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 Forty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 271-285

From "'But what's wrong with him? That's my overcoat....'" to "...going into the room to ask 'May we come in?'"

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When Brichot returns with Charlus's overcoat instead of the narrator's, Charlus drapes it around him and says, flirtatiously, "You know that's very compromising, dear boy? It's like drinking out of the same glass, I shall be able to read your thoughts." And he strokes the narrator's chin. When Brichot suggests that Charlus should kiss the narrator on both cheeks, too, "'Kiss him on both cheeks, really! cried the Baron with shrill delight. I tell you, dear boy, he thinks he's still at a school prize-giving, he's dreaming of his little pupils, I bet he sleeps with them." And Charlus is off on a kind of verbal fan-dance, coyly revealing and concealing his gayness. Brichot eggs him on, with a mention of a recent discovery of a letter by Michelangelo about his love for a woman, which counters his homosexual reputation.

From the moment Brichot had begun talking about men's reputations, M. de Charlus's whole face had betrayed the particular kind of impatience that we see in an expert on medical or military matters, when lay people who know nothing about them begin to say foolish things about therapeutics or strategy.

Charlus startles them with an estimate that only "between thirty and forty per cent" of men are truly heterosexual, ascribing "inversion to the great majority of his contemporaries, excepting only those with whom he had himself had relations; their case -- provided the relations had been in the smallest degree romantic -- he regarded as more complex." 

When Brichot learns that Charlus had been a friend of Swann's, he asks, "Was he one of them?" Charlus replies, "No, I don't think so." And then talks about introducing Swann to Odette: "She caught my eye in a semi-breeches part, when she was playing Miss Sacripant." And he claims, "She used to force me to organize the most dreadful sessions for her, four, five people at a time." He talks about how Swann was "as jealous as a tiger," and had called on him to be second in a duel.

Brichot next asks about Ski, whom Charlus dismisses as "just people's idea of that sort of man, people who don't know anything about it." Called on to produce names, Charlus claims to "live in a world of abstraction, these things only interest me from a transcendental point of view." The narrator comments,

But these moments of annoyed reaction in which the Baron tried to hide his real life were few and fleeting as compared with the hours during with he constantly let it show through, or displayed it with an irritating self-satisfaction, the need to confide being much stronger in him than the fear of self-revelation.

In the midst of a discussion of homosexuality in the court of Louis XIV, Charlus says, enigmatically, "I have a young friend in the army who is making quite a name for himself, who has done great things; but let me not gossip...." If the "young man" is Morel, it's certainly an odd reference, since Brichot and the narrator know about him. Could he be referring to Saint-Loup?  And in commenting on the way society has changed, Charlus says,

But I will admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality*. Good heavens, in my day, if one set aside the men who simply hated women, and those who, while actually preferring them, did other things for money or their careers, homosexuals were good family men and really only kept mistresses as a blind.

Charlus then surprises Brichot by revealing the Prince de Guermantes' homosexuality. And Brichot proposes, "if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once."

Throughout all this, the narrator has been chafing with the urge to get home to see Albertine: "I now had only one wish, to escape from the Verdurins' before the execution of Charlus was carried out."

*The first recorded appearance of the word "homosexuality"was in Austria in 1869; Richard von Krafft-Ebing popularized the term in Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886.

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."

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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 Eight: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 98-114

Part II, Chapter I, from "'What a strange look those two young men have!...'" to "'...Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel.'"

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Charlus, "whose insolence was a gift of nature that he took delight in exercising," pretends not to know that the two young men he is pointing out to Mme. de Surgis as having "a strange look" and who are possibly "Orientals" or "Turks," are her own sons. She introduces them to him as Victurnien, the elder, and Arnulphe. Saint-Loup is amused by the scene because "my uncle hates gigolos." Charlus continues to tease the young men, commenting on how Victurnien's name is that of a Balzac character and pretending that both of them are familiar with Balzac's works. 


Swann joins the narrator and Saint-Loup, and strikes up a conversation about the Dreyfus Affair, assuming that both of them are still Dreyfusards. But Saint-Loup reveals that he has forsaken Dreyfusism, a consequence of his breakup with Rachel: "The whole affair began very badly, and I very much regret sticking my nose in. It had nothing to do with me. If I could start again, I'd keep well out of the way. I'm a soldier, and for the army above all." 


