemed so tedious at Mme de Guermantes's dinner party -- for example, Prince Von's story about the Kaiser, General Botha, and the British Army. I had just slid these into the inner stereoscope we use, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as we adopt a society spirit and wish to receive our life only from others, to bring into solid relief what they have said and done. Like a man who has had too much to drink and feels full of kindness and consideration for the waiter who has been serving him, I marveled at my good fortune -- something I had not felt, for sure, at the actual moment -- in having dined with someone who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were, upon my word, extremely witty.

But whatever euphoria he might be feeling in the carriage is soon to dissipate at the Baron de Charlus's. For Charlus, after making him wait a long time, receives him "stretched out on a sofa" and after the narrator speaks to him "the cold fury on M. de Charlus's face seemed to intensify." He tells the narrator to sit in the Louis XIV chair and then mocks him for his ignorance when he sits in a "Directory fireside chair." Charlus has the "magnificent head" of "an aging Apollo; but it was as if an olive-greenish, bilious juice was about to seep out of his malevolent mouth." 

As Charlus's insults mount, the narrator, though still bewildered by the malevolence, becomes angry: "I grabbed hold of the Baron's new top hat, threw it to the ground, trampled on it, and, bent on pulling it to pieces, I ripped out the lining, tore the crown in two." But when he tries to leave, the Baron prevents him and changes his tone. Though he continues to insult the narrator and to charge him with ingratitude and slander, he also begins to court him, "taking my chin between two fingers, drawn there, it seemed, as if by a magnet, and, after a moment's resistance, running up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. 'Ah, how pleasant it would be to look at 'the blue moonlight' in the Bois with someone like yourself,' he said with sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, than added sadly: 'For you're nice, really. You could be nicer than anyone,' he added, laying his hand paternally on my shoulder." 

"Paternally" is not exactly the word that comes to my mind here. 

Finally, the Baron takes the narrator home in his carriage, still proclaiming that their friendship is over, and that because of his alleged behavior the narrator has blown any chance of being invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's.  So when, a few days later, he receives an invitation from the Princesse, he suspects it of being a hoax or a cruel practical joke. To try to find out if the invitation is real, he goes to visit the Duc and Duchesse, where he encounters Swann and learns that he is suffering from the same illness "that carried off his mother, who had been struck down by it at exactly the age he now was." He talks with Swann about the Dreyfus case and the anti-Semitism of the Prince de Guermantes who, Swann claims, let a wing of his country house burn down "rather than send to the neighboring property -- it belongs to the Rothschilds -- for hoses." Swann, too, he learns, is invited to the Princesse's reception, and they agree to go there together. But the novel ends with the self-absorption of the Duc and Duchesse, who treat their own concerns -- whether the Duchesse should wear red shoes or black -- as more important than Swann's illness. 

Day One Hundred Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 494-510

Part II, Chapter II, from "I know you're related to Admiral..." to "...the poor general has never lost."

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It seems that in the world of high society, the narrator is always being mistaken for someone or other. This time, it's the Princess of Parma's lady-in-waiting, Mme. de Varambon, who is sure he's related to an admiral who is "a complete stranger to me." And "despite the admonitions of the Princess of Parma and my own protestations" can't be convinced otherwise. At another occasion, someone else insists that the narrator is a "great friend of his cousin," who met him in Scotland. "I have never been in Scotland," the narrator tells him, "and in my honesty I went to the trouble -- a complete waste of time -- of pointing this out." Like politicians, Proust's socialites seem to create their own reality.

As does the Duchesse, when she insists that Zola, to whom the conversation has turned, is "not a realist, he's a poet, madame!" The narrator observes that she is "drawing her inspiration from the critical articles she had read over the last few years and converting them to her individual brilliance." The Princess of Parma is so stunned by the assertion that she "gave a sudden start for fear of being knocked to her feet." The Duchesse goes on to proclaim, "He's master of the epic dungheap! The Homer of the sewers! He can't write Cambronne's expletive" -- i.e., merde -- "in big enough letters." (In her conversation with Swann in Swann's Way the Duchesse, then the Princesse des Laumes, made a sly reference to Mme. de Cambremer's "astonishing name" -- the joke being that it is made up of both "Cambronne" and "merde.") She then turns her attention to the narrator: "'I do believe that Zola has actually written a study on the work of Elstir, the painter whose pictures you were looking at a while ago. The only ones of his that I like, as it happens,' she added. In fact, she hated Elstir's painting, but found something special in anything that was in her own house." 

The narrator asks the Duc about the identity of one of the figures in a painting in their collection, but the Duc claims to "have no head for names.... Swann would be able to tell you. He's the one who made Mme de Guermantes buy all that stuff." He then adds, "Not that there's much need to rack one's brains to say all there is to be said about M. Elstir's paintings, as there would be if we were talking about Ingres's La Source or The Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche" -- two paintings (left to right above) in the style that Elstir and other Impressionists were reacting against in their work. The Duc continues to note with outrage that Swann urged him to buy Elstir's A Bunch of Asparagus: "Three hundred francs for a bunch of asparagus!... It surprises me that someone with a discriminating mind like yourself, someone with a superior mind, actually likes that sort of thing." This painting of Elstir's was probably inspired by one by Manet: 

The Princess of Parma asks if Elstir hadn't started working on a portrait of the Duchesse.

"Indeed he did. He painted me as red as a beet. It's not the sort of thing that's going to set him down for posterity. It's ghastly. Basin wanted to destroy it."

This last statement was one that Mme de Guermantes was always making. But at other times she chose to judge differently: "I don't care for his work, but he did once do a good portrait of me." The first of these judgments was usually addressed to people who asked the Duchesse about her portrait, the second to those who did not mention it and whom she was anxious to apprise of its existence. The first was inspired by concern with her appearance, the second by vanity.

