Day One Hundred Sixty-Four: The Fugitive, pp. 563-587*

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

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, concluded, from "The memory of Albertine had become so fragmented within me...."

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The narrator claims, "I was happier to have Andrée by my side than I would have been to have Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée would be able to tell me more about Albertine that Albertine herself had ever told me." And what Andrée tells him as they're making out is pretty hot stuff. For one thing, that Albertine "had met a handsome lad at Mme Verdurin's called Morel," and that Morel had acted as bait, luring "young laundry-maids and young fisher-girls" into threesomes with him and Albertine and once taking Albertine and one of the girls "to a house of ill-fame in Couliville, where four or five women took her together or in succession."

But Andrée also claims that Albertine felt remorse and "hoped that you would save her, that you would marry her." Then she recalls the time that the narrator almost caught them in the act. The narrator's reaction is that "this was the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress, if indeed it was true, which suddenly surfaces from the depths when we no longer have any use for it." He questions Andrée's veracity, and notes that she had been spreading malicious rumors about a "man whom we had met at Balbec and who since then had been living with Rachel." This is Octave, who when he first appears in the novel is a rather foppish young golfer whom Albertine dismisses as "a lounge lizard." He is also a nephew of the Verdurins, whom he mocks. In an extended aside, the narrator tells us that later, Octave is to leave Rachel and marry Andrée, and that he will reveal himself as a talented designer who "introduced into contemporary art a revolution at least equal to hat accomplished by the Ballets Russes." (Peter Collier's note tells us that Octave is modeled in part on Jean Cocteau.)

The narrator continues with Andrée's revelations, including the suggestion that the reason Albertine left the narrator was that she didn't want the other "girls of the little gang" to know she was living with a man to whom she was not married. He finds it satisfying that her revelations confirm his original suspicions instead of "the wretched and cowardly optimism to which I had later yielded." And he forms a theory that Albertine's lesbianism had brought out her "masculine" side, "creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility." (Our narrator is of course subject to homophobic hokum.)

His grilling of Andrée is interrupted by dinner with his mother, who reports that the Princess of Parma has paid her a visit -- an unheard of thing. It was her way of making amends for the snub she had delivered the narrator's mother, who "thought, and later I came to share her opinion, that the Princess of Parma had quite simply failed to recognize her annd thought she need take no notice of her." On learning what she had done from the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princess broke protocol and made her visit.

Andrée and the narrator meet again a week later, when she presents another theory for Albertine's leaving: that her aunt feared the narrator wouldn't marry her, spoiling her for another marriage that Mme. Bontemps had in mind for her. And that the visit Albertine was supposed to make to Mme. Verdurin was not to meet Mlle. Vinteuil there, but this young man. Andrée also claims that there had never been anything physical between Albertine and either Mlle. Vinteuil or her lover. The narrator retains his doubts:

But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who had been lying? Truth and life are indeed an uphill path, and, without ever really getting to know them, I felt that the final impression which they left me was one where sadness was perhaps still overshadowed by fatigue.

Day One Hundred Fifty-One: The Prisoner, pp. 305-321

From "We had arrived at my door...." to "...it is difficult for me now to say."

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From the moment the narrator returns, it's as if he and Albertine had been spoiling for a fight. She is angry when he tells her that he has been to the Verdurins', and he is provoked when she asks, "Wasn't Mlle Vinteuil supposed to be there?" He brings up a trip she made to Balbec with the chauffeur, the postcards from which arrived much later, and she says she really went to Auteuil to see some friends and arranged for the chauffeur to have the postcards mailed from Balbec:

"I didn't even dare go out in Auteuil for fear someone would see me. I only went out once and then I was dressed as a man, just for a laugh. And with my luck, of course the first person I bumped into was your sheeny friend Bloch. But I don't think he can have been the one who told you that our trip to Balbec only ever existed in my imagination, for I don't think he recognized me."

This incident, which looms so large here, seems not to have been mentioned before. Did Proust intend to revise the incident at Versailles into one involving Balbec?

Then the narrator begins to talk about Mlle. Vinteuil and her partner, intending to reveal to Albertine that he knows about their relationship, but she interrupts him to confess that she had made up her friendship with them: "I saw you getting so passionate about this fellow Vinteuil's music that, seeing one of my friends -- this is really true, I swear -- had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, I had the silly idea of making myself more interesting to you by pretending that I'd know those two girls very well."

The narrator is touched by her revelation and by her feeling "insignificant in the Verdurin circle," and he offers to give her the money to "give a grand dinner and ask M. and Mme Verdurin." But she is offended by the condescension, and says, "Thanks a lot! Spend money on those old gargoyles, I'd much rather you left me alone for once, let me go out and get ..." Then she breaks off in evident embarrassment. He presses her to continue what she was saying, but she says she was on the brink of saying "something horribly vulgar" that she had ''heard the most terrible people saying in the street." He is convinced she's lying, and begins to try to puzzle out what she must have been about to say. Here there's a bit of a translation problem, because the  word in the French before she interrupted herself was casser, which means "break," though Clark has translated it as "get," probably because "let me go out and break..." would have made no sense. (Is the translator's interpretation "get laid"?) So the narrator has to run through several idiomatic expressions involving the word casser before he hits on one referring to anal sex.