Charlus takes the narrator, who wants to stay and talk with Swann, away from that group into another room with Mme. de Surgis. The Baron cruelly insults Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who is within earshot, with "a triumphal diatribe of which the wretched Saint-Euverte, almost immobilized behind us, could hardly have lost a single word." He insults her appearance and even her odor, and calls her an "indefatigable old streetwalker." The narrator is "indignant" at the Baron's treatment of Mme. Saint-Euverte, but observes, "In society, alas, as in the world of politics, the victims are so cowardly that you cannot hold it against their executioners for long." And when Mme. Saint-Euverte comes up to him and asks how she has offended Charlus, then laughs "uproariously," the narrator reflects that "people who laugh so loudly at what they say when it is not funny thereby excuse us from joining in by taking all the hilarity on themselves." 


The narrator, wanting to get home because he's expecting Albertine, still seeks out Swann again, but finds that they have to get away from Charlus once more, now teasing the other de Surgis brother, Arnulphe, who talks "in a lisping voice that seemed to indicate that his mental development at least was incomplete." The narrator decides to ask Swann "whether what was said about M. de Charlus was true, in which I lied twice over, for, if I did not know whether anything had ever been said, I knew very well, on the other hand, from a little earlier, that what I had meant was true." But Swann, who apparently recognizes that the narrator is referring to Charlus's homosexuality, denies it, "as if I had proffered an absurdity." He characterizes Charlus as "sentimental" and says that "because he never goes very far with women, that's given a sort of credibility to the nonsensical rumors you want to talk about." 


But as far as the scene with the Prince de Guermantes is concerned, the truth turns out to be very different from the rumors the narrator has heard. Swann says that the Prince was apologizing for being anti-Dreyfus, and had said to Swann, "I shall tell you frankly that the idea that in all this an innocent man might have suffered the most ignominious of punishments had never crossed my mind. ... I'm from a family of soldiers, I refused to believe that officers could be wrong." Moreover, the Prince has "had masses said ... for Dreyfus, for his unfortunate wife, and his children." 


The Duc interrupts the conversation with Swann to say that the Princesse had invited the Duchesse to stay for supper with five or six others, but that she had had to decline because of a prior engagement. The narrator was invited to take her place. But he, too, declines because of his appointment with Albertine. 


Swann resumes his account of the conversation with the Prince to report that the Princesse, too, had been converted, even before the Prince, to Dreyfusism. "Swann now found those who were of his opinion to be uniformly intelligent, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes and my schoolmate Bloch, whom he had hitherto kept at arm's length but whom he invited to lunch." He concludes their conversation by inviting the narrator to come see Gilberte. The narrator promises to write her a letter. And when the narrator asks about his health, he says, 

"I confess it would be very irritating to die before the end of the Dreyfus Affair. Those scum have more than one trick up their sleeves. I don't doubt they'll be beaten in the end, but they're very influential, they've got support everywhere. Just when it's going best, everything gives way. I'd like to live long enough to see Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel."

(Translator John Sturrock's note indicates that Dreyfus was rehabilitated in 1906 and Picquart became a general and minister of war.) 

Day One Hundred Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 78-98

Part II, Chapter I, from "Reassured as to her fear of having to talk with Swann..." to "...his religious respect for women's virtue." 

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The narrator glides through the party like a scuba diver through a school of beautiful and outlandish fish. Now he hears two different explanations of the scene between Swann and the Prince de Guermantes. M. de Bréauté asserts that Bergotte wrote a play that was staged at Swann's and lampooned the Prince. But Col. de Froberville insists that the Prince was outraged by Swann's continuing to hold Dreyfusard views. The Duc himself is angered that Swann, "a discerning gourmet, a positive mind, a collector, a lover of old books, a member of the Jockey Club, a man highly respected on all sides, a connoisseur of good addresses who used to send us the best port you can drink, a dilettante, a family man" should display such "ingratitude" as to continue to support Dreyfus.

The narrator points out that Prince Von is also a Dreyfusard, which the Duc dismisses because "he's a foreigner. I don't care two hoots. With a Frenchman, it's another matter. It's true, Swann is a Jew. But until today ... I had been weak-minded enough to believe that a Jew can be a Frenchman, an honorable Jew, I mean, a man of the world."

The narrator tells the Duchesse he wants to go talk to Swann, if he's still at the soirée. She replies that she isn't eager to see him because "I was told a short while ago at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, that he would like, before he dies, for me to make the acquaintance of his wife and daughter." She's not willing to honor the request, saying she hopes "that it's not as serious as all that," and "There wouldn't be salons any more if one was obliged to make the acquaintance of all the dying."

