Day One Hundred Twenty-Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 394-407

Part II, Chapter III, from "What I did not, alas, know at that time..." to "...despite their obedient silence, I had not pursued." 

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The narrator gives us a hint that there's more significance to the hired motorcar than just an ability to speed around the countryside. He will learn much later, he tells us, that the chauffeur also worked for Charlus, and that he was a friend of Charles Morel, who got a kickback for leading him to customers. "Had I known this at the time, and that the confidence which the Verdurins soon felt in this chauffeur had derived, unbeknown to them, therefrom, perhaps many of the sorrows of my life in Paris the following year, many of my misfortunes relative to Albertine, might have been avoided." 

The narrator now gives us an account of a meal taken by Charlus and Morel at  "a restaurant along the coast" -- an occasion at which he wasn't present but of which he somehow has full knowledge. (Proust increasingly shows little interest in limiting the novel's point of view to its narrator.) The scene reveals how Morel is getting his hooks into the Baron, whom he teases with a fantasy:

"You know," said Morel, anxious to excite the Baron's senses in a manner that he adjudged to be less compromising for himself (although it was in point of fact more immoral), "my dream would be to find a perfectly innocent young girl, make her fall in love with me, and take her virginity." 

Charlus is titillated by the fantasy, and by Morel's adding that he would "ditch her the same evening." "M. de Charlus was in the habit, when a fiction was able to produce in him a moment's sensual pleasure, of giving it his approval, while being prepared to withdraw this a few moments later, once the pleasure had worn off." But Charlus is shocked when he realizes that Morel's fantasy centers on Jupien's niece (misidentified by him here as Jupien's daughter). The narrator comments, "The young girl was very hardworking and had not taken any vacation, but I have learned since that, while the violinist was in the neighborhood of Balbec, she could not stop thinking of his handsome face, ennobled by the fact that, having seen Morel with me, she had taken him for a 'gentleman.'" 

Still, the point is that Morel has given Charlus a thrill, "that the idea that Morel would have no compunction in 'ditching' a girl he had violated had suddenly caused him to experience total pleasure." It has awakened the sadist in Charlus: Remember his "deranged" fantasy about Bloch beating his mother. But it's a momentary pleasure, and the narrator observes that the sadist soon hands "the floor back to the real M. de Charlus, full of artistic refinement, sensitivity, and kindness." It is, however, a foreshadowing of the way in which the relationship between Charlus and Morel will develop: 

Unfortunately for M. de Charlus, his lack of common sense, and perhaps the chasteness of the relationship he probably enjoyed with Morel, made him rack his brains from that time on to overwhelm the violinist with strange acts of kindness that the latter could not understand, and to which his nature, wild in its way, yet also mean and ungrateful, could respond only with an ever-increasing indifference or violence, which plunged M. de Charlus -- once so proud, now quite timid -- into fits of genuine despair. 

And meanwhile, the narrator's own relationship with Albertine is also turning stranger. He is realizing "that my fate was to pursue only phantoms, beings whose reality lay in part in my imagination." He recognizes his kinship with Swann, "he who had been a connoisseur of phantoms." He "perhaps felt love for Albertine," but mostly what he experiences is jealousy, not wanting to let her out of his sight. They go to have lunch at Rivebelle, but he grows obsessed with her interest in a young waiter with black hair, busily dashing from table to table. 

For a moment I wondered whether, in order to follow him, she might not be going to leave me on my own at the table. But from the days that followed I began to forget this painful impression once and for all, because I had decided never to return to Rivebelle, and had made Albertine promise, who had assured me that this was the first time she had been there, that she would never go back.

He persuades himself that he could break with her, but then he overhears her making an appointment with her aunt or a girlfriend, and "my calm was destroyed." His mother grows concerned with the amount of money he's spending, particularly on hiring the car and chauffeur, and suggests that he's seeing too much of Albertine.          

Day Ninety-Six: The Guermantes Way, pp. 390-412

Part II, Chapter II, from "I have already said (and it was..." to "...the day after my evening with Saint-Loup"

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The narrator begins with a dismissal of the concept of friendship, "which is totally bent on making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (except through art) to a superficial self that ... finds ... a vague, sentimental satisfaction at being cherished by external support ... and marvels at qualities it would castigate as failings and seek to correct in itself." But he does admit that it can, "in certain circumstances [provide] us with just the boost we needed and the warmth we are unavailable to muster of our own accord." 


So however misanthropic the narrator might eventually become, when Saint-Loup arrives after the narrator has been dumped by Mme. de Stermaria and is weeping into the rolls of carpet that are to be laid before his parents' return, he feels some gratitude. Though he wants to be taken to Rivebelle and the women he remembers from the restaurants there, he settles for one in Paris, which is smothered by a thick fog. 