Horrors! That is what she would have preferred. Horror upon horror! For even the lowest prostitute, who lends herself to that activity, or even welcomes it, will not use in speaking to the man who performs it such a revolting expression. She would feel herself too humiliated. Only with another woman, if she prefers women, will she use it, as if to excuse herself for yielding to a man.

And the inference, whether or not it's correct, is enough to cause the narrator to make this proposal:

Darling Albertine, I said gently, with deep sadness, you must see that your life here is depressing for you, we should separate, and as the quickest separations are the best, I will ask you, to make my suffering a little less, to say good-bye this evening and leave tomorrow morning before I wake up, so that I do not have to see you again.

He proposes to ask Bloch to send his cousin Esther to stay with her, which puzzles her. He does it "to try to force a confession from Albertine," but it doesn't work.

Truthfully, I find this scene something of a muddle, not only because of the translation problem, but also because Proust has not fully externalized the drama, relying instead on the narrator's internal musings and giving us no clear glimpse of what's going on inside Albertine. While Proust has no reluctance to violate point of view elsewhere, and give us the thoughts of characters like the Verdurins, the veil he draws around Albertine's inner life keeps her something of a mystery to us -- which of course is what she is to the narrator -- at some sacrifice to dramatic effect.

Day One Hundred Forty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 236-256

From "It is not that musicians can remember this lost homeland..." to "...they had been less friendly to her than she had hoped."

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The andante of the Vinteuil septet (which for some reason has ten musicians) draws to a close and there is a pause in the concert. The narrator reflects,

The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

Art is the vehicle of the imagination in which all may ride.

As Swann did with Odette, so the narrator connects a phrase from Vinteuil's music with Albertine, in this case the final phrase of the andante. But when the music resumes, it seems to transcend his relationship with her:

Then the phrases faded away, except one which I saw pass by again up to five or six times, not letting me see her face, but so tender, so different -- as the little phrase from the sonata no doubt was for Swann -- from anything that any woman had yet led me to desire, that that phrase, offering me in such a gentle voice a kind of happiness which would have truly been worth attaining -- that invisible creature whose language I could not understand and yet whom I understood so well -- was perhaps the only Unknown Woman it has ever been granted to me to meet.

The irony is that he would not have been listening to this music at all if one of the women he most fears coming in contact with Albertine, Mlle. Vinteuil's friend, hadn't rescued it from the chaotic and indecipherable notes left by the composer. The narrator ingeniously finds ways to reconcile the desecration he had witnessed of Vinteuil's image by Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as "a form of madness." And for a moment, all the threads of his past seem to be coming together:

the memories connected with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, especially, spoke to me of Combray and also of Albertine, that is to say of Balbec, since it was because I had once seen Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain and then learned of her friend's association with Albertine, that I would be going home in a moment to find not solitude but Albertine awaiting me; and my memories of Morel and M. de Charlus's first meeting on the platform at Doncières, spoke to me of Combray and its two walks, for M. de Charlus was one of those Guermantes who lived in Combray without having a house there, half-way to heaven like Gilbert the Wicked in his stained-glass window, while Morel was the son of the old valet who had let me in to meet the lady in pink and had been the means of my recognizing her, so many years later, as Mme Swann.

But we return to the party, where Saniette, whom M. Verdurin has ordered to leave because of his inability to "form a considered judgment" on the music they have heard, apparently has a stroke outside. Verdurin's first thought is not to spoil the party, like "those grand hotels where sudden deaths are swiftly concealed so as not to frighten the guests, and where the dead man may be hidden in a larder ... until he can be smuggled out of the back door." The matter is hushed up, and Saniette "lived for some weeks more, but without regaining consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time."

As the guests start to leave, Charlus becomes the head of a receiving line formed by the people he has invited. "No one would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme Verdurin, any more than to an old usherette at a theatre where some great lady has invited the whole aristocracy for one evening." One of the guests even asks the narrator if Mme. Cottard is Mme. Verdurin. Several of them take the opportunity, while talking to Charlus, of booking Morel to play at their homes, "but none of them dreamed of inviting Mme Verdurin to hear him. She was consumed with rage, when M. de Charlus, floating on a cloud and unable to register her fury, magnanimously chose to invite the Patronne to share his joy." Charlus is unaware that Mme. Verdurin is intensely jealous of any outside relationships her "little set" may form: "Every suppressed laugh from Odette as she sat next to Swann had formerly gnawed at her heart, as had, recently, every private conversation between Morel and the Baron; she could find only one consolation for her pain, which was to destroy the happiness of others." And so Mme. Verdurin begins to plot to separate Morel from Charlus, and to have the violinist for her own.

Day One Hundred Forty-Six: The Prisoner, pp. 218-236

From "To our great astonishment, when Brichot said how sad..." to "...transposition, into the realm of sound, of profundity."

