Day One Hundred Eighty-Two: Finding Time Again, pp. 322-358

From "At this moment an unexpected incident occurred. ..." through "... between which so many days have taken up their place -- in Time."

_____

La Berma's daughter and son-in-law have left her, "spitting a little blood," and come to the party to see Rachel. A footman brings their note to Rachel who "smiled at the transparency of their pretext and at her own triumph," and sends word that her performance is over. "The footmen in the ante-room, where the couple's wait continued, were already beginning to snigger at the two rejected supplicants." Meanwhile, Rachel makes fun of them before allowing them to enter, "ruining at a stroke La Berma's position in society, as they had destroyed her health." She also plans to taunt La Berma backstage about their crashing the party. "Yet she might have shrunk from delivering it if she had known that it would be fatal."

We learn now that the Duchesse is unhappy because the Duc, having mostly stopped being unfaithful to her, has fallen in love with Odette. He has "sequestrated his mistress to the point that, if my love for Albertine had repeated, with major variations, Swann's love of Odette, M. de Guermantes's love for her had recalled my love for Albertine." Odette has come full circle, becoming "once more, just as she had appeared to me in my childhood, the lady in pink" kept by his Uncle Adolphe.

As for the Duc, the narrator sees him as "little more than a ruin, but a superb one, or perhaps not even a ruin so much as that most romantic of beautiful objects, a rock in a storm." And he watches as the Duc, "tried painfully to pass through the door and descend the staircase on his way out," an image that will haunt the narrator until the closing pages of the novel.

Odette has turned talkative in her old age, and under the impression that the narrator "was a well-known author," tells him stories about her affairs, including one with M. de Bréauté. As for Swann, she says, "Poor Charles, he was so intelligent, so fascinating, exactly the kind of man I liked best." And the narrator thinks, "perhaps this was true." The narrator listens to her stories, which she tells him "simply to give me what she thought were subjects for novels."

She was wrong, not because she had not provided the reserves of my imagination with an abundance of material, but because this had been done in a much more involuntary fashion and by an act that I initiated myself as I drew out from her, without her knowledge, the laws of her life.

The Duchesse, too, is forthcoming, in her own way, with the narrator, and they leave the main drawing-room to visit the smaller rooms where people are getting away from the crowd and listening to music. In one room they see a beautiful woman whom the Duchesse identifies as Mme. de Saint-Euverte, the wife of one of the grand-nephews of the Mme. de Saint-Euverte at whose soirée Swann and the Duchesse, then the Princesse des Laumes, had chatted long ago. The Duchesse denies having been at that party. The present Mme. de Saint-Euverte, stretched out in a cradle-like chaise longue, becomes for the narrator a symbol of "both the distance and the continuity of Time. It was Time that she was rocking in that hollow cradle, where the name of Saint-Euverte and Empire style were bursting into flower in red fuchsia silk."

The Duchesse now takes it on herself to denounce Gilberte as "the most artificial, the most bourgeois thing I've ever seen," and to chide the narrator for coming "to great soulless affairs like this. Unless of course you're gathering material...." He points out how hard it must be for Gilberte "to have to listen, as she just has, to her husband's former mistress." But the Duchesse doubts that it affects Gilberte at all, and claims that "there were an awful lot of stories" about how Gilberte was unfaithful to Saint-Loup, including with an officer whom he wanted to challenge to a duel. She calls Gilberte "a slut," which the narrator sees as "the product of the hatred she felt for Gilberte, by a need to hit her, if not physically then in effigy."

Gilberte introduces him to her daughter, and says that Saint-Loup "was very proud of her. Though of course given his tastes, Gilberte went on naïvely, I think he would have preferred a boy." Mlle. de Saint-Loup, he tells us, "later chose to marry an obscure literary figure, for she was devoid of snobbery, and brought her family down to a level below that from which it had started." And she becomes the nexus of the story he is telling us:

They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her. Above all it was the two great "ways" which had led to her, along which I had had so many walks and so many dreams -- through her father, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way, through her mother, Gilberte, the Méséglise way which was the "way by Swann's". One, through the little girl's mother and the Champs-Élysées, led me to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to the Méséglise way; the other, through her father, to my afternoons at Balbec, where I could visualize him close in the sunlit sea.

But there are other tangling ways: He had first seen Odette as the lady in pink at the house of his great-uncle, whose manservant was the father of Charles Morel, whom both Charlus and Saint-Loup had been in love with. And so on, as the threads draw in Albertine and the Verdurins and Vinteuil's music and Legrandin and the other characters of the novel, so that "between the least significant point in our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us in fact a choice about which connection to make."

Thus, "in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space." And "memory, by bringing the past into the present without making any changes to is, just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time through which a life is given reality." And here he begins the task of writing the book, of restoring the past "from our ceaseless falsification of it," which necessitates

putting up with the work like tiredness, accepting it like a rule, constructing it like a church, following it like a regime, overcoming it like an obstacle, winning it like a friendship, feeding it up like a child, creating it like a world, without ever neglecting its mysteries.

He assumes the task at his "big deal table, watched by Françoise," who "through being so close to my life, ... had developed a kind of instinctive understanding of literary work, more accurate than that of many intelligent people, let alone fools." He constructs his book "not as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making," assembling his notes and sketches, "pinning a supplementary page in place here and there," a process with which Françoise can sympathize, "as she always used to be saying how she could not sew if she did not have the right number thread and the proper buttons."

