Day One Hundred Sixty-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 29-43

From "Thoughts like these, tending in some cases to diminish..." through "...the monotonous tramp of one's constitutional in the rustic darkness."

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Except for a visit in August 1914 for a medical examination, the narrator has been away in a sanatorium "until the time, at the beginning of 1916, when it became impossible any longer to obtain medical staff." He returns to wartime Paris to find Mme. Verdurin and Mme. Bontemps the queens of society. The museums are all closed, so "elegance" has established itself "in the absence of the arts." In fact, the whole aesthetic of the times has changed: Mme. Verdurin goes to Venice but what she admired

was not Venice, nor St. Mark's, nor the palaces, all of which had delighted me so much and for which she had cared very little, but the effect of the searchlights in the sky, searchlights about which she provided information supported by figures. Thus from age to age is reborn a certain realism as a reaction against the art previously admired.

And the cause that had once divided society, the Dreyfus affair, is virtually forgotten: "Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things.... Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say, 'In those prehistoric times.'"

Mme. Verdurin, once so contemptuous of the aristocracy, has changed with the times: "as the number of socially glittering people making advances to Mme Verdurin increased, so the number of those she called 'bores' diminished." The war is the chief topic of conversation, of course, and hostesses vie to outdo themselves with the latest news, so that the salons are also infested with spies. "Mme Verdurin would say: 'Do come in at five o'clock to talk about the war,' just as she would once have said 'to talk about the [Dreyfus] Affair', or more recently: 'Do come and listen to Morel.'" Morel, in fact, "was a deserter, but nobody knew this."

Another star of the salons is Octave, who has been discharged from service for medical reasons, has married Andrée, and has "become for me the author of a series of admirable works which were constantly in my thoughts" -- so constantly that the narrator realizes that Octave was also involved in "Albertine's departure from my house." At this point, the narrator says of Albertine, "I simply never thought about her," although this and other such statements are self-contradictory: realizing that you don't think about something is to think about it, which is what made the Tolstoy family's game of trying not to think about a white bear so difficult.

One person Mme. Verdurin is unsuccessful at luring to her salon is Odette, but the rest of society is "more than happy to take advantage of the luxury of the Verdurins, which continued to increase with their wealth at a time when even the richest people, unable to draw their dividends, were economizing."

The narrator finds himself enjoying a mostly solitary life, watching the airplanes defending the skies over Paris, which he claims did not evoke memories of the airplane sighted on his last visit to Versailles with Albertine, "for the memory of that drive had become indifferent to me." In a restaurant he is touched by the sight of a soldier on leave outside, allowing "his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows," which evokes memories of the people who would gather outside the hotel windows in Balbec to watch the diners there, though it's more poignant, knowing that the man will return to the trenches after seeing "the shirkers rushing to grab their tables." And once again the supposedly forgotten Albertine comes to mind as he reflects "how lovely it would have been, on evenings when I had dined out, to arrange to meet her out of doors, beneath the arcades!"

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...."

_____

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-Seven: The Fugitive, pp. 429-450*

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

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from  "Time passes, and gradually all the things which we have falsely alleged..." to "...the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this."

_____

The narrator learns that in the course of forgetting, the first things one forgets are the bad parts: "the unpleasant sides to Albertine's character and the hours of boredom that I had endured at her side." Consequently, "forgetting, although still working within me to accustom me to our separation, only made me see Albertine as sweeter and more beautiful than ever, and made me desire her return all the more."

Françoise seems to the narrator to take an "odious relish" in being rid of Albertine, and when, in the course of cleaning up her room, Françoise discovers some rings she had left behind in a drawer, an argument develops between her and the narrator. The narrator denies having given them to Albertine, and Françoise says it must have been "somebody rich who has good taste." He counters that the rings "did not come from the same person, one was given her by her aunt and she bought the other herself" -- though he fears that they were given her by a secret lover. Françoise persists in arguing that the rings are identical, and shows him that they both bear the same image of an eagle and Albertine's initials. She even produces a magnifying glass to prove her case. Finally, the narrator orders Françoise out of the room and broods on yet another discovery about Albertine: "My revulsion at her falsehood and my jealousy of someone unknown were augmented by my pain at learning that she had accepted presents in this way."