Finally, the Duchesse and the narrator go their separate ways, and he heads for the smoking room to see if Swann is there. On the way he notices "two young men whose great but dissimilar beauty had its origins in the same woman. These were the two sons of Mme de Surgis, the Duc de Guermantes's new mistress." He is detained by the Marquise de Citri, who affects a posture of boredom with everything, and by the time he frees himself from her he sees Charlus eying one of the sons of Mme. de Surgis. Charlus blushes when he finds the narrator looking at him. "Once M. de Charlus had learned from me that they were brothers, his face could not disguise the admiration inspired in him by a family capable of creating such splendid yet such different masterpieces." 

Swann enters the room, his face showing signs of his illness. "Swann's Punchinello nose, for so long reabsorbed into a pleasing face, now seemed enormous, tumid, crimson, more that of an old Hebrew." But when he starts to cross the room to talk to Swann, he is interrupted by Saint-Loup, in town for forty-eight hours. Saint-Loup wants to avoid Charlus for fear of a lecture from his uncle: 

"I find it comic that my family council,which has always come down so hard on me, should be made up of those very family members who've lived it up the most, starting with the most dissipated of the lot, my uncle Charlus, who's my surrogate tutor, who's had as many women as Don Juan, and who even at his age doesn't let up." 

The narrator, who now knows more about the nature of Charlus's "dissipations" than Saint-Loup does, skirts the issue. "'But are you sure M. de Charlus has had so many mistresses?' I asked, certainly not with the diabolical intention of revealing to Robert the secret I had chanced upon, but irritated nonetheless by hearing him maintain an error with so much assurance and self-satisfaction." Saint-Loup shrugs off his friend's apparent naïveté and turns his attention to the narrator's sex life, proposing to set him up with "that tall blonde, Mme Putbus's lady's maid. She likes women, too, but I imagine you don't mind that." The narrator observes that "Robert's love of Letters had not gone very deep, it did not emanate from his true nature, it was only a by-product of his love for Rachel, and had been erased along with it, at the same time as his abhorrence of voluptuaries and his religious respect for women's virtue."   

Day One Hundred Six: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 59-78

Part II, Chapter I, from "I caught sight of Swann, and wanted..." to "...snatch the fateful palm and march at the head." 

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The narrator sees Swann greeting the Prince de Guermantes in the garden, but,  "with the force of a suction pump," being taken away by the Prince, "certain persons informed me, 'in order to show him the door.'" But as surprised as the reader might be by this incident, the narrator makes no further comment on it at this point, instead turning his characteristically minute attention to "Hubert Robert's celebrated fountain," and to the drenching Mme. d'Arpajon receives when a gust of wind blows it her way.

He is then pulled aside by Charlus, who offers his hand and says, "It's nice to see you here." And then he adds, "but above all it's very comic." His "roars of laughter" draws attention from people who, "knowing both how hard of access he was and how liable to insolent 'outburst,' approached in curiosity and then, with an almost indecent haste, took to their heels." 

The narrator leaves the garden and returns to the house, where he is met by the Princesse, who notes that he will be dining with her and the Duchesse at the Queen of Italy's, where there will be all sorts of royalty. She says, "'It'll be most intimidating,' out of sheer silliness, which, among society people, even outweighs their vanity." Then the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes arrive, but the narrator is prevented from going to see them by the Turkish ambassadress, who had previously assured him that the Duc was gay and who now praises the Princesse after having scorned her at the Duchesse's dinner party. Her hypocrisy annoys the narrator.

Again, he observes the façade of egalitarianism that the Guermantes are capable of assuming:

"But you are our equal, if not better," the Guermantes seemed, by all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, so as to be liked and admired, but not so as to be believed; to tease out the fictitious nature of this amiability was to have been what they called well brought up; to believe that amiability to be real was to lack breeding.

The narrator proves this point for himself on another occasion when, seeing the Duc beckoning to him across the room, he responds only with a deep bow and doesn't join him. "I might have written a masterpiece, and the Guermantes would have done me less honor than for that low bow," for the Duchesse makes a special point of mentioning to the narrator's mother how impressed the Duc had been by it.
 