Anxieties arise, however: "feeling myself the bearer of a work of literature made the idea of an accident in which I might meet my death seem much more dreadful." And he understands "that since my childhood I had already died a number of times." He also experiences the incomprehension of others, when he shows them his first sketches for the work: "In the places where I was trying to find general laws, I was accused of sifting through endless detail." (The reader, or at least this one, certainly knows what he means here.) He returns to his beloved Arabian Nights for a parallel to his experience: "I would be living with the anxiety of not knowing whether the Master of my destiny, less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, when I broke off my story each evening, would stay my death sentence, and permit me to take up the continuation again the following evening." And he accepts the possibility that the book itself  will "eventually die, one day.... Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men."

Yet he remains convinced that he has something to say about his great theme:

the fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels, and this universality could only delight me, since this was the truth, the truth suspected by everybody, that it was my task to elucidate.... It was this notion of embodied time, of past years not being separated from us, that it was now my intention to make such a prominent feature in my work.

And then he recalls the Duc de Guermantes, weighed down by years, perched "on the scarcely manageable summit of his eighty-three years, as if all men are perched on top of living stilts which never stop growing, sometimes becoming taller than church steeples, until eventually they make walking difficult and dangerous, and down from which, all of a sudden, they fall." So his first concern is with the people in his novel, describing them, "even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space."

That is (to single out the last words of the novel), "in Time."

FIN

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Sixty-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 3-29

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Sixty-Four: The Fugitive, pp. 563-587*

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

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, concluded, from "The memory of Albertine had become so fragmented within me...."

_____

The narrator claims, "I was happier to have Andrée by my side than I would have been to have Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée would be able to tell me more about Albertine that Albertine herself had ever told me." And what Andrée tells him as they're making out is pretty hot stuff. For one thing, that Albertine "had met a handsome lad at Mme Verdurin's called Morel," and that Morel had acted as bait, luring "young laundry-maids and young fisher-girls" into threesomes with him and Albertine and once taking Albertine and one of the girls "to a house of ill-fame in Couliville, where four or five women took her together or in succession."

But Andrée also claims that Albertine felt remorse and "hoped that you would save her, that you would marry her." Then she recalls the time that the narrator almost caught them in the act. The narrator's reaction is that "this was the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress, if indeed it was true, which suddenly surfaces from the depths when we no longer have any use for it." He questions Andrée's veracity, and notes that she had been spreading malicious rumors about a "man whom we had met at Balbec and who since then had been living with Rachel." This is Octave, who when he first appears in the novel is a rather foppish young golfer whom Albertine dismisses as "a lounge lizard." He is also a nephew of the Verdurins, whom he mocks. In an extended aside, the narrator tells us that later, Octave is to leave Rachel and marry Andrée, and that he will reveal himself as a talented designer who "introduced into contemporary art a revolution at least equal to hat accomplished by the Ballets Russes." (Peter Collier's note tells us that Octave is modeled in part on Jean Cocteau.)

The narrator continues with Andrée's revelations, including the suggestion that the reason Albertine left the narrator was that she didn't want the other "girls of the little gang" to know she was living with a man to whom she was not married. He finds it satisfying that her revelations confirm his original suspicions instead of "the wretched and cowardly optimism to which I had later yielded." And he forms a theory that Albertine's lesbianism had brought out her "masculine" side, "creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility." (Our narrator is of course subject to homophobic hokum.)

His grilling of Andrée is interrupted by dinner with his mother, who reports that the Princess of Parma has paid her a visit -- an unheard of thing. It was her way of making amends for the snub she had delivered the narrator's mother, who "thought, and later I came to share her opinion, that the Princess of Parma had quite simply failed to recognize her annd thought she need take no notice of her." On learning what she had done from the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princess broke protocol and made her visit.

Andrée and the narrator meet again a week later, when she presents another theory for Albertine's leaving: that her aunt feared the narrator wouldn't marry her, spoiling her for another marriage that Mme. Bontemps had in mind for her. And that the visit Albertine was supposed to make to Mme. Verdurin was not to meet Mlle. Vinteuil there, but this young man. Andrée also claims that there had never been anything physical between Albertine and either Mlle. Vinteuil or her lover. The narrator retains his doubts:

But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who had been lying? Truth and life are indeed an uphill path, and, without ever really getting to know them, I felt that the final impression which they left me was one where sadness was perhaps still overshadowed by fatigue.

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One Hundred Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 494-510

Part II, Chapter II, from "I know you're related to Admiral..." to "...the poor general has never lost."

_____

It seems that in the world of high society, the narrator is always being mistaken for someone or other. This time, it's the Princess of Parma's lady-in-waiting, Mme. de Varambon, who is sure he's related to an admiral who is "a complete stranger to me." And "despite the admonitions of the Princess of Parma and my own protestations" can't be convinced otherwise. At another occasion, someone else insists that the narrator is a "great friend of his cousin," who met him in Scotland. "I have never been in Scotland," the narrator tells him, "and in my honesty I went to the trouble -- a complete waste of time -- of pointing this out." Like politicians, Proust's socialites seem to create their own reality.

As does the Duchesse, when she insists that Zola, to whom the conversation has turned, is "not a realist, he's a poet, madame!" The narrator observes that she is "drawing her inspiration from the critical articles she had read over the last few years and converting them to her individual brilliance." The Princess of Parma is so stunned by the assertion that she "gave a sudden start for fear of being knocked to her feet." The Duchesse goes on to proclaim, "He's master of the epic dungheap! The Homer of the sewers! He can't write Cambronne's expletive" -- i.e., merde -- "in big enough letters." (In her conversation with Swann in Swann's Way the Duchesse, then the Princesse des Laumes, made a sly reference to Mme. de Cambremer's "astonishing name" -- the joke being that it is made up of both "Cambronne" and "merde.") She then turns her attention to the narrator: "'I do believe that Zola has actually written a study on the work of Elstir, the painter whose pictures you were looking at a while ago. The only ones of his that I like, as it happens,' she added. In fact, she hated Elstir's painting, but found something special in anything that was in her own house." 

