Day One Hundred Eighty-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 292-322

From "Throughout this conversation Gilberte had talked to me ..." through "... when I'm really just a bundle of nerves.' "

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Gilberte and Andrée have become friends, which intrigues the narrator because Rachel, who is performing at the party, had been the mistress of both of their husbands, except that Andrée's husband (Octave) had left Rachel for her. And he speculates that Gilberte feels that Rachel had "been more deeply loved by Robert than she had ever been." Gilberte also reveals her scorn for the hostess, who is now her aunt, "for having been Mme de Saint-Loup since slightly earlier than Mme Verdurin entered the family, she considered herself always to have been a Guermantes and to have been dishonored by the misalliance her uncle had contracted by marrying Mme Verdurin." Gilberte is also rather dismissive of the Duchesse de Guermantes: "I saw you talking to my aunt Oriane, who has plenty of good qualities, but I don't think it would be unfair, do you, to say that she's hardly one of the intellectual elite."

The narrator is thinking of the party as a kind of farewell to the social life: "I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward." He recognizes that he is about to turn the lives of the people he has met into fiction, to "take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws." Which is, in a phrase, pretty much what In Search of Lost Time attempts to do. But he still has a longing for some kind of new life: "a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses." At the same time, he is prey to nostalgia, to a longing to find that his grandmother or Albertine would somehow turn up to be alive.

I forgot only one thing, which was that if they really were still living, Albertine would now have something like the appearance that Mme Cottard had presented at Balbec, and that my grandmother, being over ninety-five years old, would show me nothing of that beautiful, calm, smiling face with which I still imagined her now.

He notices the Duchesse de Guermantes "deep in conversation with a frightful old woman." Later, he will learn that the woman is Rachel, now a famous actress, one of several that the Duchesse now associates with, having given up the Faubourg Saint-Germain, "which, she said, bored her to death." He tells her of his encounter with Charlus, and when Morel enters, "the Duchesse greeted him with a politeness which I found a little disconcerting." But remembering the marriage into the Cambremer family of the "daughter" (earlier: niece) of Jupien, "the tradesman from our building, and that the additional factor which had enabled her to become a glittering success was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus," he reflects that "a name is always taken at its current valuation." The valuation of the Duchesse, for example, is now low: "The new generations concluded from [her friendship with actresses] that Mme de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some demi-rep who had never really been properly upper-crust." He also wonders if her friendship with Rachel reflects "the antipathy which the unpredictable Duchesse had recently developed towards Gilberte."

The mutability of relationships is further demonstrated by the fact that it was in the Duchesse's home that Rachel "had, long ago, received her most terrible humiliation. Rachel had gradually, not forgotten, but forgiven, but the singular prestige which the Duchesse had, in her eyes, thereby received could never be effaced."

"Meanwhile, at the other end of Paris," as the narrator puts it, the other party to which he was invited, the tea given by La Berma for her daughter and son-in-law is a disaster. Everyone has gone to the Princesse's. La Berma (previously reported as dead) is fatally ill, but "to pay for the luxury her daughter needed and which her son-in-law, idle and with poor health, was unable to provide, she had returned to acting." While on stage, she is vividly alive, but in fact is in great pain. She also resents the fact that Rachel has become a success, for she "still regarded Rachel as a tart who had been allowed to appear in dramas in which she, La Berma, was playing the leading role, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses she wore on stage." To make matters worse, "the son-in-law was furious that Rachel, whom he and his wife knew very well, had not invited them" to her performance at the Princesse's. A solitary guest shows up at La Berma's tea party.

But soon the blast of air which was sweeping everything towards the Guermantes, and which had swept me there myself, was too strong, and he rose and left, leaving Phèdre, or death, it was not very clear any longer which of the two it was, with her daughter and her son-in-law, to finish eating the funeral cakes.

As it turns out, Rachel's performance is unconventional, and "Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume" and "a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles." But the Princesse "was acting as a claque. She was whipping up enthusiasm and creating favorable impressions by constantly giving voice to exclamations of delight. Here alone her Verdurin nature could still be seen."

Now we learn that the narrator is as yet unaware of the identity of the actress, who, "without any gratification of my vanity, for she was old and ugly, ... was giving me the eye, though in a somewhat restrained manner." It turns out that she was trying to get him to recognize her, which he doesn't, until Bloch whispers to him, "Isn't it funny to see Rachel here!" The revelation "instantly shattered the enchantment which had given Saint-Loup's mistress the unknown form of this disgusting old woman." He is made "aware that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts" because "La Berma was, as they say, head and shoulders above Rachel, and time, by making Rachel a star at the same time as Elstir, had overrated a mediocrity and consecrated a genius."

