Day One Hundred Thirty-Five, The Prisoner, pp. 35-46

From "Since I tried as far as possible to have left the Duchesse..." to "...related ideas to form a powerful force for break-up."

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When he leaves the Duchesse to return home, the narrator often encounters Charlus and Morel on their way to Jupien's, where they took tea every day. Charlus was once offended when Jupien's niece said "I'll treat you to tea," a phrasing that was apparently considered "a vulgar one, particularly in the mouth of someone he was planning to make his almost-daughter-in-law." For Charlus is seeing to it that Morel and Jupien's niece are to be married. Meanwhile, Charlus has been flirting with a pageboy at a gambling club, who has written to him, and he is so delighted with the intimacy that he shows off the letter to M. de Vaugoubert, whom he usually avoids.

For the diplomat, with his monocle stuck in his eye, stared in all directions at the lads passing by. What was more, when he was with M. de Charlus, he grew more daring, and began to use a language which the Baron hated. He put all men's names in the feminine and, as he was very stupid, thought this was the height of wit and was constantly bursting out laughing.

The narrator comments to the reader that it shouldn't be surprising that this kind of "degeneracy" is often found in the upper classes: "As time passes, old families develop peculiarities -- a red, hooked nose, a deformed chin --" and "among these persisting and ever intensifying traits, there are some which are not visible: tendencies and tastes." Proust's references to homosexuality as "degeneracy" and "inversion" are sometimes read as his attempt to cover up his own gayness, but others think that with them he is widening the scope of his satire to include his narrator.

As for Charlus's enthusiasm for marrying Morel to Jupien's niece (despite her vulgar turn of speech, which, after he denounces it to Morel, she never utters again), it is a move to continue his control over his protégé. The reasoning is that "once he was married his fears for his household, for his flat, for his future would give M. de Charlus's wishes a stronger purchase upon him." 

Morel has given up his previously expressed desire to seduce and abandon a young virgin, and the prospect of marrying Jupien's niece instead of raping her appeals to him especially after he experiences cramps in his hand that raise the possibility that he will have to give up the violin. "Since, in everything outside his art, he was unbelievably lazy, he would need to find someone to keep him, and he felt he would rather it were Jupien's niece than M. de Charlus." Morel has also borrowed money from Bloch, befriending him during the transaction and then denouncing him after he realizes that he's going to have to repay it: "anti-Semitism was, in Morel, the natural result of having been lent five thousand francs by a Jew."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Four, The Prisoner, pp. 19-35

From "Françoise came in to light the fire and..." to "...a look this evening and let you know."

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The twigs that Françoise tosses on the fire to get it started spark another Proustian moment, a happy one this time. Their "smell, forgotten all through the summer, traced a magic circle around the fireplace in which, seeing myself reading at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as happy, staying in my room in Paris, as if I had been on the point of leaving for a walk toward Méséglise or meeting Saint-Loup and his friends on field exercises.... It was not just the weather outside that had changed, or the smells in my room, but inside me there was a change of age, the replacement of one person by another."

He is still convinced that he doesn't love Albertine, but as in the past, he is in the grip of his fantasy of possession. She "held nothing new for me. Every day I found her less pretty. Only the desire which she excited in others, when I learned of it and began to suffer again, in my desire to keep her from them, could put her back on her pedestal. Suffering alone gave life to my tedious attachment to her." And yet he persists in trying to make her happy by giving her presents, especially buying her expensive clothes. His chief consultant on matters of fashion is the Duchesse de Guermantes, to whom Albertine was indifferent at first, even hostile, out of her "hatred for upper-class people." But "my friend's republican disdain for a Duchess was replaced by an intense interest in a woman of fashion."

And so the narrator visits the Duchesse often, and devotes several pages to further analysis of her character, including her country roots, which reveal themselves in her vocabulary and pronunciation, which he finds not unusual, likening them to those of Françoise. On his latest visit to the Duchesse, he finds the Duc and M. de Bréauté present also. The Duc is still obsessed by the Dreyfus affair, even though it has been over for two years -- "twenty years later people would still be talking about it," the narrator comments. The narrator's comments on a dress the Duchesse once wore, "by an obscure association of ideas" provokes M. de Bréauté to mention the Dreyfus case and the Duc to an anti-Semitic tirade:

"If a Frenchman commits theft or murder, I don't feel I have to say he's innocent, just because he's a Frenchman like me. But the Jews will never admit that one of them could be a traitor, even though they know it's true, and they don't care in the least about the terrible repercussions ... that can result from their friend's crime." 

The Duchesse quite sensibly replies, "Certainly if Dreyfus had been a Christian the Jews wouldn't have taken such an interest in the case, but they did, because they realize that if he hadn't been  Jew, people wouldn't have been so ready to believe him a traitor." The Duc can only bluster that "Women don't understand anything about politics" and "France should expel all the Jews."

The narrator "saw danger ahead and hurriedly began to talk frocks again."

Day One Hundred Thirty-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 480-496

Part II, Chapter III, from "Despite this breach with the Patronne, the Cambremers..." to "...Marriage with Albertine struck me as foolishness."

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As the stay at Balbec winds down, the narrator reflects on the journeys of the little group he has found himself in, and on the nature of his relationship with Albertine. Since their homeward trips after visiting the Verdurins take place in darkness, the two, still posing as "cousins," find opportunities for "taking advantage of the darkness." 