To explain why he sought out the company of so frivolous and hypocritical a woman, the narrator comments, "Mme de Guermantes's mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was precisely what constituted the substance of my own mind) and everything that, on account of this exclusion, it had been able to preserve, the seductive vigor of supple bodies which no exhausting reflection, moral anxiety, or nervous disorder has distorted." He likens her effect on him to that of the gang of girls at Balbec. 

Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, though remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan.

As an instance of the Duchesse's "respect for intellectual values," the company at table also includes "M. de Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons that had appeared in the Revue des deux mondes" and who "moved only in the most aristocratic circles, but even then only in such as boasted a certain reputation for intellect.... His hatred of snobs derived from his own snobbishness, but it led the simple-minded (in other words, everyone) to believe that he was untainted by it." 

The Duchesse turns the conversation to her aunt, Mme. de Villeparisis, and the Duc chimes in with an observation that "Aunt Madeleine" had "said her piece to that man Bloch" at her recent salon. The Princess of Parma notes that "Mme de Villeparisis is not exactly what one would call a ... 'moral' person," but the look on the Duchesse's face makes her add, "But of course an intellect of such a high order excuses everything." But the Duchesse goes on to treat Mme. de Villeparisis with the same vitriol as she uses on others: "She will always have a reputation as a lady of the old school, a woman of sparkling wit and the loosest morals. And yet one couldn't conceive of a more middle-class, serious-minded, and lackluster person." 

A mention of Charlus causes a moment of tension between the Duc and the Duchesse. She observes that his elaborate mourning of his late wife is "as if he's mourning a cousin, a grandmother, a sister. It's not the grief of a husband.... He's as soft as a woman, Mémé is!" "Don't talk rubbish," M. de Guermantes broke in sharply. "There's nothing effeminate about Mémé. I can't think of anyone more manly than he is." Methinks the Duc doth protest too much, and so does the Duchesse: "'He's always like this when he thinks anyone is getting at his brother,' she added, turning to the Princess of Parma."

There is talk about Saint-Loup and his desire not to return to Morocco, and the Prince de Foix reveals that Saint-Loup may not have split up with Rachel after all: "'I came across her two days ago in Robert's bachelor apartment and they didn't look like two people who'd quarreled, believe me,' replied the Prince de Foix, who liked to spread every bit of gossip that might possibly damage Robert's chances of marrying." 

"That Rachel was telling me about you," says Prince von Faffenheim, who, we learned earlier, usually goes by the name "Prince Von" or even just  "Von," to the narrator. "She said that our friend Saint-Loup idolized you, that he was even fonder of you than he was of her." He goes on "devouring his food like a red-faced ogre as he spoke, all his teeth exposed by his perpetual grin." He also makes an enigmatic reference to the mistress of the Prince de Foix and offers to explain it it to the narrator if he'll come by his place afterward. The narrator declines, citing his appointment with Charlus. Prince Von says that he was also invited to dine with Charlus but not after a quarter to eleven, and offers to accompany the narrator part of the way. "But the wide-eyed gaze on his coarse, handsome red face alarmed me, and I declined his offer by telling him that a friend was coming to collect me. There was nothing offensive about this response as far as I could see. But the Prince apparently thought differently and did not address another word to me." 

There's always something left to be explained in the narrator's encounters.

Day Ninety-Seven: The Guermantes Way, pp. 412-430

Part II, Chapter II, from "These were not the traces I had noticed..." to "...perhaps they won't all be left to live as old maids."

_____

The narrator is struck by the "traces of ancient grandeur" in the Duc de Guermantes when he welcomes him to the Duchesse's dinner party. If he and the Duchesse are in fact separating, they give no sign of it. The Duc greets the narrator warmly, and when the latter expresses interest in the Elstirs they possess, he is shown into the room where they hang and left there while the Duc goes to greet other guests. And so, "the moment I was left alone with the Elstirs, I completely forgot about time and dinner," keeping the other guests waiting for forty-five minutes as he reflects on what he's seeing.

He notes that "several of the ones that society people found most absurd interested me more than the rest, because they re-created the optical illusions that make it clear that we should never be able to identify objects if we did not have recourse to some process of reasoning." And in keeping with the novel's treatment of the evanescence of key moments in time, he reflects of a painting: 

But precisely because that moment had such a forceful impact, the fixity of the canvas conveyed the impression of something highly elusive: you felt that the lady would soon return home, the boats vanish from the scene, the shadow shift, night begin to fall; that pleasure fades away, that life passes, and that the instant, illuminated by multiple and simultaneous plays of light, cannot be recaptured.

When he enters the drawing room, he is embarrassed to discover how long he has kept the other guests waiting for their dinner. But he learns that in this circle, maintaining the appearance of being unperturbed by other people's conduct is important. And soon he's face-to-face with an awkward expression of noblesse oblige, when the Duc conducts him over to "a lady of rather diminutive proportions" who acts as if they are old friends. He can't place her, but her manner toward him makes him feel as if he should, and he even says, "Ah, madame, of course! How happy Mama will be to hear that we've met again!" 

They haven't met, of course, but after some awkward moments of searching for some clue to her identity,

I recognized what sort of species of creature I was dealing with. Someone of royal blood. She had never once heard of my family or myself, but, as a daughter of the noblest race and someone with the greatest fortune in the world (she was the daughter of the Prince of Parma and had married an equally princely cousin), she was always anxious, out of gratitude to her Creator, to prove to her neighbor, however poor or humble he might be, that she did not look down on him.