He also becomes aware of what time has done to Mme. de Guermantes, whose wit has grown sour, just as Bergotte "kept his characteristic sentence rhythms, his interjections, his ellipses, his epithets, though all in order to say nothing." And he realizes that the Duchesse, once so exalted, so dazzlingly inaccessible, now treats him as one of her oldest friends, that she has

forgotten certain details which had seemed to me then to be essential, namely that I did not go to Guermantes, and was only a middle-class boy from Combray at the time when she came to Mlle Percepied's nuptial mass, and that for the whole year after her appearance at the Opéra-Comique, despite all Saint-Loup's entreaties she never invited me to her house. To me this seemed terribly important, because it was precisely at this point that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter. But to her it just seemed to be a part of the same ordinary life as always.

He reminds her of the time when he first went to the Princesse de Guermantes, uncertain whether he had really been invited, and of the red dress and red shoes she wore, and she grows melancholy about the passage of time. And though she has not forgotten that Rachel once gave that disastrous performance at her house, she remembers it quite differently: "it was I who discovered her, saw how good she was, sang her praises and made people take notice of her at a time when she had no reputation and everybody thought she was ridiculous."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Nine: Finding Time Again, pp. 249-271

From "And as with snow, too, ..." through "... It's just like a novel.'"

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The narrator's heightened consciousness of the effect of time also causes him to turn his attention to the younger people at the party: "now it was not only what had become of the young people of the past, but what would become of the young people of today, that was giving me such a strong sensation of time." A few guests, however, seem to have withstood the ravaging effects of time and "at the age of fifty they began a new kind of beauty." But women "who were too beautiful or too ugly" couldn't benefit from this kind of transformation: The former "crumble away like a statue," and the latter "did not really look as if they had aged," but haven't improved either. In a few, the process has either "accelerated or slowed down." One former beauty has been ravaged by her addiction to "cocaine and other drugs." But one man, who "must have been over fifty, and looked younger than he had when he was thirty ... had found an intelligent doctor and cut out alcohol and salt."

And then there's Odette: "'You think I'm my mother,' Gilberte had said to me. It was true." Expecting to see a great change in Odette, he doesn't recognize her at first. Having calculated how old she must be, "it seemed to me [she] could not possibly be the one I was looking at, precisely because she was so like her old self." And because Odette "had not changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She was like a sterilized rose.... The voice had stayed the same, needlessly warm, captivating.... And yet, just as her eyes seemed to be looking at me from a distant shore, her voice was sad, almost pleading, like that of the dead in the Odyssey. Odette was still capable of acting." Three years later, he will see her again at Gilberte's and find that her mind is going, though when a guest says, "She's a bit gaga, you know," Odette will visibly take offense. "[S]he who had betrayed Swann and everybody else was not being betrayed by the entire universe; and she had become so weak that she no longer even dared, now the roles were reversed, to defend herself against men. And soon she would not defend herself against death."

And thus the Princesse de Guermantes's drawing-room was illuminated, forgetful, and flowery, like a peaceful cemetery. There, time had not only brought about the ruin of the creatures of a former epoch, it had made possible, had indeed created, new associations. 

Bloch has "permanently adopted his pseudonym of Jacques du Rozier as his own name" and has become a famous and successful writer. He has shaved his moustache and wears a monocle, and "his Jewish nose had disappeared, in the way that a hunchback, if she presents herself well, can seem to stand almost straight." He comments to the narrator that the Princesse de Guermantes is hardly the "marvellous beauty" that he had once raved about, and the narrator has to explain that this isn't the same person: "The Princesse de Guermantes had died and it was the former Mme Verdurin whom the Prince, ruined by the defeat of Germany, had married." Bloch protests that he must be wrong, because he had looked up the Prince in the Almanac de Gotha, and found that he was "married to somebody terribly grand, ... Sidonie, Duchesse de Duras, née des Baux." But the narrator explains that this is still the former Mme. Verdurin, who, "shortly after the death of her husband, had married the penniless old Duc de Duras, who had made her a cousin of the Prince de Guermantes, and had died after two years of marriage." So Mme. Verdurin, who scorned the aristocracy, is now in the thick of it.

So "the outward changes in the faces that I had known were no more than the symbols of an interior change which had been going on from day to day." Case in point: Charles Morel, whose arrival is greeted with "a stir of deferential curiosity" because he's now "a man of some distinction" and commended for "his high moral standards." "I was perhaps the only person there who knew that he had been kept simultaneously both by Saint-Loup and by a friend of Saint-Loup's."

Society itself has loosened up: "The Faubourg Saint-Germain, like a senile dowager, made no response beyond a timid smile to the insolent servants who invaded her drawing-rooms, drank her orangeade and introduced her to their mistresses." The younger members of society assume "that Mme Swann and the Princesse de Guermantes and Bloch had always been in the most elevated social position."

Someone having asked a young man from one of the best families if there was not some story about Gilberte's mother, the young nobleman replied that it was true that in the first part of her life she had been married to an adventurer named Swann, but that she had subsequently married one of the most prominent men in society, the Comte de Forcheville.