He is also nettled by Françoise's hope that Albertine won't return, and takes pleasure when a letter from her arrives in "momentarily studying Françoise's eyes, drained of all hope as they read in this augury the imminent return of Albertine." But the letter simply says she will cancel the order for the Rolls-Royce and asks for the name of the agent, and concludes with a reference to their last outing together, which, she says "will never be erased from my mind until blackest night finally invades it." The narrator takes this last sentence (a rather heavy-handed bit of ironic foreshadowing) as "purely rhetorical" because "Albertine could not have kept until her dying day such a sweet memory of an outing which had certainly given her no pleasure, since he had been impatient to leave me."

In his reply, the narrator tells Albertine that he has asked Andrée to come live with him in her place and to marry him, that Andrée is "less charming, but one whose greater compatibility of character ought perhaps to allow her to be happier with me." He means the letter to provoke Albertine's jealousy, but once he sends it he's afraid it will have the opposite effect of making her "pleased to know that Andrée was living with me and was to become my wife, provided that she, Albertine, remained free."

He waits on the staircase for Saint-Loup's arrival, and accidentally hears something that he thinks uncharacteristic of his friend: Saint-Loup advising one of the Duchesse de Guermantes' footmen on how to get rid of a fellow servant the footman dislikes. The narrator is "struck dumb with stupefaction" at the "cruel, Machiavellian" advice from someone whom "until then I had always considered ... fundamentally kind, so sympathetic to those who suffer." He wonders if Saint-Loup "might not have acted treacherously towards me in his mission to Mme Bontemps." He dispels the thought when Saint-Loup enters to talk to him, but is struck with another pang when Saint-Loup mentions that on arriving at the Bontemps, he "went through a kind of outhouse which led into the house, and they took me down a long corridor into the lounge." It's the specificity of the details that bother the narrator so much: Until then he has not been able to visualize the place Albertine has escaped to. "In an outhouse, you can hide with a girlfriend." (The word "outhouse" has an unfortunate connotation for American readers, but here it just means something like an annex.) "And in that lounge, who knows what Albertine did when her aunt was not there?"

I still had not seen the house; never could I have conceived the frightful idea of a lounge, an outhouse and a corridor, which I now saw staring out at me from Saint-Loup's retina, which had seen them, and appearing in the guise of the rooms which Albertine walked into, passed through and lived in; these specific rooms and not an infinity of other possible rooms which had neutralized one another.... Alas! when Saint-Loup told me in addition that while in this lounge he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in the next room, and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realized with despair that, once rid of me, she was happy! 

Saint-Loup goes on to mention that when he was leaving, he met some other young women entering the house, and that while in the area he had met a friend of Rachel's. The idea that there are other young women in the vicinity of Albertine is "enough to make me see Albertine flushed and smiling with pleasure, held in the arms of a woman whom I did not know."

And so he's tormented by jealousy of an imaginary woman, with the additional touch of paranoia from the revelation that Saint-Loup is not quite the paragon he believed him to be. He even suspects that Saint-Loup might have "devised a whole conspiracy to keep me away from Albertine!" He recalls what he knows of Swann's state of mind during his infatuation with Odette:

If Albertine could have fallen victim to an accident and had lived, I would have had an excuse to rush to her bedside; if she had died, I would have recovered what Swann called the freedom to live. Did I believe this? Swann, who was so refined and thought he knew himself so well, had believed it.

But he is about to learn that Swann was wrong, "that the death of the woman he loved would have liberated him from nothing!" For just as he sends a telegram to Albertine begging her to return, he receives a telegram from Mme. Bontemps informing him that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident.

Proust piles irony on irony here, as Françoise, ignorant of what has happened, enters with two letters from Albertine, one praising Andrée and offering to intercede if she should be reluctant to marry him, the other expressing a second thought and asking "Would it be too late for me to return to you? ... If it were favourable, I would take the next train."

For Albertine's death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive.

He learns from her death the dark side of involuntary memory, "the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past called forth by identical moments." Everything -- the rain, the sun's rays, the morning sounds -- serves to evoke a memory of their time together.

