Day One Hundred Eighty-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 292-322

From "Throughout this conversation Gilberte had talked to me ..." through "... when I'm really just a bundle of nerves.' "

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Gilberte and Andrée have become friends, which intrigues the narrator because Rachel, who is performing at the party, had been the mistress of both of their husbands, except that Andrée's husband (Octave) had left Rachel for her. And he speculates that Gilberte feels that Rachel had "been more deeply loved by Robert than she had ever been." Gilberte also reveals her scorn for the hostess, who is now her aunt, "for having been Mme de Saint-Loup since slightly earlier than Mme Verdurin entered the family, she considered herself always to have been a Guermantes and to have been dishonored by the misalliance her uncle had contracted by marrying Mme Verdurin." Gilberte is also rather dismissive of the Duchesse de Guermantes: "I saw you talking to my aunt Oriane, who has plenty of good qualities, but I don't think it would be unfair, do you, to say that she's hardly one of the intellectual elite."

The narrator is thinking of the party as a kind of farewell to the social life: "I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward." He recognizes that he is about to turn the lives of the people he has met into fiction, to "take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws." Which is, in a phrase, pretty much what In Search of Lost Time attempts to do. But he still has a longing for some kind of new life: "a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses." At the same time, he is prey to nostalgia, to a longing to find that his grandmother or Albertine would somehow turn up to be alive.

I forgot only one thing, which was that if they really were still living, Albertine would now have something like the appearance that Mme Cottard had presented at Balbec, and that my grandmother, being over ninety-five years old, would show me nothing of that beautiful, calm, smiling face with which I still imagined her now.

He notices the Duchesse de Guermantes "deep in conversation with a frightful old woman." Later, he will learn that the woman is Rachel, now a famous actress, one of several that the Duchesse now associates with, having given up the Faubourg Saint-Germain, "which, she said, bored her to death." He tells her of his encounter with Charlus, and when Morel enters, "the Duchesse greeted him with a politeness which I found a little disconcerting." But remembering the marriage into the Cambremer family of the "daughter" (earlier: niece) of Jupien, "the tradesman from our building, and that the additional factor which had enabled her to become a glittering success was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus," he reflects that "a name is always taken at its current valuation." The valuation of the Duchesse, for example, is now low: "The new generations concluded from [her friendship with actresses] that Mme de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some demi-rep who had never really been properly upper-crust." He also wonders if her friendship with Rachel reflects "the antipathy which the unpredictable Duchesse had recently developed towards Gilberte."

The mutability of relationships is further demonstrated by the fact that it was in the Duchesse's home that Rachel "had, long ago, received her most terrible humiliation. Rachel had gradually, not forgotten, but forgiven, but the singular prestige which the Duchesse had, in her eyes, thereby received could never be effaced."

"Meanwhile, at the other end of Paris," as the narrator puts it, the other party to which he was invited, the tea given by La Berma for her daughter and son-in-law is a disaster. Everyone has gone to the Princesse's. La Berma (previously reported as dead) is fatally ill, but "to pay for the luxury her daughter needed and which her son-in-law, idle and with poor health, was unable to provide, she had returned to acting." While on stage, she is vividly alive, but in fact is in great pain. She also resents the fact that Rachel has become a success, for she "still regarded Rachel as a tart who had been allowed to appear in dramas in which she, La Berma, was playing the leading role, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses she wore on stage." To make matters worse, "the son-in-law was furious that Rachel, whom he and his wife knew very well, had not invited them" to her performance at the Princesse's. A solitary guest shows up at La Berma's tea party.

But soon the blast of air which was sweeping everything towards the Guermantes, and which had swept me there myself, was too strong, and he rose and left, leaving Phèdre, or death, it was not very clear any longer which of the two it was, with her daughter and her son-in-law, to finish eating the funeral cakes.

As it turns out, Rachel's performance is unconventional, and "Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume" and "a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles." But the Princesse "was acting as a claque. She was whipping up enthusiasm and creating favorable impressions by constantly giving voice to exclamations of delight. Here alone her Verdurin nature could still be seen."