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Mme. Verdurin surprises them with her open indifference to the death of the Princess Sherbatoff, even claiming that the Princess had a bad reputation. Her attitude "had a curiously modern, 'problem-play' sound to it, and also it was gloriously convenient; for want of feeling or immorality, once confessed, simplify life as effectively as loose morals: they remove the need to find excuses for blameworthy actions, and transform them into obligations of sincerity." But Charlus puts his foot in it by saying, "I'm glad the evening wasn't cancelled, because of my own guests."

The narrator notes that Mme. Verdurin has about her a "rather disagreeable smell of nose-drops," which she explains by saying they were prescribed to her because of her tendency to cry while listening to Vinteuil's music. "My nose gets all congested, and two days later I look like an old drunkard and to get my vocal cords working again I have to have days of inhalations." And here we learn that another member the little group has died: Cottard. And Mme. Verdurin's response to his death is similarly callous: "Well, there you are, he's dead, we all die, he'd killed patients enough, it was time to take his own medicine." (This is one of the inconsistencies Carol Clark notes in her preface: Proust has Cottard at the party talking with Mme. Verdurin and Ski only 11 pages earlier, and he is spotted again at the party later.)

The narrator asks her if Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are present. "No, I've just had a telegram, said Mme Verdurin evasively, they've had to stay in the country." When Morel comes over to say hello, he asks him about their absence, but he seems "to know very little about it." And, apropos Charlus's attitude toward Morel, we get another of the narrator's little observations about homosexuality:

The invert who has been able to nourish his passion only with a literature written for men who love women, who thought of men as he read Musset's Nights, feels a need to share, in the same way, all the social roles of the man who is not an invert, to keep someone as the admirer of chorus-girls does, or the old habitué of the Opéra, and also to settle down, to marry or live with a man, to be a father.

The narrator continues to establish his heterosexuality by commenting on his eye for the single women at the party, and contrasting it with "the furtive messages" that Charlus and the other gay men at the party -- who include "two dukes, an eminent general, a famous writer, great doctor and distinguished lawyer" -- are exchanging, in which they comment on young men as "she." He also comments on Mme. Verdurin's tolerance of homosexuality, which he refers to as "Charlisme": "Like every ecclesiastical power, she regarded mere human weaknesses as less serious than anything that could weaken the authority principle, damage orthodoxy, alter the ancient creed, in her little church." Unfortunately, Charlus is about to do just that: "What doomed M. de Charlus on that evening was the bad manners -- so common among society people -- of his guests, who were now beginning to arrive." They are determined to snub their hostess, referring to her as "old Mother Verdurin."

And M. de Charlus, as his guests pushed their way through the crowd to come and congratulate him, to thank him as if he had been the host, did not think to ask them to say a word to Mme Verdurin. Only the Queen of Naples, in whose veins ran the same noble blood as in her sisters, the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchesse d'Alençon, began to talk to Mme Verdurin as if she had come to the house for the pleasure of seeing Mme Verdurin, more than for the music or to see M. de Charlus. 

The rudeness is stilled when the concert begins: "respect for the music -- thanks to the prestige of Palamède -- had suddenly been instilled into a crowd as ill-mannered as it was smart." Mme. Verdurin also assumes her role in the concert, "a divinity presiding over the musical solemnities, a goddess of Wagnerism and migraine, a kind of almost tragic Norn, summoned up by genius in the midst of all these bores." 

And here begins one of the narrator's lengthy internal monologues, Proust's attempt to re-create the experience of listening to a concert, with the narrator's thoughts not only about the music but also about the images and feelings it elicits from him. The piece by Vinteuil is unfamiliar to him because it has not previously been performed, but in the midst of it,  "more wonderful than any girl, the little phrase, wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and still as scarves, came towards me, still recognizable under these new ornaments." (The "little phrase," of course, is the one that Swann adopted for him and Odette; here the narrator, in one of those fusions of himself with Swann, has made it his own.) But as caught up as he is in the music, he is distracted enough from it to notice Mme. Verdurin's usual poses as she listens to it. "And I stopped listening to the music to wonder again whether Albertine had seen Mlle Vinteuil in the past few days or not, as one reinvestigates an inward pain from which one has been for a moment distracted. For it was inside me that all Albertine's actions took place." But he returns to the music for an extended impression of its effect on him.  

Day One Hundred Forty-Four: The Prisoner, pp. 180-206

From "As my carriage went along the embankment..." to "...in a blur which cannot cause real suffering."

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On the way to the Verdurins', the narrator meets Brichot, and their conversation introduces the topic of Swann's death. And we have yet another of those curious interminglings of the narrator's and the author's voice, along with a reference to an actual painting that includes the supposed model for Swann, Charles Haas:

Swann ... was an outstanding personality in the artistic and intellectual world, and so, even though he had not "produced" anything, his name was able to survive a little longer. And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Gallifet, Edmond de Polignac, and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Here we have Proust pretending that the narrator is the author of Swann's Way, and that the figure of Charles Haas (above in the doorway on the right) in James Tissot's painting is Swann. Or do we have Proust admitting that he is the narrator and that Swann is Haas?