"Françoise must have been pleased that Albertine was dead, and to be fair I must acknowledge that from a kind of decorum and tact she did not pretend to be sad." She tries to stop the narrator from crying himself sick. "And she added: 'It was bound to happen, she was too happy, poor thing, she didn't know how happy she was." But there's no stopping the narrator's descent into depression.

If an illness, a duel or a runaway horse bring us face to face with death, we realize how richly we would have enjoyed the life, the sexual pleasure and the unknown lands that we are about to be deprived of. And once the danger is past, what we fall back on is the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 410-429*

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

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from  "Saint-Loup could barely have caught the train when..." to "...the long-lost sweetness of having her by my side."

_____

Bloch stops by to tell him that he has dined with M. Bontemps and, having seen Albertine and the narrator quarreling, has told Bontemps "that he ought to implore her to address this issue." The narrator is furious, but Bloch seems only amused at his anger. Then Françoise informs the narrator that a policeman is there: The parents of the little girl he took home with him have filed a complaint "for seducing a minor." The narrator reacts to this as yet another of "Wagnerian motifs" in his life. After a confrontation with the furious parents and a grilling by the police, he is let off for lack of evidence. But Françoise informs him that the concierge, when asked if the narrator was "in the habit of inviting young girls home," had told the inspector about Albertine, and that the house was now under surveillance. The experience gives him a guilty conscience:

I thought that "the seduction of minors" could also refer to Albertine. Thus my life seemed walled in on all sides. And at the thought that I had not lived a chaste life with her, I found in the punishment inflicted on my for having cradled an unknown little girl in my arms the balance which always occurs in human punishment, suggesting that there is hardly ever either a just condemnation or a judicial error, but a kind of harmony between the false notion of an innocent act entertained by the judge and the culpable acts which he has ignored.

The spring weather soothes him into "a few moments of pleasant calm, imagining Venice and meeting beautiful, unknown women," but this gives way to panic. He recognizes that this mood "would later become a permanent state for me, a life where would no longer suffer because of Albertine, where I would no longer love her." And this in itself, the prospect of forgetting, is enough to torment him. 

After four days have elapsed, Saint-Loup telegraphs that Albertine and her aunt "have gone away for three days." In the meantime, he is approached by the Duc de Guermantes about the prospect of marrying one of his nieces, "reputedly the prettiest young lady in Paris," who has set her sights on him. Her parents were "resigned in the interests of their daughter's happiness to such a misalliance and with such an unequal party." But the narrator finds the idea too painful to contemplate.

Another telegram from Saint-Loup informs him that "despite his precautions," Albertine was present when he met with Mme. Bontemps. The narrator is stung by this blow to "the last shred of pride surviving from my love for Gilberte." He telegraphs Saint-Loup to return "to avoid at least the appearance of aggravating through added persistence the intervention which I had so wanted to keep secret." And then Albertine telegraphs to say that if he had written her directly, "I WOULD HAVE BEEN ONLY TOO PLEASED TO RETURN: DO NOT TRY ANY SUCH ABSURD APPROACH AGAIN." As a result, he writes her to say that he won't ask her to return, but mentions that "The yacht was already almost fitted out" and that he would keep it and the Rolls-Royce, even though he will not use them. For him it is a "bogus letter, which I wrote so as to seem detached from her." He thinks that the letter will "make Albertine return as soon as possible," but once he has sent it he begins to regret doing so: "I hoped that she would refuse to return."

He opens a newspaper and learns of the death of La Berma, which inspires him to thoughts of how his renunciation of Albertine resembles Phaedra's parting from Hippolytus.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Five: The Fugitive, pp. 387-410*

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

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, through "...saying to myself, 'I have returned her shot, on the volley.'"

_____

The narrator predictably goes through an emotional meltdown on hearing that Albertine has left, beginning with denial, in which "feeling as gentle with myself as my mother had been with my grandmother on her deathbed," he tells himself, "None of this is of any importance." He reads her farewell note and tries to persuade himself that "she does not believe a word of all this" and will be home by evening. "And at the same time I was calculating whether I would have time that morning to go out and buy the yacht and the Rolls-Royce that she desired, and, abandoning all hesitation, did not consider for a moment that I had thought it rather unwise to make her this gift."