His jealousy persists, and it precipitates a break with Bloch. Saint-Loup has come to meet them during their stop at the station in Doncières, and because the narrator is afraid she's too interested in his friend, "I held Albertine captive with my eyes, pointlessly vigilant as it happens." But Bloch is there, too, meeting his father, "who had just inherited from his uncle and, having leased a château called La Commanderie, thought it very much the grand seigneur to travel about only in a post chaise, with postilions in livery." Bloch asks the narrator to come say hello to his father, but the narrator "could not bear to leave Albertine in the train with Saint-Loup." Bloch takes offense: "From that day forward, he ceased to show me the same affection and, what I found more hurtful, no longer had the same regard for my character."


The narrator admits that Bloch "had all the defects that displeased me most, but at the same time, "the young Israelite had had an effect on M. de Charlus that was anything but irritation." The Baron tries to disguise his interest in Bloch, and upon being told that he was not staying in Balbec launches into an anti-Semitic rant about how Jews like to stay in places with Christian associations: "As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a château, he always chooses one called Le Prieuré, L'Abbaye, Le Monastère, La Maison Dieu." All the places called La Commanderie, Charlus points out, "were built or owned by the Knights of the Order of Malta (of which I am one)." And he asks the narrator to show him how to get to Bloch's father's château she he can "see how our ancient domains are withstanding such a profanation." And he demands to know where Bloch lives in Paris: "Since three-quarters of the streets take their name from a church or abbey, there's a good chance of the sacrilege continuing." 

The narrator doesn't know Bloch's address, however, which puts him in Morel's good graces: 

Morel, who had not failed to observe the impression Bloch had been making, thanked me surreptitiously for having "dispatched him, adding cynically, "He'd have liked to stay, all that's jealousy, he'd like to take my place. Typical of a Yid!"

The narrator concludes the chapter by remembering the people and places around Balbec that he has seen during the summer: 

Indeed, such was the degrading influence, and also the charm, of the country around Balbec, that it had become truly familiar ground for me; if their territorial distribution, their being sown along the full extent of the coast in diverse crops, necessarily lent to the visits I made to these various friends the form of a journey, they also now confined the attractions of that journey to the social ones, of a succession of visits.... In this too social valley, to the sides of which I sensed there clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetic cry of evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog but the "How goes it?" of M. de Criquetot, or the "Kaire" of Brichot.

And he concludes: "The benefit that I derived from it, at least, was no longer to see things except from the practical point of view. Marriage with Albertine struck me as foolishness." We'll see about that.

Day One Hundred Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 78-98

Part II, Chapter I, from "Reassured as to her fear of having to talk with Swann..." to "...his religious respect for women's virtue." 

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The narrator glides through the party like a scuba diver through a school of beautiful and outlandish fish. Now he hears two different explanations of the scene between Swann and the Prince de Guermantes. M. de Bréauté asserts that Bergotte wrote a play that was staged at Swann's and lampooned the Prince. But Col. de Froberville insists that the Prince was outraged by Swann's continuing to hold Dreyfusard views. The Duc himself is angered that Swann, "a discerning gourmet, a positive mind, a collector, a lover of old books, a member of the Jockey Club, a man highly respected on all sides, a connoisseur of good addresses who used to send us the best port you can drink, a dilettante, a family man" should display such "ingratitude" as to continue to support Dreyfus.

The narrator points out that Prince Von is also a Dreyfusard, which the Duc dismisses because "he's a foreigner. I don't care two hoots. With a Frenchman, it's another matter. It's true, Swann is a Jew. But until today ... I had been weak-minded enough to believe that a Jew can be a Frenchman, an honorable Jew, I mean, a man of the world."

The narrator tells the Duchesse he wants to go talk to Swann, if he's still at the soirée. She replies that she isn't eager to see him because "I was told a short while ago at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, that he would like, before he dies, for me to make the acquaintance of his wife and daughter." She's not willing to honor the request, saying she hopes "that it's not as serious as all that," and "There wouldn't be salons any more if one was obliged to make the acquaintance of all the dying."

Finally, the Duchesse and the narrator go their separate ways, and he heads for the smoking room to see if Swann is there. On the way he notices "two young men whose great but dissimilar beauty had its origins in the same woman. These were the two sons of Mme de Surgis, the Duc de Guermantes's new mistress." He is detained by the Marquise de Citri, who affects a posture of boredom with everything, and by the time he frees himself from her he sees Charlus eying one of the sons of Mme. de Surgis. Charlus blushes when he finds the narrator looking at him. "Once M. de Charlus had learned from me that they were brothers, his face could not disguise the admiration inspired in him by a family capable of creating such splendid yet such different masterpieces." 

Swann enters the room, his face showing signs of his illness. "Swann's Punchinello nose, for so long reabsorbed into a pleasing face, now seemed enormous, tumid, crimson, more that of an old Hebrew." But when he starts to cross the room to talk to Swann, he is interrupted by Saint-Loup, in town for forty-eight hours. Saint-Loup wants to avoid Charlus for fear of a lecture from his uncle: 

"I find it comic that my family council,which has always come down so hard on me, should be made up of those very family members who've lived it up the most, starting with the most dissipated of the lot, my uncle Charlus, who's my surrogate tutor, who's had as many women as Don Juan, and who even at his age doesn't let up." 

