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 Thirty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 460-480

Part II, Chapter III, from "The reconciliation put an end to M. de Charlus's torments..." to "...I realized we had to cut our moorings."

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Things are still not going well between Charlus and Morel. When they're separated by Morel's military obligations, the violinist "would write the Baron fond and despairing letters, in which he assured him that he would have to put an end to his life because some frightful affair meant that he needed twenty-five thousand francs." And Charlus would refuse, fearing that he money "would have provided Charlie with the means of dispensing with him and also of enjoying the favors of someone else." 

That "someone else" turns out to be "the Prince de Guermantes, who, having come to spend a few days on the coast to pay a visit to the Duchess of Luxembourg, encountered the musician, without knowing who he was and without being known to him, and offered him fifty francs to spend the night together at the house of prostitution in Maineville." Charlus finds out that Morel is meeting someone there, and sends for Jupien to help him spy on Morel and his unknown companion. The result is a farcical scene which makes Morel, who has been tipped off about the Baron's espionage, more wary of the Baron, but leaves Charlus none the wiser. And it's followed by another scene in which Morel goes to see the Prince at a villa he's renting and is startled to discover there a picture of Charlus.

Wild with terror, Morel, recovering from his initial stupefaction, and not doubting that this was an ambush into which M. de Charlus had led him as a test of his fidelity, tumbled down the villa's few steps four at a time and began running as fast as his legs could carry him.

Meanwhile, the narrator has been spending time in the company of the Comte de Crécy, "a poor but extremely distinguished member of the gentry," with whom he has been hitting it off because of his interest in the Guermantes genealogy. And Mme. de Cambremer and Mme. Verdurin have been sparring with one another to see who can establish herself as the dominant figure in local society, using Charlus, Morel, and members of the "little set" as pawns in their game. Brichot in particular gets caught up in this little war because he has something of a crush on Mme. de Cambremer. 

It was a day of high emotion at La Raspelière when Mme Verdurin was seen to disappear for a whole hour with Brichot, whom she was known to have told that Mme de Cambremer made fun of him, that he was the laughingstock of her drawing room, that he was about to dishonor his old age and jeopardize his position in academic life. 

Thus Brichot is brought to heel. 

Day One Hundred Twenty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 344-368

Part II, Chapter II, from "The piece having finished, I took the liberty..." to "...imploring heaven, beneath his monocle, for a martyr's crown."

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The narrator's request that Morel play something by César Franck is met with dismay by Mme. Verdurin, who requests Debussy's Fêtes instead. As Sturrock's note points out, these are orchestral pieces not readily transcribable to a solo violin. Morel knows only the beginning in any case, so he segues from that to a Meyerbeer march -- musically about as far away from Debussy as one can get. But "everyone thought it was still Debussy, and they went on calling out, 'Sublime!' By revealing that the composer was that not of Pelléas but of Robert le Diable, Morel cast a certain chill."

The rest of the evening is full of the same kind of comedy -- the whole "Wednesday" is one of Proust's funniest scenes. Ski informs the hostess that Charlus is not really a prince, "his family's bourgeois merely, of minor architects." When the narrator corrects him, Ski shrugs off the correction, "no more apologizing for his mistake than a few hours earlier for that which had almost caused us to miss the train."

Mme. Verdurin, who used to respond to anything funny by burying her face in her hands, now, on hearing a witticism from Brichot, "the Patronne would clutch at the Princesse's armpit, digging in her nails, and hide her head there for a moment or two like a child playing hide-and-seek." Once her phony spasm of laughter ends, "she could now let go of the Princesse's bruised shoulder, and she allowed her face to reappear, not without pretending to wipe her eyes and to catch her breath two or three times." 

Saniette remains the butt of every Verdurin joke, and when he admits that he doesn't know how to play whist, spoiling M. Verdurin's desire to play the game, "M. Verdurin, furious, marched on Saniette wearing a terrible expression: 'You don't know how to play anything, then!' he shouted, furious at having lost an opportunity for a game of whist, but overjoyed at finding one for insulting the former archivist." 