The Princess of Parma is not the only guest to treat the narrator this way, or to be "so humbly amiable that it did not take more than a moment to sense the lofty pride from which such amiability stemmed." He also notes that "as the reader will learn, I was later to know highnesses and majesties of a quite different sort, queens who play at being queens and speak not after the conventions of their kind, but like queens in Sardou's plays." 


The attention being directed at the narrator attracts the notice of one of the late-arriving guests, the Comte Hannibal de Bréauté-Consalvi, who peers anxiously at the narrator through his monocle. And even when the Duc introduces him. the Comte remains none the wiser, concluding that the narrator must be some kind of celebrity: "It was utterly typical of Oriane, who had the knack of attracting to her salon men who were in the public eye -- one of them to a hundred of her own, of course, otherwise the tone would have been lowered." And so M. de Bréauté continues to treat the narrator with exaggerated respect, like "someone who found himself face-to-face with one of the 'natives' of an undiscovered country on which his raft had landed, from whom, in the hope of gain, he would endeavor, as he observed their customs with interest and made sure he maintained demonstrations of friendship by uttering loud cries of benevolence like themselves, to obtain ostrich eggs and spices in exchange for glass beads."


Finally, they go in to dinner.

Day Eighty-Seven: The Guermantes Way, pp. 248-261

From "'Well, speak of the devil! And here is...'" to "...identify her with the 'lady in pink.'" 

_____

Saint-Loup arrives, and after he speaks to her, the Duchesse de Guermantes turns her attention to the narrator. But it's clear that she does so only because Saint-Loup insists, and when he leaves to speak to his mother their conversation is stilted. 

The arrival of "the Prince de Faffenheim-Munsterberg-Weiningen" to see M. de Norpois causes a small stir. "'Oh, I know he's very sound,' said Mme de Marsantes, 'and that's so rare among foreigners. But I've taken the trouble to find out. He's anti-Semitism personified." The Prince's elaborate name causes the narrator to go off into a reverie on visiting a German spa when he was a child, but his romantic notions of Germany are at odds with the truth: 

I speedily learned that the revenues he drew from the forest and the river inhabited by gnomes and water sprites, from the magic mountain on which rose the ancient Burg that still held memories of Luther and Louis the German, were spent on running five Charron motorcars, on a house in Paris and another in London, a Monday-night box at the Opéra, and another for the Tuesday-night performances at the Théâtre-Français.

And the Prince himself undermines the narrator's expectations of national character; he "had expected to hear the rustlings of elves and the dance of the kobolds" in the Prince's speech, but "as he made his bow to Mme de Villeparisis, this short, red-faced, pot-bellied Rhinegrave said to her 'Gut-tay, Matame la Marquise,' in the accent of a concierge from Alsace." The Prince is chiefly there because he is courting M. de Norpois to get elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and wants the Marquise's social influence too. The narrator gives us a humorous account of the delicate diplomatic negotiations involved.  

The narrator's tête-à-tête with the Duchesse ends abruptly. 

She rose without bidding me goodbye. She had just caught sight of Mme Swann, who seemed somewhat embarrassed by my presence. Doubtless she remembered that she had been the first to assure me that she was convinced of Dreyfus's innocence.

"I don't want my mother to introduce me to Mme Swann," Saint-Loup said to me. "She's an ex-prostitute. Her husband's a Jew, and she comes here to parade as a Nationalist."

The narrator's interest in seeing Odette is heightened because he has recently had a visit from Charles Morel, the son of his late uncle Adolphe's valet. Morel, "a handsome young man of eighteen," came at his father's request to bring some items possessed by the narrator's uncle which he had thought "inappropriate to send to my parents, and had set them aside as something that might interest a young man of my age" -- photographs of actresses and courtesans he had known, "the last images of the rakish proclivities he kept hermetically sealed from his family life." 

Morel proves to be an ambitious young man, "dressed expensively rather than with taste," who treats the narrator as an equal and flirts with Jupien's niece, finally ordering from her a velvet waistcoat "that was so bright-red and so loud that, for all his bad taste, he was never able to bring himself to wear."

But the thing that strikes the narrator most about the visit is the photograph he find among his uncle's collection: the sketch by Elstir of "Miss Sacripant," whom the narrator had recognized as Odette. And Morel reveals that his father had singled out this picture as one the narrator would be particularly interested in: "She's the very demimondaine who was lunching with him on that last occasion you saw him. My father was not at all sure about letting you in. It seems that you made a great impression on that loose lady, and she hoped to see you again." 

Odette was the "lady in pink" whose presence brought about Uncle Adolphe's estrangement from the narrator's parents.

Day Eighty-Four: The Guermantes Way, pp. 209-224

From "Mme de Villeparisis rang, and a footman..." to "...repeating a long-established joke."

_____

Bloch's breaking the vase is not his first faux pas of the evening. Muttering to himself, he blames the servants for putting the vase where he might bump into it, and Mme. de Villeparisis for not training them better. "He was one of those touchy, high-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it," the narrator comments. Bloch starts to take his leave, but Mme. de Villeparisis calls him back to discuss the theatrical production he proposes to stage at her home. Among the performers he wants to use is "a tragic actress 'with blue-green eyes, beautiful as Hera,' who would recite lyrical prose with a feeling for 'plastic beauty.' But when she heard the actress's name, Mme de Villeparisis declined. It was the name of Saint-Loup's mistress." 

She whispers to the narrator that she thinks the affair will soon be over, and blames it all on Captain Borodino for "furthering a scandalous liaison" by giving Saint-Loup leave to see Rachel in Bruges. Meanwhile, Bloch keeps adding to his gaffes by denouncing Saint-Loup as a "dirty rascal" and by telling an anecdote in which Saint-Loup -- or "de Saint-Loup-en-Bray" as Bloch persists in calling him -- fails to show due deference to the son of Sir Rufus Israels. The anecdote lands with a thud in the room because "Sir Rufus Israels, whom Bloch and his father regarded as an almost royal figure, one to be trembled at by the likes of Saint-Loup, was in the eyes of the Guermantes world merely a foreign upstart." 