He reflects, not for the first time, on the nature of habit:

I suddenly saw Habit in a completely new perspective. Until now I had considered it above all as a negative force suppressing the originality and even our awareness of our perceptions; now I saw it as a fearsome goddess, so attached to us, with her inscrutable face so grafted on to our hearts that if she detaches herself and turns away from us, this deity, whose presence we were barely able to discern, inflicts upon us the most terrible suffering, and then she is as cruel as death.

He berates himself for not taking notice of the warning signs, including "the sound of a suddenly opened window," but instead rationalizing away her discontent: "It is life which little by little, case by case, allows us to realize that what is most important for our hearts or our minds is taught us not by reason but by other powers." Even when he had imagined her leaving him, he could not have foreseen "the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, 'Miss Albertine has left.'"

all the worries that I had felt since I was a child ... had been solicited by this new source of anxiety and had rushed to reinforce it, amalgamating themselves with it into one homogeneous mass which suffocated me.

The experience is worse than his with his previous infatuations, with Mme. de Guermantes and Gilberte, because he "had never tasted sensual pleasure" with them, and his "love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit." But this experience also brings out his pride: "I did want her to return, but did not want to be seen to care."

He now remembers that he had been experiencing panic attacks that he had been trying to deny, and that although he had been able to talk himself out of the idea that she might leave him, "when I found her still there when I rang for her in the morning, I had breathed an enormous sigh of relief." Which made the news of her leaving harder to bear because it was "the one unthinkable event, a departure somehow sensed several days in advance, despite my logical reasons for being reassured." As intricate the narrator's self-analysis here may be, it is nonetheless one of the most acute and finely observed accounts of the emotions and rationalizations surrounding such an experience that can be found in literature.

On the street, he sees a little girl and takes her home with him, where he "rocked her for a while on my knees." But the experience only heightens the pain of Albertine's absence and he sends her home with five hundred francs. Having learned that Albertine has left for Touraine, where her aunt lives, he enlists Saint-Loup in his efforts, sending him to put pressure on Mme. Bontemps, even bribing her, to make Albertine return. Saint-Loup is surprised to learn that Albertine has been living there all this time, and when the narrator shows him her picture, "His face registered a surprise that bordered on stupefaction. 'Is this the girl that you love?' he said finally, in a voice whose astonishment was muted by the fear of offending me." He recalls that he was similarly unimpressed by Rachel:

It is ... likely perhaps that the person whose every move is anxiously anticipated by her lover, with all the awe that would be due to a deity, appears as an inconsequential person, only too pleased to do anything required, in the eyes of a man who does not love her, as did Saint-Loup's mistress for me.

The plan is for Saint-Loup to offer Mme. Bontemps "thirty thousand francs for her husband's electoral committee." Saint-Loup protests that if she's that dishonest, "three thousand francs would be enough," but the narrator is not willing to low-ball on anything so important to him. Saint-Loup gives in:

"And although I find it rather odd to set up such a blatant deal, I know well that even in our own circles there are duchesses, even the most strait-laced, who would do more embarrassing things for thirty thousand francs than tell their nieces not to stay in Touraine."

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 Ninety-Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 342-366

Part II, Chapter II, from "Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn..." to "...the songs of a Gothic jongleur." 

_____

The second chapter, like the first, begins with a summary, but since the chapter constitutes the remaining 250 pages of the book, it's a rather scanty summary. 

It begins with a bit of a surprise, in the narrator's statement, "I had just been reborn." Given his earlier description of his deep attachment to his grandmother, that seems almost callous coming immediately after the account of her death. His mother, he notes, is still in mourning, but she is in Combray with his father, and is not around to disapprove of his plans to visit Mme. Villeparisis's house to see a play that's being performed there. 

So he is left alone in Paris, remembering his stay in Doncières with Saint-Loup, and listening to the hiccuping sound of the new furnace boiler, which "was in no way connected to my memories of Doncières, but its prolonged encounter with them inside me that afternoon was to force it into such an affinity with them that, after I thought I had more or less forgotten it, whenever I heard the central heating it would bring them back to me." Another instance of "involuntary memory," or "Proustian moment." 

