From "She seemed concerned to concur..." to "...part of the afternoon in my company."
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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.
From "After we left Paris..." to "...'one of the world's biggest scoundrels.'"
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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.'"
From "I felt myself isolated -- ..." to "... ever heard from him again for the rest of their lives."
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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.
From "I went to see Bloch shortly after..." to "...until sleep came to dry my tears."
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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.
From "From the very first days of our acquaintance..." to "...accompanied with a little sob."
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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."