Bloch goes on to rudely insist on opening a window, and when Mme. de Villeparisis forbids it because she has a cold, he persists in calling the room a "hothouse" and arguing that the overheated room is "exactly what is giving you the cold." And then he asks to be introduced to de Norpois because he wants "to get him to talk about the Dreyfus case." Mme. de Villeparisis is embarrassed because Bloch's eagerness to see de Norpois brings attention to their relationship: de Norpois is already present, in her study, and has not yet come down to join the party. 

She sends the butler to fetch de Norpois, who picks up a hat at random in the vestibule to conceal the fact that he hasn't arrived from outside: "He had no idea that the Marquise had completely undermined the plausibility of this charade prior to his appearance." When he arrives, she treats him with "an exaggerated respect for his position as ambassador." But the narrator notes that these "less familiar, more ceremonious marks of respect ..., in the salon of a distinguished woman, in contrast to the freedom with which she treats her other regular guests, mark out that man immediately as her lover." 

De Norpois warmly greets the narrator, who "took advantage of this to relieve him of the hat he had felt obliged to bring with him as a sign of formality; I had just noticed that it was my own." But the ambassador continues to steamroll over the narrator's opinions, reminding him that he had harshly criticized the narrator's writing, and that they had disagreed about Bergotte. But the narrator decides to press the advantage of de Norpois's acquaintance with the Duchesse de Guermantes, hoping that the ambassador might help him get an invitation from her to see the paintings by Elstir that she owns. He tells de Norpois that Elstir is his favorite painter and that the Duchesse owns one -- "a masterpiece" -- he'd particularly like to see. But as usual, de Norpois puts him down: "'A masterpiece!' exclaimed M. de Norpois in astonished disapproval. 'It can't even claim to be a picture. It's a mere sketch.'" 

Bloch takes de Norpois aside, and the narrator overhears the Duchesse and Mme. de Villeparisis talking about Rachel, who had once given a disastrous performance at the Duchesse's salon. "A perfect horror, you know," the Duchesse says. "Not an ounce of talent, and grotesque to look at." At that moment, her husband arrives and she says, wryly, "Oh, well, I suppose I'd better be going," a reference "to the comic aspect of their appearing to be paying a call together like a newly married couple, and not to the often strained relations that existed between her and this strapping pleasure-seeker, who was getting on in years, but who still led the life of a young bachelor." The Duchesse goes on to talk about Rachel's performance of a play by Maeterlinck, which disillusions the narrator: "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. I found a sort of grim satisfaction in this evidence of her total incomprehension of Maeterlinck." 


Bloch has returned and, overhearing the conversation about Saint-Loup and his mistress, "began to slander him so violently that everyone was appalled." M. d'Argencourt suggests that there is a similarity between Saint-Loup's relationship with Rachel and that of Swann and Odette.

"Oh, but things were quite different in Swann's case," the Duchesse protested. "It was extraordinary, I know, because she was something of an idiot, but she was never ridiculous, and at one time she was pretty."

"Pooh-pooh!" muttered Mme de Villeparisis.

"You didn't think so? I did. She had some charming features, very fine eyes, lovely hair, and she dressed wonderfully. She still does. She's become loathsome, I agree, but she was a ravishing woman in her time. Not that I was any less sorry when Charles married her, because it was so unnecessary" 

Day Seventy-Seven: The Guermantes Way, pp. 111-126

From "I felt myself isolated -- ..." to "... ever heard from him again for the rest of their lives." 

_____

Good company and good food put the narrator in a pleasant mood. Saint-Loup, noting the narrator's attention to his new (still unnamed) friend, "half joking, half in earnest," claims to be jealous, causing the narrator to reflect, 

Men who are enormously in love with women, who live in a society of woman-lovers, permit themselves to joke in a way that others, less easily deceived by harmless pleasantry, would never dare to. 

However much truth there is in this observation about male camaraderie, methinks the narrator doth proclaim his and Saint-Loup's heterosexuality a bit too much. 

Even though he has claimed that the good fellowship has helped put Mme. de Guermantes out of his mind for a while, he notes that "There were evenings when, as I crossed the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so great a pang of longing for Mme de Guermantes that it took my breath away." He likens his suffering to that "I had experienced in connection with Gilberte -- or on those occasions in Combray when Mama had not stayed in my room, and also when I recalled ertaiin pages of Bergotte." 

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup and his mistress have had a falling-out, and he is miserable, too. He has a dream in which he is in a country house and hears "the intermittently regular cries that his mistress was apt to make at moments of orgasm" coming from another room. But they begin the process of reconciliation with a stipulation from her that he not come to see her until January 1. This disturbs the narrator because it means postponing Saint-Loup's promise to introduce him to Mme. de Guermantes the next time they're in Paris together. When Saint-Loup says he won't be going back to the city until Easter, the narrator tells him that he'll at Balbec then -- his family thinks a stay there earlier in the year will be good for his health. 

Finally, the narrator hits on a stratagem: He knows that the Duchesse has some paintings by Elstir in her collection, so he suggests that Saint-Loup write to her and ask her to give the narrator permission to come see the paintings. Saint-Loup gladly agrees. 

The selection ends with a conversation about Saint-Loup's captain, the Prince de Borodino, which leads into the narrator's reflections on "the differences between the two aristocracies: the old nobility and that of the Empire." Saint-Loup belongs to the former, the Prince de Borodino to the latter. 