The narrator, who now knows more about the nature of Charlus's "dissipations" than Saint-Loup does, skirts the issue. "'But are you sure M. de Charlus has had so many mistresses?' I asked, certainly not with the diabolical intention of revealing to Robert the secret I had chanced upon, but irritated nonetheless by hearing him maintain an error with so much assurance and self-satisfaction." Saint-Loup shrugs off his friend's apparent naïveté and turns his attention to the narrator's sex life, proposing to set him up with "that tall blonde, Mme Putbus's lady's maid. She likes women, too, but I imagine you don't mind that." The narrator observes that "Robert's love of Letters had not gone very deep, it did not emanate from his true nature, it was only a by-product of his love for Rachel, and had been erased along with it, at the same time as his abhorrence of voluptuaries and his religious respect for women's virtue."   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred 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 Ninety-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 390-412

Part II, Chapter II, from "I have already said (and it was..." to "...the day after my evening with Saint-Loup"

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The narrator begins with a dismissal of the concept of friendship, "which is totally bent on making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (except through art) to a superficial self that ... finds ... a vague, sentimental satisfaction at being cherished by external support ... and marvels at qualities it would castigate as failings and seek to correct in itself." But he does admit that it can, "in certain circumstances [provide] us with just the boost we needed and the warmth we are unavailable to muster of our own accord." 


So however misanthropic the narrator might eventually become, when Saint-Loup arrives after the narrator has been dumped by Mme. de Stermaria and is weeping into the rolls of carpet that are to be laid before his parents' return, he feels some gratitude. Though he wants to be taken to Rivebelle and the women he remembers from the restaurants there, he settles for one in Paris, which is smothered by a thick fog. 


The fog arouses a "dim memory of arrival in Combray by night" -- but it is only a dim memory, not the transformative one produced by the taste of the madeleine. It does, however, arouse in him a sense of "inspired exhilaration, which might have resulted in something had I remained alone and so avoided the detour of the many futile years I was yet to spend before discovering the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book." In other words, this dim memory of Combray is not enough to set him off in search of lost time. If it had, he observes, "the carriage I found myself in would have deserved to rank as more memorable than Dr. Percepied's, in which I had composed the little descriptive piece about the Martinville steeples, recently unearthed, as it happened, which I had reworked and offered without success to the Figaro." So his rejection of friendship, it seems, is a way of blaming it for his setting aside his career as a writer. 

In the carriage, he's surprised and angry when Saint-Loup confesses that he has badmouthed the narrator to Bloch: "'I told Bloch you weren't very fond of him, that you found him rather vulgar. You know me, I like things to be clear-cut,' he concluded smugly, in a tone of voice that brooked no argument." The narrator regards this as a betrayal of their friendship, and observes that "his face was marred, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a horribly twisted expression, which I encountered only once or twice in all the time I knew him." He is at a loss to explain Saint-Loup's callousness. 


At the restaurant, the narrator enters alone, while Saint-Loup stays to give the driver instructions. The place is divided into two areas, one of which is dominated by a group of young aristocrats, anti-Dreyfusards, and the other by the Dreyfusards. The narrator takes a seat in the area reserved for the aristocrats, and is rudely ushered into the other area, facing the drafty "door reserved for the Hebrews." He observes the behavior of the aristocrats, who include the Prince de Foix. 


And then there's an ambiguous passage about the Prince de Foix and Saint-Loup, who, the narrator tells us, belonged to a "closely knit group of four" who were "known as the four gigolos," "were never invited to anything separately" and at country houses were always given adjoining bedrooms:

as a result, especially since the four of them were extremely good-looking, rumors circulated about the nature of their intimacy. As far as Saint-Loup was concerned, I was in a position to denounce such rumors categorically. But the curious thing is that, if it eventually came to light that the rumors were true of all four of them, then each one had been utterly unaware of the facts in relatin to the other three. Yet each had done his utmost to inform himself about the others, either to gratify a desire or, more likely, a grudge, to prevent a marriage, or to have the upper hand over the friend whose secret he had uncovered. A fifth member (for in groups of four there are always more than four) had joined this Platonic quartet, a man far more suspect than the others. But religious scruple had held him back until long after the group had broken up and he himself was a married man, the father of a family, one minute rushing off to Lourdes to pray that the next baby might be a boy or a girl, and the next flinging himself at soldiers.

Considering Saint-Loup's previous overreaction to being propositioned by a man on the street, and his apparent jealousy of the narrator's friendship with Bloch, it seems safe to say that we haven't learned everything about Saint-Loup yet. 


Saint-Loup's arrival, and his discovery of the narrator sitting in front of the drafty door, causes a flurry of apologies from the management. It also causes a renewal of admiration of Saint-Loup from the narrator, who compares him to the "foreigners, intellectuals, would-be artists" in the café, who are mocked by the aristocrats for their awkwardness and lack of style but are nevertheless "highly intelligent and goodhearted men who, in the long run, could be profoundly endearing." Saint-Loup has style and grace and wealth in addition to intelligence and good-heartedness, which impresses the narrator because of his background. 

Among the Jews especially, there were few whose parents did not have a kindness of heart, a broad-mindedness, an honest, in comparison with which Saint-Loup's mother and the Duc de Guermantes came across as the sorriest of moral figures in their desiccated emotions, the surface religiosity they cultivated only to condemn scandal, and their clannish apology for a Christianity which never failed to lead ... to colossally wealthy marriages. But, for all this, Saint-Loup, in whatever way the faults of his parents had combined to create a new set of qualities, was governed by a delightful openness of mind and heart.