The fog arouses a "dim memory of arrival in Combray by night" -- but it is only a dim memory, not the transformative one produced by the taste of the madeleine. It does, however, arouse in him a sense of "inspired exhilaration, which might have resulted in something had I remained alone and so avoided the detour of the many futile years I was yet to spend before discovering the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book." In other words, this dim memory of Combray is not enough to set him off in search of lost time. If it had, he observes, "the carriage I found myself in would have deserved to rank as more memorable than Dr. Percepied's, in which I had composed the little descriptive piece about the Martinville steeples, recently unearthed, as it happened, which I had reworked and offered without success to the Figaro." So his rejection of friendship, it seems, is a way of blaming it for his setting aside his career as a writer. 

In the carriage, he's surprised and angry when Saint-Loup confesses that he has badmouthed the narrator to Bloch: "'I told Bloch you weren't very fond of him, that you found him rather vulgar. You know me, I like things to be clear-cut,' he concluded smugly, in a tone of voice that brooked no argument." The narrator regards this as a betrayal of their friendship, and observes that "his face was marred, while he uttered these vulgar words, by a horribly twisted expression, which I encountered only once or twice in all the time I knew him." He is at a loss to explain Saint-Loup's callousness. 


At the restaurant, the narrator enters alone, while Saint-Loup stays to give the driver instructions. The place is divided into two areas, one of which is dominated by a group of young aristocrats, anti-Dreyfusards, and the other by the Dreyfusards. The narrator takes a seat in the area reserved for the aristocrats, and is rudely ushered into the other area, facing the drafty "door reserved for the Hebrews." He observes the behavior of the aristocrats, who include the Prince de Foix. 


And then there's an ambiguous passage about the Prince de Foix and Saint-Loup, who, the narrator tells us, belonged to a "closely knit group of four" who were "known as the four gigolos," "were never invited to anything separately" and at country houses were always given adjoining bedrooms:

as a result, especially since the four of them were extremely good-looking, rumors circulated about the nature of their intimacy. As far as Saint-Loup was concerned, I was in a position to denounce such rumors categorically. But the curious thing is that, if it eventually came to light that the rumors were true of all four of them, then each one had been utterly unaware of the facts in relatin to the other three. Yet each had done his utmost to inform himself about the others, either to gratify a desire or, more likely, a grudge, to prevent a marriage, or to have the upper hand over the friend whose secret he had uncovered. A fifth member (for in groups of four there are always more than four) had joined this Platonic quartet, a man far more suspect than the others. But religious scruple had held him back until long after the group had broken up and he himself was a married man, the father of a family, one minute rushing off to Lourdes to pray that the next baby might be a boy or a girl, and the next flinging himself at soldiers.

Considering Saint-Loup's previous overreaction to being propositioned by a man on the street, and his apparent jealousy of the narrator's friendship with Bloch, it seems safe to say that we haven't learned everything about Saint-Loup yet. 


Saint-Loup's arrival, and his discovery of the narrator sitting in front of the drafty door, causes a flurry of apologies from the management. It also causes a renewal of admiration of Saint-Loup from the narrator, who compares him to the "foreigners, intellectuals, would-be artists" in the café, who are mocked by the aristocrats for their awkwardness and lack of style but are nevertheless "highly intelligent and goodhearted men who, in the long run, could be profoundly endearing." Saint-Loup has style and grace and wealth in addition to intelligence and good-heartedness, which impresses the narrator because of his background. 

Among the Jews especially, there were few whose parents did not have a kindness of heart, a broad-mindedness, an honest, in comparison with which Saint-Loup's mother and the Duc de Guermantes came across as the sorriest of moral figures in their desiccated emotions, the surface religiosity they cultivated only to condemn scandal, and their clannish apology for a Christianity which never failed to lead ... to colossally wealthy marriages. But, for all this, Saint-Loup, in whatever way the faults of his parents had combined to create a new set of qualities, was governed by a delightful openness of mind and heart.

And he is further endeared to the narrator when he goes to borrow the Prince de Foix's vicuña cloak to keep the narrator warm in the drafty room, and on his return negotiates the crowded room with a graceful balancing act along the banquettes that line the wall. It resembles the act of a lover more than that of a friend. Meanwhile, the waiters have been kowtowing to the narrator, and the proprietor addresses him as "M. le Baron" and then, on being corrected, "M. le Comte." "I had no time to launch a second protest, which would almost certainly have promoted me to the rank of marquis." 


When he's seated again, Saint-Loup tells the narrator that Charlus wants to see him tomorrow evening. The narrator replies that he's dining with the Duchesse de Guermantes that evening. Saint-Loup, who calls it a "fabulous blowout," tries to persuade him that he should "get out of it" and that Charlus doesn't want him to go, but they agree that the narrator will see Charlus afterward at eleven. 


They also talk about the threat of war in Morocco, to which Saint-Loup is scheduled to return and from which he's trying to get transferred, with the Duchesse's help: "she can twist Général de Saint-Joseph round her little finger." He tells the narrator that he doesn't think there will be war with Germany over Morocco, but adds with semi-prescience: "You need only to think what a cosmic thing a war would be today. It would be more catastrophic than the Flood and the Götterdämmerung put together. Only it wouldn't last so long." 