The narrator asks the Duc about the identity of one of the figures in a painting in their collection, but the Duc claims to "have no head for names.... Swann would be able to tell you. He's the one who made Mme de Guermantes buy all that stuff." He then adds, "Not that there's much need to rack one's brains to say all there is to be said about M. Elstir's paintings, as there would be if we were talking about Ingres's La Source or The Princes in the Tower by Paul Delaroche" -- two paintings (left to right above) in the style that Elstir and other Impressionists were reacting against in their work. The Duc continues to note with outrage that Swann urged him to buy Elstir's A Bunch of Asparagus: "Three hundred francs for a bunch of asparagus!... It surprises me that someone with a discriminating mind like yourself, someone with a superior mind, actually likes that sort of thing." This painting of Elstir's was probably inspired by one by Manet: 

The Princess of Parma asks if Elstir hadn't started working on a portrait of the Duchesse.

"Indeed he did. He painted me as red as a beet. It's not the sort of thing that's going to set him down for posterity. It's ghastly. Basin wanted to destroy it."

This last statement was one that Mme de Guermantes was always making. But at other times she chose to judge differently: "I don't care for his work, but he did once do a good portrait of me." The first of these judgments was usually addressed to people who asked the Duchesse about her portrait, the second to those who did not mention it and whom she was anxious to apprise of its existence. The first was inspired by concern with her appearance, the second by vanity.

To explain why he sought out the company of so frivolous and hypocritical a woman, the narrator comments, "Mme de Guermantes's mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was precisely what constituted the substance of my own mind) and everything that, on account of this exclusion, it had been able to preserve, the seductive vigor of supple bodies which no exhausting reflection, moral anxiety, or nervous disorder has distorted." He likens her effect on him to that of the gang of girls at Balbec. 

Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, though remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan.

As an instance of the Duchesse's "respect for intellectual values," the company at table also includes "M. de Bréauté, the author of an essay on the Mormons that had appeared in the Revue des deux mondes" and who "moved only in the most aristocratic circles, but even then only in such as boasted a certain reputation for intellect.... His hatred of snobs derived from his own snobbishness, but it led the simple-minded (in other words, everyone) to believe that he was untainted by it." 

The Duchesse turns the conversation to her aunt, Mme. de Villeparisis, and the Duc chimes in with an observation that "Aunt Madeleine" had "said her piece to that man Bloch" at her recent salon. The Princess of Parma notes that "Mme de Villeparisis is not exactly what one would call a ... 'moral' person," but the look on the Duchesse's face makes her add, "But of course an intellect of such a high order excuses everything." But the Duchesse goes on to treat Mme. de Villeparisis with the same vitriol as she uses on others: "She will always have a reputation as a lady of the old school, a woman of sparkling wit and the loosest morals. And yet one couldn't conceive of a more middle-class, serious-minded, and lackluster person." 

A mention of Charlus causes a moment of tension between the Duc and the Duchesse. She observes that his elaborate mourning of his late wife is "as if he's mourning a cousin, a grandmother, a sister. It's not the grief of a husband.... He's as soft as a woman, Mémé is!" "Don't talk rubbish," M. de Guermantes broke in sharply. "There's nothing effeminate about Mémé. I can't think of anyone more manly than he is." Methinks the Duc doth protest too much, and so does the Duchesse: "'He's always like this when he thinks anyone is getting at his brother,' she added, turning to the Princess of Parma."

There is talk about Saint-Loup and his desire not to return to Morocco, and the Prince de Foix reveals that Saint-Loup may not have split up with Rachel after all: "'I came across her two days ago in Robert's bachelor apartment and they didn't look like two people who'd quarreled, believe me,' replied the Prince de Foix, who liked to spread every bit of gossip that might possibly damage Robert's chances of marrying." 

"That Rachel was telling me about you," says Prince von Faffenheim, who, we learned earlier, usually goes by the name "Prince Von" or even just  "Von," to the narrator. "She said that our friend Saint-Loup idolized you, that he was even fonder of you than he was of her." He goes on "devouring his food like a red-faced ogre as he spoke, all his teeth exposed by his perpetual grin." He also makes an enigmatic reference to the mistress of the Prince de Foix and offers to explain it it to the narrator if he'll come by his place afterward. The narrator declines, citing his appointment with Charlus. Prince Von says that he was also invited to dine with Charlus but not after a quarter to eleven, and offers to accompany the narrator part of the way. "But the wide-eyed gaze on his coarse, handsome red face alarmed me, and I declined his offer by telling him that a friend was coming to collect me. There was nothing offensive about this response as far as I could see. But the Prince apparently thought differently and did not address another word to me." 

There's always something left to be explained in the narrator's encounters.

Day Ninety-Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 342-366

Part II, Chapter II, from "Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn..." to "...the songs of a Gothic jongleur." 

_____

The second chapter, like the first, begins with a summary, but since the chapter constitutes the remaining 250 pages of the book, it's a rather scanty summary. 

It begins with a bit of a surprise, in the narrator's statement, "I had just been reborn." Given his earlier description of his deep attachment to his grandmother, that seems almost callous coming immediately after the account of her death. His mother, he notes, is still in mourning, but she is in Combray with his father, and is not around to disapprove of his plans to visit Mme. Villeparisis's house to see a play that's being performed there. 

So he is left alone in Paris, remembering his stay in Doncières with Saint-Loup, and listening to the hiccuping sound of the new furnace boiler, which "was in no way connected to my memories of Doncières, but its prolonged encounter with them inside me that afternoon was to force it into such an affinity with them that, after I thought I had more or less forgotten it, whenever I heard the central heating it would bring them back to me." Another instance of "involuntary memory," or "Proustian moment." 