Now we learn that the narrator is as yet unaware of the identity of the actress, who, "without any gratification of my vanity, for she was old and ugly, ... was giving me the eye, though in a somewhat restrained manner." It turns out that she was trying to get him to recognize her, which he doesn't, until Bloch whispers to him, "Isn't it funny to see Rachel here!" The revelation "instantly shattered the enchantment which had given Saint-Loup's mistress the unknown form of this disgusting old woman." He is made "aware that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts" because "La Berma was, as they say, head and shoulders above Rachel, and time, by making Rachel a star at the same time as Elstir, had overrated a mediocrity and consecrated a genius."

He also becomes aware of what time has done to Mme. de Guermantes, whose wit has grown sour, just as Bergotte "kept his characteristic sentence rhythms, his interjections, his ellipses, his epithets, though all in order to say nothing." And he realizes that the Duchesse, once so exalted, so dazzlingly inaccessible, now treats him as one of her oldest friends, that she has

forgotten certain details which had seemed to me then to be essential, namely that I did not go to Guermantes, and was only a middle-class boy from Combray at the time when she came to Mlle Percepied's nuptial mass, and that for the whole year after her appearance at the Opéra-Comique, despite all Saint-Loup's entreaties she never invited me to her house. To me this seemed terribly important, because it was precisely at this point that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter. But to her it just seemed to be a part of the same ordinary life as always.

He reminds her of the time when he first went to the Princesse de Guermantes, uncertain whether he had really been invited, and of the red dress and red shoes she wore, and she grows melancholy about the passage of time. And though she has not forgotten that Rachel once gave that disastrous performance at her house, she remembers it quite differently: "it was I who discovered her, saw how good she was, sang her praises and made people take notice of her at a time when she had no reputation and everybody thought she was ridiculous."

Day One Hundred Sixty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 609-658*

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

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, concluded, from "After lunch, whenever I did not set out to wander around Venice...."
Chapter IV: A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup

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Okay, first off: I think the telegram announcing Albertine's resurrection is a mistake that Proust would have corrected in revising The Fugitive. The reaction to the telegram is not at all what we expect from the intensely obsessive narrator, who more characteristically would have endlessly pondered Albertine's motives in both faking her death and then announcing that she had done so. And he is also paranoid enough to wonder if the telegram is a hoax, and if so, who is playing the trick on him and to what end. But instead he stuffs it in his pocket and goes off to prowl the back alleys of Venice. It can be argued that it has thematic significance, in fusing Albertine with Gilberte, but that has already occurred in his imaginings. And the explanation that the errors in the telegram are the result of Gilberte's faulty penmanship is awkward at best. The telegram is a melodramatic gimmick that the novel would have been better off without.

But accepting what the novel gives us, we set out on a bit of a travelogue, ostensibly so the narrator can take notes for a "study of Ruskin." (Proust, of course, translated Ruskin, as the note reminds us.) It's striking in this chapter how often Venice is likened to, or contrasted with, Combray, and not, as one might expect, Paris. The reason, I think, is that Proust wants to bring us back to the beginning of the novel as he nears its conclusion -- and at this point, the end of The Fugitive looks like a conclusion, with its assemblage of revelations about many of the principal characters.

Albertine still hovers in his mind, of course, despite his assertions that he has forgotten her. A painting by Carpaccio "almost revived my love for" her because one of the costumes worn by a figure in it resembles the Fortuny coat she wore on their trip to Versailles on the eve of her departure. And he even wonders if a young Austrian woman he meets also "loved women" the way Albertine did.

A figure from the past -- the Baroness Putbus -- almost makes him stay in Venice after his mother leaves because of the promiscuous lady's maid that Saint-Loup once told him about. But he makes a mad dash for the train and joins her, carrying three letters -- two for her, one for him -- that had been handed him at the last moment. The letters announce two marriages: Gilberte's to Saint-Loup and Mme. de Cambremer's son to Jupien's niece. Of the latter marriage, the narrator reflects:

It allows the Cambremers to drop anchor at the Guermantes', where they never dared hope pitch their tent; what is more, the child, since she was adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable for the Cambremers since they had lost their own; and finally she is the adopted and, according to the Cambremers, probably the real -- that is, the natural -- daughter of someone whom they consider to be a prince of the blood.

