Day One Hundred Seventy-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 226-249

From "At that moment the butler came to tell me ..." through "... now broadly spread beneath the snow."

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The narrator's reverie in the library comes to an end when the music in the drawing-rooms is over and he can join the guests there, but he is sure he can continue in the same meditative frame of mind. He's misaken because "a dramatic turn of events occurred which seemed to raise the gravest of objection to my undertaking."

He enters the drawing-room to discover what appears to him to be a masked ball taking place: "everybody seemed to have put on make-up, in most cases with powdered hair which changed them completely." In other words, time has changed them. The transformation is more than physical: M. d'Argencourt, who has long treated the narrator coldly, has become "another person altogether, as kindly, helpless and inoffensive as the usual Argencourt was contemptuous, hostile and dangerous."

the new, almost unrecognizable d'Argencourt stood there as the revelation of Time, which he rendered partially visible. In the new elements which made up the face and character of M. d'Argencourt one could read a certain tally of years, one could recognize the symbolic form of life not as it appears to us, that is as permanent, but in its reality, in such a shifting atmosphere that by evening the proud nobleman is depicted there in caricature.

The experience, the juxtaposition of the people he remembers with what time has made of them, "was like what we used to call an optical viewer, but giving an optical view of years, a view of not one moment, but of one person set in the distorting perspective of Time."

And then the table is turned on him: the Duchesse de Guermantes addresses him as "my oldest friend." A young man calls him "an old Parisian." Another young man, whom he had met when he arrived, leaves a note for him signed, "'your young friend, Létourville.' 'Young friend!' That was how I used to write to people who were thirty years older than myself, like Legrandin." Bloch arrives, and in his mannerisms "I would have recognized the learned weariness of an amiable old man if I had not at the same time recognized my friend standing before me ... and was astonished to notice on his face some of the signs generally thought to be more characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he really was old, and that it is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men."

Most disturbing to him is the realization that he had "discovered this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I wanted to begin to clarify, to intellectualize within a work of art, realities whose nature was extra-temporal." He persists, however, in thinking of himself as young, and when Gilberte de Saint-Loup suggests that they go to dinner together, he agrees, "So long as you don't think it compromising to dine alone with a young man," which causes the people around him to laugh and him to correct himself, "or rather, with an old man." Still, he thinks to himself, "I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing."

And now it dawned upon me what old age was -- old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends' children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d'Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world. 

And he continues to survey the crowd of once-familiar faces -- Legrandin, Ski, etc. -- to note how "Time, the artist, had 'rendered' all these models in such a way that they were still recognizable but they were not likenesses, not because he had flattered them, but because he had aged them." He observes the influence of heredity:

I had seen the vices and the courage of the Guermantes recur in Saint-Loup, as also his own strange and short-lived character defects, and in Swann's case his Semitism. I could see it again in Bloch. He had lost his father some years ago and, when I had written to him then, had not at first been able to reply to me, because in addition to the powerful family feeling that often exists in Jewish families, the idea that his father was a man utterly superior to all others had turned his love for him into worship.

And he stumbles on the difficulty of reconciling his long-held image of people with the present reality, "to think of the two people under a single heading," to realize "that they are made of the same material, that the original stuff did not take refuge elsewhere, but through the cunning manipulation of time has become this, that it really is the same material, never having left the one body."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Four: Finding Time Again, pp. 149-171

From "However I felt immediately, from the unenthusiastic way in which they spoke of him ..." through "... thrown down by a gravedigger trying to pin them more securely in their graves."

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The narrator knows, of course, where Saint-Loup lost his croix de guerre, but he is not shocked by the revelation: "if Saint-Loup had indeed entertained himself during the evening in that way, it was only to fill in time while he was waiting, because, seized with the desire to see Morel again, he had used all his military connections to discover which regiment Morel was in."

He tells us about the way the butler torments Françoise by putting the worst possible spin on the war news and terrifying her with thoughts of the Germans invading Paris -- it amounts to the butler's "own private war against Françoise (whom actually he liked, despite that, in the same way that one likes somebody whom one enjoys enraging every day by beating them at dominoes).... He waited for bad news like a child waiting for an Easter-egg, hoping that things would go badly enough to frighten Françoise, but not so badly as to cause him actual suffering."

The narrator also tells us about Françoise's wealthy relatives who, when their son is killed in the war, go to help their daughter-in-law run her café. And it occasions this bit of authorial breaking of the fourth wall:

In this book, in which there is not one fact that is not fictitious, not one real character concealed under a false name, in which everything has been made up by me in accordance with the needs of my exposition, I have to say, to the honour of my country, that Françoise's millionaire relatives alone, who came out of their retirement to help their niece when she was left without support, that they and they alone are real living people.... I take a childlike and deeply felt pleasure, in transcribing their real name here: appropriately enough, they are called by the very French name of Larivière.

