Day One Hundred Twenty-Nine: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 449-460

Part II, Chapter III, from "Meanwhile, and as if he were dealing with..." to "...at the top of his voice, raising his hands, 'Alleluia!'" 

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Charlus's relationship with Morel takes an even odder turn one evening when, as they are returning from an evening at the Verdurins', Morel takes his leave from the Baron, the narrator, and Albertine. Charlus, who has expected to spend the rest of the evening with Morel, is so distraught that the narrator proposes to stay with the Baron, sending Albertine away. He goes with Charlus to a café, where the Baron demands paper and ink and writes an eight-page letter to Morel which he gives to the narrator to deliver and to say "that you thought you caught something about sending seconds -- I am fighting tomorrow indeed."

Morel is in high spirits when the narrator arrives with the letter, which he initially refuses to read: "No, a hundred times over; you don't know that old crook's lies, his infernal stratagems. It's a device to get me to go and see him. Well, I'm not going; I want a peaceful evening." When the narrator says he thought it was something about a duel, Morel replies, "I don't give a damn, that disgusting old man can happily go and get himself massacred if he wants." But he changes his mind and decides to read the letter, whereupon he rushes to see Charlus.

Being in a mood that evening not to be able to do without Morel, he had invented that it had been reported to him that two of the regimental officers had slandered him in connection with the violinist, and that he was going to send his seconds to them. Morel had glimpsed the scandal, his life in the regiment made impossible, and had come running.

Charlus is, of course, "delirious with joy" at Morel's arrival. He has even persuaded himself that he wanted to fight and that he "felt regret at giving up this duel, originally contrived only to get Morel to come." And there is a hilarious, almost Falstaffian moment in which Charlus starts to mime sword-fighting maneuvers, "leading us to move our beer glasses closer for safety, and to fear that the first clash of blades might wound the adversaries, the doctor, and the seconds." He has already sent for Cottard to act as a second and tries to persuade the narrator to summon Elstir to paint the scene.

But if M. de Charlus was enchanted by the prospect of a fight that he had at first thought purely fictitious, Morel was reflecting in terror on the rumors that, thanks to the stir that the duel would make, might be hawked all the way from the regimental band to the temple on the rue Bergère. 

Cottard arrives in a state of high excitement that swiftly turns to disappointment and then discomfort when Charlus displays affection toward him for his support, holding Cottard's hand and stroking it. He feels a moment of homophobic panic, imagining "that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to a rape, for the accomplishment of which, the duel having served merely as a pretext, he had been drawn into an ambush and led by the Baron into this lonely hall, where he was about to be taken by force." Fortunately, Mme. Cottard is also there, and the scene -- one of the funniest in the novel -- ends with Charlus triumphant and Morel re-ensnared.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 419-434

Part II, Chapter III, from "I was naturally most surprised to learn..." to "...and has never acknowledged me since."

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Morel's success in getting the coachman fired and the chauffeur hired to replace him coincides with a change in his attitude toward the narrator, who notes that Morel had not only "ceased to keep his distance from me" but would even "literally bound toward me in an effusion of delight." The narrator assumes that Charlus had a hand in this change, but he adds a bit of foreshadowing: 

How at the time could I have guessed what I was told afterward (and of which I have never felt certain, Andrée's assertions concerning anything connected with Albertine, later on especially, having always struck me as needing to be taken with caution, for, as we saw earlier, she was not genuinely fond of my loved one but was jealous of her), what in any event, if it were true, had been remarkably well hidden from me by the two of them: that Albertine knew Morel well?

The narrator then attempts an analysis of Morel's character, which "was full of contradictions." Morel would do anything for money, except that he was "truly a past master" of the violin, having "put ahead of money his diploma as first-prize-winner at the Conservatoire." Morel trusts no one, and had recognized in the chauffeur "one of his own kind, ... a man mistrustful in the proper meaning of the word, who remains stubbornly silent when with decent people but at once sees eye to eye with a debauchee" -- again, a foreshadowing of what is to happen after the narrator returns to Paris. "In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are."

Meanwhile, Charlus has become "the most faithful" of Mme. Verdurin's set, even though he has been at least partially "outed" among them, and Cottard frets to Ski "whether I can allow him to travel with us after what you've told me." Mme. Cottard, overhearing this conversation, decides that Charlus must be Jewish, which leads to some comic misunderstanding between her and Charlus. Moreover, the others in the group, not knowing of Charlus's social status, conclude that they're doing him a favor by accepting him into their set, and they pride themselves in their tolerance: 

In fact, ... if M. de Charlus did not come, they felt disappointment almost at traveling only among people who were like everyone else and not to have next to them this bedizened, potbellied, and impenetrable personage, reminiscent of a box, of some suspect and exotic provenance, that gives off a curious smell of fruit, the mere thought of sampling which would turn the stomach.