We learn that Saint-Loup and Rachel have broken up, and that Saint-Loup had been angry with him for a while because Rachel, to provoke Saint-Loup's jealousy, had claimed that the narrator tried to have sex with her. But now Saint-Loup has written to say that he had met Mlle. de Stermaria, with whom the narrator was smitten at Balbec, and "had asked for an assignation with the young woman on my behalf." He is now awaiting a response to the letter he has written to Mlle. de Stermaria (now "Mme de Stermaria, given that she had divorced her husband after three months of marriage").

But then Albertine pays him a surprise visit. She has matured so much that "she was hardly recognizable ... she had a real face at last; her body had developed." 

I am not quite sure whether it was the desire for Balbec or for her that took hold of me then; perhaps my desire for her was itself a lazy, cowardly, incomplete way of possessing Balbec, as if to possess a thing materially, to take up residence in a town, were equivalent to possessing it spiritually. 

As before, the narrator thinks of sexual attraction as a matter of possession. And while he claims that he was "not in the least in love with Albertine," he dreams "both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body" the way Eve is attached to Adam's body in the medieval sculptures at Balbec. 

In their conversation, we learn the intriguing fact that the narrator has fought a duel, but no further details. The narrator focuses instead on her manner of speech, which strikes him as more "grown-up" than it had in Balbec, and suspects that she has learned these expressions "from Mme Bontemps, along with a hatred of Jews and a respect for the color black because it is always suitable and never out of place." 

And reiterating that he was no longer in love with her, so that he "no longer ran the risk, as I might have done in Balbec, of wrecking her affection for me, since it no longer existed," he begins to seduce her -- at least into letting him kiss her cheek. He is in bed already, so he teases her into lying down next to him by saying "I'm not in the least ticklish. You could tickle me for a whole hour and I wouldn't feel a thing." She responds to this come-on by getting in bed with him, only to be interrupted by the entrance of Françoise with a lamp: "Albertine had just time to regain her chair." 

Their game resumes when Françoise leaves (although the narrator suspects her of listening outside the door). He reflects that 

women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

His teasing pursuit of Albertine results in a kind of consummation -- on his part at least: "her caresses had satisfied me in a way that she could not have failed to notice, and which I had even feared might provoke her to the slight gesture of revulsion and offended modesty Gilberte had made in similar circumstances behind the laurel bushes in the Champs-Élysées." Albertine does seem "embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going after what had just happened." As for the narrator, he is more concerned about getting her to leave so he can get to the play at Mme. Villeparisis's on time. And he maintains a kind of cold distance from her: 

Albertine -- and this was perhaps, with another, which will be clear in due course, one of the reasons that had made me unconsciously desire her -- was one of the incarnations of the charming little French country girl typified in stone in Saint-André-des-Champs. I recognized in her, as I did in Françoise, who was soon nevertheless to become her deadly enemy, a courtesy toward host and stranger, a sense of propriety, a respectful bedside manner.

Even without the heavy-handed foreshadowing, it's clear this is not going to work out well.                        

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, the Dreyfus affair made strange bedfellows. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Eighty-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 261-275

From "M. de Charlus was soon seated..." to "...I was the same man."

_____

Charlus has arrived, though Mme. de Villeparisis was not too happy about it, largely because he could be unpredictable and, as the narrator puts it, "was the soul of indiscretion." Charlus has yet to acknowledge the narrator, who observes, "The tuft of his gray hair, the twinkling eye beneath the eyebrow pushed up by his monocle, the red flowers in his buttonhole were like three mobile apexes in a convulsive and striking triangle.... [T]he Baron's roving eyes, like those of a street hawker constantly on the lookout for the 'cops' to appear, had certainly explored every corner of the room and taken in everybody there." 

Odette, too, is somewhat distant, and when the narrator says something nice about de Norpois to her, she tells him that Charlus said that at a dinner recently de Norpois had referred to the narrator as "a hysterical little flatterer." The narrator, realizing that he had once tried to use de Norpois to get an introduction to Odette, changes the subject to the Duchesse de Guermantes. "Mme Swann adopted the pretense of regarding her as a person of no interest, whose presence one did not even notices." 

Then, "in my attempt to form an exact picture of the life of Mme de Guermantes," he asks Mme. de Villeparisis about Mme. Leroi, who refers to her "with affected disdain" as "the daughter of those wealthy timber merchants.... I've known such interesting, such delightful people in my time that I can't really think that Mme Leroi could add anything further to that." She asks de Norpois whether Mme. Leroi isn't "very inferior to all the people who come here," but he responds only with an enigmatic bow. So she says to the narrator, "there are some absurd people about. Would you believe that I was visited this afternoon by a gentleman who tried to persuade me that he found more pleasure in kissing my hand than a young woman's." The narrator knows "immediately that this must have been Legrandin." 

Next he talks with Saint-Loup and suggests that they dine together the next day, and discovers that Saint-Loup is dining with Bloch, who has so recently been denouncing him to everyone. Saint-Loup says, "I think it's friendship for life between us, on his part at least." The narrator is not surprised: "To fulminate against someone was often Bloch's way of showing a keen sympathy that he had supposed was not reciprocal." 

And speaking of abrupt reversals, Charlus suddenly invites the narrator to visit him. But their conversation is interrupted by Saint-Loup's departure, after a small quarrel with his mother. She expresses her distress to the narrator, who "was glad not to give her the impression by leaving with Robert that I was involved in the pleasures that deprived her of him." 

At that moment I would have undertaken a mission to make Robert break with his mistress as readily as I had been to make him go and live with her permanently a few hours earlier. In the one case, Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend; in the other, his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet, in that interval of a few hours, I was the same man.

The narrator's involvement in society has become much more complicated. 

Day Eighty-Five: The Guermantes Way, pp. 225-237

From "M. de Guermantes sat up in the armchair..." to "... 'Yes, Your Highness, of your bracelets.'" 