Bloch, who had once "cut such a sorry figure" in his former attempts to get into society, "had not left off publishing those books of his, the absurd sophistry of which I was today doing my best to demolish so as not to be bogged down by it, works without originality but which provided young people, and a large number of fashionable women, with the impression of an unusually rarefied intellect, a sort of genius." But his final arrival in society has been eased by "the few names he had retained from his acquaintance with Saint-Loup enabled him to give his current prestige the illusion of infinite regress." Bloch introduces the narrator to a young woman who is also a friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes, "and who was one of the smartest women of the day." But even she is completely confused by the lineages of the various friends of the narrator, having been led to believe that the Forchevilles are socially superior to the Guermantes.  

Day One Hundred Seventy-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 85-108

From "The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely. ..." through "... And he began to roar with laughter as if we had been alone in a drawing-room."

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As the narrator and Charlus stroll along the boulevard, the latter holds forth on the war, though with occasional asides on other topics, such as his estrangement from Morel. "The boy is mad about women, and never thinks about anything else," Charlus says, which the narrator has reason to doubt, "having with my own eyes seen Morel agree to spend a night with the Prince de Guermantes for fifty francs." But he has also known men who were once willing to yield to such enticements give them up out of "religious scruples," fear of exposure "when certain scandals broke, or by a fear of non-existent diseases in which they had been made to believe.... Thus it was that the former lift-boy at Balbec would no longer have accepted, for love or money, propositions which now seemed to him as dangerous as approaches from the enemy." And Morel "had fallen in love with a woman with whom he was still living and who, being more strong-willed than he was, had been able to demand absolute fidelity from him."

Charlus goes on to talk about Norpois' enthusiastic support of the war -- "I think the death of my aunt Villeparisis must have given him a new lease of life" -- in his newspaper articles, and to talk about the old aristocracy of Europe in familiar terms; "As for the Tsar of the Bulgars, he is a complete nancy, a raving queer, but very intelligent, a remarkable man. He likes me very much." The narrator finds Charlus "obnoxious when he started on topics like these. He brought to them a self-satisfaction as annoying as that which we feel in the presence of an invalid who is always pointing out how good his health is." 

The narrator takes an opportunity to digress about "the relations between Mme Verdurin and Brichot." The latter's articles in the newspaper have "literally dazzled" society, to the annoyance of Mme. Verdurin, who,  "exasperated by the success that his articles were having in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now took care never to have Brichot to her house when he was likely to meet there some glittering woman whom he did not yet know and who would hasten to entice him away." The narrator himself doesn't care much for Brichot's articles: "The vulgarity of the man was constantly visible beneath the pedantry of the literary scholar." And Mme. Verdurin "never started an article by Brichot without the prior satisfaction of thinking that she was going to find ridiculous things in it." And when she does, she makes a practice of mocking them to her guests, and by extension to mock her society rivals, such as Mme. Molé, who profess to admire them. Mme. Molé, the narrator tells us, "was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in reality she thought the equal of Michelet."

Meanwhile, Charlus continues to talk about the war from his own peculiar point of view: "all those great footmen, six feet tall, who used to adorn the monumental staircases of our loveliest female friends, have all been killed." And he claims to be less distressed by the damage done to the cathedral at Rheims than to "the annihilation of so many of the groups of buildings which once made the smallest village in France both charming and edifying." The narrator thinks of Combray, and hopes Charlus won't talk about it, but he does, noting the destruction of Saint-Hilaire: "The church was destroyed by the French and the English because it was being used as an observation-post by the Germans. The whole of that mixture of living history and art that was France is being destroyed, and the process is not over yet." He goes on to proclaim pro-German sentiments, making the narrator uneasy:

He had developed the habit of almost shouting some of the things he said, out of excitability, out of his attempt to find outlets for impressions of which he needed -- never having cultivated any of the arts -- to unburden himself.... On the boulevards this harangue was also a mark of his contempt for passers-by, for whom he no more lowered his voice than he would have moved out of the way.

Day One Hundred Seventy: Finding Time Again, pp. 63-85

From "And now, returning to Paris for the second time ..." through "... a murder occurring in Russia should have anything Russian about them."

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Now in 1916, the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte, still at Tansonville, in which she reports that "all the other chateaux in the neigbourhood, abandoned by their panic-stricken owners, have almost all been destroyed from top to bottom." She has stayed there "not only to save the house but to save those precious collections my dear father set so much store by." Combray itself is held half by the French and half by the Germans after the battle of Méséglise, which lasted eight months.

And he is visited by Saint-Loup, inspiring in him "that feeling of shyness, that sense of eeriness which in fact all soldiers on leave made me feel, and which one experiences when one comes into the presence of someone suffering from a fatal illness, who none the less still gets up, gets dressed, and goes for walks." They talk about a recent Zeppelin raid and "the beauty of the aeroplanes as they climbed into the night," a scene that Saint-Loup calls "Wagnerian" and "seemed rather pleased with this comparison between airmen and Valkyries."

On the street, the narrator encounters Charlus. The narrator has just contrasted him with Saint-Loup, who had "aligned himself with that section of the aristocracy which put France above everything else, while M. de Charlus was a defeatist at heart." Charlus is no longer the figure in society that he once was, partly by choice, partly by virtue of having quarreled with Mme. Verdurin, who "had now summed up her condemnation, and alienated everybody from him, by pronouncing him 'pre-war.'" Furthermore, she is trying to persuade them that Charlus, who has always boasted of his German kin, is a spy: "I used to have a house that was situated high above a bay. I'm convinced the Germans told him to set up a base there for their submarines."

