Day One Hundred Sixty-Five: The Fugitive, pp. 588-609*

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

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, through "...But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality."

_____

The narrator and his mother travel to Venice, where, from the top of St. Mark's, the golden angel "promised me joy half an hour later on the Piazzetta, a promise more reliable than his previous mission to bring tiding of Great Joy to men of good will." He is there because, he assures us, "I had nearly forgotten Albertine." Yet of course the fact that he feels compelled to mention it reveals what he tells us in the same sentence: "I did still remember her a little." He remembers her especially when he cruises the "humble campi and deserted side canals" off the beaten tourist paths where he "found it easier to meet women of the people" and wondered "if anyone could have told me exactly how far, in this passionate perusal of Venetian women, what was due to them, and what to Albertine, or my former desire to travel to Venice." As he stopped "to talk to working girls, as Albertine might have done before me, ... I wished that she were with me." And he realizes that "they could not be the same girls" Albertine had met when she was there, because they would be older -- as he himself is, "for what I now loved, despite the specific qualities of the person, and what escaped me, was youth itself."

With his mother, he explores the more familiar sights of Venice, "where the slightest social call takes on at once both the form and the charm of a visit to a museum and that of a naval maneoevre." They meet Mme. Sazerat there, and one day, in a hotel restaurant he sees an old woman with "a sort of red, leprous eczema covering her face" and recognizes "beneath her bonnet, in her black tunic, created by [Worth], but looking to the uninitiated as if it belonged to an old concierge, the Marquise de Villeparisis," whose death he and Charlus had talked about in The Prisoner. She is joined by "her former lover, M. de Norpois," also showing signs of age, though never previously reported dead. Norpois recognizes a Prince Foggi, with whom he talks at length about diplomatic matters.

Meanwhile, the narrator mentions Mme. de Villeparisis to Mme. Sazerat, who nearly faints because Mme. de Villeparisis, then the Duchesse d'Havré and "the most beautiful woman of the day," had brought ruin to Mme. Sazerat's father in a love affair in which "she acted like a common whore." Mme. Sazerat asks to be taken to see her, but when the narrator points her out is confused to see "only an old gentleman sitting beside a horrid old lady with a red face and a hunchback."

Back at the hotel, the narrator receives a letter from his broker which "opened for an instant the gates of the prison where Albertine lay living within me." He had invested heavily "in order to have more money to spend on her," and after her death ordered the broker to sell everything, leaving him "the owner of barely one-fifth of the wealth that I had inherited from my grandmother." And then he receives a telegram:

DEAR FRIEND YOU BELIEVE ME DEAD, MY APOLOGIES, NEVER MORE ALIVE, WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU TO DISCUSS MARRIAGE, WHEN DO YOU RETURN? AFFECTIONATELY, ALBERTINE

His reaction to this extraordinary message is only to confirm that he is no longer in love with Albertine. He is no longer able even to visualize her: "the memory that recurred was that of a girl already stout and mannish, in whose faded features there sprouted like a see the profile of Mme Bontemps." After telling the hotel porter that it had been delivered by mistake, he puts it in his pocket and tries to "act as if I had never received it."

I had definitively stopped loving Albertine. In such fashion this love, after diverging so much from what I had foreseen, in the light of my love for Gilberte; after causing me to make such a long and painful detour, finally in its turn, after claiming exemption, surrendered, as had my love for Gilberte, to the universal rule of oblivion.

Day Ninety: The Guermantes Way, pp. 290-306

From "I, for my part, returned home..." to "...that she had had a slight stroke." 

_____

The Dreyfus affair is inescapable: When he gets home the narrator finds his family's butler and the Guermantes's butler in a heated argument about the case, and in just as complicated a manner as the conversation between Bloch and de Norpois or the one between Bloch's father and Mme. Sazerat. Their butler, a Dreyfusard, is arguing that Dreyfus was guilty, while the Guermantes butler, an anti-Dreyfusard, is arguing for his innocence.

They behaved in this manner not to hide their convictions, but out of shrewd, hardheaded competition. Our butler, who was not sure there would be a retrial, wanted to compensate in advance for not winning the argument by denying the Guermantes' butler the satisfaction of seeing a just cause crushed. The Guermantes' butler thought that if a retrial was refused ours would be more incensed by the continued detention of an innocent man on Devil's Island.

But the rest of the section is concentrated on the grandmother's illness, about which the narrator makes this aphoristic comment:

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us, and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

The account of her illness gives us some more glimpses into the medical practices at the turn of the century, including the use of the still fairly novel medical thermometer and the fact that aspirin had "not yet come into use at the time" as a febrifuge. Cottard prescribes his milk diet, which doesn't work, though the narrator blames it on his grandmother's putting too much salt in it. The narrator remembers Bergotte's recommendation of a doctor who would not "bore" him, and calls in Dr. du Boulbon, a "specialist in nervous diseases" who studied with Charcot, the teacher of Freud. 