The narrator of course knows the truth of the relationship between Charlus and Jupien, and between Charlus and Morel, who once was going to marry Jupien's niece. Moreover, he recognizes that both marriages signal the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain's definition of society, with Saint-Loup, a Guermantes, marrying "the daughter of Odette and a Jew." Money, which Jupien's daughter will inherit from Charlus and which Gilberte already possesses, is the key, and it has been, as the narrator tells us, the cause of much behind-the-scenes intrigue among the various families involved. The narrator's mother has heard "that it was the Princess of Parma who arranged the marriage of the young Cambremer." Meanwhile, the rumors have started that both grooms are gay. Charlus, on learning from the Princess that Cambremer is the nephew of Legrandin, is pleased: "If he took after his uncle, after all, that shouldn't put me off, I have always said that they make the best husbands."

The effect on society of the marriages is colossal: "the magical charm that Mme de Cambremer had imagined the Duchesse de Guermantes to possess evaporated as soon as she found herself solicited by the latter." And "Gilberte started to show her contempt for what she had so desired, to declare that the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were fools unfit for company, and, matching words with deeds, did indeed cease to seek their company." And when Jupien's niece dies of typhoid soon after the wedding, because she is thought to be related to Charlus the effect is extraordinary: "the death of a petty commoner throws all of the princely families into mourning." Meanwhile, Legrandin has begun styling himself Comte de Méséglise. And Charlus  discovers that his widowed son-in-law shares his sexual orientation.

Gilberte and Saint-Loup decide to live at Tansonville, but the neighbors at Combray are not impressed with the fact that Odette's daughter lives there now. The narrator goes to visit them, leaving his current girlfriend in the apartment he now rents and under the supervision of a friend "who was not attracted to women." His visit is particularly to try to cheer up Gilberte, "since Robert was deceiving her, but not in the manner which everyone believed and which perhaps even she still believed, or at any rate declared. For "Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, showed himself off in public with women whom he compromised and whom everyone, no doubt even Gilberte, believed to be his mistresses." In fact Saint-Loup is having an affair with Charles Morel.

Reviewing the past, the narrator comes to realize that Saint-Loup had been giving signals of his homosexuality for a long time. He had once told the narrator:

"It's a shame that your girlfriend from Balbec does not have the fortune required by my mother, I think that the two of us would have got on well together." He had meant to imply that she was from Gomorrah as he was from Sodom.... In the end it was the same factor that had inspired both in Robert and in me the desire to marry Albertine (that is, her love for women). But the causes of our desire, like its ends, were opposite. I had been driven to it by the despair I had felt at the discovery, Robert by his satisfaction; I in order to prevent her through constant surveillance from yielding to her inclination; Robert in order to cultivate it and to enjoy the freedom that he would allow her to offer him her girl-friends.

Saint-Loup "ceaselessly" impregnates Gilberte, but he flirts with waiters in restaurants. And the narrator learns from Aimé that Saint-Loup had put the moves on "the lift" during the narrator's first visit to Balbec, causing a scene that had to be hushed up. The narrator thinks Aimé may be lying, but he can't be sure. He also remembers that Saint-Loup had looked "rather lingeringly" at Morel one time at the Verdurins, and remarked "It's strange how this lad remind me of Rachel." But Saint-Loup's acceptance of his homosexuality also affects his friendship with the narrator: "It was only as long as he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, at least for a period of time, the men who did not interest him directly were subject to a display of indifference."

Odette now finds herself in the role of being protected by Saint-Loup: "The fact that she was no longer in her prime was of little importance in the eyes of a son-in-law who did not love women."

Thus, thanks to Robert, she was able, on the threshold of her fiftieth (some said her sixtieth) year to dazzle with extraordinary luxury at any dinner-table and very soirée to which she was invited. Without needing as she had done before to have a "friend," who now would no longer have forked out, or even acted his part. Thus she embarked on a final period of chastity, which seemed definitive, and she had never been more elegant.