Arriving at the Verdurins', the narrator and Brichot encounter Charlus, who continues to make Brichot uneasy with his increasingly flamboyant manner. Brichot, the narrator tells us, "reassured himself by repeating pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because ... he could not understand that in those days loving a boy (Socrates' jokes make it clearer than Plato's theories) was like keeping a dancer today, before one becomes engaged and settle down." But, the heterosexual narrator (apparently not to be identified here with the gay Proust) tells us, today "all everyday homosexuality -- that of Plato's young men or Virgil's shepherds -- has disappeared, and all that survives and multiplies is the involuntary kind, the nervous disease, the kind that one hides from others and disguises from oneself." Narrator/Proust continues with the usual stereotyping: gay men seem to have a greater sensibility for the arts and even (when Charlus discusses Albertine's wardrobe with the narrator) "an inborn taste, a passion for the study, the science of female dress."

Certainly Charlus has changed from the man we met earlier in the novel, the one who railed against effeminacy.

In any case, it was not only in the cheeks, or rather jowls, of the painted face, in the plump breasts and bouncing buttocks of the self-indulgent body invaded by fat, that there now floated on the surface, visible as oil, the vice once so carefully hidden away by M. de Charlus in the furthest depths of his being. It now overflowed in his speech.

Charlus even chides the narrator and Brichot for looking "like two lovers. Arm in arm, Brichot, I must say, you are going a bit far!" The narrator wonders if Charlus his lost his grip, if his words were "the sign of an aging mind," or if he is simply showing "the disdain for middle-class opinion that all the Guermantes had underneath." He speculates that "the narrow range of pleasures offered by his vice had come to bore him, and that sometimes "he would go and spend the night with a woman, in the way a normal man might, once in his life, want to sleep with a boy, out of the same kind of curiosity, each the mirror-image of the other, and each equally unhealthy." And he observes that Charlus

now emitted, quite without thinking, something like the little squeals -- involuntary in his case, and therefore all the more revealing -- that homosexuals produce -- in their case deliberately -- when they call out to each other -- "darling!"; as if this purposely "camp" manner, which M. de Charlus had so long avoided like the plague, were nothing but a brilliant, faithful imitation of the intonations that the Charluses of the world inevitably develop when they reach a certain phase of their disease. 

It's difficult to read these passages today, with their stereotyping and their references to homosexuality as "vice" or "disease," but in their time they constituted shrewd social analysis.

But in the context of the novel, this analysis is really heading toward a crisis in the relationship of Charlus and Morel, which the narrator anticipates by skipping ahead "several weeks" to Charlus's opening of a letter to Morel from the actress Léa, "known for her exclusive attraction to women." In the letter, Léa addressed Morel in the feminine, calls him "Dirty girl!" and says that "you are one and no mistake!" The significance of the letter is left to tantalize us, as is the narrator's statement, "We shall see, in fact, in the last volume of this work, M. de Charlus doing things that would have been even more astonishing to his family and friends than the life revealed by Léa was to him." The narrator notes that Charlus could only feel jealous of Morel when he was with men: "Women had no such effect. This is, in fact, nearly always the rule with Charluses. The love that the man they love has for a woman is something else, happening within a different species (lions don't go after tigers), and does not worry them; indeed, it may reassure them." Unless, the narrator adds, they regard heterosexual intimacy as "disgusting" and "a degradation."

There is one further bit of foreshadowing: a reference to the effect of society gossip. "We shall see later how that verbal press could annihilate the power of a Charlus once he had ceased to be fashionable, and elevate above him a Morel who was not worth a millionth part of his former protector."

Meanwhile, the narrator gets a shock: Charlus tells him that Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are to be at the Verdurins, "and they are two young women of dreadful reputation." As if the narrator didn't know that already. And of course, the Pandora's box of suspicion, regarding Albertine's plans to visit the Verdurins and what she and Andrée had been doing when not under his eagle eye, is opened: "Andrée had said to me, 'We walked a bit, here and there, we didn't meet anyone,' and during which in fact Mlle Vinteuil had obviously arranged to met Albertine at Mme Verdurin's."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 102-117

From "The morning after the evening when Albertine..." to "...peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

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Proust returns to one of his favorite topics, the interface between sleeping and waking, as the narrator arises in the morning to the musical sounds of street-seller crying their wares. "I had never enjoyed them so much as I did now that Albertine was living with me. They seemed to me the joyous signal of her awakening and, by involving me in the life outside, made me more conscious of the calming power of a dear presence, now as constant as I could wish." It helps, of course, that "she had given up her idea of going to the Verdurins' and would be going instead, as I had suggested to the 'special' matinée at the Trocadéro." First, however, she is going riding with Andrée, and we have a bit of foreshadowing as he warns her "no gymnastics" and tells her how dreadful it would be if she had an accident. On the other hand, he also reflects "how wonderful if, once on horseback, she had ridden off into the blue yonder, liked it there, and never come home! How much simpler it would have been if she could have gone and been happy somewhere else."