Mme. Verdurin's campaign against Charlus "had found a tireless and particularly cruel spokesman in Morel, who writes cruel satires on him for the gossip columns, attacking not only his patriotism but his homosexuality. The narrator observes that the style of the pieces is "derived from Bergotte," but not from Bergotte's prose; rather, Morel writes in the tone of voice that he used to use when he imitated Bergotte's manner of speech. But Morel has finally enlisted, going against Mme. Verdurin's wishes: She is reluctant to let any of her inner circle go, "regarding the war as a great 'bore' which made them abandon her."

Cottard receives another brief resurrection, just long enough to prescribe croissants to be dipped in Mme. Verdurin's breakfast coffee as a preventative to her migraines: Though the wartime shortages have made croissants unavailable, Cottard obtains an order for them to be custom-made for her.

This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the croissant she was soaking, she said: "How awful! It's worse than the most horrific tragedy." But ... the look which lingered on her face, probably induced by the taste of the croissant, so valuable in preventing migraine, was more like one of quiet satisfaction.

As for Cottard, he dies again, "followed soon afterwards by M. Verdurin, whose death upset only one person, that, oddly enough, being Elstir." M. Verdurin had been one of the painter's earliest patrons, before he split with the little set. 

The shortage of grown men has caused Charles to do "the same as some Frenchmen, who in France had loved women, but who now lived in the colonies: he had, out of necessity, developed first the habit of, and then a taste for, little boys," though by "keeping up a plentiful correspondence with men at the front, he was not short of sufficiently mature soldiers when they came on leave." Charlus "was mad about Moroccans, but most of all, about Anglo-Saxons, whom he viewed as living statues by Phidias."

Charlus does indeed have pro-German sentiments, partly because of his tendency to take the side of the underdog, though the "Germans, in his eyes, were very ugly, perhaps because they were too close to his own blood." 

He may have believed that taking sides against the Germans would be acting as he acted only during his periods of sexual pleasure, that is, in opposition to his compassionate nature, burning with desire for seductive evil, and crushing virtuous ugliness.

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-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 3-29

From "All day long, in that slightly too bucolic residence..." through "...the oblivion which piles up so relentlessly?)"

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The narrator is still where he was at the end of The Fugitive, staying at Tansonville with Gilberte. Saint-Loup shows up occasionally during his stay, but the narrator finds him changed, and in his description of him repeats verbatim one he had given of Legrandin in The Fugitive. He is "slenderer and swifter," with the "habit of conducting himself like a gust of wind."

A full description of him would also have to take account of his desire, the older he grew, to appear young, as well as of the impatience characteristic of men who are always bored and blasé, being too intelligent for the relatively idle life they lead, in which their faculties are never fully stretched.

Toward Gilberte, Saint-Loup affects "a sentimentality ... that bordered on the theatrical.... Robert loved her. But he lied to her all the time." He remarks to the narrator on her resemblance to Rachel, which "one could, at a stretch, now see between them," and the narrator speculates that this caused Saint-Loup to pick her over "other women of comparable fortune" when his family put pressure on him to marry. The narrator also observes in Saint-Loup a "regression to the birdlike elegance of the Guermantes" which brings out in him the effeminate "manners of M. de Charlus," although "Robert never permitted his type of love to come up in conversation," dodging the topic of homosexuality as if he were indifferent to it.

As for the narrator, he has "lost all recollection of the love of Albertine," but he discovers that "there is also an involuntary memory of the limbs" when he wakes up in the night and calls out "Albertine!" It seems that "a recollection suddenly burgeoning within my arm had made me reach behind my back for the bell, as if I had been in my bedroom in Paris." This physical memory causes him to call out for her help in locating the pull.

Morel, he sees, is "treated as the son of the house." Françoise naively regards this as characteristic of the generosity of the Guermantes, having observed that Legrandin similarly served as patron to Théodore, the one-time grocerer's assistant in Combray. The narrator meets Théodore's sister and learns that his surname is Sautton, and that he "must be the person who wrote to me about my Figaro article!"

In conversation with Gilberte, the narrator says, "I once knew a woman who ended up completely shut away by the man who loved her; she was never allowed to see anyone, and could only go out accompanied by trusty servants." Gilberte replies that "someone as good as you must have been horrified by that," and adds that he ought to get married: "A wife would make you healthy again, and you world make her very happy." He claims that he was once engaged but "couldn't make up my mind to marry her" and that she broke it off "because of my fussiness and indecision." This is as close as he can get to confession: "It was, indeed, in this over-simplified form that I regarded my adventure with Albertine, now that I could see it only from the outside."

From his window, he can see the spire of the church at Combray, but he postpones visiting it:

"Never mind, it'll have to wait for another year, if I don't die in the meantime," seeing no obstacle to this other than my death, never envisaging that of the church, which seemed bound to endure long after my death, as it had endured for so long before my birth.