The narrator's views on homosexuality also seem to have mellowed: "I found that it made no difference from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human to take it wherever one could find it." But Saint-Loup's "liaison" with Morel offends him because Saint-Loup is married, and to Gilberte, and he feels the pain of losing his friendship.

He feels another pain when he visits Combray and no longer experiences the love he had once felt for the place. "I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte." Moreover, Gilberte reveals that she had fallen in love with him the first time they saw each other, and she explains the "indecent gesture" she made at the time: "I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I'm ashamed of it now." For his part, he now realizes that his life might have been different "if I had not met two shadowy figures coming towards me side by side in the twilight" and decided to break with Gilberte. But he also observes that the torment of that love and separation has vanished:

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

In Search of Lost Time might well have ended right there.

Day One Hundred Forty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 165-180

From "I learned that day there had been a death..." to "...was to be once more taken from me."

_____

Bergotte has died, provoking the narrator to thoughts about medicine ("natural diseases can get better, but never medical ones, for medicine knows nothing of the secrets of cure") and to reflections about the author's reclusive character:

Bergotte had not been out of the house for years. He had never liked society, or rather he had once liked it for a single day, only to despise it afterwards as he despised everything, after his own fashion, which was not to despise what one cannot obtain, but what one has obtained, as soon as one has obtained it.

Which, of course, sounds a lot like the narrator himself.

In telling of Bergotte's death, Proust takes one of his most audacious liberties with narrative point of view, having the narrator not only tell us about a death he didn't witness but even report on what was going on in Bergotte's mind as he died. Bergotte supposedly read a critic's comment on Vermeer's View of Delft and, failing to recognize a detail the critic pointed out in the painting, a patch of yellow wall said to be "like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty," he went out to see for himself the painting, which was on loan for an exhibition of Dutch art.

His head spun faster; he fixed his gaze, as a child does on a yellow butterfly he wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. "That is how I should have written, he said to himself. My last books are too dry, I should have applied several layers of colour, made my sentences precious in themselves, like that little patch of yellow wall."

A stroke fells him. "They buried him, but all the night before his funeral, in the lighted bookshop windows, his books, set out in threes, kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."

But while the story stands on its own as a vignette about the artist's quest for immortality, the narrator finds another significance in the writer's death: Albertine claimed that she "had met him the day before, she told me about it that evening, and he had even kept her a little late, for he had talked to her for quite a long time. Probably she had been the last person he spoke to." Except that she is lying: "Albertine had not met Bergotte on that day at all. But I had not suspected it for a moment, she had told me the story so naturally, and it was only much later that I recognized her charming gift for lying with simplicity."

And then the narrator lies to her, telling her that he was going out to see some friends, but not revealing that he was going to the Verdurins'. As he leaves to hail a cab, he finds Morel sitting on a bollard, crying, an aftermath of the earlier quarrel with Jupien's niece that the narrator had overheard. If Morel breaks his engagement to her, he jeopardizes his relationship with Charlus, on whose money he depends.

It is quite possible that the love and then the indifference or hatred Morel felt towards Jupien's niece were both sincere. Unfortunately it was not the first time (and it would not be the last) that he had behaved in this way, suddenly "throwing over" a young girl after swearing to her that he would love her for ever, even showing her a loaded revolver and saying that he would blow his brains out if he sank so low as to leave her. 

And so the narrator has had two experiences -- the death of an artist and the dilemma of a lover -- that give him food for thought about his own life.

Day One Hundred Thirty-Six, The Prisoner, pp. 46-67

From "I did not meet M. de Charlus and Morel all that regularly..." to "...so sweet and pink among all that snowy lace."

_____

The narrator begins with "a little incident whose cruel significance escaped me entirely and which I only came to understand much later." He arrives home unexpectedly early one day to find Andrée leaving and when, having forgotten his key, Albertine comes to let him in there is a bit of confusion about finding the light switch and about the fragrant bunch of flowers he is carrying -- Albertine "hates strong scents," as Andrée has reminded him. "I had almost surprised her with Andrée, and she had given herself a breathing-space by switching off all the lights, had gone into my bedroom so that I should not go into hers and see her unmade bed, and pretended to have been writing." The narrator promises that he will explain all this later.