_____

The Dreyfus case dominates today's excerpt, pretty much establishing the date of the scene as 1898 with a reference to Bloch's attending the trial of Émile Zola. (This also provides a clue to the narrator's age: Proust was 26 when the trial took place.) 

His conversation with de Norpois about the case has left Bloch none the wiser as to the ambassador's true opinions on the case. De Norpois gives an eyeroll when Mme. de Villeparisis asks him about their conversation, indicating to the narrator that de Norpois is "a convinced anti-Dreyfusard" whose diplomatic skills have "flattered Bloch's vanity" and left him unable "to disentangle M. de Norpois's real views." 

But there's no doubt about the prevailing view of the people at Mme. de Villeparisis's salon. The Duc de Guermantes is fuming because Saint-Loup's election to the Jockey Club has been endangered by his Dreyfusard views: "[I]f one of our family were to be refused membership in the Jockey -- especially Robert, whose father was president for ten years -- it would be an outrage. ... With a name like 'the Marquis de Saint-Loup,' one isn't a Dreyfusard. And that's all there is to it." M. de Guermantes blames it on "that dreadful bed-hopping young miss of his. ... And she just happens to be a compatriot of our M. Dreyfus." And while the Duc proclaims his broadmindedness with a version of the "some of my best friends" argument -- "I'd be happy to be seen with a Negro if he was a friend of mine, and I wouldn't give two hoots what anyone thought" -- he also proclaims, "I am quite capable of proving that there's never been a drop of Jewish blood in our family." 

The Duchesse reveals that her chief objection to Dreyfus is one of style: "Those idiotic, heavy-handed letters he writes from his island! I don't know whether M. Esterhazy is any better, but at least there is more style about the way he writes, more of a sense of tone. M. Dreyfus's supporters can't be very pleased about it. What a pity they can't just exchange their innocent victim for one with more style." 

The scene leaves no doubt that the narrator (and Bloch and Saint-Loup) are out of the mainstream of high society's opinion on the case. 

Day Eighty-Four: The Guermantes Way, pp. 209-224

From "Mme de Villeparisis rang, and a footman..." to "...repeating a long-established joke."

_____

Bloch's breaking the vase is not his first faux pas of the evening. Muttering to himself, he blames the servants for putting the vase where he might bump into it, and Mme. de Villeparisis for not training them better. "He was one of those touchy, high-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it," the narrator comments. Bloch starts to take his leave, but Mme. de Villeparisis calls him back to discuss the theatrical production he proposes to stage at her home. Among the performers he wants to use is "a tragic actress 'with blue-green eyes, beautiful as Hera,' who would recite lyrical prose with a feeling for 'plastic beauty.' But when she heard the actress's name, Mme de Villeparisis declined. It was the name of Saint-Loup's mistress." 

She whispers to the narrator that she thinks the affair will soon be over, and blames it all on Captain Borodino for "furthering a scandalous liaison" by giving Saint-Loup leave to see Rachel in Bruges. Meanwhile, Bloch keeps adding to his gaffes by denouncing Saint-Loup as a "dirty rascal" and by telling an anecdote in which Saint-Loup -- or "de Saint-Loup-en-Bray" as Bloch persists in calling him -- fails to show due deference to the son of Sir Rufus Israels. The anecdote lands with a thud in the room because "Sir Rufus Israels, whom Bloch and his father regarded as an almost royal figure, one to be trembled at by the likes of Saint-Loup, was in the eyes of the Guermantes world merely a foreign upstart." 


Bloch goes on to rudely insist on opening a window, and when Mme. de Villeparisis forbids it because she has a cold, he persists in calling the room a "hothouse" and arguing that the overheated room is "exactly what is giving you the cold." And then he asks to be introduced to de Norpois because he wants "to get him to talk about the Dreyfus case." Mme. de Villeparisis is embarrassed because Bloch's eagerness to see de Norpois brings attention to their relationship: de Norpois is already present, in her study, and has not yet come down to join the party. 

She sends the butler to fetch de Norpois, who picks up a hat at random in the vestibule to conceal the fact that he hasn't arrived from outside: "He had no idea that the Marquise had completely undermined the plausibility of this charade prior to his appearance." When he arrives, she treats him with "an exaggerated respect for his position as ambassador." But the narrator notes that these "less familiar, more ceremonious marks of respect ..., in the salon of a distinguished woman, in contrast to the freedom with which she treats her other regular guests, mark out that man immediately as her lover." 

De Norpois warmly greets the narrator, who "took advantage of this to relieve him of the hat he had felt obliged to bring with him as a sign of formality; I had just noticed that it was my own." But the ambassador continues to steamroll over the narrator's opinions, reminding him that he had harshly criticized the narrator's writing, and that they had disagreed about Bergotte. But the narrator decides to press the advantage of de Norpois's acquaintance with the Duchesse de Guermantes, hoping that the ambassador might help him get an invitation from her to see the paintings by Elstir that she owns. He tells de Norpois that Elstir is his favorite painter and that the Duchesse owns one -- "a masterpiece" -- he'd particularly like to see. But as usual, de Norpois puts him down: "'A masterpiece!' exclaimed M. de Norpois in astonished disapproval. 'It can't even claim to be a picture. It's a mere sketch.'" 

Bloch takes de Norpois aside, and the narrator overhears the Duchesse and Mme. de Villeparisis talking about Rachel, who had once given a disastrous performance at the Duchesse's salon. "A perfect horror, you know," the Duchesse says. "Not an ounce of talent, and grotesque to look at." At that moment, her husband arrives and she says, wryly, "Oh, well, I suppose I'd better be going," a reference "to the comic aspect of their appearing to be paying a call together like a newly married couple, and not to the often strained relations that existed between her and this strapping pleasure-seeker, who was getting on in years, but who still led the life of a young bachelor." The Duchesse goes on to talk about Rachel's performance of a play by Maeterlinck, which disillusions the narrator: "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. I found a sort of grim satisfaction in this evidence of her total incomprehension of Maeterlinck." 