And he is further endeared to the narrator when he goes to borrow the Prince de Foix's vicuña cloak to keep the narrator warm in the drafty room, and on his return negotiates the crowded room with a graceful balancing act along the banquettes that line the wall. It resembles the act of a lover more than that of a friend. Meanwhile, the waiters have been kowtowing to the narrator, and the proprietor addresses him as "M. le Baron" and then, on being corrected, "M. le Comte." "I had no time to launch a second protest, which would almost certainly have promoted me to the rank of marquis." 


When he's seated again, Saint-Loup tells the narrator that Charlus wants to see him tomorrow evening. The narrator replies that he's dining with the Duchesse de Guermantes that evening. Saint-Loup, who calls it a "fabulous blowout," tries to persuade him that he should "get out of it" and that Charlus doesn't want him to go, but they agree that the narrator will see Charlus afterward at eleven. 


They also talk about the threat of war in Morocco, to which Saint-Loup is scheduled to return and from which he's trying to get transferred, with the Duchesse's help: "she can twist Général de Saint-Joseph round her little finger." He tells the narrator that he doesn't think there will be war with Germany over Morocco, but adds with semi-prescience: "You need only to think what a cosmic thing a war would be today. It would be more catastrophic than the Flood and the Götterdämmerung put together. Only it wouldn't last so long." 


After the earlier anger, the narrator regains his admiration for Saint-Loup: 

Our rare conversations alone together, and this one in particular, have assumed, in retrospect, the status of important turning points. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (with some remorse), what he would have liked to inspire. Still in the throes of the pleasure it had given me to see him come cantering toward me and gracefully reaching his goal, I felt that this pleasure arose from the fact that each of his movement as he had moved along the wall bench possibly derived its meaning from, was motivated by, something very personal to Saint-Loup himself, but that what really lay behind it was something he had inherited, by birth and upbringing, from his race. ... In the same way that Mme de Villeparisis, on an intellectual level, had needed a great deal of serious thought in order to convey a sense of the frivolous in her conversation and in her memoirs, so, in order for Saint-Loup's body to carry so much nobility, all ideas of nobility had first to leave his mind, which was intent on higher things, before returning to his body to re-establish themselves there as noble attributes of an utterly unstudied kind.

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-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 237-248

From "'You're not going to Mme Sagan's ball...'" to "...and Robert himself entered the room." 

_____

Bloch's bumptiousness continues, but it doesn't seem to bother de Norpois, "who told us afterward, somewhat naïvely, remembering perhaps the few surviving traces in Bloch's speech of the neo-Homeric manner he had largely outgrown: 'He is rather amusing, with that slightly outmoded, solemn manner of speaking he has.'" But the argument about the Dreyfus case persists until the Duc de Châtelleraut, "who could feel that everyone was turning against Bloch, and who, like many society people, was a coward," makes a remark about the fact that Bloch is Jewish. Bloch replies, "'But how did you know? Who told you?,' as though he had been the son of a convict. Yet, given his last name, which was not exactly Christian in flavor, and his face, there was something rather naïve in his startled words." 

Mme. de Villeparisis, in the meantime, had come to the conclusion "that he could be a compromising person for M. de Norpois to know.... So she decided to make it clear to Bloch that he need not come to the house again." She does so by feigning a kind of drowsiness when Bloch comes to take his leave, and by not extending her hand. Bloch persists, in an effort not to lose face, and 

thrust out the hand she had refused to shake. Mme de Villeparisis was shocked. But ... she merely let her eyelids droop over her half-closed eyes.

"I think she's asleep," said Bloch to the archivist.... "Goodbye madame," Bloch shouted. 

The Marquise moved her lips slightly, like a dying woman who wants to open her mouth but whose eyes show no sign of recognition. Then she turned, brimming with renewed vitality, to the Marquis d'Argencourt, while Bloch left the room convinced that she must be soft in the head.

Nevertheless, the narrator tells us, she received Bloch a few days later because she still wanted him to stage the play for her. Meanwhile, her dismissal of Bloch has become society gossip, "but in a version that had already ceased to bear any relation to the truth.

After Bloch's departure, Saint-Loup's mother, Mme. de Marsantes, arrives. She is also, as the narrator tells us, the Duc de Guermantes's sister. "She was especially friendly to me because I was Robert's friend, and also because I did not move in the same world as Robert." 

Then Mme. de Villeparisis informs the Duchesse de Guermantes that she's expecting the arrival of "someone whom you've no desire to know": Odette Swann. Odette, the narrator comments, has become an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, because she was afraid that Swann's Jewish "origins might  turn to her disadvantage." She was also "following the example of Mme Verdurin, in whom a latent bourgeois anti-Semitism had awakened and grown to a positive frenzy." The Duchesse thanks Mme. de Villeparisis for the warning and assures her that since she knows Odette by sight, she'll "be able to leave at the right moment." Mme. de Marsantes, however, tells the Duchesse that Odette is "very nice. She's an excellent woman." 

Mme. de Villeparisis changes the subject to Lady Israels, and Mme. de Marsantes reveals that she has broken off relations with her. 

"It seems she's one of the very worst of them and makes no secret of the fact. Besides, we've all been too trusting, too hospitable. I shall never go near anyone of that race again. While we closed our doors to old country cousins, our own flesh and blood, we opened them to Jews. Now we can see what thanks we get for it."

