Day One Hundred Seventy-Five: Finding Time Again, pp. 171-191

From "The Duchesse de Létourville, who was not going to the Princesse de Guermantes's party ..." through "... than that sort of cinematographic approach."

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Jupien and the narrator leave the Baron sitting on a bench to rest while they go for a stroll and talk about Charlus and his state of health. Jupien confides that he can't leave the Baron alone for long because "he's still as randy as a young man" and he's so generous that he keeps giving away "everything he's got to other people." The Baron was temporarily blind, and during this period of sightlessness Jupien once left him alone in a room at "the Temple of Shamelessness," as he calls his brothel, and returned to find Charlus with "a child who wasn't even ten years old." Charlus also tends to cause trouble because of his pro-German sympathies, which he is not shy about voicing loudly:

Even though the war was long over, he would groan about the defeat of the Germans, among whom he counted himself, and say with pride: "And yet there is no doubt but that we shall have our revenge, for we have proved that it is we who are capable of the greater resistance and who have the better organisation." 

Considering the date of Finding Lost Time, Proust is being chillingly prophetic here.

Jupien parts with the narrator: "Look, he's already managed to get into conversation with a gardener's boy.... I can't leave my invalid alone for a second, he's nothing but a great baby." The narrator continues on his way, reflecting that the change from his usual routine is doing him some good, though "The pleasure today seemed to me to be a purely frivolous one, that of going out to an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes." He reflects once again on his lost vocation: "I now had proof that I was no longer good for anything, that literature could no longer bring me any joy, whether through my own fault, because I was not talented enough, or through the fault of literature, if it was indeed less pregnant with reality than I had thought."

And then, entering the courtyard to the Guermantes's house, he dodges an approaching car and steps on some uneven paving stones, triggering the first of a series of epiphanies:

But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive around Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.

He realizes that the paving stones had triggered a memory of similarly "uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark's" in Venice, just as "the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?"

Then, while he is waiting in a sitting room for the conclusion of a piece of music that his hostess wishes not to be interrupted, it happens again: a servant knocks a spoon against a plate, which triggers his memory of a hammer striking the wheel of the train he had recently sat in, feeling indifferent to the beauty of the countryside. And again, a butler gives him a plate of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, and when he wipes his mouth with the napkin, the texture of it recalls a similar sensation while he was looking out to sea at Balbec. Each instant of involuntary memory -- connections between past and present triggered by the madeleine, the paving stones, the sound of the spoon, the texture of the napkin -- "suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."

The narrator perceives in these moments in which "the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in" something he calls "extra-temporal." When he tasted the madeleine, "at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being."

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.

He believes he has experienced "a little bit of time in its pure state." This perception of "the essence of things"

languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. 

"I knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names" -- an observation that takes us back to the concluding sections of Swann's Way ("Place-Names: The Name") and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ("Place-Names: The Place"). He recalls the disillusionments at Balbec, the fact that he did not experience its beauty when he was there as much as he did in remembering it, and that he was unable to recapture that beauty when he went back for a second visit.

Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came in contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths.

This is a vindication of the narrative strategy of In Search of Lost Time, the endless analysis of relationships (Swann-Odette, narrator-Gilberte, narrator-Albertine), the attempt to understand the emotional intricacies of a life.

It is also an attempt to give coherence to one's own existence:

I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already I used attentively to fix before my mind's eye some image which had impelled me to look at it. 

He has been trying to decipher "impressions such as that made on my by the sight of the steeples of Martinville" and other epiphanic moments. And he concludes

I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art? 

The "primary character" of these epiphanies, the thing that gives them their authenticity for the narrator (and hence for the reader), "was that I was not free to choose them." They are not subject to logical analysis. "The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary." Whereas the spontaneous impression contains its own truth, and demands an elucidation that "can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards."

Art, then, is a process of discovery, not of will: "we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, ... we cannot shape it according to our wishes." And above all, it can't be dominated by rules or theories: "A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached." Proust/the narrator here strikes back at proclamations about the social or political role of the artist: "the sound of the spoon on a plat, or the starched stiffness of the napkin ... had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations." He admits that the war has brought out proponents of these roles, which remind him of "M. de Norpois's simple theories in opposition to 'flute-players'" when he criticized Bergotte to the young narrator. And he even takes a dig, I think, at stream-of-consciousness writers:

Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.  