Bloch has returned and, overhearing the conversation about Saint-Loup and his mistress, "began to slander him so violently that everyone was appalled." M. d'Argencourt suggests that there is a similarity between Saint-Loup's relationship with Rachel and that of Swann and Odette.

"Oh, but things were quite different in Swann's case," the Duchesse protested. "It was extraordinary, I know, because she was something of an idiot, but she was never ridiculous, and at one time she was pretty."

"Pooh-pooh!" muttered Mme de Villeparisis.

"You didn't think so? I did. She had some charming features, very fine eyes, lovely hair, and she dressed wonderfully. She still does. She's become loathsome, I agree, but she was a ravishing woman in her time. Not that I was any less sorry when Charles married her, because it was so unnecessary" 

Day Eighty-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 160-177

From "She seemed concerned to concur..." to "...part of the afternoon in my company."

_____

The narrator discovers that "Rachel, when from the Lord" is intelligent and articulate, if a bit given to slang -- "the irritating jargon of literary cliques and artists' studios." She likes the same works of art -- Impressionism, Wagner -- that he does. He also notes that she was "clumsy with her hands," and that "She recovered her dexterity only when she was making love, with the touchingly intuitive foresight of women who are so in love with men's bodies that they immediately sense what will give most pleasure to those bodies, which are yet so different from their own." How does he know this? 

In talking of the theater, she says that La Berma's "way of doing things no longer appeals to us." He is irritated by the "ironic superiority" with which she talks of other actors, "because I believed -- quite wrongly, as it happened -- that it was she who was inferior to them." He also gives a foreshadowing hint in a remark about "all great talent that is not yet recognized, as hers was not at the time." Throughout this, he refers to her as "Saint-Loup's mistress" more often than he does to her as Rachel.

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup's jealousy continues to flare up, as when he notices that she was "making eyes at a young student who was lunching with a friend at one of the next tables." Then word comes that someone outside the restaurant is asking for him. It is Charlus, his uncle. "My family track me down everywhere," Saint-Loup says angrily, and has a waiter sent to say that he's not there. "An old womanizer like him, and still at it, preaching at me and coming here to spy on me!" And when Rachel continues to flirt with the student, Saint-Loup leaves the restaurant angrily, only to return by another entrance and send word for Rachel and the narrator to join him in a private dining room. 

The narrator begins to get drunk, and his antipathy toward Rachel fades somewhat when she gives him champagne, a Turkish cigarette, and a rose that she unpins from her bodice.

At which point I thought, "I needn't feel I've spent the day too badly; the time spent in the company of this young woman has not been wasted, since I have had from her -- gracious things that cannot be bought too dear -- a rose, a scented cigarette, a glass of champagne." I thought this because it seemed to me that such thoughts would lend an aesthetic flavor to these hours of boredom, and so justify and redeem them. I ought perhaps to have been aware that the very need of a justification to make my boredom bearable was sufficient proof that my feelings were anything but aesthetic.

Suddenly, with an abruptly dreamlike shift that perhaps is intended to reflect the narrator's intoxication, we are at the theater, where he is upset by the efforts of Rachel and a claque of her friends to hoot an untalented young singer from the stage. He also notices that Rachel, whom Saint-Loup had first seen onstage, "had one of those faces that distance ... throws into sharp outline, and which, seen close up, crumble to dust." 

The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, means that it can take no time at all to settle all one's chances of happiness on someone who a few days earlier was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, commonplace apparition on the boards of a theater.

Or, he might have added, in a garden full of hawthorn like Gilberte or with a gang of girls on an esplanade like Albertine. 

During the intermission they go backstage, where the narrator mentions to Saint-Loup that he was sorry that they didn't get a chance to say a proper goodbye in Doncières, and Saint-Loup reveals that he was upset because he had only been able to give him a cold salute as he rode by on his way to the garrison. 

I had already observed in Balbec that, compared with the spontaneous sincerity of his face, with that transparent skin which revealed the sudden surge of his emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a number of the dissimulations demanded by etiquette, and that, like a truly skilled actor, he had the ability, in his regimental and in his society life, to play a succession of different roles. 

That this conversation is being had backstage in a theater highlights the observation. Meanwhile he notices a heavily made-up young male dancer rehearsing his moves, who "seemed so entirely of another species from the sensible people in conventional dress among whom he was pursuing his ecstatic trance like a madman." Rachel knows the dancer (whom, translator Mark Traherne tells us in a note, Proust modeled on Nijinsky) and calls him "a beautifully made man." This sparks a quarrel between her and Saint-Loup, who threatens to leave. 

Saint-Loup also notices some cigar-smoking men, a group of journalists, and expresses concern that the smoke will exacerbate the narrator's asthma. When he asks one of them to throw away his cigar, the man replies, "I'm not aware of any rule against smoking. If people are ill they should stay at home." In the background, Rachel is flirting boldly with the dancer, to whom she says, "You look like a girl yourself. I'm sure I could have a really exciting time with you and a girl I know. ... The things we could do together!" Whereupon Saint-Loup slugs the journalist. 

Saint-Loup and the narrator leave the theater without Rachel, but when the narrator pauses for a moment at a spot he associates with Gilberte, Saint-Loup walks on ahead and is accosted by "a somewhat shabbily dressed gentleman." Suddenly, as the narrator catches up with his friend, Saint-Loup begins pummeling this stranger, "who seemed to be losing his self-possession, his jaw, and a great deal of blood." It turns out that the man, "seeing Saint-Loup as the handsome soldier he was, had propositioned him." 