Then she stops, noting that her son, "young fool that he is," has very different feelings on the matter. And shortly after that, Saint-Loup himself arrives.     

Day Eighty-Five: The Guermantes Way, pp. 225-237

From "M. de Guermantes sat up in the armchair..." to "... 'Yes, Your Highness, of your bracelets.'" 

_____

The Dreyfus case dominates today's excerpt, pretty much establishing the date of the scene as 1898 with a reference to Bloch's attending the trial of Émile Zola. (This also provides a clue to the narrator's age: Proust was 26 when the trial took place.) 

His conversation with de Norpois about the case has left Bloch none the wiser as to the ambassador's true opinions on the case. De Norpois gives an eyeroll when Mme. de Villeparisis asks him about their conversation, indicating to the narrator that de Norpois is "a convinced anti-Dreyfusard" whose diplomatic skills have "flattered Bloch's vanity" and left him unable "to disentangle M. de Norpois's real views." 

But there's no doubt about the prevailing view of the people at Mme. de Villeparisis's salon. The Duc de Guermantes is fuming because Saint-Loup's election to the Jockey Club has been endangered by his Dreyfusard views: "[I]f one of our family were to be refused membership in the Jockey -- especially Robert, whose father was president for ten years -- it would be an outrage. ... With a name like 'the Marquis de Saint-Loup,' one isn't a Dreyfusard. And that's all there is to it." M. de Guermantes blames it on "that dreadful bed-hopping young miss of his. ... And she just happens to be a compatriot of our M. Dreyfus." And while the Duc proclaims his broadmindedness with a version of the "some of my best friends" argument -- "I'd be happy to be seen with a Negro if he was a friend of mine, and I wouldn't give two hoots what anyone thought" -- he also proclaims, "I am quite capable of proving that there's never been a drop of Jewish blood in our family." 

The Duchesse reveals that her chief objection to Dreyfus is one of style: "Those idiotic, heavy-handed letters he writes from his island! I don't know whether M. Esterhazy is any better, but at least there is more style about the way he writes, more of a sense of tone. M. Dreyfus's supporters can't be very pleased about it. What a pity they can't just exchange their innocent victim for one with more style." 

The scene leaves no doubt that the narrator (and Bloch and Saint-Loup) are out of the mainstream of high society's opinion on the case. 

Day Eighty-Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 177-193

From "As I had imagined before making..." to  "...and the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room." 

_____

After yesterday's fisticuffs, a quieter but no less combative scene: the salon of Mme. de Villeparisis. We learn, however, that the Marquise is by no means at the pinnacle of society, that she "was one of those women who, born of an illustrious family and marrying into another no less illustrious, ... apart from a number of duchesses who are their nieces or sisters-in-law, even a crowned head or two, old family connections, entertain in their salons only third-rate guests drawn from the bourgeoisie and from a nobility that is either provincial or tainted." The reasons for her "loss of status" aren't entirely clear to the narrator. One reason may be that she has been having an affair with M. de Norpois, a surprising fact that has been kept from us until now. She also has a reputation for a "sharp tongue" that may have gotten her into trouble. But the narrator chiefly suspects that it's because of "her intelligence, the intelligence of a secondary writer far more than that of a woman of rank." She is a bluestocking. Society, the narrator tells us, is "in the habit of rating a salon by the people its mistress excluded rather than by those she received," so Mme. de Villeparisis's earlier intellectual curiosity ruined her reputation. Unfortunately, "she had begun to attach importance to that status once she had lost it." 

Tonight the narrator encounters at Mme. de Villeparisis's only an archivist, M. de Molé, who has been helping her sort through the letters she had received from eminent people for inclusion in her memoirs; a historian, M. Pierre, who had come to see a portrait she possesses because he wants to include it in a book he's writing; and the ubiquitous Bloch, "now an up-and-coming dramatist upon whom she counted to secure free performances from actors and actresses for her future afternoon receptions." Bloch's presence is possible because the Dreyfus case had not yet reached the point when it "hurl[ed] Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder" and because he was not yet famous, "whereas important Jews representative of their side were already threatened." 

Mme. de Villeparisis's salon was looked down upon by the likes of Mme. Leroi, "and Mme de Villeparisis was stung by that opinion. But hardly anyone today knows who Mme Leroi was, her opinions have completely vanished." Thanks to her memoirs, the narrator notes, Mme. de Villeparisis's salon "will be regarded as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by posterity." He gives tongue-in-cheek credit for that to "God, whose will it is that a few well-written books should exist" and therefore "breathes didain into the hearts of the Mmes Leroi, for he knows that, should they invite the Mmes de Villeparisis to dinner, then these would immediately leave their writing desks and order their carriages for eight o'clock." 

But Mme. de Villeparisis is not alone on the third tier of society. There are three others, once prominent, who have similarly fallen from the heights for one reason or another. "Mme de Villeparisis saw much of these three ladies, but she did not like them." Nevertheless, one of them, a tall woman with "a monumental pile of white hair, dressed in the style of Marie-Antoinette," arrives to join the company. Mme. de Villeparisis addresses her as "Alix." She maintains an "icy majesty," and has a little squabble with Mme. de Villeparisis over the opinion once expressed by Liszt that the portrait she is showing the historian is a copy. But before she leaves, she invites the narrator to "join her box on the following Friday." 

And then, "The door opened, and the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room."    

Day Sixty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 480-496

From "Whereas before my visits to Elstir's..." to "...those required of a tuner or a singing teacher as of a draftsman.'"