As for his thoughts on the waking state, he comments that "the waking world still enjoys the superiority of being able to be continued every morning, unlike dreams which are different every night. But perhaps there are other worlds more real than the waking world. For have we not seen how the 'real world' is transformed by every revolution in the arts, and without waiting for that, by the degree of aptitude or cultivation which distinguishes and artist from an ignorant fool?" He subscribes to the notion of modernists that the dream state provides the artistically inclined with a privileged insight into reality. Before habit and memory set in, "One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack." But he recalls a failed effort to remain in a dream state and concludes that "We constantly have to choose between health and wisdom on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been too much of a coward to choose the second."

Albertine is delighted by the street-sellers, and wants to buy everything they offer, from winkles to carrots. She imagines the various foods, and her thoughts turn to the elaborate ice creations made in Paris at the time, until the narrator is put on edge by the sensuality of her descriptions, particularly of "the physical sensation of imagining something so delicious, so cool in her mouth, which gave her an almost sexual pleasure." He is further disturbed when her recollections turn to her stay "at Mlle Vinteuil's, at Montjouvain," where they would "sit in the garden and travel all round France by drinking a different sparkling mineral water every day." He tries to take her mind off of Mlle. Vinteuil -- or rather his mind off of what they might have done together, and thinks again of the choice between living with Albertine or separating from her: "which sort of peace should one put first (either by continuing one's daily, exhausting activity, or by resuming the pain of separation) -- peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

Day One Hundred Thirty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 3-19

From "From early morning, with my face still turned..." to "...with the brake on running in neutral."

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"It was ... mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me at this period." Hardly a new point of view for our narrator. He has brought Albertine back to Paris with him, and "every evening, very late, before leaving me to sleep, she would slip her tongue into my mouth like my daily bread." He thereby experiences a "kind of spiritual sweetness" which he analogizes to "not the night which Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend at the barracks -- a favour which, after all, cured a mere passing malaise -- but that other night when my father sent Mama to sleep in the little bed next to mine." Sometimes comment on Proust is superfluous.

It is a strange ménage, made stranger by the fact that the narrator has once again changed his attitude toward Albertine, "whom I hardly even found pretty any more, in whose company i was bored and whom I had a clear sense of no longer loving." The arrangement is oddly tolerated by his parents: His mother, "did not want to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, whose place it was, if anyone's, to act, and who did not find the arrangement unsuitable, much to my mother's surprise." His mother is, in any case, preoccupied with her aunt's illness. And the narrator is relieved that she's not there, because it prevents Albertine from mentioning to her that she was friends with Mlle. Vinteuil, which would "have utterly precluded not only a marriage, ... but even a stay in our house by Albertine as a guest."

Andrée visits Albertine at the narrator's, and Albertine reveals to him that Andrée had been in love with him during the first stay in Balbec. The narrator is happiest when the girls go out together, having at least temporarily set aside his fantasies that the two of them are lovers, and he concludes that "I no longer loved Albertine, for nothing remained of the pain, now cured, which I had suffered in the tram at Balbec when I learned what Albertine's adolescence had been, including, perhaps, visits to Montjouvain." Of course, he also reflects that "a chronic illness needs only the smallest pretext to recur." And the narrator has not given up his fantasies about predatory lesbians waiting to seduce young women: "The truth was that in leaving Balbec I had thought I was leaving Gomarrah behind, that I was tearing Albertine away from it; alas! Gomorrah was dispersed to the four corners of the Earth."

He has told Albertine that "the doctor said I had to stay in bed. That was not true." Instead, he finds that it's a matter of out of sight, out of mind. When he's "in public with Albertine" he grows anxious "that she had been speaking to someone or even looking at someone." But when he stays home and she goes out he feels "the elating powers of solitude." 

Day One Hundred Thrty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 497-514

Part II, Chapter IV, from "I was only awaiting an opportunity..." to "...I absolutely must marry Albertine."

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And so the narrator makes a great about-face in the space of a single short chapter.

He announces to his mother, who is leaving Balbec for Combray to stay with her dying aunt, that he has decided not to marry Albertine and will stop seeing her. He plans to tell Albertine that he doesn't love her and to switch his attentions to Andrée. But ... best-laid plans. As they are returning from the evening at Mme. Verdurin's he tells her that he is "beginning to find this life rather stupid" and that he's going to ask the Patronne to have some music played by a musician Albertine probably doesn't know: Vinteuil.

Oops.

It turns out that Albertine has "a girlfriend, older than me, who was like both a mother and sister to me, whom I spent my best years with in Trieste," whom she's meeting in Cherbourg a few weeks from now, "and isn't this extraordinary, is in actual fact the best friend of this Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuil's daughter almost as well."

Cue the Proustian moment, "suddenly rising up out of the depths of that darkness where it had seemed to lie forever entombed and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new life, terrible and deserved, perhaps also to explode before my eyes the fateful consequences to which wicked actions give rise indefinitely." And so on.

Albertine the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of her friend, a practicing and professional sapphist, this, compared with what I had imagined at my most suspicious, was ... a terrible terra incognita on which I had just set foot, a new phase of unsuspected suffering that was opening.

He's so jolted by the news that he asks Albertine to come stay the night at the hotel in Balbec, where, after she goes to her room on another floor, he is racked with sobs. "What I had dreaded, had long vaguely suspected in Albertine, what my instinct had isolated from her whole being, but what my arguments, guided by my desire, had slowly led me to deny, was true! ... For, pretty as Albertine was, how could Mlle Vinteuil, with her proclivities, not have asked her to satisfy them?"