Charlus, the narrator tells us, still believes that only a very few people know that he's gay, "and that none of them were on the Normandy coast." He doesn't know that "on a day when he and Morel were late and had not come by the train," Mme. Verdurin had announced to the group, "We won't wait for the young ladies any longer!" And he evidently doesn't get her true meaning when, on the nights when he and Morel stay over at La Raspelière, she gives them adjoining rooms and announces, "If you feel like making music, don't hesitate; the walls are like that of a fortress, you've no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like the dead."


Meanwhile, the narrator is still struggling with his feelings for Albertine, still persuading himself that he "no longer felt jealousy or scarcely any love for her, and gave no thought to what she might be doing on the days when I did not see her." But if, on the train to the Verdurins, she goes into another compartment with the other women in the group, he can't sit still. He has to get up and check "too see whether something abnormal might not be going on." 

He also manages to alienate the Princesse Sherbatoff when, one day on the train, he sees Mme. de Villeparisis and talks to her in the Princesse's presence. "I had absolutely no idea, however, that Mme de Villeparisis knew very well who my companion was but had no wish to meet her.... When I said goodbye to the Princesse, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not even offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the carriages arrive and the little group disperses.                                                                 

Day One Hundred Nineteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 273-288

Part II, Chapter II, from "Cottard was far more inclined to say, 'I'll see..." to "...there got the doctor, Saniette, and Ski."

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Cottard is so devoted to the Verdurins and their "Wednesdays" that nothing, not even an emergency demanding his professional attention, can deter him: 

For Cottard, kindly man though he was, would renounce the comforts of a Wednesday not for a workman who had had a stroke but for the headcold of a minister. Even in this last instance he would say to his wife: "Make my sincere apologies to Mme Verdurin. Warn her I'll be late getting there. His Excellency might well have picked another day to catch cold." One Wednesday, their elderly cook having cut the vein in her arm, Cottard, already in a dinner jacket in order to go to the Verdurins', had given a shrug when his wife timidly asked him whether he could not dress the wound. "But I can't, Léontine," he had exclaimed with a groan, "you can see I've got my white waistcoat on."

Cottard is convinced that the Verdurins, because Mme. Verdurin inherited "thirty-five million," are the cream of society, and that in comparison to the Duchesse de Guermantes, "Mme Verdurin is a great lady, the Duchesse de Guermantes is probably on her uppers." 

At a station, a beautiful girl gets on the train and attracts the narrator's eye. "I have never again met, nor identified, the beautiful girl with the cigarette.... But I have never forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing." And the experience induces a meditation on time and memory, for he realizes that the beautiful girl would, ten years later, have "faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time." This experience with an anonymous girl precedes the mention of the fact that the Verdurins are upset because their favorite violinist has disappeared. We are told here only that he has been "doing his military service near Doncières" and that he had not met them at the station the last time they expected him. The attentive reader will remember another musical soldier recently spotted at a train station. 

It will be especially unfortunate if the violinist doesn't show up tonight, Brichot observes, because Mme. Verdurin has invited the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer, from whom they are leasing La Raspelière. Cottard is delighted, and says to the narrator, "What did I tell you? The Princesse Sherbatoff, the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer." The Verdurins have had some concern about whether the anti-Dreyfusism of the Cambremers will put them at odds with the overwhelmingly Dreyfusard view of their little set, but they resolve to seat them next to Brichot, "the only one of the faithful who had taken the side of the General Staff, which had lowered him greatly in Mme Verdurin's esteem."

Ski launches into praise of Mme. de Cambremer's intelligence and prettiness. "Since I thought the complete opposite of what Ski had expressed..., I contented myself with saying that she was the sister of a very distinguished engineer, M. Legrandin," the narrator comments, and he admits to the others that he has already met her. He adds that he is looking forward to seeing her so that he can remind her he wants to borrow a book they had talked about: the former curé of Combray's volume on the etymology of local place-names. Brichot immediately launches into an extended monologue about the errors in the curé's book that takes up almost four pages in the novel. 

We are rescued from Brichot's philology by his realization that they have passed the stop where they were to meet the Princesse Sherbatoff. The group launches a search for the Princesse and finds her in an empty carriage reading the Revue des deux mondes: It is "the lady who, in this same train, two days earlier, I had thought might be the madam of a brothel." (Again, never ignore even the anonymous walk-on characters in Proust.) The Princesse has some good news for the group: The missing violinist has been found. "He had kept to his bed the previous day on account of a migraine, but would be coming this evening and bringing an old friend of his father's whom he had met again in Doncières." Now who could that be? 

The affair of the violinist reminds Brichot of something: "our poor friend Dechambre, formerly Mme Verdurin's favorite pianist, has just died." And Brichot and Cottard argue about whether Dechambre had played the Vinteuil sonata at Mme. Verdurin's when Swann was there. (He did.)

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."

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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-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."

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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?