The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been made a maréchal and a prince-duc by the Emperor, into whose family he had subsequently married, and whose father had then married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a minister after the coup d'état, felt that all of this meant very little to Saint-Loup and the Guermantes set. 

The tangle of bloodlines and French history is complicated, and for the reader who just wants to get on with the story a little boring, but Proust's aim is to present French society in as much detail as possible.

Day Seventy-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 38-48

From "But my eyes were diverted from..." to "...or the first flames of a great fire." 

_____

The narrator's attention is turned to "a badly dressed, ugly little woman" who turns out to be an unsuccessful actress, a rival of La Berma's filled with "a deadly hatred" for her. When the performance of the act from Phèdre begins, the woman comments derisively about La Berma until those around her shush her. 

This time, in part because he came in with diminished expectations, he finds that "the talent of La Berma, which had escaped me when I had struggled hard to grasp its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself forcefully upon my admiration as something self-evident." She becomes "a window opening onto a masterpiece" but also something more: "La Berma's interpretation was, around Racine's work, a second work, it, too, enlivened by genius." 

He realizes that he is no longer setting La Berma's performance against some "preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius."

Now I could appreciate the merits of a wide-ranging, poetic, and powerful interpretation; or, rather, it was upon this that these words are conventionally conferred, but only in the way that we give the names Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets that have nothing mythological about them. Our feelings belong to one world, our ability to name things and our thoughts belong to another; we can establish a concordance between the two, but not bridge the gap. 

I think what he's saying here is that the emotional impact of an experience cannot be fully expressed in words, which are abstracts of the experience. And that relying on words -- such as "wide-ranging, poetic, and powerful" -- as a guide to what the one who utters them has experienced is inadequate. 

But what's happening on stage isn't the only dramatic or aesthetic experience to be had in the theater: "the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the box, smothered in white chiffon." And a sort of duel ensues between the Duchesse and the Princesse. "It was as if the Duchesse had guessed that her cousin, of whom, rumor had it, she was prone to make fun for what she called her 'exaggerations' ..., would be dressed this evening in a manner that the Duchesse thought of as 'theatrical,' and that she had decided to give her a lesson in good taste." But together, both the Duchesse and the Princesse show up other women in the theater.

As in the play that was now being performed, to understand how much personal poetry La Berma drew from it, one had only to transfer her role, the role she alone knew how to play, to any other actress, so the spectator who looked toward the balcony would have seen, in two of the boxes there, how an "arrangement" that was supposed to resemble that of the Princesse de Guermantes's box merely made the Baronne de Morienval appear eccentric, pretentious, and ill-bred, and how an attempt, both painstaking and costly, to imitate the dress and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes merely made Mme de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl mounted on wires, rigid, desiccated, and crabby, with a plume of feathers from some funeral procession stuck vertically in her hair. 

The narrator has learned from Elstir not to regard matters of fashion as trivial. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the artist had talked about fashion with respect: "To despise dressmakers was no longer possible, since Elstir had said that the deft and gentle gesture with which they give a final ruffle, a last caress, to the bows and feathers of a just-completed hat was as much a challenge to his artistry as any movement by a jockey." (ITSOYGIF, p. 481)

Day Sixty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 496-507

From "The various waves of feeling sent through me ..." to "... and were replaced by others."

_____

The narrator decides to make his move on Albertine, but as usual he keeps overthinking things, devising oblique strategies to win her over. 


He joins the gang, plus some extras recruited for the game, to play ring-on-a-string. (A ring is threaded onto a long piece of string, which is then tied together to form a circle. The player who is "it" stands in the middle of the circle while the other players pass the ring along the string. "It" tries to find the ring, and if he or she succeeds, the one who was holding the ring becomes "it.") The narrator is ticked off because another boy is next to Albertine, which deprives him of the opportunity to touch her hand. 

A squeeze from the hand of Albertine had a sensual softness which seemed at one with the slightly mauve pink of her skin: it made you feel as though you were penetrating her, entering the privacy of her senses, an impression one had too from her resounding laugh, which was as suggestive of indecency as any throaty murmur of invitation, or as certain cries. 

He lets himself get caught with the ring and, when he takes his position in the center, succeeds in finding the ring as it passes into the hand of the boy next to Albertine, so he can take the boy's place. But he's so preoccupied with touching her hand, and so convinced that she is returning his ardor, that he's shocked when she whispers, "Take the thing, would you! I've been trying to pass it to you for about half an hour!" 


Embarrassed, he leaves the game in the company of Andrée to walk to the cliffs at Les Creuniers, which Elstir had painted. Andrée is clearly flirting with the narrator, but he doesn't notice, trying to say nice things about Albertine that Andrée would repeat to her: "Andrée said she was also very fond of Albertine and thought she was a dear; but the complimentary things I said about her friend did not seem to please her very much." 

Along the way he sees a hawthorn bush, which is associated with his first sighting of Gilberte -- "just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers." He falls into an imaginary conversation with the bush about its vanished blossoms, and when he returns to Andrée resumes his praises of Albertine, about which he naively reports,  "Despite this, I was never to learn whether Albertine heard a word of what  I said about her." He also maintains his ignorance of Andrée's jealousy of his infatuation with Albertine when he recalls, "If it was suggested that Albertine's marriage prospects might not be as bad as was supposed, Andrée scotched the notion and repeated in a furious tone, 'Of course the girl's unmarriageable! I don't ned to be told -- I think it's terrible!'" 


And so he wanders into another set of self-made barriers that prevent him from achieving his ostensible goal with Albertine, which he might have accomplished with a more direct approach.