We learn that Saint-Loup and Rachel have broken up, and that Saint-Loup had been angry with him for a while because Rachel, to provoke Saint-Loup's jealousy, had claimed that the narrator tried to have sex with her. But now Saint-Loup has written to say that he had met Mlle. de Stermaria, with whom the narrator was smitten at Balbec, and "had asked for an assignation with the young woman on my behalf." He is now awaiting a response to the letter he has written to Mlle. de Stermaria (now "Mme de Stermaria, given that she had divorced her husband after three months of marriage").

But then Albertine pays him a surprise visit. She has matured so much that "she was hardly recognizable ... she had a real face at last; her body had developed." 

I am not quite sure whether it was the desire for Balbec or for her that took hold of me then; perhaps my desire for her was itself a lazy, cowardly, incomplete way of possessing Balbec, as if to possess a thing materially, to take up residence in a town, were equivalent to possessing it spiritually. 

As before, the narrator thinks of sexual attraction as a matter of possession. And while he claims that he was "not in the least in love with Albertine," he dreams "both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body" the way Eve is attached to Adam's body in the medieval sculptures at Balbec. 

In their conversation, we learn the intriguing fact that the narrator has fought a duel, but no further details. The narrator focuses instead on her manner of speech, which strikes him as more "grown-up" than it had in Balbec, and suspects that she has learned these expressions "from Mme Bontemps, along with a hatred of Jews and a respect for the color black because it is always suitable and never out of place." 

And reiterating that he was no longer in love with her, so that he "no longer ran the risk, as I might have done in Balbec, of wrecking her affection for me, since it no longer existed," he begins to seduce her -- at least into letting him kiss her cheek. He is in bed already, so he teases her into lying down next to him by saying "I'm not in the least ticklish. You could tickle me for a whole hour and I wouldn't feel a thing." She responds to this come-on by getting in bed with him, only to be interrupted by the entrance of Françoise with a lamp: "Albertine had just time to regain her chair." 

Their game resumes when Françoise leaves (although the narrator suspects her of listening outside the door). He reflects that 

women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

His teasing pursuit of Albertine results in a kind of consummation -- on his part at least: "her caresses had satisfied me in a way that she could not have failed to notice, and which I had even feared might provoke her to the slight gesture of revulsion and offended modesty Gilberte had made in similar circumstances behind the laurel bushes in the Champs-Élysées." Albertine does seem "embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going after what had just happened." As for the narrator, he is more concerned about getting her to leave so he can get to the play at Mme. Villeparisis's on time. And he maintains a kind of cold distance from her: 

Albertine -- and this was perhaps, with another, which will be clear in due course, one of the reasons that had made me unconsciously desire her -- was one of the incarnations of the charming little French country girl typified in stone in Saint-André-des-Champs. I recognized in her, as I did in Françoise, who was soon nevertheless to become her deadly enemy, a courtesy toward host and stranger, a sense of propriety, a respectful bedside manner.

Even without the heavy-handed foreshadowing, it's clear this is not going to work out well.                        

Day Sixty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 507-533

From "About a month after ..." to end. 

____

Albertine, preparing to visit her aunt, Mme. Bontemps, for a few days, arranges to spend the night at the hotel because it's close to the train station. And she tells the narrator he "can come up and sit by my bedside while I'm having my dinner." As you can imagine, he's thrilled: "Her words carried me back further than the time when I had been in love with Gilberte, to the days when love had seemed to be a thing that was not only external to myself, but achievable." So he goes to the room in an exhilarated state, finding her in bed and wearing her nightgown. He's "intoxicated" by "her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks," and the moonlight, the sea, and "the swelling breasts of the closest of the Mainville cliffs":

I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or, rather, it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me.

Bad move. 


Recovering from her startled and angry rejection, which ends with her pulling the bell to call for a servant, he gives her up. When she returns from her visit to her aunt and forgives him, warning him not to try anything like that again, he turns his attentions to Andrée. 