More than Albertine, the thing that haunts him now is his "lack of an aptitude for literature." And it is brought home to him when Gilberte gives him a copy of "a recently published volume of the Goncourts' journal," which he reads in bed that night. In this parody "excerpt" Goncourt visits the salon of Mme. Verdurin: "Cottard, the doctor, is there with his wife, and the Polish sculptor Viradobetski, Swann the collector, an aristocratic Russian lady, a princess with a name ending in "-ov" which I don't quite catch." "Brichot, from the University" is there, too, and the talk turns to Elstir, whom, he is told, they called "Monsieur Tiche." The extract is filled with elaborate and minute descriptions of the room and even the china from which they eat, and reports of the conversation. The narrator is stung by "The magic of literature!" and reflects,

Certainly, I had never concealed from myself the fact that I did not know how to listen, nor, as soon as I was not alone, how to observe. My eyes would not notice what kind of pearl necklace an old woman might be wearing, and anything that might be said about it would not penetrate my ears.

He rebukes himself for making judgments about people, for later discovering that someone he thought "a society bore, a stuffed shirt, ... was a major figure!" He concludes that "Goncourt knew how to listen, as he knew how to see: I did not." And he regrets that he is "unable to go back and see all the people whom I had failed to appreciate" and that "the progress my illness was making" is forcing him "to break with society, give up travelling and visiting museums, in order to enter a sanatorium and undergo treatment."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Fifty: The Prisoner, pp. 285-305

From "While we were talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife..." to "...still the best place to pursue the dream of life."

_____

The Verdurins accomplish their coup: "drunk on melodrama, Mme Verdurin had impressed on her husband that he must take the violinist on one side and, at all costs, speak to him." Once he has done so, she continues to pour salt into Morel's wounds: "I believe that you should no longer accept this shameful familiarity with a disgraced creature who is not received anywhere, she added, quite unconcerned that this was a lie and forgetting that she herself received him in her house almost daily." More lies follow: She tells Morel that Charlus is "mixed up in all sorts of scandals" and that he's almost bankrupt, that "everything is mortgaged to the hilt, his town house his country estate, etc." And Morel believes them all. "'I don't know how to thank you,' said Charlie in the tone one uses to a dentist who has just been causing one excruciating pain to which one does not want to admit."

Mme. Verdurin, "not wishing to disrupt the inner circle," reassures Morel that he doesn't have to stop meeting the Baron, that he can continue to see him at her salon. But she sinks her hooks in: "But insist on your independence, and don't let him drag you to all those two-faced old trouts' houses; I wish you could have heard what they said behind your back." She assures him that the artists who come to her house "know they can trust me, she said in the sweet, simple tone she knew how to assume at a moment's notice." And she claims that Charlus's efforts to get Morel the cross of the Légion d'honneur -- which he has been pursuing this very evening -- was a joke: "his recommendation would be enough to make sure you didn't get it." And then the coup de grâce:

Like the way he laughed aloud when he sid that you really wanted the decoration to please your uncle, and your uncle was a flunkey. -- He said that!' cried Charlie, convinced by these carefully remembered last words that everything Mme Verdurin had said was true.

Charlus, Brichot and the narrator return to the drawing-room, where Charlus walks right into the trap by proclaiming to Morel that he will soon be Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. "'Leave me alone, don't you dare come near me, cried Morel to the Baron. I bet this isn't your first time, you must have tried to corrupt other people before me.'"

The narrator expects to "see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus, I had had to face his insane rages for a thousand times less than this, no one was safe from them, a king would not have intimidated him." Instead, Charlus collapses before them.

And the gestures expressive of panic terror have changed so little, that the old gentleman to whom something unpleasant was happening in a Paris drawing-room struck again, without knowing it, the small number of stylized attitudes which in archaic Greek sculpture indicated the alarm of nymphs being pursued by the god Pan.

Charlus does receive one gesture of support, however, when the Queen of Naples, whom Morel has been wanting to meet, returns to pick up a fan she had left behind. Made aware of the situation, the queen snubs Morel and the Verdurins out of "an unshakeable attachment to people whom she loved, to her relations, to all the princes of her family, one of whom was M. de Charlus, then to all the middle-class or humbler people who showed respect to those she loved, who had the proper feelings towards them." And so Charlus leaves with the queen, "without having let Morel be presented to her."

A few days later, Charlus, the narrator tells us, "contracted one of those infectious pneumonias that were so common at the time, was judged by his doctors and judged himself to be at death's door, and then spent several months suspended between life and death.... It exhausted the Baron so completely that it left him little chance to think about the Verdurins. He was half-dead."