I knew now that I loved Albertine, but I was in no hurry, alas, to tell her: the fact was that, since the time when I had played at the Champs-Élysées, my notion of love had undergone a change, while those to whom my love was addressed, though they were consecutive, remained unchanged. For one thing, the confession of love, the declaration of my tenderness to her whom I loved, no longer seemed to be one of love's classic and indispensable scenes; and for another, love itself, instead of appearing to be a reality eternal to me, now seemed a subjective pleasure. I sensed that the less Albertine knew about this pleasure of mine, the more she would be likely to let me go on enjoying it. 

The course of true love never did run smooth, but this is ridiculous. 


Meanwhile, he goes on flirting with Rosemonde and poor Andrée. When he hears that Albertine's aunt, Mme. Bontemps, is arriving for a visit, he desperately wants an introduction to her. So of course he pretends he doesn't, repeatedly scorning Mme. Bontemps to Andrée, while in the meantime arranging an introduction through Elstir. When he tells Andrée that he is invited to meet Albertine's aunt, though he really doesn't want to, she reacts as one might expect her to: "'I knew it all along!' Andrée exclaimed bitterly, gazing away at some invisible point, her eyes enlarged and flawed by displeasure."

Day Sixty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 465-480

From "One morning, not long after the day..." to "...the dormant immediacy of its charm.'"

____

As the narrator becomes more involved with the gang of girls, the focus of his attention shifts from Albertine to first one and then another, from Gisèle to Rosemonde to Andrée. Gisèle, "the one who looked rather poor and tough," greets him with "a smile, open and affectionate and full of blue eyes." He is walking with Albertine and Andrée, who snub Gisèle, Andrée accusing her of "awful dishonesty" and Albertine referring to her as "a little pest." But on learning that Gisèle is leaving for Paris, the narrator decides to slip away and follow her: "Gisèle would not be surprised to to see me, and once we had changed trains at Doncières, we would have a corridor train to Paris; while the English governess dozed, I would have Gisèle all to myself.... I could have assured her with total veracity that I was no longer attracted to Albertine." 

But he misses the train, so he goes back to his pursuit of the other girls, "all of them having stayed on in Balbec." Gisèle "now could not have been further from my thoughts." He begins spending every day with them, making excuses not to go on a carriage ride with Mme. de Villeparisis, staying away from Elstir's studio unless the girls go there, breaking his promise to visit Saint-Loup. "The Andrée who had struck me to begin with as being the most unfriendly of them all was in fact much more sensitive, affectionate, and astute than Albertine." (Does it need to be pointed out that Andrée is the third girl he's fallen for who has the feminized version of a man's name?) He now finds in Albertine "something of the Gilberte I had known in the earliest days, the explanation of which is that there is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times." He also notes that "Andrée, who was extremely wealthy, showed great generosity in sharing her luxury with Albertine, who was poor and an orphan." 

In the company of the girls, he finally pays a visit to Elstir, where the talk turns to the artistic potential of "regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside racecourse," to women's fashion, and to yachting.

Day Sixty-Four: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 450-465

From "On arriving at Elstir's..." to "...conditional on differing circumstances.'"

_____

The introduction to Albertine is treated to Proustian microanalysis. First, the narrator tells us that, "On going into a fashionable gathering as a young man, one takes leave of the person one was, one becomes a different man." And that the introduction itself was pleasurable only in retrospect: "Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present." 

And if he is a different person in the situation, so is Albertine, his perception of her and her charms constantly changing, "as each part of her made out of imagination and desire was replaced by a perception much less." Her speech is different from what he expected, suggesting "a level of cultivation far above what I would have imagined to be that of the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf course." He finds himself focusing on "one of her temples, flushed and unpleasant to look at, instead of the singular expression in her eyes, which until then had been the thing about her that had always been in my thoughts." 

But then he discovers himself from her point of view, as she mentions things that she had noticed about him as he crossed the room, pretending not to  focus on the impending introduction to her: "everything that I believed, not to be of importance only to myself, but to have been noticed only by me, and yet here they were, transcribed in a version I had not suspected existed, in the mind of Albertine." 

Now, feeling "a moral obligation toward the real Albertine to keep the promises of love made to the imaginary one," he begins a process of reconciling "the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted" with "the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea" of his imagination. He has noticed a beauty mark on her face, but can't seem to decide where it is. Today it was "on her cheek, just below the eye." But when he had seen her before, "when she had greeted Elstir in passing, I had seen it on her chin. Each time I saw Albertine, I noticed she had a beauty mark, and my misguided memory moved it about her face, sometimes putting it in one place, at other times another." 

He also experiences the disappointment that he had felt on the first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes, on seeing the church at Balbec, on watching La Berma in Phèdre, and on meeting Bergotte for the first time: "Disappointed as I was with Mlle Simonet, a young girl not very different from others I knew, I consoled myself with the thought ... that even though she had not lived up to my expectations, at least through her I would be able to meet her friends in the little gang." 

But when he sees her again a few days later on the esplanade, she has changed again. He almost doesn't recognize her as "a young girl with a little flat hat and a muff" and, "remembering the good manners which had so struck me, I was now surprised by their opposite, her coarse tone and her 'little gang' manners." Even the peripatetic beauty mark has relocated: 

Just as a phrase of Vinteuil that had delighted me in the sonata, and which my memory kept moving from the andante to the finale, until the day when, with the score in hand, I was able to find it and localize it where it belonged, in the scherzo, so the beauty mark, which I had remembered on her cheek, then on her chin, came to rest forever on her upper lip, just under her nose.

The citation of a phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, the leitmotif for Swann's infatuation with Odette, is a pretty obvious signal that the narrator will undergo a similarly dramatic relationship with Albertine. 