Day One Hundred Nine: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 115-137

Part II, Chapter I, from "Once Swann had left, I returned..." to "...'My hunger's gone.'" 

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We learn that the Princesse de Guermantes, with whom the narrator says he is "one day to be such good friends," is infatuated with Charlus. Whenever the Baron's name comes up in conversation, the narrator notices her alerted attention. "If she made allusion to the rumors that a few people were circulating concerning the Baron, it was only as though to absurd and infamous inventions." As for Charlus's attempts to conceal the fact that he is gay, the narrator asserts, "there are no vices that in high society cannot find complaisant support, and the domestic arrangements of a château have been known to be turned upside down so that a sister may sleep next to her sister the moment it was known that she did not have a merely sisterly love for her." 

As the narrator is getting ready to take his leave with the Duc and Duchesse, who are driving him home, the Duc turns his own attentions to Charlus, his younger brother, speaking to him affectionately. But he makes a gaffe in their conversation to Charlus when, speaking of their earlier years, he says: 

"'Oh, you were someone out of the ordinary, for it can be said that in nothing did you have the same tastes as everyone else....' But hardly had he spoken these words before the Duc went red as a beet, as they say, for he knew, if not of his brother's habits, then at least of his reputation." 

The Duc attempts to cover up the slip, but Charlus had noticed his brother's embarrassment. The moment grows more awkward until the Duchesse intervenes to make moves toward departing. There is a moment of social jousting as they wait for the carriages among the Duchesse, Mme. de Gallardon (who refers to the Duchesse as "a nasty piece of work"), and the Princesse d'Orvilliers, whom the narrator recognizes as a "woman who, near the Guermantes hôtel, had cast long, languorous looks at me.... But never again was I to receive from her, when I met her, a single one of those overtures in which she had seemed to be offering herself."

On the way home, remembering Saint-Loup's comment about the availability of the maid to Baronne Putbus, the narrator asks the Duchesse about the Baronne. She replies, "Oh no, not her.... I don't even know by what mischance I know the name of that cow. She's the dregs of society." 

At home, he discovers that Albertine hasn't arrived yet, so he waits impatiently for her, slipping into his old obsessiveness: "All this anxiety for that same Albertine, to whom I had not given three minutes' thought during the Guermantes soirée!" Finally, she telephones, saying that she had misread his note and was near her home. "I sensed that she was lying, and it was now, in my fury, more from a need to inconvenience her than to see her that I wanted to force her to come." By doing so, he also inconveniences Françoise, who is forced to get out of bed to admit Albertine when she arrives. 

"I had learned to recognize this terrible need for another human being in Combray, in connection with my mother, to the point of wanting to die if she got Françoise to tell me she could not come upstairs." And so, in a matter of a few hours, the narrator has reverted from the sophisticated figure in high society salons to the small boy at the beginning of Swann's Way. The obsessiveness he had shown with Gilberte has also revived. "With Albertine, I felt that I would never learn anything, would never succeed in unraveling this tangled multiplicity of authentic details and untruthful facts." He also treats Françoise cruelly, playing on her dislike of Albertine: "I knew that what was best able to annoy Françoise was that I should spend money on people she did not like... Françoise loathed Albertine, in any case, because Albertine, being poor, could not add anything to what Françoise saw as my advantage."

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 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 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. 

Day Seventy-Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 48-61

From "The reason for Mme de Cambremer's presence..." to "...burning flames of hatred and of love." 
_____
The selection begins with Proust slipping out of the narrator's point of view and into that of Mme. de Cambremer, scrutinizing the Princesse and the Duchesse de Guermantes in their box. 

She was happy enough this evening with the thought that all these women she scarcely knew would be able to see a person from their own set seated beside her, the young Marquis de Beausergent, the brother of Mme Argencourt, who moved between both social worlds, and whom the women of the second were delighted to parade before the eyes of the first.