Then there's one of those "continuity errors," as Carol Clark calls them in her introduction, in which we are told that Cottard wasn't at the party (even though we have had both a reference to his death and several sightings of him there) because he was tending to Saniette (whom we have also seen there, being berated by Verdurin and suffering a stroke) because "Saniette had some kind of a stroke" resulting from his losses in the stock market. The purpose of the scene seems to be to soften our judgment of the Verdurins, because they decide to become anonymous benefactors of Saniette, setting up a fund for his support to be overseen by Cottard. The narrator says that Cottard told him "about the whole thing some years later, at Saniette's funeral in fact." (Earlier, when Saniette suffered his stroke outside the party, we were told that he "lived for some weeks more.") And he adds, "by changing my opinion of M. Verdurin, whom I was coming to think the very worst of men, Cottard's revelation, if he had made it earlier, would have dispelled the suspicions I had about the role the Verdurins might play in my relationship with Albertine." In short, it's all very much of a muddle.

Brichot and the narrator share a carriage on the ride home from the Verdurins, in which Brichot expresses his regret at what had happened to Charlus and his surprise at how violently Morel had reacted to the Verdurins' lies.

Day One Hundred Forty-Eight: The Prisoner, pp. 256-271

From "'Ah! My dear General,' M. de Charlus suddenly exclaimed,..." to "...valuable sayings that they would disdain to originate themselves."

_____

Charlus greets General Deltour, who has just finished talking with Cottard (even though the latter has been reported as dead), and while Charlus is talking to him Mme. Verdurin summons Brichot and commands, "Take him out to smoke a cigarette with you, so that my husband can take his inamorata on one side without old Charlus seeing, and show him the danger he is falling into." And she proceeds to slander Charlus, claiming that "he's been mixed up in some dirty business, and the police are watching him," that "he's been in prison," and that "someone I know who lives in his street says you can't imagine the characters that go up to his house."

As they walk away, Brichot praises Mme. Verdurin to the narrator, but adds, "I must admit, however, to great sadness at the thought that the poor Baron does not yet know of the blow that is going to fall upon him. He is quite mad about that boy. If Mme Verdurin succeeds, he is going to be a very unhappy man." They join Charlus, who takes the opportunity to show the narrator about the house and its store of possessions. Charlus is still bubbling over with the triumph of the concert, even dwelling on a moment when a lock of hair fell across Morel's forehead: "Did you notice the moemtn when his forelock came adrift? No? Ah then, my dear chap, you didn't notice anything.... And at that moment, the graceful entry, like little country-dance, of the allegro vivace. You know, that lock was the signal for revelation, even to the most slow-witted." But the Baron notices that the narrator is tiring and sends Brichot to fetch his greatcoat.

The narrator is puzzled by Charlus' friendship with Brichot, whose conversation even "the least discerning of Mme de Guermantes's guests would have found laboured and dull," but concludes that it's because "not only was he friendly to Morel, but he could collect from the Greek philosophers, the Latin poets and oriental storytellers texts which furnished the Baron's taste with strange and charming garlands." And the narrator has been feeling a "great, affectionate pity" for Charlus "ever since Mme Verdurin had unveiled her plan before me."

I had no opinion about the extent to which right and wrong might be involved in the relations between Morel and M. de Charlus, but the idea of the suffering that was being prepared for M. de Charlus revolted me. I wanted to prevent it, but I didn't know how.

But he is embarrassed when Charlus reminds him of the offer he once made to him when they were leaving Mme. de Villeparisis's together, and he tries to change the subject by talking about Mme. de Villeparisis's apparently recent death. Swann, Princess Sherbatoff, Cottard, Saniette, Mme. de Villeparisis ... who's next? It's as if Proust is cleaning house.

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Forty-Five: The Prisoner, pp. 206-218

From "As we were about to enter the courtyard of the Verdurins' house..." to "...she immediately stopped speaking."

_____

Entering the Verdurins', they are joined by Saniette, who brings word that the Princess Sherbatoff has just died. As usual, M. Verdurin treats Saniette brutally, making him wait in the drafty vestibule while others have their coats checked, just because Saniette has been affecting an archaic manner of speaking. When the others offer condolences on the Princess's death, Verdurin insists that she is just very ill, and in response to Saniette's insistence that she had died at six o'clock: "'You're always exaggerating,' said M. Verdurin brutally, for, the party not having been put off, he preferred to stick to the story of illness."

Tension has arisen between Charlus and Mme. Verdurin, partly because of Morel and "the ridiculous and distasteful part which M. de Charlus was making him play." She still relies on Charlus to supply Morel for concerts, and she resents the fact that he continues to hold sway over the invitation list. Charlus

at the first mention of names that Mme Verdurin put forward as possible guests, pronounced the most categorical sentence of exclusion, in a peremptory tone in which the vindictive pride of the testy great noble mingled with the dogmatism of the expert party organizer who would take off his play and refuse his collaboration sooner than descend to concessions which, according to him, would spoil the overall effect.

But Mme. Verdurin has risen in social stature thanks to her support of artists, and as a consequence is able to challenge Charlus's authority. Charlus's propensity to quarrel with people means that certain people were excluded from Mme. Verdurin's only because of his whim. "Now these outcasts were often people at the top of the tree, as they say, but who in M. de Charlus's eyes had fallen from that position as soon as they fell out with him." One of these victims of Charlus was the Countess Molé, whom Mme. Verdurin wanted to welcome to her circle. And Charlus's lofty idea of aristocracy, to which he was entitled as a Guermantes, meant that he snubbed "some of the smartest people whose presence would have made Mme Verdurin's salon one of the foremost in Paris.