He begins an integration with Albertine's world when they meet Octave, "[a] young man with regular features and tennis racquets" who is "the son of a very wealthy industrialist." He and Albertine chat about golf while the narrator seethes with jealousy, noting that Octave "had no idea of how to use certain words, or even of the most elementary rules of good grammar." But he's gratified when Albertine dismisses him as "a lounge lizard ... incapable of conversing with you. He's good at golf and that's all he's good at." 

And then Bloch turns up, informing the narrator that he's going to Doncières to see Saint-Loup. When he leaves them, Albertine informs the narrator, "'I don't like him at all!'" When he tells her Bloch's name, "she exclaimed, 'I wouldn't have minded betting he was a Jew boy! They always know how to get your back up!'" 

They agree to go out together sometime, and the narrator parts from her in some perplexity, finding her "upbringing ... inconceivable," her "inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, a mystery.... Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses." (If that last phrase seems enigmatic, it's because, as Grieve notes, scholars can't decipher Proust's handwriting and tell whether he wrote reposant -- "restful" -- or passionnant -- "exciting." Though either way it remains enigmatic.)

They do go out again, and this time they meet Andrée, the tall girl in the "little gang," who joins them but remains silent. They briefly encounter Octave again, who when the narrator alludes to Octave's family connection to the Verdurins, "disparaged the celebrated Wednesdays, and added that M. Verdurin was ignorant of the proper wearing of the dinner jacket." They pass the d'Ambresac sisters, and when both he and Albertine exchange greetings with them, she comments on the shared acquaintance, giving him some hope "that my situation with Albertine might improve." 

Albertine also surprises him with the information that the older d'Ambresac sister is betrothed to Saint-Loup, with whom the younger was also in love. "I felt very sad to realize that Saint-Loup had concealed his engagement from me and that he should be contemplating such an immoral thing as to marry without first giving up his mistress." 

But Albertine is not inclined to introduce him to the rest of the gang of girls: "It's very sweet of you to bother about them. But they're nobody, just pay attention to them. I mean, a fellow as clever as you should have nothing to do with a group of silly girls like that. Actually, Andrée's very clever, and she's a very nice girl, although perfectly skittish. But honestly, the others are just silly." And when he tries to set up a meeting with Andrée a few days later, she fibs by saying her mother is ill, when in fact, as he learns from Elstir, she had another engagement.

Day Sixty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 439-450

From "I had to rejoin Elstir...." to "...would have been in a state of panic.'"

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Catching up with Elstir after avoiding an introduction to the girls, the narrator tells the artist that he would have been "so happy to meet them," to which Elstir replies quite sensibly, "Well, in that case, what did you stand miles away for?"  The narrator takes umbrage at the reply, retreating into self-consciousness: "I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them."  

When Elstir offers to give him a sketch "as a memento of our friendship," the narrator tells him what he really wants is a photo of the portrait of "Miss Sacripant," the sexually ambiguous watercolor he had examined earlier. Suddenly the narrator realizes the truth: The woman in the picture is Odette. (The note of sexual ambiguity is not new with Odette: She has admitted to relations with members of her own sex.) And then he's struck by another realization: 

the identity of Elstir himself. He had painted a portrait of Odette de Crécy -- could such a brilliant man, a solitary, a philosopher, who had accumulated wisdom, who stood above all things, whose conversation was so enthralling, possibly be the painter, vacuous and devious, adopted long ago by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether they had not nicknamed him "M. Biche." He answered, in a very simple manner, that this was indeed the case, as though speaking of a part of his life that was rather remote, as though not realizing his answer caused me an acute disappointment.

(A question: How does the narrator know so much about the Verdurins' "little set" at this point? Has Swann already unburdened himself of the full story that the narrator recounts in "Swann in Love"? Or have Swann and Odette simply gossiped to him about the old days of the little set? In Swann's Way the painter is seldom mentioned, at least in comparison to the pianist, who plays for Swann the theme from Vinteuil's sonata that figures so much in his wooing of Odette. Or is this just one of Proust's narrative inconsistencies?) 

Elstir then goes on to defend himself, claiming that there has never been a man who "has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory.... Wisdom cannot be inherited -- one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things." Sensible enough, but he goes on for too long about it, leading Grieve to append a footnote in which he comments that Proust himself wrote a marginal note, "This is all badly written." So it is. 

The narrator leaves, heartened by the knowledge that he will get his introduction to the girls one day. In the meantime he's engaged in preparations for Saint-Loup's return to the garrison where he is stationed. Things are muddled a bit when Bloch shows up, "to Saint-Loup's great displeasure," and manages to get himself invited to visit him at Doncières, despite Saint-Loup's efforts to discourage the visit. 

After a lovely passage in which the narrator describes commonplace things -- "knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet" and so on -- to show how Elstir's art has attuned him to "beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things," he receives an invitation to a reception where he can meet Albertine. And now the trinity of forces determining his personality -- will, sensibility and mind, which are rough analogues of Freud's triad of id, ego, and superego -- take hold again in the anticipation of "the pleasure of making her acquaintance."

My mind saw this pleasure, now that it was assured, as being worth not very much. But the will in me did not share that illusion for an instant, being the persevering and unwavering servant of our personalities, hidden in the shadows, disdained, forever faithful, working unceasingly, and without heeding the variability of our self, making sure it shall never lack what it needs. ... So my mind and sensibility set up a debate on how much pleasure there might be in making the acquaintance of Albertine, while in front of the mirror I considered the vain and fragile charms that they would have preferred to preserve unused for some better occasion. But my will did not lose sight of the time at which I had to leave; and it was Elstir's address that it gave to the coachman. My mind and sensibility, now that the die was cast, indulged in the luxury of thinking it was a pity. If my will had given a different address, they would have been in a state of panic.