Proust doesn't describe action. He describes the impression of action. So we see both fights, with the man in the theater and the man on the street, through the narrator's unprepared eyes. In the first, Saint-Loup raises his arm "vertically above his head, as if he were signalling to someone I could not see, or like an orchestra conductor" before bringing his hand down and delivering "a resounding smack on the journalist's cheek." And on the street Saint-Loup's fists become "ovoid bodies assuming with dizzying speed all the positions they needed to form an unstable constellation.... Hurled out like missiles from a catapult, there seemed to me to be at least seven of them." The imagery rather suggests a panel from a superhero comic book. 

What we have just witnessed from Saint-Loup is, of course, a gay-bashing. And also, perhaps, an instance of what has been called "gay panic" by lawyers who have defended gay-bashers in court -- the theory that homophobia provokes some men to violence when they are propositioned by gay men. This is Saint-Loup's own defense: 

My friend could not get over the effrontery of this 'clique' who no longer even waited for the shades of night before they ventured out, and he spoke of the proposition with the same indignation that can be found in newspaper reports of armed assault and robbery in broad daylight in the center of Paris. Yet the victim of Saint-Loup's blows was excusable in on respect: the downward slope brings desire quickly enough to the point of fulfillment for beauty alone to be seen as consent. That Saint-Loup was beautiful was beyond question.... [But] thrashings of this sort, even when they reinforce the law, do nothing to bring uniformity to morals.

That last phrase is a strangely tacked-on bit of moralizing over the disturbing scene that has just been presented to us. What's more important here is the subtext. Throughout this selection, Saint-Loup has been more tender toward and more defensive of the narrator than he has been toward his mistress. The love between the two men is stronger. And the eruption of violence takes place first in the ambiguously sexualized ambience of the theatrical backstage, with Rachel's teasing suggestion that the epicene dancer join her another woman in a three-way -- an ironic parody of the trio of narrator, Rachel and Saint-Loup, among whom sexual tension has been bristling all day. It's no surprise that violence should erupt when there is a forthright challenge to Saint-Loup's sexual identity. Note also that the sexually ambiguous Charlus has a cameo role in this episode.   

Day Eighty: The Guermantes Way, pp. 148-160

From "After we left Paris..." to "...'one of the world's biggest scoundrels.'" 

_____

The narrator joins Saint-Loup on the trip to see his mistress in the suburbs, where spring is further advanced than in the city. The cherry and pear trees in full bloom dazzle the narrator, whom Saint-Loup leaves to admire them -- "I can see you want to look at all this and play the poet," he says -- while he goes to fetch his mistress, of whom he has been talking endlessly on their journey. 

When Saint-Loup arrives with her, the narrator recognizes her immediately as "Rachel, when of the Lord," a prostitute who had been shown to him by a madam when he first started visiting brothels. (We see why Proust had not given Saint-Loup's mistress a name until now.)

I saw that what had seemed to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in a brothel, where I had simply seen it as a woman wanting to earn twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than family, more than the most coveted position, if I had started to imagine her as an intriguing being, interesting to know, difficult to seize and to hold.

The repetitions of "twenty francs" and the reference to Rachel as "it" are telling. The narrator's reaction to the revelation that his friend is so deeply involved with a prostitute (he later refers to Rachel as a "tart" and a "whore") seems excessive from a man who has lately been infatuated with Odette Swann, whose background is not so very different. His disgust with Saint-Loup's mistress suggests more than concern for his friend; it suggests jealousy -- that narrator is himself in love with Saint-Loup. And his mood changes accordingly:

We cut across the village. The houses were sordid. But beside the most dilapidated of them, the ones that looked as if they had been scorched by a shower of brimstone, a mysterious traveler, making a day's stay in the cursed city, a resplendent angel, stood over it, stretching the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in blossom: a pear tree. 

The village has turned into one of the cursed cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. 

The narrator remembers -- or perhaps imagines -- "that Robert was able to stand aside for a second from the woman he had gradually created out of layer upon layer of affection, and suddenly distance himself enough to glimpse another Rachel, identical yet entirely different, whose behavior was clearly that of a little tart." At the station where they take the train back to Paris, Rachel meets "a pair of common little tarts like herself," Lucienne and Germaine. He sneers at their "imitation otter-skin collars," and once again reminds himself that such "women were available for a louis, whereas Rachel cost [Saint-Loup] more than a hundred thousand francs a year." He fancies that Saint-Loup's eyes have been opened by the encounters, but when they're on the train, "Rachel's magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price." 


In the restaurant, Rachel (whom Saint-Loup calls "Zézette") does win over the narrator a little by criticizing Saint-Loup's family, by warning him that he's drinking too much wine, and by revealing herself as a passionate Dreyfusard. But Saint-Loup begins showing signs of jealousy, particularly toward their waiter, who is Aimé, the headwaiter from the hotel in Balbec: "Aimé had a certain distinction and exuded, quite unconsciously, the romantic appeal that stems, for a few years at least, from a head of fine hair and a Grecian nose, which is what made him stand out among the crowd of other waiters." He recognizes them and chats with the narrator about his grandmother. But Saint-Loup notices that Rachel seems to be paying "special attention" to Aimé, and his jealousy flares up: "'Is there anything particularly interesting about the waiter, Zézette?' he asked his mistress when he had dismissed Aimé somewhat abruptly. 'You seem to be making quite a study of him.'" 

Day Seventy-Seven: The Guermantes Way, pp. 111-126

From "I felt myself isolated -- ..." to "... ever heard from him again for the rest of their lives." 