He sends for Albertine and complicates matters more by making up a story about a woman he had left in Paris whom he had been planning to marry, and that he had been thinking of killing himself: "If I was going to die, I'd have liked to say goodbye to you." Albertine falls for this story: "I won't leave you again, I'm going to stay with you." He decides that he must take her to Paris, to prevent her from meeting her old girlfriend in Cherbourg. "True," he reflects, "I might have told myself that in Paris, if Albertine had these proclivities, she would find a great many other people with whom to gratify them." But he asks her anyway, realizing that with his mother in Combray and his father away on "a tour of inspection," they would be alone together in Paris.

He reverts to his old childishness, likening his current emotional torment to "that which used to rise up into my room of old in Combray from the dining room, where I could hear, laughing and talking with strangers, amid the sound of forks, Mamma, who would not be coming up to say good night; like that which, for Swann, had filled the houses where Odette had gone to a soirée in search of unimaginable delights."

Albertine replies that she can't go to Paris now, and urges him to marry the woman there. He replies that he "wouldn't have wanted to make a young woman live with someone so sickly and so tiresome." She protests, of course. But he has revealed a truth about himself: "I was too given to believing that the moment I was in love I could not be loved, and that self-interest alone could attach a woman to me."

After she leaves him, she sends word that "she could, if I wanted, come to Paris that same day." The news reaches the hotel manager, who tries to persuade him to stay. And he has second thoughts on looking around the room:

I two or three times had the idea, momentarily, that the world in which this room and these bookcases were, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my unhappiness something like that which we get from reading a novel, and which a madman alone could make into a lasting and permanent unhappiness, extending into his life. 

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the strength of will to stay in this reality. He has a vision of Albertine taking the place of Mlle. Vinteuil's friend in the room in Montjouvain where he had spied on on them. And when his mother comes to see him  he falls back into the old childishness, which she perhaps unwittingly encourages: "Remember that your mamma is leaving today and is going to be desolate at leaving her darling in this state. All the more, my poor child, because I hardly have time to console you." She has "the look she had worn in Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night beside me, that look which at this moment bore an extraordinary resemblance to that of my grandmother when she allowed me to drink cognac."

And so he tells her: "I absolutely must marry Albertine."

Day One Hundred Four: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 3-33

Part I, from "As we know, well before going that day..." to "...fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." 

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Actually, Part I in the Penguin/Viking edition begins with a portentous phrase: "First appearance of the men-women, descendants of those inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven." And then comes an epigraph: 

Woman will have Gomorrah and man will have Sodom.

--Alfred de Vigny

Still, we can't much blame Proust for laying it on a bit thick. He knew that the book was bound to attract bluenoses and censors, and that it had to have at least the appearance of moralizing if it had any hope of attracting even partly sympathetic heterosexual readers. Hence the long, dense, occasionally obscure portrait of the underground gay network, an embryonic version of what today is a community.

The section is a flashback to the concluding section of The Guermantes Way, and was originally written as a part of it. The narrator is lurking, on the lookout for the Guermantes carriage, so he can go ask the Duc and Duchesse if he really was invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's reception. And so he sees a startling encounter between Charlus, "potbellied, aged by the full daylight, graying," and Jupien.

Jupien ..., at once shedding the humble, kindly expression I had always seen him wear, had -- in perfect symmetry with the Baron -- drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence, and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.

The botanical metaphor, based on a conversation at the dinner party in The Guermantes Way that the Duchesse had with the Princess of Parma about the pollination of a particularly beautiful plant which bore only female flowers, continues throughout the section. Meanwhile, Jupien leaves the courtyard, throwing flirtatious come-hither looks at Charlus, and is pursued by the Baron, who returns with him and disappears into his shop. 

The narrator has "lost sight of the bumblebee," but he realizes that he has just witnessed "the good fortune reserved for men of the Baron's kind by one of those fellow creatures who may even be, as we shall see, infinitely younger than Jupien and better-looking, the man predestined so that they may receive their share of sensual pleasure on this earth: the man who loves only elderly gentlemen." He is self-conscious about his voyeurism, recalling "the scene in Montjouvain, hidden in front of Mlle Vinteuil's window," but he persists in it nevertheless -- to an almost absurd extent, sneaking into the empty shop that adjoins Jouvain's, listening through the "exceedingly thin partition" and climbing a ladder to peer through a transom. "From which I later concluded that if there is one thing as noisy as suffering it is pleasure, especially when there is added to it ... an immediate concern with cleanliness." 

He also overhears the conversation between Charlus and Jupien, in which the former uses the opportunity to network, to explore with Jupien the erotic potential of the neighborhood. When Charlus asks him about any gay "young society men" who visit the Duc and Duchesse, Jupien tries to describe one but is unable to give a portrait that Charlus recognizes. To the narrator, however, "the portrait seemed an accurate reference to the Duc de Châtellerault" -- the one who seemed to take delight in the embarrassment of the footman serving him at the Duchesse's dinner party. 