The Dreyfus affair also continues to have its effect on society:

Because they were nationalists, the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain fell into the habit of receiving ladies of another social milieu; when nationalism disappeared, the habit persisted. Mme Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her salon some good writers who at that time were no value to her social schemes because they were Dreyfusards. But political passions, like other passions, wane. New generations spring up who no longer understand them, even the generation which first felt them changes, experiences new political passions which, as they do not correspond exactly to the earlier ones, rehabilitate a certain proportion of the excluded, the reasons for their exclusion having altered.

During the Dreyfus affair, then, Mme. Verdurin, by gathering Dreyfusard artists to her salon, built the foundation of her post-affair success: "The Dreyfus Affair has passed, she still had Anatole France." 

Mme. Verdurin is now credited with a genuine interest in the arts, and she has become a chief patron of the Russian ballet, being seen by the crowd at the Opéra "in a grand circle box, ... flanking the Princess Yourbeletieff." Her suppers,

jointly presided over by Princess Yourbeletieff and the Patronne, brought together the dancers who had not yet eaten, so as to be able to jump even higher, their director, the scene-painters, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, an unchanging inner circle around which ... the greatest ladies in Paris and foreign Highnesses did not disdain to go ... to observe close at hand these great men who were revolutionizing taste in the theatre and who, in an art perhaps somewhat more artificial than painting, had produced a renewal as radical as Impressionism.

So Charlus is beginning to lose his usefulness to Mme. Verdurin, "and one day soon the two halves of society that M. de Charlus wanted to keep apart would be brought together, at the cost, of course, of not inviting him that evening."

Day One Hundred Thirty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 460-480

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Brichot is brought to heel. 

Day One Hundred Twenty-Eight: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 434-449

Part II, Chapter III, from "A great musician, a member of the Institute,..." to "...no one I have to say a single thank-you to."

_____

Charlus's ignorance of the talk about his relationship with Morel continues when the Verdurins are visited by a famous musician. Morel urges the Baron to flatter the man, for the sake of Morel's career, which he does. But as the narrator notes, Charlus is unaware that the musician "had asked Ski, referring to M. de Charlus and Morel, as he might have done to a man and his mistress: 'Have they been together long?'" The musician is a "man of the world," however, and means no malice toward Morel or Charlus. The narrator compares Charlus to a fish swimming in a tank, which lives in ignorance of "the amused passerby who is following his antics, or the all-powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, deferred at this moment in the case of the Baron (for whom the pisciculturalist, in Paris, will be Mme Verdurin), will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one."

There follows several pages of dense and allusive literary talk, centering mostly on Balzac, between Charlus and Brichot, with occasional contributions from Cottard, in the midst of which Charlus refers to the "pederasty" of some of Balzac's characters. When he utters the word, "Ski, Brichot, and Cottard had looked at one another with a smile that was less ironic perhaps than imbued with the satisfaction that dinner guests might feel who had succeeded in getting Dreyfus to talk about his own Affair, or the Empress about her reign." But when Ski tries to get him to elaborate on the subject, "the Baron assumed the annoyed, mysterious, and finally (seeing they were not listening to him) severe and judicial expression of a father hearing improprieties being spoken in front of his daughter." He tries to change the subject to "things that might interest this young lady" -- indicating Albertine but, the narrator observes, clearly meaning Morel. In fact, Charlus later confirms this for the narrator:

"You know," he said to me, referring to the violinist, "he's not at all what you might think, he's a very decent boy who's always stayed very sensible, very responsible." And you felt from these words that M. de Charlus looked on sexual inversion as a danger equally as threatening for young men as prostitution is for women, and that, if he used the epithet ''responsible" in connection with Morel, it was in the sense that it acquires when applied to a young working girl. 

Charlus is also concerned that, when he returns to Paris with Morel, "the latter's family might step in and his happiness be put in jeopardy."

As for Morel, it's clear to the narrator that he's simply using the Baron for advancement. Morel talks to the narrator "exactly as Rachel, Saint-Loup's mistress, had once done," and "judging by what M. de Charlus repeated to me, said the same things about me in my absence as Rachel had said about me to Robert." But he also treats the Baron cruelly when he's in the company of other soldiers, greeting him with "a shrug of the shoulders" and "a wink to his comrades," pretending to be asleep, or coughing as a signal to the others to "jokingly adopt the mincing speech of men of M. de Charlus's kind." He would finally return, "as though having been forced," to the Baron, "whose heart had been pierced by all these arrows." 

Charlus even tries to get Morel to change his name to something that echoes his, such as "Charmel." But he doesn't understand that "the name Morel was indissolubly linked to his first prize for violin, hence any modification was out of the question." Morel also doesn't like to be reminded of the difference in social status between them: 

"There was a time when my forebears were proud of the title of valet de chambre, of maître d'hôtel to the King." "There was another time," answered Morel haughtily, "when my forebears cut the throats of yours." 