He reflects on Albertine's popularity and the advantages that her beauty has given her, which overcome her status as the dowryless ward of the stingy M. Bontemps. She tells no one else about "our bedside scene, which a plainer girl might have wanted to share with the world." And he "even began to wonder whether her violent reaction might not have been prompted by some other reason, such as squeamishness (if she had suddenly noticed a bad smell about her person, and thought it might offend me), or timidity (if she believed, in her ignorance of the realities of lovemaking, that my state of nervous debility might somehow be contagious, contractable from a kiss)." 


For her part, she wonders, "What sort of girls must you be familiar with to be surprised at what I did?" (He has already reflected that her behavior was different from what he expected after "Bloch first informed me that women were there for the having.") And she concludes with "I'm sure you're just teasing me! Andrée's the one you really like -- admit it! And I'm sure you're right -- she's much nicer than me, and she's beautiful! Oh, you men!" 


But he has already realized that he doesn't love Andrée: "she was too intellectual, too high-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself." She was "never happier than when translating into French a novel by George Eliot." His obsession with Albertine only increases: 

It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman, these characters coming over me not just in response to the random recurrence of memories, but also under the variable influence of some intervening belief which afected this or that memory by making me see it differently. 

It's clear that instead of him possessing her, she has possessed him. 


And so the summer ends: "the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad, and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week." He and his grandmother and Françoise linger at the hotel, where only a few guests remain, including some wealthy and aristocratic young men, one of whom is the Marquis de Vaudémont. They invite him to join them at a restaurant, but he declines. (But since the name has been introduced, we can bet we'll encounter the marquis again.) The hotel grows emptier and colder, but it has become to feel like home for him, and he is "all the more determined to come back one day."


Finally he and his grandmother and Françoise leave, and we set out on The Guermantes Way.

Day Sixty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 496-507

From "The various waves of feeling sent through me ..." to "... and were replaced by others."

_____

The narrator decides to make his move on Albertine, but as usual he keeps overthinking things, devising oblique strategies to win her over. 


He joins the gang, plus some extras recruited for the game, to play ring-on-a-string. (A ring is threaded onto a long piece of string, which is then tied together to form a circle. The player who is "it" stands in the middle of the circle while the other players pass the ring along the string. "It" tries to find the ring, and if he or she succeeds, the one who was holding the ring becomes "it.") The narrator is ticked off because another boy is next to Albertine, which deprives him of the opportunity to touch her hand. 

A squeeze from the hand of Albertine had a sensual softness which seemed at one with the slightly mauve pink of her skin: it made you feel as though you were penetrating her, entering the privacy of her senses, an impression one had too from her resounding laugh, which was as suggestive of indecency as any throaty murmur of invitation, or as certain cries. 

He lets himself get caught with the ring and, when he takes his position in the center, succeeds in finding the ring as it passes into the hand of the boy next to Albertine, so he can take the boy's place. But he's so preoccupied with touching her hand, and so convinced that she is returning his ardor, that he's shocked when she whispers, "Take the thing, would you! I've been trying to pass it to you for about half an hour!" 


Embarrassed, he leaves the game in the company of Andrée to walk to the cliffs at Les Creuniers, which Elstir had painted. Andrée is clearly flirting with the narrator, but he doesn't notice, trying to say nice things about Albertine that Andrée would repeat to her: "Andrée said she was also very fond of Albertine and thought she was a dear; but the complimentary things I said about her friend did not seem to please her very much." 

Along the way he sees a hawthorn bush, which is associated with his first sighting of Gilberte -- "just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers." He falls into an imaginary conversation with the bush about its vanished blossoms, and when he returns to Andrée resumes his praises of Albertine, about which he naively reports,  "Despite this, I was never to learn whether Albertine heard a word of what  I said about her." He also maintains his ignorance of Andrée's jealousy of his infatuation with Albertine when he recalls, "If it was suggested that Albertine's marriage prospects might not be as bad as was supposed, Andrée scotched the notion and repeated in a furious tone, 'Of course the girl's unmarriageable! I don't ned to be told -- I think it's terrible!'" 


And so he wanders into another set of self-made barriers that prevent him from achieving his ostensible goal with Albertine, which he might have accomplished with a more direct approach.

