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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woman will have Gomorrah and man will have Sodom.

--Alfred de Vigny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We jump ahead to

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

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