The incident has obviously put Charlus in a whole new light for the narrator: "Until now, because I had not understood, I had not seen.... an error dispelled lends us an extra sense." He understands the need for concealment, for fear of suffering the fate of Oscar Wilde, "the poet who was yesterday being fêted in every drawing room and applauded in every theater in London, only to be driven on the morrow from every lodging house, unable to find a pillow on which to lay his head." And he launches into a lengthy account of the "freemasonry" of gays that "rests on an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeship, of knowledge, of commerce, and of vocabulary, ... all of them obliged to protect their secret." He also touches on the closeted, the self-denying, the young men ignorant of the meaning of their own desires. 

And then he realizes what his recent encounter with Charlus had been.

There were indeed certain individuals that he found it enoiugh to have come to him, and to hold them for a few hours under the sway of his tongue, to appease the desire kindled in him by some encounter.... On occasions, as had no doubt transpired in my own case one the evening when I had been summoned by him after the Guermantes dinner party, assuagement came about thanks to a violent dressing down cast by the Baron into his visitor's face.... M. de Charlus had passed from being the dominated to the dominator, and, feeling himself calmed and purged of his anxiety, dismissed the visitor he had at once ceased to find desirable.

Part I ends with the narrator regretting that his voyeurism has perhaps made him miss "the fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." It's an effective overture to the novel.

Day Thirty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 107-119

From "Though I did not understand..." to "...'you'll get an invitation.'" 

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Swann, we learn, will apparently always associate Vinteuil's sonata with the Bois de Boulogne, and "the charm of certain nights" there, "about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette." Indeed, we have already seen Odette in her element in the Bois. She proposes that the narrator join them on an outing to the Zoo in the Bois, which also reminds her of Mme. Blatin, giving her occasion to make fun of the narrator's misapprehension that that the Swanns were friends of hers. "Even nice Dr. Cottard, who wouldn't speak evil of a soul, says the woman's a pest." And she tells the story of Mme. Blatin calling a "Singhalese" man a "blackie," to which the man retorted, "'Me blackie,' he bellowed at Mme Blatin, 'you camel!'" For the reader, however, Mme. Blatin remains an odd enigma.

While Gilberte is readying herself for their outing, the Swanns enjoyed "telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter," whose "thoughtful kindness" and "desire to please" he had already observed. He also notes that, "Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents," and that when he mentioned Mlle. Vinteuil to her, Gilberte replies, "She's a person I'll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn't nice to her father -- I've heard she made him unhappy."

His infatuation with the Swanns and their household continues, and he observes,

For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter-hour after I first stepped into her drawing room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her that had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility which has been abolished by the fulfillment of a different possibility.

In the Bois, the Swanns encounter the Princesse Mathilde, whom Swann identifies to the narrator as "the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her." While they are chatting with the Princesse, listening to her say that Hippolyte Taine "behaved like a pig" and that Alfred de Musset once arrived an hour late and "dead drunk" when she invited him to dinner, the narrator's friend Bloch makes an appearance. But Mme. Swann is under the impression that Bloch, who has "been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps" is "on the minister's staff, which was news to me ... and that his name was M. Moreul."

Day Thirteen: Swann's Way, pp. 158-169

From "My walks that autumn ..." to "... form assumed by cruelty." 

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This section sent me back to Wordsworth, to "The Prelude" and the "Intimations of Immortality" ode, those poems that trace the process from boyish exhilaration to the disillusionment of maturity in which

nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

On his solitary walks in the autumn of his aunt's death the narrator begins to discover the disjunction between himself and the world, to be "struck for the first time by this discord between our impressions and their habitual expression."

And seeing on the water and on the face of the wall a pale smile answering the smile of the sky, I cried out to myself in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn." But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at those opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.

But from the grumpy way with which his enthusiasm is received by a passerby, he "learned that the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men."

And mostly what he discovers in himself is the limits of his adolescent erotic longings, which merge with the landscape.

For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they would have appeared to a grown man. And I made no distinction between earth and people. I desired a peasant girl from Méségliese or Rossainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méségliese and Balbec.

The narrator assumes an availability of women from the "lower" classes, keeping his imagination distant from women of his own class. And he "has not yet abstracted [sexual] pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, [or] reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." Even in the sly passage in which he masturbates "at the top of our house in Combray in the little room smelling of orris root," he's at one with nature "until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail added itself to the leaves of the wild black currant that leaned in toward me."

And then adolescent eroticism gives way to detachment, disillusionment, depression:

I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance and was no more than a conventional framework for my life, as is, for the fiction of a novel, the railway carriage on the seat of which a traveler reads it in order to kill time.

This is followed by the scene, which takes place a few years later, in which the narrator spies on Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as they mock the portrait of the late M. Vinteuil. It is a moment "that remained obscure to me at the time" but will eventually form in him the idea of sadism. Throughout the scene, the narrator's sympathetic understanding remains with Mlle. Vinteuil, in whom he "recognized her father's obsequious and reticent gestures, his sudden qualms.... And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a touch and swaggering brawler."