As the narrator anticipates, this relationship doesn't work out well.

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."

_____

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-Six: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 407-419

Part II, Chapter III, from "After dinner the car brought Albertine back..." to "...capable on certain days of genuine kindness." 

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The narrator describes a romantic evening with Albertine, although his attitude is hardly romantic, since he tells himself "that we must be in love after all, to have spent the night kissing." He is continually prey to jealousy, so that he even restricts visits from Saint-Loup: "I had preferred to forgo seeing Albertine rather than risk his meeting her, jeopardizing the state of contented calm in which I had been for some time now, and reviving my jealousy. I felt easy in my mind only once Saint-Loup had left again." He's afraid that Saint-Loup will ask to be introduced to the Verdurins, which would "mar all the pleasure that I enjoyed there with Albertine," but Saint-Loup has no interest in sets like the Verdurins: "'They're circles,' he said, 'where they play at being tribes, where they play at being congregations and chapels. You're not going to tell me it isn't a small sect; they're all sweetness and light to the people who belong, and couldn't be more contemptuous of the ones who don't.'" 

On one of his outings with Albertine, the narrator sees his first airplane: "fifty meters or so above me, in the sunlight, between two great wings of glittering steel that were bearing him away, a being whose indistinct face I fancied resembled that of a man." The sight moves him to tears. Meanwhile, other twentieth century technology is taking hold in his life, as the chauffeur asks Morel to persuade the Verdurins to hire him and replace their coachman. Morel does this by first getting the Verdurins' servants to "steal from the coachman everything he needed to harness up," so that the Verdurins will be angry when he is delayed getting ready to take them places. And then, when the chauffeur puts pressure on Morel by threatening to return to Paris, he gets the servants to beat the coachman up and sabotage the carriage. Morel then tells the Verdurins that the coachman drinks and has several times overturned the carriage. The result, when they see the damaged carriage and the bloodied coachman, is that he's fired and the chauffeur hired in his place. 

We get a hint that all this business with the chauffeur and Morel is foreshadowing, when the narrator tells us of the former: "I, all unknowing, employed him by the day in Paris; but I am getting too far ahead of myself, all this will be met with again in the story of Albertine." And as for Morel, "since I have been running ahead, I do not want all the same to leave the reader under the impression that Morel might have been wicked through and through. Rather, he was full on contradictions, capable on certain days of genuine kindness."    

Day One Hundred Twenty-Three: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 369-382

Part II, Chapter III, from  "I could not keep awake. I was taken up..." to "...difference in status between M. de Charlus and Aimé." 

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Chapter III begins with an extended passage on some familiar themes in the novel: sleep, memory, and time. Exhausted from his visit to the Verdurins, the narrator can hardly stay awake as he's taken up to his room by an elevator operator who chatters on about his sister, who is the mistress of a rich man and who "never leaves a hotel without relieving herself in a wardrobe or a chest of drawers, so as to leave a small memento for the chambermaid who'll have to clean it up." He seems inordinately proud of this.

The narrator observes that in dreams there are two kinds of time, but then narrows it to "only one, not because that of the waking man holds good for the sleeper, but perhaps because the other life, that in which we sleep is not -- in its profound part -- subject to the category of time.... On these mornings (which is what makes me say that sleep perhaps knows nothing of the law of time), my attempt to wake up consisted above all in an attempt to introduce the obscure, undefined block of sleep that I had just been living into the framework of time." 

As for memory, the narrator comments on "the great Norwegian philosopher" he had met at the Verdurins and his endorsement of Bergson's theory that "We possess all our memories, if not the faculty of recalling them." The narrator (or the Norwegian philosopher -- Proust doesn't quite make it clear) objects, 

But what is a memory that we cannot recall? Or let us go further. We do not recall our memories of the last thirty years, but we are totally steeped in them; why, then, stop at thirty years, why not continue this previous existence back before our birth?... If I can have, in me and around me, so many memories that I do not remember, this oblivion (a de facto oblivion at least, since I do not hae the faculty of seeing anything) may apply to a life that I have lied in the body of another man, or even on another planet.... The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man that I have been since my birth than this latter remembers what I was before it.

The arrival of the valet de chambre interrupts these metaphysical speculations, and the narrator's thoughts turn to Charlus, about whom he had dreamed that he "was 110 years old and had just twice slapped him mother, Mme Verdurin, in the face for spending five billion on a bunch of violets." Charlus had recently dined in a private room at the hotel with "none other than the footman of a cousin of the Cambremers." All of the servants at the hotel, even Françoise, had recognized the footman, but his "playacting" had fooled the guests. The occasion allowed the narrator to identify Charlus to Aimé, who was surprised to learn his identity. The narrator learns that Charlus had been smitten with Aimé and had written him a long letter commenting, among  other things, on his resemblance to a dead friend of Charlus's. The narrator speculates that Charlus's relationship with Morel is "perhaps Platonic," leading the Baron to "now and again seek out company for an evening such as that in which I had just met him in the hall."  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the carriages arrive and the little group disperses.                                                                 

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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