I knew now that I loved Albertine, but I was in no hurry, alas, to tell her: the fact was that, since the time when I had played at the Champs-Élysées, my notion of love had undergone a change, while those to whom my love was addressed, though they were consecutive, remained unchanged. For one thing, the confession of love, the declaration of my tenderness to her whom I loved, no longer seemed to be one of love's classic and indispensable scenes; and for another, love itself, instead of appearing to be a reality eternal to me, now seemed a subjective pleasure. I sensed that the less Albertine knew about this pleasure of mine, the more she would be likely to let me go on enjoying it. 

The course of true love never did run smooth, but this is ridiculous. 


Meanwhile, he goes on flirting with Rosemonde and poor Andrée. When he hears that Albertine's aunt, Mme. Bontemps, is arriving for a visit, he desperately wants an introduction to her. So of course he pretends he doesn't, repeatedly scorning Mme. Bontemps to Andrée, while in the meantime arranging an introduction through Elstir. When he tells Andrée that he is invited to meet Albertine's aunt, though he really doesn't want to, she reacts as one might expect her to: "'I knew it all along!' Andrée exclaimed bitterly, gazing away at some invisible point, her eyes enlarged and flawed by displeasure."

Day Forty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 198-217

From "What helped me to bear the thought..." to "...the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria."

_____

The narrator finally makes the break with Gilberte -- after selling his Aunt Léonie's Chinese vase for ten thousand francs so he can send Gilberte flowers every day -- when he sees her walking down the street "with a young man in the twilight." (Actually, he says he "thought" he saw her -- few things happen definitively to our narrator.) He is "now determined never to see her again," and he spends the money so he can "lie weeping in the arms of other women, whom I did not love."

And then there's a bit of foreshadowing:

On one occasion there was an unpleasant scene at home because I declined to accompany my father to an official function, at which M. and Mme Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, who was then little more than a child. The different periods of our life overlap. Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others).

He also tells us that "all the diverse modes of sorrow will be described in connection with a later love affair." The reader is left to decide whether to take that as a threat or a promise.

But for now he is beginning to experience "the peace of mind of lasting sadness." His imagination dwells on things that might have been, "sweet and constantly regenerated images" that "came to occupy more space in my mind than the glimpse of her with the young man, which weakened for lack of nourishment." He stops visiting Mme. Swann's because "the memory of Gilberte was inseparable from such visits," though he and Gilberte continue to write letters to each other. Hers "were fully as considerate as any I wrote to people who meant nothing to me."

As they slowly grow apart, he begins to regret having decided against a diplomatic career -- a choice he made "so as not to absent myself from a girl whom I would not now be seeing again, whom I had already more or less forgotten." He resumes his visits to Mme. Swann's, which "now caused me no grief at all," but to avoid seeing Gilberte, he more often meets Odette (and her entourage that includes Swann and other men) on her Sunday morning walk. His fascination with Odette is such that he continues to notice the minutest hidden details of her dress, "like the fine Gothic stonework hidden eighty feet up a cathedral, on the corner face of a balustrade, just as perfectly executed as the bas-relief statues in the main doorway, but which no one had ever set eyes on until an artist on a chance visit to the city asked to be allowed to climb up there."

He pinpoints the Swanns' niche in society: "though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic idea and purposes -- in was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile." And he witnesses the Prince de Sagan's attention to Odette as "homage to Woman, even though she was embodied in a woman whom his mother or sister would never stoop to frequent."

And so, at the end of the section "At Mme Swann's," the narrator reports that "the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria."

Day Forty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 171-183

From "'Really,' Mme Bontemps would say..." to "...I sensed, however, that it was going to be."

_____

The narrator acts as eavesdropper in most of this section, listening in on the chat and cattiness of Mme. Swann's "at home" while still playing his little games of strategy to win back Gilberte. When Odette says that Gilberte has written to invite him to come see her tomorrow, he replies, "Gilberte and I can't see each other anymore."

"You know she's very fond of you," Mme Swann said. "Are you sure tomorrow's not possible?" A sudden surge of joy went through me, and I thought: "Well, why not? I mean, it's her mother who's asking me!" But my dejection returned at once. I was afraid Gilberte might deduce from my presence that my recent indifference toward her had been only for show, and I decided that the separation should continue.