He now overhears M. de Vaugoubert and Charlus in a conversation about which guests might be gay. Not that Vaugoubert is likely to act on the information: "The diplomatic career had had the same effect on his life as if he had taken holy orders." Then the narrator and the Duchesse are approached by Mme. Timoléon d'Amoncourt, who had a sort of literary salon and who now makes her way in society by distributing among its members letters and manuscripts she has been given by famous authors. She tells the Duchesse that she has a letter in which D'Annunzio praises her beauty and that she has some manuscripts by Ibsen she wants to give her. She also claims to have met the narrator at the Princess of Parma's, where he has never been, and that "The Russian Emperor would like your father to be sent to Petersburg." He learns that "She always had a state secret to reveal to you, a potentate whom you must meet, a watercolor by a master to offer you. There was an element of falsehood certainly in all these futile attractions, but they made of her life a comedy of scintillating complexity, and it was a fact that she had secured the appointment of precepts and generals." 

The Duchesse's status in society is demonstrated as they walk "between a double hedge of guests who, aware that they would never get to know 'Oriane,' wanted at least, as a curiosity, to point her out to their wives." The narrator notes that the Duchesse's salon included people whom the Princesse would never have been able to invite, because of the Prince's anti-Semitism. The Princesse could not invite Mme. Alphonse de Rothschild or Baron Hirsch, "whom the Prince of Wales had brought to [the Duchesse's] house but not to that of the Princesse." And here we get a hint of what may have happened between the Prince and Swann earlier: 

His anti-Semitism ... made no concessions to the fashionable, however highly accredited, and if he received Swann, whose friend he had been from a long way back, ... it was because, knowing that Swann's grandmother, a Protestant married to a Jew, had been the mistress of the Duc de Berry, he tried, from time to time, to believe in the legend that had it that Swann's father was an illegitimate son of the Prince. On this hypothesis, which was, however, false, Swann, the son of a Catholic, who had himself been the son of a Bourbon and a Catholic woman, was Christian through and through.

Next, the Duchesse sights Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who has, through a careful process of elimination, created a celebrated salon. "But the fact was that the pre-eminence of the Saint-Euverte salon existed only for those whose social life consists merely in reading the accounts of matinées and soirées in Le Gaulois  or Le Figaro, without ever having been to any of them." Such readers imagined "the Saint-Euverte salon to be the first in Paris, whereas it was one of the last." The Duchesse wonders why the Princesse "should invite us here with all these dregs." 

Day One Hundred Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 37-59

Part II, Chapter I, from "As I was not in any hurry to arrive..." to "...moved away to let him welcome the new arrivals." 

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And so the narrator goes to the reception at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes's, still uncertain whether he has been invited or been the victim of a practical joke.

Outside, he encounters the Duc de Châtellerault, who has been "outed" to him by yesterday's conversation between Jupien and Charlus. Somehow, the narrator has learned of a liaison between the Duc and the Princesse's doorman, in which the Duc managed to keep his identity secret by pretending to be an Englishman. So when the Duc and doorman meet again at the entrance to the reception, there's a comical recognition scene: "As he asked his 'Englishman' of two days before what name he should announce, the doorman was not merely moved, he judged himself to be indiscreet, tactless.... On hearing the guest's reply, 'the Duc de Châtellerault,' he felt so overcome with pride that he remained speechless for a moment." 

The narrator, on the other hand, expects social ruin when his own name is "roared out, like the sound preceding a possible cataclysm," fearing that the Princesse will order the footmen to haul him away. Instead she rises and approaches him graciously, then dismisses him with the words, "You'll find the Prince in the garden." But now he faces another dilemma: finding someone who will introduce him to the Prince. He sees Charlus, who could have done so, but is afraid that the Baron will not forgive him for arriving at the reception without his prior intercession -- he had earlier assured the narrator, "The only entrée to those salons is through me."
 

Then he's stopped by someone else he knows, "Professor E--," the physician he encountered when his grandmother suffered her stroke, and who seemed more interested in getting ready for his dinner with the minister of commerce than in helping the ill woman. Now, Professor E--, who knows no one at the reception, having been invited because of his recent successful treatment of the Prince, wants to cling to the narrator. But the latter manages to shrug him off to talk to the Marquis de Vaugoubert, who "was one of the few men (perhaps the only man) in society who found himself in what is known in Sodom as 'confidence' with M. de Charlus." That is, Vaugoubert had committed youthful homosexual indiscretions known to Charlus. But ambitious to make his way in the Foreign Ministry, Vaugoubert has devoted himself to chastity: 

Having gone from an almost infantile debauchery to absolute continence on the day his thoughts turned to the Quai d'Orsay and the desire to make a great career, he wore the look of a caged beast, casting glances in all directions expressive of fear, craving, and stupidity.