____

The narrator's association with the gang of girls gives him new insights into the class they belong to, including their anti-Semitism. 

We would often encounter Bloch's sisters; and since I had dined at their father's table, I was obliged to greet them. My new friends did not know them. "I'm not allowed to be friends with children of Israel," Albertine said.... [T]he chosen people did not inspire warm feelings in the bosoms of these daughters of the middle class, who, with their good Catholic upbringing, probably believed that Jews fed on the flesh of infant Christians.... The fact was that Bloch's sisters, overdressed but half-naked, managing to look both languid and brazen, resplendent and sluttish, did not create the best of impressions. 

Being surrounded by young girls in flower has not driven Gilberte from his mind. On his picnics with the girls, he has a Proustian moment or two: "In cakes, there was a cloying creaminess, and in tarts, a refreshing fruitiness, which were aware of many things about Combray and about Gilberte, and not just the Gilberte of Combray days, but the Gilberte of Paris too, for I had renewed my acquaintance with them at her afternoon teas." 


But his obsession with the gang of girls has begun to strain his friendship with Saint-Loup, who has written to say that since the narrator hasn't visited him at Doncières, he has requested leave to visit him at Balbec. But the narrator puts him off with excuses, preferring to stay with the girls. "Those who have the opportunity to live for themselves --- they are artists, of course, and I was long since convinced that I would never be one -- also have the duty to do so; and for them, friendship is a dereliction of that duty, a form of self-abdication."


He loves to listen to the girls' chatter, and to identify the various regional accents that tinge their speech. He is aware of the banality of their talk, but he luxuriates in it nonetheless. 

With Mme de Villeparisis or Saint-Loup, my words would have made a show of much more enjoyment than I really felt, concealing the fact that they always wore me out; whereas, when I lay among those girls, the full cup of my joy, unaffected by the insignificance and sparseness of what we said, brimming in motionless silence, overflowed and let the murmuring wavelets of my happiness lap and ripple among these young roses. 

He has not yet made his choice from among them, but one day Albertine borrows some paper and pencil from the others and writes a note to him, forbidding the others to read it: "I like you." It makes him start "thinking she was the one who would be the great love of my life."

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 Fifty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 340-359

From "Though it was a Sunday..." to "...'her again, one of these evenings.'" 

_____

The narrator goes to two very different social events.

In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."

We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."

I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.

And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which

like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.

When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."

And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?

Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."

The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.

So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.

Bloch père is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet the elder Bloch is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mention of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."

As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double status of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.

Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."

Day Fifty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 314-325

From "From the very first days of our acquaintance..." to "...accompanied with a little sob."

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The narrator gives us a portrait of two of his friends, Robert de Saint-Loup and Bloch, who could hardly be more different from each other, and in the middle of it extended thoughts on conventional manners and snobbery.

Saint-Loup becomes a favorite of the narrator's grandmother because of his "naturalness," which we remember from long ago, when the narrator commented on her distaste for the gardener's too-symmetrical flowerbeds. "But in nothing was the naturalness of Saint-Loup so endearing to my grandmother as in the open way he expressed his liking for me," declaring it "apart from his love for his mistress, ... the greatest joy in his life." But the narrator is not so generous in returning his friendship: "I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company" or from "the pleasure that could come from finding something deep within myself, from bringing it out of its inner darkness and into the light of day."

This solitary self-absorption is what allows the narrator time to reflect on Saint-Loup's character as an aristocrat who rejects the attitudes of his class. "It was because he was a noble that his passion for ideas and his attraction to socialism, which made him seek the company of young, pretentious, and badly dressed students, attested to something genuinely pure and disinterested in him, though the same could not be said about them."

Or about Bloch, who turns up at Balbec, whom they first overhear railing about the "glut" of Jews there. "Eventually, the man who found Jews so distasteful stepped out of the tent, and we glanced up to look at the anti-Semite: it was my old school friend Bloch." Saint-Loup's attitude toward Bloch is more tolerant than that of the narrator, who comments on Bloch's "more picturesque than pleasant" retinue of sisters, relatives, and friends:

It is quite likely that this Jewish community, like any other, perhaps more than any other, could boast of many charms, qualities, and virtues. The enjoyment of these, however, was restricted to its members. The fact was they were disliked; and this, once they became aware of it, became a proof in their eyes of anti-Semitism, against which they ranged themselves in a dense phalanx, closing ranks in the face of a world that was, in any case, of no mind to join their group.

The narrator notices that Bloch refers to the lift as "lyfte" and to "The Stones of Venyce by Lord John Ruskin," apparently under the impression that "in England not only all individuals of the masculine gender were lords, but that the letter i was always pronounced like y." Saint-Loup worries that Bloch will be embarrassed when he learns the truth and will think him inconsiderate for not setting him straight -- which good manners forbid him from doing. But when the narrator pronounces "lift" correctly, Bloch notices the correct pronunciation: "'I see -- so it's "lift,"' To which, in a sharp and supercilious tone, he added, Ányway -- doesn't matter.'" Which reveals "how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker."

Bloch then accuses the narrator of "snobbery" in his association with Saint-Loup, launching the narrator into reflections about how the thing of which we accuse others is often the thing of which we are most guilty ourselves. This long, essay-like paragraph includes such aphoristic observations as, "we should make a rule of never speaking of ourselves, given that it is a subject on which we may be sure our own view and that of others will never coincide."