There follows a lengthy analysis of his relationship with Albertine. The real person has grown over-familiar to him, and he appreciates her best when he can work her into his imaginative life, merging his idea of her with works of art and music and literature, "escaping the crushing pressure of matter and floating free in the weightless spaces of thought.... At that moment she seemed like a work of Elstir or of Bergotte, I felt a lofty enthusiasm for her, seeing her distanced by imagination and art." We have seen something similar a long time ago, when the young narrator prioritized the imagination over nature.

He has continued to keep her residence in his home a secret from his friends, for fear that one of them "might take a fancy to her." She in her turn continues to keep secrets from him. "Our engagement was turning into a trial and giving her the timid manner of a guilty prisoner." But she seems agreeable to the arrangement, telling him: "I think it's stupid to let people see who you love; with me it's the opposite, as soon as I'm attracted to  somebody, I seem to take no notice of them. That way nobody knows what's going on."

He continues to lavish her with clothes, and "for the final details of several of them I had written to Mme Swann, who had replied in a letter beginning with the words, 'After your long eclipse, when I read your letter asking about my robes de chambre, I thought I was hearing from a ghost.'" Albertine is "developing into a woman of fashion," thanks to his consultations with the Duchesse and with Odette.

The narrator has concluded that "love is often only the association between the image of a girl (of whom otherwise we would very quickly have tired) and the increased heart rate inseparable from a long, futile wait when the young lady has 'stood us up.'" But he notes that Jupien's niece was undergoing a similar problem with Morel, thanks to his relationship with Charlus. The chauffeur "had praised to her the violinist's supposed infinite delicacy of feeling" while Morel was "telling her what a slave driver M. de Charlus was to him." But then she "discovered in Morel (though it did not make her stop loving him) depths of wickedness and treachery ... and in M. de Charlus an astonishing and limitless kindness." So she is as confused about "what, each in himself, the violinist and his protector were" just as the narrator is "about Andrée, whom I saw every day, and Albertine, who lived in my house."

In the end, it all comes down to the narrator's desire to possess Albertine, a possession that would in essence stop time, suspend its changes. He relishes most the times when she is sound asleep, and he can have the illusion of time in suspension: "Having her asleep at my side offered something as sensually delicious as my moonlit nights on the bay at Balbec, when the water was calm as a lake amid scarcely moving branches, and one could lie on the beach forever, listening to the sound of the sea." (A conventional symbol of eternity.) While she sleeps, "Whole races, atavisms, vices slept in her face. Every time she moved her head she created a new woman, often undreamed of by me. I felt that I possessed not one, but innumerable young girls." When he kisses her without awakening her, "It seemed to me at those moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting part of dumb nature."

And then, as she awakens, comes a famous passage:

Now she began to speak; her first words were ''darling" or ''my darling,'' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce "darling Marcel" or "my darling Marcel." 

This audacious bit of what might be called metafiction has given many license to refer to the narrator of the entire book as Marcel. I'm of two minds about that: For one thing, "Marcel" is easier to type than "the narrator." On the other hand, to call the narrator Marcel is to fall into the trap of identifying narrator with author, which despite the often intensely autobiographical nature of the Search, is to take the easy way out. Proust has always relied on free indirect style, which as James Wood puts it, allows us to "see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once." To fuse the narrator and author of the Search into one is to deprive us of the authorial point of view on the narrator, to suggest that he endorses the ideas and emotions of the narrator, when it's clear that he often opens his narrator to criticism.

Another thing to remember is that The Prisoner went unpublished during its author's lifetime: It's entirely possible that Proust might have had second thoughts about this casual breaking down of the fourth wall before he went to print with the book. To have the narrator point out that he's just a narrator and not the author of the work is a betrayal of the contract that the reader makes with an author: that his story should be treated as truth, not fiction. We, the readers, have forgiven the author much, including his frequent violations of point of view -- telling of events the narrator couldn't have witnessed, and even entering into the thoughts of other characters. But this is a more major breach of contract. And it comes at a point when Proust is trying to make the intricacies of a strange sexual and psychological relationship as credible as possible. Frankly, I think he made a mistake with the narrator/Marcel identification, so I'm going to ignore it.