But Mme. de Cambremer can scarcely be more fascinated -- and delighted -- with the Duchesse than the narrator: 

the Duchesse, goddess turned woman, and for that moment a thousand times more beautiful, raised in my direction the white-gloved hand that had been resting on the edge of the box and waved it as a sign of friendship; my eyes were met by the spontaneous incandescence and the flashing eyes of the Princesse, who had unwittingly set them ablaze merely by the movement of looking to see whom her cousin had just greeted, and the latter who had recognized me, showered upon me the sparkling and celestial rain of her smile. 

An obsession is rekindled, and he begins to stalk the Duchesse with all the ardor that he used to direct toward encounters with the gang of girls. But the Duchesse seems displeased with the meetings on her daily walk that the narrator engineers; he pretends not to see her until the moment they pass each other in the street. She responds with "a sullen face that gave a distinctly curt nod, far removed from the friendly gesture of the Phèdre evening." He wonders if "it was possible that Mme de Guermantes's servants had heard their mistress say how tired she was of inevitably running into me when she went out, and had repeated her remarks to Françoise." 


He begins to mistrust Françoise, who "was the first person to demonstrate to me by her example (which I was to understand only much later, when it was repeated more painfully, as the final volumes of this work will show, by a person who was much dearer to me) that the truth does not have to be spoken to be made apparent." Françoise sometimes seems to be full of benevolence toward him. 

But Jupien, whose lapses into indiscretion were unfamiliar to me at the time, revealed afterward that she had told him that I was not worth the price of the rope it would take to hang me, and that I had tried to do her all the harm I could. 

He begins to doubt the evidence of his senses, to suspect "that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving.... Was it the same with all social relations? And to what depths of despair would it lead me if it were the same with love? That was the future's secret." 

And thus it was [Françoise] who first gave me the idea that people do not, as I had imagined, present themselves to us clearly and in fixity with their merits, their defects, their plans, their intentions with regard to ourselves..., but, rather, as a shadow we can never penetrate, of which there can be no direct knowledge, about which we form countless believes based upon words and even actions, neither of which give us more than insufficient and in fact contradictory information, a shadow that we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, as masking the burning flames of hatred and of love.

Day Seventy-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 38-48

From "But my eyes were diverted from..." to "...or the first flames of a great fire." 

_____

The narrator's attention is turned to "a badly dressed, ugly little woman" who turns out to be an unsuccessful actress, a rival of La Berma's filled with "a deadly hatred" for her. When the performance of the act from Phèdre begins, the woman comments derisively about La Berma until those around her shush her. 

This time, in part because he came in with diminished expectations, he finds that "the talent of La Berma, which had escaped me when I had struggled hard to grasp its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indifference, imposed itself forcefully upon my admiration as something self-evident." She becomes "a window opening onto a masterpiece" but also something more: "La Berma's interpretation was, around Racine's work, a second work, it, too, enlivened by genius." 

He realizes that he is no longer setting La Berma's performance against some "preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius."

Now I could appreciate the merits of a wide-ranging, poetic, and powerful interpretation; or, rather, it was upon this that these words are conventionally conferred, but only in the way that we give the names Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets that have nothing mythological about them. Our feelings belong to one world, our ability to name things and our thoughts belong to another; we can establish a concordance between the two, but not bridge the gap. 

I think what he's saying here is that the emotional impact of an experience cannot be fully expressed in words, which are abstracts of the experience. And that relying on words -- such as "wide-ranging, poetic, and powerful" -- as a guide to what the one who utters them has experienced is inadequate. 

But what's happening on stage isn't the only dramatic or aesthetic experience to be had in the theater: "the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the box, smothered in white chiffon." And a sort of duel ensues between the Duchesse and the Princesse. "It was as if the Duchesse had guessed that her cousin, of whom, rumor had it, she was prone to make fun for what she called her 'exaggerations' ..., would be dressed this evening in a manner that the Duchesse thought of as 'theatrical,' and that she had decided to give her a lesson in good taste." But together, both the Duchesse and the Princesse show up other women in the theater.