He has married, but Mme. de Vaugoubert is as masculine as her husband is effeminate. "I felt, alas, that she looked on me with interest and curiosity as one of the young men who appealed to M. de Vaugoubert, and whom she would have so much liked to be, now that her aging husband preferred youth."

However, the narrator still hasn't persuaded anyone to introduce him to the Prince. Next he sees Mme. d'Arpajon, and his inability for a moment to remember her name sends him off into a reverie about how we remember names. And here Proust begins to craft a dialogue between the narrator and the reader, playing off the latter's frustration with his seeming ability to move his story forward: 

"All of which," the reader will say, "teaches us nothing about this lady's disobligingness; but since you've been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l'Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well." It is very regrettable, you are right, M. le Lecteur.

And he goes on with more reflections on the topic of remembering things until the reader interrupts again: "'So Mme d'Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?' No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again." This bit of authorial raillery perhaps reflects Proust's interest in English fiction, where such author-reader interchanges often take place, and it also raises the question of the narrator's identity, on which Proust had no doubt already been challenged by readers and critics.

In any case, Mme. d'Arpajon doesn't introduce him to the Prince, leaving him venturing to approach Charlus again, only to be interrupted by Mme. de Gallardon, who wants to introduce her nephew, Adalbert, Vicomte de Courvoisier, to Charlus. The Baron responds to her with his customary surliness, but the narrator persists with his own request. 

[P]erhaps -- in spite of his ill-humor against me -- I would have succeeded with him when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not had the unhappy idea of adding, out of scrupulousness, and so that he should not suppose me tactless enough to have entered on the off chance, relying on him to enable me to stay, "You know that I know them very well, the Princesse has been very kind to me." "Well, if you know them, what need have you of me to introduce you?" he snapped at me and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game of cards with the nuncio, the German ambassador, and a personage whom I did not know. 

Finally, he succeeds when he encounters M. de Bréauté, who obligingly effects the introduction. He finds the Prince aloof, in contrast with the agreeableness of the Duc de Guermantes, but paradoxically "realized at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit 'as an equal,' and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince."

Day One Hundred Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 510-595

Part II, Chapter II, from "In the time that followed, I was continually to be invited..." to "..."'You'll live to see us all in our graves!'" 

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A long stay in a waiting room today left me with nothing to do but read much more than my ten-page minimum, taking me to the end of The Guermantes Way.  In this final section, we learn of the narrator's continued involvement with the social circle to which the Duchesse's dinner party invitation introduced him; of the bizarre behavior of Charlus, who thinks the narrator has been not only showed ingratitude for not taking advantage of the opportunities the Baron has offered him, but also somehow slandered him; and of Swann's terminal illness.  

The narrator describes the dinner party as "a sort of social Eucharist," but insists with florid irony that "the manducation of the ortolan was not obligatory." He continues to comment on the shallowness of the society of which he has become part, sometimes by entering into the characters' heads, as when the Duchesse, in conversation with the Princess of Parma, makes a reference to "'Gustave Moreau's Young Man and Death. Your Highness is of course acquainted with the masterpiece.' The Princess of Parma, who had never even heard of Moreau, nodded in vigorous assent and smiled warmly in order to demonstrate her admiration for this painting." And he once more exposes the Duchesse's hypocrisy. Having previously called Elstir's portrait of herself "ghastly," she now claims, "Elstir has done a fine portrait of me.... It's not a good likeness, but it's intriguing." And yet the narrator continues to forgive her: "That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been a disappointment to me at first; I reacted to it now, with the help of so much fine wine, as something almost wondrous." But he also takes himself to task, recalling "those hours spent in society when I lived on the surface, my hair well groomed, my shirtfront starched -- that is to say, hours in which I could feel nothing of what I personally regarded as pleasure."

At one party, there are some foreshadowings of events to come, when Prince Von, "who could not endure the English" is attempting to advance the idea of an alliance between France and Germany, denouncing Edward VII and the British army, and insisting "it's us you ought to make friends with, it's the Kaiser's dearest wish, but he wants it to come from the heart. He puts it this way: 'What I want to see is a hand clasped in my own, not someone touching their hat to me!' With that you would be invincible." 