Proust is, I think, rather self-conscious in his somewhat overheated treatment of this incident: He tries to downplay its melodramatic theatricality by drawing attention to it.

It was true that in Mlle. Vinteuil's habits, the appearance of evil was so complete that it would have been hard to find it so perfectly represented in anyone other than a sadist; it is behind the footlights of a popular theater rather than in the lamplight of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging her friend to spit on the portrait of a father who lived only for her; and almost nothing else but sadism provides a basis in real life for the aesthetics of melodrama.

But the narrator discerns in Mlle. Vinteuil something of the prudishness of her father. "It was not evil which gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed agreeable to her; it was pleasure that seemed to her malign." And he ends by (somewhat heavy-handedly, I think) drawing a moral from the incident:

Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, and to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty.

Day Twelve: Swann's Way, pp. 146-158

From "'Léonie,' said my grandfather ..." to "... one of life's vulgar scenes."

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After the encounter with Gilberte, there are no more visits to Tansonville, but the family's walks continue. Along them, they sometimes encounter Mlle. Vinteuil -- Montjouvain, Vinteuil's home, lies along their route -- "driving a cabriolet at top speed." And then one year, "she was always accompanied by an older friend, a woman who had a bad reputation in the area and who one day moved permanently into Montjouvain." As the local gossips put it, Vinteuil "can be sure she's not dabbling in music when she's with his daughter."

Though "prudish," as the narrator has called him, Vinteuil is "incapable of any effort whose direct goal was not his daughter's happiness." The narrator comments that

it is remarkable how a person always inspires admiration for her moral qualities in the family of the person with whom she is having carnal relations. Physical love, so unfairly disparaged, compels people to manifest the very smallest particles they possess of goodness, of self-abnegation, so much that these particles glow even in the eyes of those immediately surrounding them.

Nevertheless, Vinteuil "saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and because of this his manner had recently acquired that humility, that respect for those who were above him and whom he saw from below (even if they had been well below him until then)." When Vinteuil encounters Swann, whose "inappropriate marriage" has also put him in disgrace in the eyes of Combray, Swann invites him to "send his daughter to play at Tansonville." The invitation was one "which two years before would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with such feelings of gratitude that he believed he was obliged by them not to have the indiscretion of accepting it."

We jump ahead to

the autumn in which we had to come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate, because she had at last died, proving correct both those who had claimed that her enfeebling regimen would end by killing her, and those who had always maintained that she suffered from an illness that was not imaginary but organic, to the evidence of which the skeptics would certainly be obliged to yield when she succumbed to it.

Françoise's grief is "savage," and "some demon" leads the narrator to tease her with his lack of sentiment over his aunt's death. She is especially provoked because the plaid wrap that the narrator puts on for his solitary walks in the direction of Tansonville, where he still hopes for a glimpse of Gilberte, is so out of keeping with the mourning for his aunt that she feels has been sadly deficient.

Day Nine: Swann's Way, pp. 102-117

From "While I read in the garden ..." to "... all the way to my bed like a little child." 

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We focus again on Aunt Léonie and Françoise, as they await the arrival of Eulalie with news about the church service. Rain begins to fall, and Françoise reports that Mme. Amédée, the narrator's grandmother (who has previously been identified as "Bathilde"), has gone out for a walk.

"That doesn't surprise me at all," said my aunt, lifting her eyes to the heavens. "I've always said that her way of thinking is different from everyone else's...."

"Mme. Amédée is always as different as she can be from everyone else," said Françoise gently, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants from saying that she believed my grandmother was a little "touched."

Finally, Eulalie arrives, but her visit coincides with that of the garrulous curé -- "an excellent man," the narrator observes, "with whom I am sorry I did not have more conversations, for if he understood nothing about the arts, he did know many etymologies." His visit tires out Aunt Léonie, who sends Eulalie away without learning the "important" information whether "Mme. Goupil arrived at Mass before the elevation."

Françoise, who detests Eulalie, is unhappy that Aunt Léonie always gives Eulalie money.

She would not, however, have seen any great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, so long as it went to rich people. Perhaps she thought that they, having no need of gifts from my aunt, could not be suspected of showing fondness for her because of them.

And so the routine goes on, interrupted only by the kitchen maid's suddenly going into labor, an event that deprives Aunt Léonie of Françoise's ministrations while she is sent to fetch a midwife. The narrator, sent to check on his aunt, looks in to find her awaking with a look of terror on her face. He lingers to hear her murmur, "I've gone and dreamed that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me go for a walk every day!" There are even subroutines within the routine, as when lunch is served early on Saturdays because Françoise goes to the market in the afternoon. Any stranger who is ignorant of this change in routine, or even any family member who forgets it, is subject to ridicule.

The surprise of a barbarian (this was what we called anyone who did not know what was special about Saturday) who, arriving at eleven o'clock to talk to my father, found us at table, was one of the things in her life which most amused Françoise.

We also meet the "extremely prudish" M. Vinteuil and his "tomboyish" daughter, and we go on a Sunday walk with the narrator and his parents, following a circuitous route familiar only to the father until they reach home.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.