Du Boulbon does in fact treat the grandmother's illness as at least partly psychosomatic, and recommends that she get out of bed and take walks in the Champs-Élysées, despite her fatigue. He also tries to reassure her that there should be no stigma to being called neurotic: "Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They and they alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art." And noting a book by Bergotte on her table, he says, "Cured of your nervous complaint, you would no longer have any taste for it. Now, what right have I to supplant the pleasure it gives you with a nervous stability that would be quite incapable of giving you such pleasure. The pleasure itself is a powerful remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps."


And so the narrator takes his grandmother out for a walk on the Champs-Élysées, where they go to "the little old-fashioned pavilion with the green metal trellis-work" that had figured earlier in one of his more memorable encounters with Gilberte. But there his grandmother becomes more ill, and he recognizes that she has suffered a stroke.        

Day Eighty-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 275-290

From "We returned to the drawing room...." to "... off they set at a brisk trot." 

_____

The selection begins with one of Proust's occasional slips that suggest a lack of serious editing: One not-very-long sentence begins "Robert was unaware of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, ..." And the next sentence is: "He was unaware of almost all these infidelities." The repetition may possibly be intentional, a reinforcement of the point, but it's hardly necessary. I think it more likely just a moment of inattentiveness as he launches into a discussion of Saint-Loup's relationship with Rachel, one that more and more seems to resemble Swann's with Odette. 

Mme. de Marsantes bids the narrator "an anxious goodbye" -- although he isn't really planning to leave -- and then switches back to the more formal manner of "a grande dame who knew exactly how to conduct herself." But when Mme. de Villeparisis overhears him telling Saint-Loup's mother that he is in no hurry and is waiting for Charlus, she surprises him by being displeased at his being on "friendly terms" with the Baron, and urges him to go on without Charlus. So, "under the impression that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew," he takes his leave. 

As he's descending the staircase, he hears Charlus call out to him, "So this is what you call waiting for me, is it?" And so the two of them set out together on foot, Charlus saying that he wants to wait until he sees a cab to his liking. On the street, cab after cab passes without being hailed, some of them even stopping, but Charlus says he's waiting for one with the right kind of lamps. He talks to the narrator "with the same sporadic familiarity that had already struck me in Balbec, and which was in such contrast with the harshness of his tone." 

"I have often thought, monsieur, that there was in me, thanks not to my humble gifts but to circumstances that you may one day have occasion to learn, a wealth of experience, a kind of secret dossier of inestimable worth, which I have not felt it proper to use for my own purposes, but which would be of priceless benefit to a young man to whom I would hand over, in a matter of months, what it has taken me more than thirty years to acquire, and which I am perhaps alone in possessing."

The narrator has no idea what he's getting at, and is further puzzled when he breaks off this thread to ask him about Bloch and whether "my school friend was young, good-looking, and so forth." When the narrator says Bloch is French, Charlus says, "'I took him to be Jewish.' His assertion of such an incompatibility led me to believe that M. de Charlus was more anti-Dreyfusard than anyone I had met. And yet he went on to protest against the charge of treason leveled against Dreyfus." The narrator's confusion about Charlus's attitude continues when the Baron asserts that Dreyfus "would have committed a crime against his country if he had betrayed Judaea, but what has that got to do with France?" And nothing the narrator can say, such as observing that if there were a war against France, Jews would have to serve, too, can dislodge Charlus from his course of thought. Charlus even pursues a fantasy in which Bloch stages some "biblical entertainment" that involved Bloch as David and Bloch's father as Goliath, and an "excellent spectacle" in which Bloch attacks his mother: "to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving the old cow what she deserves." 

The narrator rightly characterizes these as "dreadful, almost deranged remarks," noting that as he makes them, "M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it hurt," and reflects "that the connections, scantily investigated to date, I felt, between goodness and evil in the same heart, various as they might be, would be an interesting area of study." Then, coincidentally, he sees Bloch's father on the street, and offers to introduce him to the Baron, who takes umbrage at the very idea, citing "the youth of the person making the introduction, and the unworthiness of the person introduced."

But as it happened, M. Bloch was paying no attention to us. He was busy greeting Mme Sazerat effusively, to her great delight. This startled me, for previously, in Combray, she was so anti-Semitic that she had been indignant with my parents for allowing young Bloch into the house. But Dreyfusism, like a strong gust of wind, had blown M. Bloch right up against her a few days before this. My friend's father had found Mme Sazerat charming and was particularly gratified by the lady's anti-Semitism, which he saw as a proof of the sincerity of her faith and the authenticity of her Dreyfusard views. 

Clearly, the Dreyfus affair made strange bedfellows. 

Again, we have to wonder how the narrator knows all of this, including the conversation that Bloch père is said to have had with Nissim Bernard about his encounter with Mme. Sazerat, which elicits this wonderful portrait of M. Bernard: 

Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on, for reasons to be revealed in due course, he now looked like a Pre-Raphaelite worm onto which hairs had been indecently grafted, like threads in the depths of an opal. 