But what most attracts the narrator to the company of Ducs and Princes and Barons is the sense of times past, of European history embodied in family pedigrees. The people he meets in society are dull, stupid, and prejudiced, but "these prejudices from the historical past instantly restored to the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry." 

M. de Guermantes had a command of memories that gave his conversation the fine feel of an ancient mansion, lacking in real masterpieces but still full of authentic pictures, of middling interest and imposing, giving an overall impression of grandeur.... Thus does the heavy structure of the aristocracy, with its rare windows, admitting a scant amount of daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar, but also the same massive, blind force as Romanesque architecture, enclose all our history within its sullen walls.

Still, the company he keeps is full of fools, of the misinformed and casually malicious, such as the Turkish ambassadress who warns the narrator that the decidedly heterosexual Duc de Guermantes is "a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son." The narrator notes that "error, gullibly credited untruth were for the ambassadress like a life-sustaining element without which she could not function." But he also credits the inanity of conversation at these affairs to his own presence: "The talk was trivial, no doubt because I was present, and, seeing all these pretty people kept apart, it pained me to think that my presence was preventing them from proceeding, in the most precious of its salons, with the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain." 

As he leaves the Hôtel de Guermantes for his appointment with Charlus, the narrator reflects on the occasion as one of his epiphanies: 

I was prey to this second sort of exhilaration, very different from that afforded by a personal impression, like those I had received in other carriages: once in Combray, in Dr. Percepied's gig, from which I had seen the Martinville steeples against the setting sun; another day in Balbec, in Mme de Villeparisis's barouche, when I tried hard to work out what it was I was reminded of by an avenue of trees. But in this third carriage, what I had before my mind's eye was those conversations that had seemed so tedious at Mme de Guermantes's dinner party -- for example, Prince Von's story about the Kaiser, General Botha, and the British Army. I had just slid these into the inner stereoscope we use, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as we adopt a society spirit and wish to receive our life only from others, to bring into solid relief what they have said and done. Like a man who has had too much to drink and feels full of kindness and consideration for the waiter who has been serving him, I marveled at my good fortune -- something I had not felt, for sure, at the actual moment -- in having dined with someone who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were, upon my word, extremely witty.

But whatever euphoria he might be feeling in the carriage is soon to dissipate at the Baron de Charlus's. For Charlus, after making him wait a long time, receives him "stretched out on a sofa" and after the narrator speaks to him "the cold fury on M. de Charlus's face seemed to intensify." He tells the narrator to sit in the Louis XIV chair and then mocks him for his ignorance when he sits in a "Directory fireside chair." Charlus has the "magnificent head" of "an aging Apollo; but it was as if an olive-greenish, bilious juice was about to seep out of his malevolent mouth." 

As Charlus's insults mount, the narrator, though still bewildered by the malevolence, becomes angry: "I grabbed hold of the Baron's new top hat, threw it to the ground, trampled on it, and, bent on pulling it to pieces, I ripped out the lining, tore the crown in two." But when he tries to leave, the Baron prevents him and changes his tone. Though he continues to insult the narrator and to charge him with ingratitude and slander, he also begins to court him, "taking my chin between two fingers, drawn there, it seemed, as if by a magnet, and, after a moment's resistance, running up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. 'Ah, how pleasant it would be to look at 'the blue moonlight' in the Bois with someone like yourself,' he said with sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, than added sadly: 'For you're nice, really. You could be nicer than anyone,' he added, laying his hand paternally on my shoulder." 

"Paternally" is not exactly the word that comes to my mind here. 

Finally, the Baron takes the narrator home in his carriage, still proclaiming that their friendship is over, and that because of his alleged behavior the narrator has blown any chance of being invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's.  So when, a few days later, he receives an invitation from the Princesse, he suspects it of being a hoax or a cruel practical joke. To try to find out if the invitation is real, he goes to visit the Duc and Duchesse, where he encounters Swann and learns that he is suffering from the same illness "that carried off his mother, who had been struck down by it at exactly the age he now was." He talks with Swann about the Dreyfus case and the anti-Semitism of the Prince de Guermantes who, Swann claims, let a wing of his country house burn down "rather than send to the neighboring property -- it belongs to the Rothschilds -- for hoses." Swann, too, he learns, is invited to the Princesse's reception, and they agree to go there together. But the novel ends with the self-absorption of the Duc and Duchesse, who treat their own concerns -- whether the Duchesse should wear red shoes or black -- as more important than Swann's illness.