After the earlier anger, the narrator regains his admiration for Saint-Loup: 

Our rare conversations alone together, and this one in particular, have assumed, in retrospect, the status of important turning points. For him, as for me, this was the evening of friendship. And yet the friendship I felt for him at this moment was scarcely, I feared (with some remorse), what he would have liked to inspire. Still in the throes of the pleasure it had given me to see him come cantering toward me and gracefully reaching his goal, I felt that this pleasure arose from the fact that each of his movement as he had moved along the wall bench possibly derived its meaning from, was motivated by, something very personal to Saint-Loup himself, but that what really lay behind it was something he had inherited, by birth and upbringing, from his race. ... In the same way that Mme de Villeparisis, on an intellectual level, had needed a great deal of serious thought in order to convey a sense of the frivolous in her conversation and in her memoirs, so, in order for Saint-Loup's body to carry so much nobility, all ideas of nobility had first to leave his mind, which was intent on higher things, before returning to his body to re-establish themselves there as noble attributes of an utterly unstudied kind.

Day Ninety-Five: The Guermantes Way, pp. 379-390

Book II, Chapter II, from "There was nothing delightful about the days..." to "...Morocco or on his way back by sea."

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From the moment the narrator began obsessing about Mme. de Stermaria it was pretty clear that disillusionment lay ahead. We've seen him in the throes of overactive imagination often enough before, and this time he takes it to ludicrous heights. 

He begins today itching for the coming assignation with her, and with his usual fantasy of possession: "What I needed was to possess Mme de Stermaria ... on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I had asked her to dine with me." Of course, it has to be in this particular setting. He associates the Bois with Odette, although Proust doesn't make the association explicit, and the Île des Cygnes "seemed to be the perfect setting for pleasure." In fact, it is an odd setting at best, given that it is autumn, cold and foggy and windy. Proust emphasizes the antithetical nature of the setting, having the narrator observe "a first red leaf already blooming like a last rose," the rain falling "noiselessly on the ancient water, which, in its divine infancy, still still changes constantly with the conditions of the moment, and continually forgets the reflections of clouds and flowers," and the geraniums which, "by intensifying their brilliant color, have put up a vain struggle against the gathering twilight." And he emphasizes the kinkiness in the narrator's lust for her: "by walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water's edge, I should be behaving in the same way as other men who, unable actually to penetrate a convent, do at least, before possessing a woman, dress her up like a nun." 

And if that weren't enough, when Albertine stops by to visit, he asks her to go with him to the restaurant on the island to help select the menu. She "seemed to hesitate." Well, duh. But for whatever reason, Albertine agrees to do so. He considers making an "assignation" with Albertine "very late the same evening" as his date with Mme. de Stermaria in case it doesn't work out, "in order to forget during an hour of purely sensual indulgence ... the emotions and possible disappointments of this incipient love for Mme de Stermaria." But he assures himself that "Saint-Loup's letter was sufficient assurance ... that ... Mme de Stermaria would give herself on the very first evening, so I should have no need to summon Albertine to the house as a last resort." 

The narrator has often behaved foolishly, but he seems particularly blind this time: 

When I found myself alone again at home, reminding myself that I had spent the afternoon on an excursion with Albertine, that I was dining in two days with Mme de Guermantes, and that I needed to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, it occurred to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary attempts to capture our need for a great love, but what did not occur to me was that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, we may return to it and transform it into a completely different work, possibly more important than the one we had originally planned.

In fact, his infatuation with Mme. de Stermaria is already waning: He realizes that what he really wants to do is "seek out some of the women I had seen in Rivebelle." Still, when she breaks their date, it's a blow. 

What added to my despair at not seeing Mme de Stermaria was that her answer led me to believe that, while I, hour after hour since Sunday, had been living for this dinner alone, she had probably never given it a second thought. I learned later on that she had married, an absurd love match with a young man she must already have been seeing at this time, who had probably made her forget my invitation. 

And the pain of the memory lingers: "I did not see her again. It was not she that I loved, but it could well have been." The saddest words of tongue or pen.                               

Day Sixty: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 404-416

From "It was the day after I had seen ..." to "... whatever does not correspond to that view."

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Sober again, the narrator resumes his obsession with his "group of girls," but also finds time to make more trips with Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, where they notice "a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray." The owner informs them that this is "the famous painter Elstir," whom the narrator remembers as having been mentioned by Swann. The narrator and Saint-Loup send a note to Elstir's table. The artist comes and sits with them, "but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him." He invites the narrator to visit his studio in Balbec.

But the narrator's obsession with the group of girls is such that he puts the visit off after, out for a walk with his grandmother, he sees one of the group "hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable," with "an authoritative-looking personage," perhaps her governess. "From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me." He takes every opportunity he can to be on the esplanade or wherever he might catch sight of the girls. 

Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again -- for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. ... Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days.

His grandmother is irritated at his failure to visit Elstir, and eventually he gives in and makes the visit. His mood changes when he sees the works in the artist's studio, "for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling thoughts for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality's composite spectacle."

Day Fifty-Nine: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 391-404

From "An amount of beer, let alone..." to "...rehearsal of the memory of a certain person."

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The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."

Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 

When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."

Day Fifty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 380-391

From "I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert..." to "...the waiters who were about to serve us."

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Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.