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 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 Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 37-59

Part II, Chapter I, from "As I was not in any hurry to arrive..." to "...moved away to let him welcome the new arrivals." 

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And so the narrator goes to the reception at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes's, still uncertain whether he has been invited or been the victim of a practical joke.

Outside, he encounters the Duc de Châtellerault, who has been "outed" to him by yesterday's conversation between Jupien and Charlus. Somehow, the narrator has learned of a liaison between the Duc and the Princesse's doorman, in which the Duc managed to keep his identity secret by pretending to be an Englishman. So when the Duc and doorman meet again at the entrance to the reception, there's a comical recognition scene: "As he asked his 'Englishman' of two days before what name he should announce, the doorman was not merely moved, he judged himself to be indiscreet, tactless.... On hearing the guest's reply, 'the Duc de Châtellerault,' he felt so overcome with pride that he remained speechless for a moment." 

The narrator, on the other hand, expects social ruin when his own name is "roared out, like the sound preceding a possible cataclysm," fearing that the Princesse will order the footmen to haul him away. Instead she rises and approaches him graciously, then dismisses him with the words, "You'll find the Prince in the garden." But now he faces another dilemma: finding someone who will introduce him to the Prince. He sees Charlus, who could have done so, but is afraid that the Baron will not forgive him for arriving at the reception without his prior intercession -- he had earlier assured the narrator, "The only entrée to those salons is through me."
 

Then he's stopped by someone else he knows, "Professor E--," the physician he encountered when his grandmother suffered her stroke, and who seemed more interested in getting ready for his dinner with the minister of commerce than in helping the ill woman. Now, Professor E--, who knows no one at the reception, having been invited because of his recent successful treatment of the Prince, wants to cling to the narrator. But the latter manages to shrug him off to talk to the Marquis de Vaugoubert, who "was one of the few men (perhaps the only man) in society who found himself in what is known in Sodom as 'confidence' with M. de Charlus." That is, Vaugoubert had committed youthful homosexual indiscretions known to Charlus. But ambitious to make his way in the Foreign Ministry, Vaugoubert has devoted himself to chastity: 

Having gone from an almost infantile debauchery to absolute continence on the day his thoughts turned to the Quai d'Orsay and the desire to make a great career, he wore the look of a caged beast, casting glances in all directions expressive of fear, craving, and stupidity.

He has married, but Mme. de Vaugoubert is as masculine as her husband is effeminate. "I felt, alas, that she looked on me with interest and curiosity as one of the young men who appealed to M. de Vaugoubert, and whom she would have so much liked to be, now that her aging husband preferred youth."

However, the narrator still hasn't persuaded anyone to introduce him to the Prince. Next he sees Mme. d'Arpajon, and his inability for a moment to remember her name sends him off into a reverie about how we remember names. And here Proust begins to craft a dialogue between the narrator and the reader, playing off the latter's frustration with his seeming ability to move his story forward: 

"All of which," the reader will say, "teaches us nothing about this lady's disobligingness; but since you've been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l'Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well." It is very regrettable, you are right, M. le Lecteur.

And he goes on with more reflections on the topic of remembering things until the reader interrupts again: "'So Mme d'Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?' No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again." This bit of authorial raillery perhaps reflects Proust's interest in English fiction, where such author-reader interchanges often take place, and it also raises the question of the narrator's identity, on which Proust had no doubt already been challenged by readers and critics.

In any case, Mme. d'Arpajon doesn't introduce him to the Prince, leaving him venturing to approach Charlus again, only to be interrupted by Mme. de Gallardon, who wants to introduce her nephew, Adalbert, Vicomte de Courvoisier, to Charlus. The Baron responds to her with his customary surliness, but the narrator persists with his own request. 

[P]erhaps -- in spite of his ill-humor against me -- I would have succeeded with him when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not had the unhappy idea of adding, out of scrupulousness, and so that he should not suppose me tactless enough to have entered on the off chance, relying on him to enable me to stay, "You know that I know them very well, the Princesse has been very kind to me." "Well, if you know them, what need have you of me to introduce you?" he snapped at me and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game of cards with the nuncio, the German ambassador, and a personage whom I did not know. 

Finally, he succeeds when he encounters M. de Bréauté, who obligingly effects the introduction. He finds the Prince aloof, in contrast with the agreeableness of the Duc de Guermantes, but paradoxically "realized at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit 'as an equal,' and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Finally, they go in to dinner.