Charlus continues with his baffling ramble, mentioning in the course of it the loss of his wife, "the loveliest, noblest, most perfect creature imaginable," and then bristling at the sight of M. d'Argencourt, who "tried to avoid us" but is thwarted by Charlus, who insists on talking to d'Argencourt about the narrator. "I noted that M. d'Argencourt, to whom I had barely been introduced at Mme. de Villeparisis's, and to whom M. de Charlus had now spoken at length about my family, was appreciably colder to me than he had been an hour ago, and subsequently, for a long time, he behaved with the same reserve whenever we met." Clearly, Charlus has an odd effect on people. 

As they walk on, the narrator introduces the topic of the Duchesse de Guermantes, but elicits from Charlus only the demand that he "give up society life. It pained me to see you at that ridiculous gathering." He asks this as part of a kind of Mephistophelian bargain, as a "sacrifice" in return for which he can bestow all manner of gifts on the narrator: "The 'Open Sesame' to the Guermantes mansion, and any others worthy of throwing open their doors to you, lies with me." 

Then the narrator asks about Mme. de Villeparisis and her family, and learns that she gained the name when she married a M. Thirion, who "thought that he could adopt some defunct aristocratic name with impunity," and chose Villeparisis because, "there have been no Villeparisis since 1702." 

The fact that Mme de Villeparisis as merely Mme Thirion completed her downfall in my estimation, which had begun when I saw the uneven gathering of people in her salon.... I continued to visit her occasionally, and from time to time she sent me tokens of remembrance. But in no way did it seem to me that she was part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and if I had needed any information about it, she was one of the last people I should have asked.

Charlus continues with some modified praise for Saint-Loup as a suitable friend for the narrator: "At least he's a proper man, not one of those effeminate creatures one comes across everywhere nowadays, who look just like rent boys capable of bringing their innocent victims to a sorry end at the drop of a hat.' (I did not know the meaning of this slang expression, 'rent boy.')" And with that, Charlus hires a cab driven by a drunken cabbie, gets into the cab beside him and drives the cab himself.  

Day Seventy-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 137-148

From "The weather had become milder...." to "...joined the banks of the Vivonne." 

_____

The narrator begins to go out for his daily walks again, inevitably crossing paths with Mme. de Guermantes, whose faint smile of greeting he sometimes perversely ignores. When Saint-Loup comes to Paris for a brief visit of a few hours, he surprises the narrator, "'Oriane's not at all nice,' he told me, without realizing he was going back on his previous words. 'She's not the Oriane she was, they've gone and changed her. It's not worth your bothering with her, I promise you.'" Aside from the fact that the narrator has previously tried to conceal from Saint-Loup his romantic interest in the Duchesse, this is a little odd because there's no mention of the promise to write to her about letting him see her paintings by Elstir. Instead, Saint-Loup offers to introduce him to his cousin who is married to the Duc de Poictiers, saying that she's younger and more intelligent than the Duchesse. There's some indication that Saint-Loup and Mme. de Guermantes may have had a falling-out over the Dreyfus case, because he indicates to the narrator that Mme. de Poictiers, though not a Dreyfusard, has shown signs of open-mindedness about the case.

Then we learn from the narrator's father that M. de Norpois is a friend of Mme. de Villeparisis and has suggested that the narrator "would be able to meet interesting people at her gatherings." Norpois also told him that Mme. de Villeparisis "keeps a Bureau of Wit," without elaborating on what that might mean. "As for myself," the narrator says, "lacking any very clear picture of this Bureau of Wit, it would not have come as any great surprise to find the old lady from Balbec installed behind a bureau, as in fact I eventually did." 

That the Dreyfus case has divided society is demonstrated to the narrator's father when Mme. Sazerat, a Dreyfusard, meets his greeting with "the sort of acknowledgment that is dictated by politeness toward someone who has done something disgraceful" and when she smiles at the narrator's mother "with vague melancholy, as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man." 

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup returns to Paris to see his mistress and invites the narrator to join him. On his way to Saint-Loup's for the trip to the mistress's home on the outskirts of the city, the narrator runs into Legrandin, whom he has not seen since the days when the family used to visit Combray regularly. Legrandin remarks with his usual candor on the narrator's fashionable dress, and says, "Your ability to stay for a single moment in the nauseating atmosphere of the salons -- it would suffocate me -- is its own condemnation, its own damnation of your future in the eyes of the Prophet.... Ah, those aristocrats! The Terror has a lot to answer for; it should have guillotined every one of them." He offers to send him his latest novel: "You will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin-de-siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest. What you need is Bergotte -- you've admitted it -- gamy fare for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries." 

Nevertheless, the narrator parts from Legrandin "without any particular ill-feeling for him."