It's a lovely tribute, of course, but a bit of a fib, for Proust earlier introduced two minor characters, Marie Gineste and Céleste Albert, who were "real living people," the latter his own housekeeper.

And then comes the great blow of Saint-Loup's heroic death at the front, two days after he returned to it. The narrator recalls "that self-effacement that characterized the whole of his behaviour, right down to the way he would follow me out on the street bare-headed to close the door of my cab every time I left his house." And he links this great loss to that of Albertine:

Only a few days after I had seen him in pursuit of his monocle in the hall at Balbec, when I had thought him so haughty, there was another living form which I had seen for the first time on the beach at Balbec, and which also no longer existed outside the state of memory: this was Albertine, trudging across the sand that first evening, indifferent to everything around her, as much at home there as a seagull... His life and Albertine's, discovered so late, at Balbec, and so swiftly over, had scarcely touched; it was he, I reminded myself as I saw how the nimble shuttles of the years weave slender connections between those of our memories which seem at first most independent of each other, it was he whom I had sent to Mme Bontemps's house when Albertine left me. And then it had turned out that their two lives each had a parallel, and unsuspected, secret. 

The "parallel ... secret" is their homosexuality.

Françoise, who had not particularly liked Saint-Loup, "flaunted her grief" and seems to relish imagining the grief that afflicted Saint-Loup's mother. "And she watched for signs of grief in me with such avidity that I feigned a degree of brusqueness when speaking of Robert." He notes that Saint-Loup was buried "in the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray," although the church was previously said to have been destroyed. And he notes that although he had expected the Duchesse de Guermantes to receive the news of Saint-Loup's death "with the same indifference that I had seen her display towards the deaths of so many others whose lives had seemed so closely  bound up with her own," she is in fact "inconsolable."

And then he learns that Saint-Loup's efforts to locate Morel had had ironic consequences: Because the army's attention had been alerted, Morel is identified as a deserter and arrested. Morel, thinking that Charlus is behind the arrest, claims he was led astray by Charlus and M. d'Argencourt, who are arrested but soon released. Morel, too, is released and sent to the front, "where he showed great gallantry, survived every danger, and came back at the end of the war, with the medal that M. de Charlus had once vainly solicited for him, and which he owed indirectly to the death of Saint-Loup.

Several years pass, in which the narrator returns to the sanatorium, which "cured me no more than the first." On the train taking him back to Paris, he reflects on the failure of his literary ambitions and feels indifferent to the beauty he witnesses in the countryside -- a sign of the extent of his depression. On his return, he is invited to "a tea-party given for her daughter and son-in-law by La Berma" (no matter that her death has earlier been reported in the novel) and to a reception at the new home of the Prince de Guermantes. The name evokes his childhood memories: "I had wanted to go to the Guermantes' house as if that might have been able to bring me closer to my childhood and to the depths of my memory in which I saw it." He finds himself in "the streets leading to the Champs-Élysee," which unleashes another flood of memories: "And, like an aviator, who has up to that point travelled laboriously along the ground, suddenly 'taking off,' I rose up slowly towards the silent heights of memory."

And then he sees, getting out of a cab, aided by Jupien, M. de Charlus, "convalescing now from an attack of apoplexy." He has "an unruly forest of entirely white hair" and "a white beard, like those formed by the snow on the statues of river-gods in the public gardens.... [T]he old, decayed prince now wore the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear." He watches as Charlus tips his hat and bows to Mme. de Saint-Euverte, whom earlier he "would never have consented to dine with." And he speaks to the narrator, at first in a pianissimo that contrasts with the loudness that attracted so much attention when he once walked on the boulevards, of the deaths of so many of his contemporaries.

Day Eighty-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 275-290

From "We returned to the drawing room...." to "... off they set at a brisk trot." 

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The selection begins with one of Proust's occasional slips that suggest a lack of serious editing: One not-very-long sentence begins "Robert was unaware of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, ..." And the next sentence is: "He was unaware of almost all these infidelities." The repetition may possibly be intentional, a reinforcement of the point, but it's hardly necessary. I think it more likely just a moment of inattentiveness as he launches into a discussion of Saint-Loup's relationship with Rachel, one that more and more seems to resemble Swann's with Odette. 

Mme. de Marsantes bids the narrator "an anxious goodbye" -- although he isn't really planning to leave -- and then switches back to the more formal manner of "a grande dame who knew exactly how to conduct herself." But when Mme. de Villeparisis overhears him telling Saint-Loup's mother that he is in no hurry and is waiting for Charlus, she surprises him by being displeased at his being on "friendly terms" with the Baron, and urges him to go on without Charlus. So, "under the impression that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew," he takes his leave. 