One note: in the previous account of this battle between the will and the other two elements of personality, Grieve's translation was "sensitivity" rather than "sensibility." Again, it would be worth knowing what the French original was.

Day Sixty-Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 427-439

From "I walked up and down, impatient..." to "...I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'"

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As the narrator waits for Elstir to finish the painting he's working on, worrying that he might miss seeing the "gang of girls," he examines a watercolor of a young woman. "The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait I was looking at came from the fact, which I did not understand, that it was a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed." The sexual ambiguity of the portrait intrigues him. At times the figure looks like "a rather boyish girl" and then again "an effeminate young man, perverted and pensive." The face's "wistful or forlorn" look, "in the contrast it made with the accessories from the world of theater and debauchery, gave a strange thrill." But it's also an expression that might have been assumed by the actress for the portrait. 

When Elstir sees what he's looking at, he dismisses it as worthless, something he'd done when much younger. But he also hides it away quickly when he hears his wife coming, even though "I can assure you the young creature in the bowler hat had no part to play in my life." Mme. Elstir, whom the artist addresses as "My beautiful Gabrielle!," makes little impression on the narrator at first. He notices that she has black hair that's turning white and was "common  but not simple in her manner," as if she's affecting a pose "required by her mode of statuesque beauty, which had lost, in aging, all its attractiveness." But he comes to realize that her husband had found in her an ideal of beauty that he had previously located only in his imagination -- that she is herself "a portrait by Elstir."  

But he remains impatient to leave in time to catch another glimpse of his girls. Finally, Elstir is ready to take a walk with him.

I was walking back toward the villa with Elstir when, with the suddenness of Mephistopheles materializing before Faust, there appeared at the far end of the avenue -- seemingly the simple objectification, unreal and diabolical, of the temperament opposite to my own, of the almost barbaric and cruel vitality which, in my feebleness, my excess of painful sensitivity and intellectuality, I lacked -- a few spots of the essence it was impossible to mistake for any other, a few of the stars from the zoophytic cluster of young girls, who, although they looked as though they had not seen me, were without a doubt at that very moment making sarcastic remarks about me. 

Self-consciously, he pretends to look at porcelain in a shop window while Elstir walks ahead to meet the girls. "The certainty of being introduced to the girls had made me not only feign indifference to them, but feel it." But to his surprise, "Elstir parted from the girls without calling me over. They turned up a side street and he came toward me. It was a fiasco." The sudden reversal of expectations, that he was going to meet Albertine at last, "made her almost insignificant to me, then infinitely precious; and some years later, the belief that she was faithful to me, followed by disbelief, would have analogous results." (Proust is not averse to giving the plot away.) 

The experience inspires the narrator to some thoughts about self-deception:

what is known to the will remains inefficacious if it is unknown to the mind and the sensitivity: they can believe in good faith that we wish to leave a woman, when only the will is privy to our attachment to her. They are fooled by the belief that we will see her again in a moment. But let that belief vanish, in the realization that she has just gone and will never come back, and the mind and sensitivity, having lost their bearings, are afflicted with a fit of madness, and the paltry pleasure of being with her expands to fill everything in life.

He follows this insight with an anecdote: His grandmother and some other ladies in Combray once set up a fund to provide an annuity for a girl they believed to be the daughter of their drawing teacher, who was dying shortly after the death of the woman they assumed to be his mistress. When they complimented the child's beautiful hair, the grandmother asked, "'Did her mother have such lovely hair?' To which the father gave the guileless reply: 'I don't know -- I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'" I confess that I don't quite get this: Is the point that they were wrong, and the woman was not his mistress? Or is it that he is unwilling to admit it? Or maybe she followed Joe Cocker's advice and left her hat on? It seems to me something has been lost either in the telling or the translating.

Day Sixty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 416-427

From "At the hotel in Balbec ..." to "... it might lend some of itself to me, in their eyes."

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Viewing Elstir's work inspires the narrator to musings on Impressionism. (Commenters on Proust often identify Elstir with -- among others -- Monet.)

Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of. One of the metaphors that recurred most often in the sea pictures surrounding him then was one that compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them....

On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear fontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean....

Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest....

Elstir's intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to discover them....

The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant in order to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity (since the things one knows are not one's own), was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated.

And so on. 

Elstir also takes it upon himself to correct the narrator's first disappointed experience of the church of Balbec. And he disagrees with Legrandin's comment to the narrator that Brittany was "bad for someone inclined to wistfulness."

"Not at all," he replied. "When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn't be kept away from it, he mustn't have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what's in it. And you'll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you'll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it's more of it, it's all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them."

"Wistfulness" is not a word we use much anymore, and in this context I'd like to know what the original word in French was. The dictionary gives, as translations for "wistfulness," nostalgie, mélancolie and tristesse. But "nostalgia" and "melancholy," though the narrator is certainly given to both, seem to narrow the focus to, on the one hand, a longing for the past, and on the other, a generalized feeling of the blues. "Wistfulness" suggests dreaminess and longing, and I think Grieve must have hit on the right word to characterize the narrator. Certainly no one ever put more effort into getting to know his dreams, his longings, his nostalgia and his melancholy than the narrator does. 

And then a surprise: "the young cyclist from the little group of girls came tripping along the lane, with her black hair, and her toque pulled down, her plump cheeks, and her cheerful, rather insistent eyes." She greets Elstir, and he tells the narrator that her name is Albertine Simonet. 

"There's hardly a day," Elstir said, "when one or another of [the gang of girls] doesn't come down the lane and drop in to pay me a little visit," a statement that reduced me to despair -- if I had gone to see him as soon as my grandmother had suggested it, I might well have made the acquaintance of Albertine long since!