The Marquis de Cambremer, listening to Cottard's lame puns, demands of Verdurin, "Who is that gentleman playing cards? What's his occupation in life? What does he sell? I rather like to know who I find myself with, so as not to become intimate with just anyone at all." Verdurin seizes the opportunity to aggrandize himself, asserting that the man is "our family doctor," the more to astonish the Marquis when he reveals that this is the famous Professor Cottard. As for Cottard, he's annoyed when his wife drops off to sleep in her armchair. He succeeds in waking her: 

"My bath is just the right temperature," she murmured, "but the feathers of the dictionary..." she exclaimed, coming upright. "Oh, good heavens, I'm so silly! What am I saying? I was thinking about my hat, I must have said something foolish, I was just about to doze off, it's that wretched fire." Everyone started to laugh, for there was no fire.

Charlus, who is watching Morel play cards, "could not restrain himself from pinching the violinist's ear" and saying, "This young man is astonishing.... He plays like a god." When Mme. Verdurin suggests that they stay the night, Charlus replies that Morel's leave from Doncières extends only till midnight. "'He must go back there to sleep, like a very good, very obedient little boy,' he added, in a voice at once self-satisfied, affected, and insistent, as though he were deriving a sadistic and voluptuous pleasure from employing this chaste comparison, as well as letting his voice dwell in passing on what concerned Morel, from touching him with, for want of a hand, words that seemed to be palpating him." 

The narrator observes that Charlus's voice and mannerisms have become more effeminate. At the same time, the Baron has begun to utter witticisms at Mme. Verdurin's expense. "This was the first of the skirmishes between them.... There were, alas, to be others in Paris." But the Baron is still on guard against having his homosexuality exposed, and when Mme. Verdurin, referring to a little trip her husband is planning, says, "'I'm none too sure who he's invited. M. de Charlus, are you one of them?' The Baron, who heard only these final words and did not know they had been talking about an excursion to Arembouville, gave a start." 

Meanwhile, Mme. Verdurin has begun trying to sink her hooks into the narrator. She has invited him to bring Albertine -- whom the narrator is pretending is his cousin -- to her Wednesdays, and she makes disparaging remarks about Swann, partly because Swann had been part of the Duchesse de Guermantes' circle. "'And who's this Robert de Saint-Loup you were talking about?' she said anxiously, for she had heard that I was due to go and visit him in Doncières and was afraid he might cause me to default." She claims to have heard about Saint-Loup from Morel, "a complete lie, because Saint-Loup and Morel did not even know of each other's existence." 

Finally, the carriages arrive and the little group disperses.                                                                 

Day One Hundred Twenty-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 318-344

Part II, Chapter II, from "Even as I replied to the questions..." to "...And this may have been true."

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While talking with Mme. de Cambremer, the narrator recalls his conversation with his mother earlier that day in which she revealed that she has heard that Mme. Bontemps has said that a marriage between Albertine and the narrator "would be her aunt's dearest wish." He is inclined to "wait a little ... to try and find out whether I truly loved her," and thinks of bringing her to one of the Verdurins's "Wednesdays." Meanwhile, Mme. de Cambremer says that "everyone's talking about" Saint-Loup's "marriage with the Princesse de Guermantes's niece." The narrator, who knows of no such arrangement, is "seized by a fear of having spoken unsympathetically in front of Robert about a girl whose originality was false and whose mind was as second-rate as her character was violent." 

Brichot is still going on about place-name etymologies, dominating the dinner-table conversation, which is a relief to Saniette, who is nervously anticipating some attack from M. and Mme. Verdurin, who use him as a kind of whipping boy. Saniette "had been touched to hear M. Verdurin ... telling the maître d'hôtel to set a jug of water beside M. Saniette, who drank nothing else. (The generals who get the most soldiers killed insist that they be well fed.)" Also at the table is "an illustrious Norwegian philosopher" who speaks French so slowly and carefully that he can barely get a complete sentence out. 