Bloch was a bad-mannered, neurotic snob; and since he belonged to a family of no note, he suffered, as though at the bottom of the ocean, from the incalculable pressures bearing upon him from not just the Gentiles on the surface, but the superimposed layers of Jewish society, all more estimable than the one he belonged to, and each of them pouring scorn on the one immediately below itself.... When Bloch spoke of the fit of snobbery I must be having and invited me to own up to being a snob, I could have answered, "If I were a snob, I wouldn't be mixing with you."

Day Forty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 150-161

From "It was about this time that Bloch..." to "...personal freedom, has not yet acquired."

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Bloch turns up again, this time to take the narrator to his first brothel, and to give him "the truly divine gift ... which can be acquired only from reality: the charm of the individual." One individual that a madam thrusts upon him is "a Jewess" whom she calls Rachel, and whom the narrator nicknames "Rachel, when of the Lord," a rather arch allusion to an aria in Halévy's opera La Juive: "Rachel, quand du seigneur."

The madam doesn't get the joke. And the narrator doesn't get the girl -- she is "busy" on later visits, and he stops visiting the brothel, though not before giving the madam several pieces of furniture, including "a large couch," that he has inherited from his Aunt Léonie. "But as soon as I set eyes on them again in that brothel, put to use by those women, I was assailed by all the virtues that had perfumed the air in my aunt's bedroom at Combray, now defiled by the brutal dealings to which I had condemned the dear, defenseless things. I could not have suffered more if it had been the dead woman herself being violated." And here Proust plays an ironic memory trick -- ironic, given that it was the madeleine soaked in tea that caused the memory of Aunt Léonie and of Combray to surface so dramatically earlier in the novel -- by noting that "memory does not usually produce recollections in chronological order, but acts more like a reflection inverting the sequence of parts," so that "it was not until much later that I remembered this was the couch on which, many years before, I had been initiated into the pleasures of love by one of my cousins."

Meanwhile, he is also selling off his aunt's silverware so he can buy flowers for Mme. Swann. However, things are not going so well with Gilberte. He notes that he gave up the idea of becoming a diplomat because the career might have separated him from Gilberte, but his obsession with her and the Swanns has also distracted him from his writing -- to the dismay of his parents and his grandmother. He details the long chain of excuses and rationalizations -- familiar to any procrastinator -- that keep him from sitting down to write.

Moreover, he begins to sense that Gilberte is not quite so enamored of him as he is of her.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity that in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual, and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since if one had not obtained what one desired.

The Swanns, "who were more and more convinced I was an improving influence on" Gilberte, don't help when they stop her from going to a dancing class and instead make her stay to entertain the narrator. "Gilberte's face was devoid of all joy, laid waste, a blank, melancholy mask, which for the rest of the afternoon seemed to grieve privately for those foursome reels being danced without her, because of my presence here." And so he finds himself "on the threshold of one of those difficult junctures which most of us encounter several times in our lives," when pride and self-indulgence cause an avoidable pain.

Day Thirty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 82-93

From "Though I had begun..." to "...a département, 'From the Aisne.'" 

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Proust's detailed account of the way late 19th-century French society functioned is probably one of the reasons contemporary readers give up on him, and today's section is particularly slow-going. 

We switch from the young narrator to the mature one in mid-stream here, as the former admits that his "state of emotional turmoil" at being in the presence of the Swanns prevented him from understanding much that Swann said to him. So it must be the mature narrator who outlines for us the social nuances that inform their behavior, particularly Mme. Swann's. But Swann himself remains quite taken with people with whom he would not have associated before his marriage to Odette. For example, there are the Bontemps. Swann regards M. Bontemps as "a really distinguished person," although the narrator describes him as having "a silky fair beard, a pretty face, an adenoidal pronunciation, bad breath, and a glass eye."

But what should draw our attention to Bontemps is that Gilberte tells us,

"He's the uncle of a girl that used to go to my school. She was in one of the classes well below mine -- 'that Albertine,' everybody used to call her. I'm sure she'll be very 'fast' one of these days, but at the moment she's the funniest-looking thing."

Proust regards society as kaleidoscopic, constantly changing its standards of who's acceptable. The narrator tells us, "By the time I had taken my first communion, prim and proper ladies were being confronted, to their astonishment, with elegant Jewesses in some of the houses they frequented." But with the Dreyfus Affair ("slightly later than my first entry into the world of Mme Swann," the narrator tells us, suggesting that his "entry" took place before 1894), "All things Jewish were displaced, even the elegant lady, and hitherto nondescript nationalists came to the fore. ... If instead of the Dreyfus Affair there had been a war with Germany, the kaleidoscope would have turned in a different direction." But at this time, the influential Jews in French society included Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife was Swann's aunt. And "Lady Israels, who was hugely wealthy and very influential, had contrived to make sure that no one of her acquaintance would ever be at home to Odette."

Day Thirty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 3-30

From "When it was first suggested..."to "'...Of course I'm not disappointed!'"

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The narrator's comment in Swann's Way about "the mystery of personality" seems to apply particularly well here at the opening of the second volume, in which we learn that the foolish Dr. Cottard we met at the Verdurins in the first volume has now become "a scientific man of some renown," and that Swann is now regarded as "nothing but a vulgar swank," at least by the narrator's father. "This statement of my father's may require a few words of explanation," the narrator interjects, "as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion."