Meanwhile, he overhears Mme. Bontemps talking about her niece Albertine, whom she describes as "as artful as a bunch of monkeys." And he witnesses the sparring between the rival leaders of salons, Odette and Mme. Verdurin. "On marrying Odette, Swann had asked her to resign from 'the little set'" and "had permitted Odette to exchange only two visits a year with Mme Verdurin," who has become known as "the Patronne." Odette tells her own set that "M. Swann is not overfond of old Mother Verdurin.... And I'm a very dutiful wife, you know."

And so when Mme. Verdurin shows up for Odette's "at home," there's some jockeying for position, especially where Mme. Cottard, who belongs to both groups, is concerned. Mme. Verdurin also has her eye on Odette's friend Mme. Bontemps. So Mme. Verdurin goes out of her way to "accidentally" refer to Odette as "Mme de Crécy," following it up with "oh, goodness me, what have I said? I'll never get into the habit of saying 'Mme Swann'!" This, it seems, is an in-joke among the "little set." Mme. Verdurin even goes so far as to criticize Odette's neighborhood ("such a godforsaken part of town"), to worry that the damp is bad for Swann's eczema, and to ask if the house had rats. "'You're not very good at arranging chrysanthemums, are you?' she added on the way out, as Mme Swann was moving toward the door with her."

When she's gone, Mme. Bontemps suggests that before attending Mme. Verdurin's salon, she and Odette and Mme. Cottard have dinner together. "Then, after dinner, all three of us could go and Verdurinate together, I mean Verdurinize." Mme. Cottard, still trying to play both sides, passes along the news that "the house that Mme Verdurin has just bought is going to have the electric light in it" and reports that "The sister-in-law of a friend of mine has actually got a telephone installed in her house!"

Meanwhile, the narrator is brooding on the game he is playing with Gilberte. "I had achieved the aim of my visit: Gilberte would know I had been to her house during her absence" and "would be told I had spoken about her affectionately, as I could not help doing; and she would know I did not suffer from the inability to live without her, which I felt was the source of her recent discontents with me."

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.'" 

_____

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 Thirty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 93-107

From "In any case, Swann was blind..." to "...foreseen by someone much less gifted."

_____

Swann's marriage to Odette is built on denial -- on both sides. He "was blind not only to the gaps in Odette's education, but also to her poverty of mind." For her part, her "inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say." It's a marriage of "subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar."

Except that Swann has indulged his own vulgar streak, setting up "experiments in the sociology of entertainment" in which he brings together "people from very different backgrounds." When he announces that he's going to have the Cottards come to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme, he looked "like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves." But by doing so he annoys Mme. Bontemps, who has recently been introduced to the Duchesse and is upset that someone else of her acquaintance also has that privilege.

(Here there seems to be a typographical error: "Would she even have the heart to tell her husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure that she had assured him was unique to themselves?" The not [my italics] in that sentence contracts its apparent meaning -- that the Cottards were going to partake of the same pleasure. I think the intended word must be now. Unfortunately, I don't have another text handy to cross-check.)

We also learn that Swann is no longer jealous of Odette, that he was "now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere." He realizes that when he was jealous in the past, he fell into another kind of denial, determined to believe "that Odette's daily doings were quite innocent." Now he realizes that "she had ... been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe." And now he is carrying on an affair of his own, with

a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette.... And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.

Proust also slips one of his foreshadowings in here, telling us that "the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counterdemonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death."

At the Swanns' the narrator gets -- though he's unaware of it at this time -- another link to the couple's past, when he hears Odette play the theme from the Vinteuil sonata that used to be their theme song. The music allows the narrator to reflect on the interlocked nature of time, memory, and music:

Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. ... What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory.... This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.... Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible toward the unknown depths of the distant future.

This is the shrewd comment of the mature narrator, of course, and not of the young narrator who is willing to capitulate to received opinion rather than to trust his own disappointment at the performance of La Berma. Of course, he also adds, "It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or airplanes had a future, and it is possible to be an acute psychologist yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted."

Is the narrator, who has already demonstrated himself to be "an acute psychologist," talking about himself here?