As he's descending the staircase, he hears Charlus call out to him, "So this is what you call waiting for me, is it?" And so the two of them set out together on foot, Charlus saying that he wants to wait until he sees a cab to his liking. On the street, cab after cab passes without being hailed, some of them even stopping, but Charlus says he's waiting for one with the right kind of lamps. He talks to the narrator "with the same sporadic familiarity that had already struck me in Balbec, and which was in such contrast with the harshness of his tone." 

"I have often thought, monsieur, that there was in me, thanks not to my humble gifts but to circumstances that you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth of experience, a kind of secret dossier of inestimable worth, which I have not felt it proper to use for my own purposes, but which would be of priceless benefit to a young man to whom I would hand over, in a matter of months, what it has taken me more than thirty years to acquire, and which I am perhaps alone in possessing."

The narrator has no idea what he's getting at, and is further puzzled when he breaks off this thread to ask him about Bloch and whether "my school friend was young, good-looking, and so forth." When the narrator says Bloch is French, Charlus says, "'I took him to be Jewish.' His assertion of such an incompatibility led me to believe that M. de Charlus was more anti-Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. And yet he went on to protest against the charge of treason leveled against Dreyfus." The narrator's confusion about Charlus's attitude continues when the Baron asserts that Dreyfus "would have committed a crime against his country if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has that got to do with France?" And nothing the narrator can say, such as observing that if there were a war against France, Jews would have to serve, too, can dislodge Charlus from his course of thought. Charlus even pursues a fantasy in which Bloch stages some "biblical entertainment" that involved Bloch as David and Bloch's father as Goliath, and an "excellent spectacle" in which Bloch attacks his mother: "to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving the old cow what she deserves." 

The narrator rightly characterizes these as "dreadful, almost deranged remarks," noting that as he makes them, "M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it hurt," and reflects "that the connections, scantily investigated to date, I felt, between goodness and evil in the same heart, various as they might be, would be an interesting area of study." Then, coincidentally, he sees Bloch's father on the street, and offers to introduce him to the Baron, who takes umbrage at the very idea, citing "the youth of the person making the introduction, and the unworthiness of the person introduced."

But as it happened, M. Bloch was paying no attention to us. He was busy greeting Mme Sazerat effusively, to her great delight. This startled me, for previously, in Combray, she was so anti-Semitic that she had been indignant with my parents for allowing young Bloch into the house. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind, had blown M. Bloch right up against her a few days before this. My friend's father had found Mme Sazerat charming and was particularly gratified by the lady's anti-Semitism, which he saw as a proof of the sincerity of her faith and the authenticity of her Dreyfusard views. 

Clearly, the Dreyfus affair made strange bedfellows. 

Again, we have to wonder how the narrator knows all of this, including the conversation that Bloch père is said to have had with Nissim Bernard about his encounter with Mme. Sazerat, which elicits this wonderful portrait of M. Bernard: 

Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on, for reasons to be revealed in due course, he now looked like a Pre-Raphaelite worm onto which hairs had been indecently grafted, like threads in the depths of an opal. 

Charlus continues with his baffling ramble, mentioning in the course of it the loss of his wife, "the loveliest, noblest, most perfect creature imaginable," and then bristling at the sight of M. d'Argencourt, who "tried to avoid us" but is thwarted by Charlus, who insists on talking to d'Argencourt about the narrator. "I noted that M. d'Argencourt, to whom I had barely been introduced at Mme. de Villeparisis's, and to whom M. de Charlus had now spoken at length about my family, was appreciably colder to me than he had been an hour ago, and subsequently, for a long time, he behaved with the same reserve whenever we met." Clearly, Charlus has an odd effect on people. 

As they walk on, the narrator introduces the topic of the Duchesse de Guermantes, but elicits from Charlus only the demand that he "give up society life. It pained me to see you at that ridiculous gathering." He asks this as part of a kind of Mephistophelian bargain, as a "sacrifice" in return for which he can bestow all manner of gifts on the narrator: "The 'Open Sesame' to the Guermantes mansion, and any others worthy of throwing open their doors to you, lies with me." 

Then the narrator asks about Mme. de Villeparisis and her family, and learns that she gained the name when she married a M. Thirion, who "thought that he could adopt some defunct aristocratic name with impunity," and chose Villeparisis because, "there have been no Villeparisis since 1702." 

The fact that Mme de Villeparisis as merely Mme Thirion completed her downfall in my estimation, which had begun when I saw the uneven gathering of people in her salon.... I continued to visit her occasionally, and from time to time she sent me tokens of remembrance. But in no way did it seem to me that she was part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and if I had needed any information about it, she was one of the last people I should have asked.

Charlus continues with some modified praise for Saint-Loup as a suitable friend for the narrator: "At least he's a proper man, not one of those effeminate creatures one comes across everywhere nowadays, who look just like rent boys capable of bringing their innocent victims to a sorry end at the drop of a hat.' (I did not know the meaning of this slang expression, 'rent boy.')" And with that, Charlus hires a cab driven by a drunken cabbie, gets into the cab beside him and drives the cab himself.