The narrator, who has come to the soirée in part to get information about Mme. Putbus and the lady's maid he fears might be a potential seducer of Albertine, learns from Mme. Verdurin that she "tried hard to divert her holidays to Venice, we're rid of her for this year." He also overhears a conversation between Cottard and Ski that reveals they know of the rumors about Charlus's sexual orientation. 


Saniette falls into a trap with an innocent remark that allows the Verdurins to make fun of him. "Hardly one of the faithful could forbear from guffawing, and they looked like a band of cannibals whose taste for blood has been reawakened by a wound inflicted on a white man." And even when Saniette tries to redeem himself with a little pun, Verdurin claims to have heard the joke "a hundred times," when in fact he heard it once from Ski, who pretended it was his own invention. (It's worth noting that, throughout this episode at the Verdurins', Proust makes no effort to stick to the narrator's point of view, instead providing information about the characters' thoughts and their past history which would likely have been unavailable to his narrator.)


The narrator mentions some sketches he has seen at Elstir's, which allows Mme. Verdurin to reveal her former acquaintance with the painter they called Tiche, and that she doesn't "like at all, not at all" the paintings he has done since he broke with the "little set." "Basically a second-rater. I can tell you, I sensed that right away. All in all, he never interested me." When Cottard asks why Mme. Verdurin doesn't invite Elstir and his wife,

"No prize tart enters my house, M. le Professeur," said Mme. Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done her very best to get Elstir to return, even with his wife, but before they got married she had tried to come between them, she had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, and had stolen. Instead, Elstir had broken with the Verdurin salon.

As they leave the dinner table, there's another moment when, as with Cottard earlier, Charlus wonders if his secret is being alluded to. Verdurin says to him, "'I realized you were one of us from the very first words we exchanged!' M. de Charlus, who had placed a very different interpretation on this expression, gave a sudden start." But it quickly turns out that Verdurin was referring to the preference given to the Marquis de Cambremer because Charlus is "only a baron." This naturally raises Charlus's hackles, and he goes on to inform Verdurin that he is "also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, and Prince d'Oléron, de Carency, de Viareggio, and des Dunes." But then he reassures Verdurin that he's not offended, while at the same time condescending to him. 


While Mme. Verdurin is showing the narrator her painting by Elstir, and proclaiming that "the man was finished" the moment he broke with "the little nucleus," the Cambremers are inspecting the redecorating that the Verdurins have done with the property they are renting from them and pronouncing the Verdurins' taste bad. Charlus and Cambremer do a little one-upping and name-dropping with each other. ("The dukedom of Aumale was in our family for a long time before entering the House of France," M. de Charlus was explaining to M. de Cambremer, in front of an open-mouthed Morel, for whom this whole discourse was, if not addressed to him, intended.") And the narrator finds that his praise of Brichot's etymologizing has made him "appear stupid in the eyes of Mme Verdurin, who could see that I had 'swallowed' Brichot." 


The selection ends with Charlus accompanying Morel in Fauré's sonata for piano and violin, and with the narrator's comment about the decadent Baron: 

His sadness following the death of his wife did not, thanks to his habit of lying, debar M. de Charlus from a way of life that was out of keeping. Later on, he stooped so low as to let it be understood that, during the funeral ceremony, he had found a means of asking the altar boy for his name and address. And this may have been true.

Day One Hundred Twenty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 288-318

Part II, Chapter II, from "The coachman, though very young..." to "...if only in order to pass it on to his sister."

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Brichot and Cottard are disturbed to hear the news of Dechambre's death, fearing that Mme. Verdurin will be so upset that the Wednesday will be spoiled. But the narrator observes that "Like almost all society people, Mme Verdurin, precisely because she had need of the company of others, never gave them another thought after the day they died." And that "M. Verdurin would pretend that the death of the faithful so affected his wife that, in the interests of her health, it was not to be mentioned." Which is precisely what happens when they arrive at La Raspelière. 