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 Twenty-Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 394-407

Part II, Chapter III, from "What I did not, alas, know at that time..." to "...despite their obedient silence, I had not pursued." 

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The narrator gives us a hint that there's more significance to the hired motorcar than just an ability to speed around the countryside. He will learn much later, he tells us, that the chauffeur also worked for Charlus, and that he was a friend of Charles Morel, who got a kickback for leading him to customers. "Had I known this at the time, and that the confidence which the Verdurins soon felt in this chauffeur had derived, unbeknown to them, therefrom, perhaps many of the sorrows of my life in Paris the following year, many of my misfortunes relative to Albertine, might have been avoided." 

The narrator now gives us an account of a meal taken by Charlus and Morel at  "a restaurant along the coast" -- an occasion at which he wasn't present but of which he somehow has full knowledge. (Proust increasingly shows little interest in limiting the novel's point of view to its narrator.) The scene reveals how Morel is getting his hooks into the Baron, whom he teases with a fantasy:

"You know," said Morel, anxious to excite the Baron's senses in a manner that he adjudged to be less compromising for himself (although it was in point of fact more immoral), "my dream would be to find a perfectly innocent young girl, make her fall in love with me, and take her virginity." 

Charlus is titillated by the fantasy, and by Morel's adding that he would "ditch her the same evening." "M. de Charlus was in the habit, when a fiction was able to produce in him a moment's sensual pleasure, of giving it his approval, while being prepared to withdraw this a few moments later, once the pleasure had worn off." But Charlus is shocked when he realizes that Morel's fantasy centers on Jupien's niece (misidentified by him here as Jupien's daughter). The narrator comments, "The young girl was very hardworking and had not taken any vacation, but I have learned since that, while the violinist was in the neighborhood of Balbec, she could not stop thinking of his handsome face, ennobled by the fact that, having seen Morel with me, she had taken him for a 'gentleman.'" 

Still, the point is that Morel has given Charlus a thrill, "that the idea that Morel would have no compunction in 'ditching' a girl he had violated had suddenly caused him to experience total pleasure." It has awakened the sadist in Charlus: Remember his "deranged" fantasy about Bloch beating his mother. But it's a momentary pleasure, and the narrator observes that the sadist soon hands "the floor back to the real M. de Charlus, full of artistic refinement, sensitivity, and kindness." It is, however, a foreshadowing of the way in which the relationship between Charlus and Morel will develop: 

Unfortunately for M. de Charlus, his lack of common sense, and perhaps the chasteness of the relationship he probably enjoyed with Morel, made him rack his brains from that time on to overwhelm the violinist with strange acts of kindness that the latter could not understand, and to which his nature, wild in its way, yet also mean and ungrateful, could respond only with an ever-increasing indifference or violence, which plunged M. de Charlus -- once so proud, now quite timid -- into fits of genuine despair. 

And meanwhile, the narrator's own relationship with Albertine is also turning stranger. He is realizing "that my fate was to pursue only phantoms, beings whose reality lay in part in my imagination." He recognizes his kinship with Swann, "he who had been a connoisseur of phantoms." He "perhaps felt love for Albertine," but mostly what he experiences is jealousy, not wanting to let her out of his sight. They go to have lunch at Rivebelle, but he grows obsessed with her interest in a young waiter with black hair, busily dashing from table to table. 

For a moment I wondered whether, in order to follow him, she might not be going to leave me on my own at the table. But from the days that followed I began to forget this painful impression once and for all, because I had decided never to return to Rivebelle, and had made Albertine promise, who had assured me that this was the first time she had been there, that she would never go back.

He persuades himself that he could break with her, but then he overhears her making an appointment with her aunt or a girlfriend, and "my calm was destroyed." His mother grows concerned with the amount of money he's spending, particularly on hiring the car and chauffeur, and suggests that he's seeing too much of Albertine.