Both men have reinvented themselves -- in Swann's case an adaptation to "a new position for himself, ... far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it." The narrator notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the current view of the sudden vulgarity of "this man (who in former days, and even now, could show exquisite tact in not advertising an invitation to Twickenham or Buckingham Palace) braying out the fact that the wife of an undersecretary's undersecretary had returned Mme. Swann's visit."

In his gushing ways with these new friends and his boastful citing of their exploits, Swann was like the great artist who takes up cooking or gardening late in life and who, though modest enough to be untroubled by criticism of his masterpieces, cannot bear to hear faint praise of his recipes or flower beds.

As for Cottard, now "Professor Cottard," "it is possible to be unread, and to like making silly puns, while having a special gift that outweighs any general culture, such as the gift of the great strategist or the great clinician." And Cottard has apparently emerged as a gifted diagnostician. The narrator observes that "the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a turning inside out." So Cottard has shaved his beard and mustache and cultivated a cold and taciturn manner -- except when he's with the "little circle" at the Verdurins "where he instinctively became himself again."

These transformations of personality are, I think, central to the novel, which is not only a search for lost time but often also a search for the lost self that time has carried away. In his introduction, Grieve notes how often Proust switches point of view from the narrator as a young man to the narrator in his later years, sometimes to the confusion of the reader. And that Proust doesn't specify the narrator's age, so that we're never quite sure how old he is at any given time in his remembrances of things past. I think this is key to Proust's examination of memory. We assume that the narrator is a mature man, telling us about what it was like to be a child anxiously awaiting his mother's goodnight kiss, but in telling us the story he becomes that child again, giving us more than any mere scouring of our memories could really supply. We are what we create ourselves to be.

But we are not the sole creators of ourselves. One theme apparent in the opening pages of this volume is the influence of others, not only family and friends, but of society as a whole in shaping the person. Both Swann and Cottard are who are they have become because they are responding to the expectations of others. And the pompous Marquis de Norpois, the narrator's father's new friend, holds sway over the narrator's parents.

By strengthening in my father's mind the high opinion he had of M. de Norpois, and thereby also fostering in him a higher opinion of himself, she felt she was fulfilling the wifely duty of making life sweet for her husband, just as she did when she saw to the excellence of the cooking and the quietness of the servants.

M. de Norpois also plays a key role in fulfilling the narrator's desire to see the actress La Berma. Although the doctor has forbidden him from going to the theater, fearing that the overexcitement would be hazardous to his health, the narrator, under the influence of the praise of the writer Bergotte (in the little book given him by Gilberte), continues to plead for the opportunity: "By day and night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal." And it is de Norpois who sanctions his going to see La Berma perform in two acts from Phèdre.

But the experience is disillusioning, not at all the transport that the narrator has been expecting: "I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma's talent seeming to add anything at all to them.... [S]he blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out." When the applause breaks out, he is momentarily lifted out of his disappointment:

I let the cheap wine of this popular enthusiasm go to my head. Even so, once the curtain had fallen, I was aware of being disappointed that the enjoyment I had longed for had not been greater, but also of wishing that, such as it was, it would continue, and that I was not obliged to leave behind me forever, as I walked out of the auditorium, this life of the theater in which I had just shared for a few hours.

We've seen the narrator disappointed before: in his first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes. But he conquered that disappointment quickly, overcoming the ordinariness of her appearance by dwelling on the cultural and historical significance of the family she represents. Now he hopes that de Norpois will illuminate him on the excellence of La Berma. But he receives only platitudes and received opinions from the Marquis:

"I have never seen Mme. Berma in Phèdre, but I have been told she is outstanding. It must, of course, have been quite a thrill for you.

M. de Norpois, being incomparably cleverer than I was, must be in possession of the truth that I had been unable to derive from La Berma's acting.... Concentrating my whole attention on my impressions, which were hopelessly confused, with no thought of shining or finding favor, but in the hope of gaining from him the truth I sought, I made no effort to substitute set phrases for the words that failed me, I made no sense, and eventually, so as to have him say straight out what was so admirable about La Berma, I owned up to my disappointment.

"What's that?" exclaimed my father, appalled at the poor impression my ineptness might make on M. de Norpois. "How can you say you didn't enjoy it? Your grandmother told us you didn'[t miss a word, that you just stared and stared at her, that nobody else in the whole auditorium lapped it up the way you did!"

"Well, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, to see what was so great about her. I mean, she's very good..."

"Well, then, if she's very good, what more do you want?"

And after de Norpois delivers himself of some more inanities about the reputation of La Berma, the narrator finally concludes, "He's right, you know! ... What a lovely voice, what simple costumes! How clever of her to think of doing Phèdre! Of course I'm not disappointed!"

On the one hand we have here an amusing but fairly commonplace bit of satire on bourgeois received opinions and their potentially deleterious effect on the bright and inquisitive mind of an original and aspiring artist. But what makes this more than just a comic moment is the way the experience of disillusionment works on the narrator. Just a few pages earlier, his father has touted de Norpois as an authority on becoming a published writer. We have learned that the narrator inherited Aunt Léonie's estate, so he has the wherewithal to make his way in whatever career he chooses. So his father urges him to show de Norpois something he has written. What he produces is the piece about the three steeples that he wrote on their ride back from a walk on the Guermantes way. "I had written it in a state of exhilaration which I felt it must convey to anyone who read it. But my exhilaration must have failed to touch M. de Norpois; and he handed it back to me without a word."

What we have here is failure to communicate.