_____

Good company and good food put the narrator in a pleasant mood. Saint-Loup, noting the narrator's attention to his new (still unnamed) friend, "half joking, half in earnest," claims to be jealous, causing the narrator to reflect, 

Men who are enormously in love with women, who live in a society of woman-lovers, permit themselves to joke in a way that others, less easily deceived by harmless pleasantry, would never dare to. 

However much truth there is in this observation about male camaraderie, methinks the narrator doth proclaim his and Saint-Loup's heterosexuality a bit too much. 

Even though he has claimed that the good fellowship has helped put Mme. de Guermantes out of his mind for a while, he notes that "There were evenings when, as I crossed the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so great a pang of longing for Mme de Guermantes that it took my breath away." He likens his suffering to that "I had experienced in connection with Gilberte -- or on those occasions in Combray when Mama had not stayed in my room, and also when I recalled ertaiin pages of Bergotte." 

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup and his mistress have had a falling-out, and he is miserable, too. He has a dream in which he is in a country house and hears "the intermittently regular cries that his mistress was apt to make at moments of orgasm" coming from another room. But they begin the process of reconciliation with a stipulation from her that he not come to see her until January 1. This disturbs the narrator because it means postponing Saint-Loup's promise to introduce him to Mme. de Guermantes the next time they're in Paris together. When Saint-Loup says he won't be going back to the city until Easter, the narrator tells him that he'll at Balbec then -- his family thinks a stay there earlier in the year will be good for his health. 

Finally, the narrator hits on a stratagem: He knows that the Duchesse has some paintings by Elstir in her collection, so he suggests that Saint-Loup write to her and ask her to give the narrator permission to come see the paintings. Saint-Loup gladly agrees. 

The selection ends with a conversation about Saint-Loup's captain, the Prince de Borodino, which leads into the narrator's reflections on "the differences between the two aristocracies: the old nobility and that of the Empire." Saint-Loup belongs to the former, the Prince de Borodino to the latter. 

The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been made a maréchal and a prince-duc by the Emperor, into whose family he had subsequently married, and whose father had then married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a minister after the coup d'état, felt that all of this meant very little to Saint-Loup and the Guermantes set. 

The tangle of bloodlines and French history is complicated, and for the reader who just wants to get on with the story a little boring, but Proust's aim is to present French society in as much detail as possible.

Day Fifty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 359-369

From "I went to see Bloch shortly after..." to "...until sleep came to dry my tears."

_____

Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."

We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)

An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.

And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.

Day Fifty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 314-325

From "From the very first days of our acquaintance..." to "...accompanied with a little sob."

_____

The narrator gives us a portrait of two of his friends, Robert de Saint-Loup and Bloch, who could hardly be more different from each other, and in the middle of it extended thoughts on conventional manners and snobbery.

Saint-Loup becomes a favorite of the narrator's grandmother because of his "naturalness," which we remember from long ago, when the narrator commented on her distaste for the gardener's too-symmetrical flowerbeds. "But in nothing was the naturalness of Saint-Loup so endearing to my grandmother as in the open way he expressed his liking for me," declaring it "apart from his love for his mistress, ... the greatest joy in his life." But the narrator is not so generous in returning his friendship: "I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company" or from "the pleasure that could come from finding something deep within myself, from bringing it out of its inner darkness and into the light of day."

This solitary self-absorption is what allows the narrator time to reflect on Saint-Loup's character as an aristocrat who rejects the attitudes of his class. "It was because he was a noble that his passion for ideas and his attraction to socialism, which made him seek the company of young, pretentious, and badly dressed students, attested to something genuinely pure and disinterested in him, though the same could not be said about them."

Or about Bloch, who turns up at Balbec, whom they first overhear railing about the "glut" of Jews there. "Eventually, the man who found Jews so distasteful stepped out of the tent, and we glanced up to look at the anti-Semite: it was my old school friend Bloch." Saint-Loup's attitude toward Bloch is more tolerant than that of the narrator, who comments on Bloch's "more picturesque than pleasant" retinue of sisters, relatives, and friends:

It is quite likely that this Jewish community, like any other, perhaps more than any other, could boast of many charms, qualities, and virtues. The enjoyment of these, however, was restricted to its members. The fact was they were disliked; and this, once they became aware of it, became a proof in their eyes of anti-Semitism, against which they ranged themselves in a dense phalanx, closing ranks in the face of a world that was, in any case, of no mind to join their group.

The narrator notices that Bloch refers to the lift as "lyfte" and to "The Stones of Venyce by Lord John Ruskin," apparently under the impression that "in England not only all individuals of the masculine gender were lords, but that the letter i was always pronounced like y." Saint-Loup worries that Bloch will be embarrassed when he learns the truth and will think him inconsiderate for not setting him straight -- which good manners forbid him from doing. But when the narrator pronounces "lift" correctly, Bloch notices the correct pronunciation: "'I see -- so it's "lift,"' To which, in a sharp and supercilious tone, he added, Ányway -- doesn't matter.'" Which reveals "how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker."

Bloch then accuses the narrator of "snobbery" in his association with Saint-Loup, launching the narrator into reflections about how the thing of which we accuse others is often the thing of which we are most guilty ourselves. This long, essay-like paragraph includes such aphoristic observations as, "we should make a rule of never speaking of ourselves, given that it is a subject on which we may be sure our own view and that of others will never coincide."

Bloch was a bad-mannered, neurotic snob; and since he belonged to a family of no note, he suffered, as though at the bottom of the ocean, from the incalculable pressures bearing upon him from not just the Gentiles on the surface, but the superimposed layers of Jewish society, all more estimable than the one he belonged to, and each of them pouring scorn on the one immediately below itself.... When Bloch spoke of the fit of snobbery I must be having and invited me to own up to being a snob, I could have answered, "If I were a snob, I wouldn't be mixing with you."