The journey from the station is filled with such spectacular scenery that the narrator is "intoxicated" by it, unlike the rest of the travelers. The Princesse "later confessed to Cottard that she found me very enthusiastic; he replied that I was too emotional, that I would have needed sedatives and to take up knitting." 

As for any suspicions we might have about the identity of the missing violinist, they're confirmed when they arrive and M. Verdurin reports that they will be entertained by "a youngster my wife discovered, just as she discovered Dechambre, and Paderewski and the others: Morel." And that he will be accompanied by "an old friend of his family's who he's met again and who bores him to death...: the Baron de Charlus." Ski, the sculptor, is "surprised to learn that the Verdurins had consented to receive M. de Charlus." But it turns out that outside the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Baron has "been confused with a certain Comte Leblois de Charlus, who was not even faintly, or only distantly related to him, and who had been arrested, perhaps in error, during a police raid that was still talked about." So it turns out that although the Baron deserves his reputation, he has achieved it falsely. And when Ski brings it to Mme. Verdurin's attention, she dismisses it as rumor and says that even if it's true, it wouldn't compromise her in any way. She is "furious" with Ski because "Morel being the principal ingredient of her Wednesdays, she was anxious before all else not to upset him." 

When Morel and Charlus arrive, the latter is "as self-conscious as a schoolboy entering for the first time into a brothel and overdoing his respects to the madam." He adopts an effeminate manner, "fluttering affectedly, and with the same ampleness to his waddlings as though they were hobbled and made broader by his being in a skirt, that he made for Mme Verdurin, wearing so flattered and honored an expression that you might have thought that to be introduced to her was for him a supreme favor." 

But the narrator is more surprised by Morel, who had previously treated him "condescendingly." This time he fawns on the narrator, asking him to conceal from Mme. Verdurin the fact that his father had been the valet to the narrator's uncle, and "to say that, in your family, he was the steward of estates so vast that it made him the equal practically of your parents." The narrator is annoyed by the request, "But so unhappy and so urgent was his expression that I did not refuse." As it turns out, Mme. Verdurin had known the narrator's family and responds with a story about his great-grandfather's stinginess. And after he has accomplished this task, Morel reverts to his original "disdainful familiarity" toward the narrator, "and for a time he avoided me even, contriving to make it look as though he despised me.... I concluded ... from that first evening that he must be base by nature, that he would not shrink when need be from obsequiousness and knew nothing of gratitude." We also learn that Charlus becomes a manager of Morel: "You are to imagine some merely skillful performer from the Ballets Russes, trained, taught, and brought on in every sense by M. de Diaghilev." 

Charlus does make a powerful impression on one member of the gathering:  When Mme. Verdurin says, "The Baron was just saying...," Cottard responds with "'A baron! Where, where's a baron? Where's a baron?' he exclaimed, looking around for him with an astonishment bordering on incredulity." 

Meanwhile, the Cambremers arrive, and the narrator treats us to a description of the Marquis's nose: "not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; ... the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most readily." We also learn that, in the army, he had been given the nickname "Cancan." As for Mme. de Cambremer, "She was furious to be jeopardizing her reputation this evening at the Verdurins' and had done so only at the entreaties of her mother-in-law and husband, for the sake of the tenancy." But she brightens when she sees Charlus there, because she has not yet managed to be introduced to him. Charlus "had given Odette -- and kept -- his word that he would not allow himself to be presented to Mme de Cambremer." 

At the dinner table, the Baron finds himself seated by Cottard, who is so smitten with Charlus's title that there is a moment of misinterpretation: "The Baron, who was quick to find men of his own kind wherever he was, did not doubt that Cottard was one such, and was giving him the eye." The narrator gives us some reflections on the usual course of events when one "invert," as he calls them, meets another, but 

M. de Charlus's error was short-lived. A godlike discernment showed him a moment later that Cottard was not of his own kind and that he had no need to fear his advances, either for himself, which would merely have exasperated him, or for Morel, which would have seemed to him more serious.