As in the play that was now being performed, to understand how much personal poetry La Berma drew from it, one had only to transfer her role, the role she alone knew how to play, to any other actress, so the spectator who looked toward the balcony would have seen, in two of the boxes there, how an "arrangement" that was supposed to resemble that of the Princesse de Guermantes's box merely made the Baronne de Morienval appear eccentric, pretentious, and ill-bred, and how an attempt, both painstaking and costly, to imitate the dress and style of the Duchesse de Guermantes merely made Mme de Cambremer look like some provincial schoolgirl mounted on wires, rigid, desiccated, and crabby, with a plume of feathers from some funeral procession stuck vertically in her hair. 

The narrator has learned from Elstir not to regard matters of fashion as trivial. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the artist had talked about fashion with respect: "To despise dressmakers was no longer possible, since Elstir had said that the deft and gentle gesture with which they give a final ruffle, a last caress, to the bows and feathers of a just-completed hat was as much a challenge to his artistry as any movement by a jockey." (ITSOYGIF, p. 481)

Day Seventy: The Guermantes Way, pp. 21-38

From "Despite the apparent haughtiness of their butler..." to "...immense bird of paradise, soft, glittering, and velvety." 

_____

Françoise is the narrator's principal source of information about their new home. She tells him 

that the Guermantes did not occupy their hôtel because of some immemorial right, but were fairly recent tenants, and that the garden they overlooked on the side that was unknown to me was quite small and no different from all the other neighboring gardens; so I discovered at last that it contained no feudal gallows or fortified mill, no fishpond or pillared dovecote, no communal bakehouse, tithe barn, or fortress, no fixed bridges or drawbridges, not even flying bridges or toll bridges, no pointed towers, wall charters, or commemorative mounds. 

Nevertheless, he persists in his fascination with the name "Guermantes," and the images it rouses in his imagination, and is further intrigued when a friend of his father's says of the Duchesse: "She has the highest status in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hers is the leading house in the Faubourg." He recalls how his glimpse of her in the church at Combray had been disillusioning at first, "like a god or a nymph changed into a swan or a willow and henceforth subjected to natural laws." His frequent sightings of her now as she comes and goes from the hôtel could also be disillusioning: 

she played out the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked the position of her veil, smoothed her cuffs, arranged her cape, as the divine swan goes through all the movements of his animal species, keeps his painted eyes on either side of his beak without any sign of movement in them, and then darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, behaving like a swan and forgetting that he is a god.

But he persists in wanting to "know what was really enclosed within the brilliant orange-colored envelope of her name." He is amazed "that this leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was situated on the Right Bank and the fact that, every morning, from my bedroom, I could hear its carpets being beaten." Nor is he fazed by the arrogance of the Duc de Guermantes, "who stood there on the pavement, a giant, enormous in his light-colored clothes, a cigar between his teeth, his head in the air, his monocle alert," waiting for the horse that would take him to "his mistress in the Champs-Élysées." 

Françoise continues to be a conduit for information about the family that she gleans from the servants, including the Duchesse's plans to visit the Duchesse de Guise at Cannes and her attending the Opéra in the box of the Princess of Parma. (Françoise also reports that "there had been a good deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d'Ambresac, and that it was virtually settled.") 


And then the narrator comes in possession of a ticket to a gala at the Opéra, where La Berma will be doing an act from Phèdre. His disappointment at his first experience of La Berma's performance makes that part of the gala of less interest to him than the opportunity to glimpse society in its element. And as he waits for the gala to begin, he, like others in the orchestra, gawks at the "white deities" in the boxes, imagining them as "water goddesses," as "radiant daughters of the sea ... constantly turning round to smile at the bearded tritons who hung from the anfractuous rocks of the ocean depths, or at some aquatic demigod, whose skull was a polished stone, around which the tide had washed up a smooth deposit of seaweed, and whose gaze was a disc of rock crystal." (In other words, a balding man with a monocle.) 


The Princesse de Guermantes, in her parterre box, particularly draws his attention. 

The imagination being like a barrel organ that does not work properly and always plays a different tune from the one it should, every time I had heard anyone mention the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection of certain sixteenth-century masterpieces began to sing in my head. I was forced to rid myself of the association now that I saw her there before me, offering crystallized fruit to a stout gentleman in tails.

And then the performance of the act from Phèdre begins.