Day One Hundred Seventy: Finding Time Again, pp. 63-85

From "And now, returning to Paris for the second time ..." through "... a murder occurring in Russia should have anything Russian about them."

_____

Now in 1916, the narrator receives a letter from Gilberte, still at Tansonville, in which she reports that "all the other chateaux in the neigbourhood, abandoned by their panic-stricken owners, have almost all been destroyed from top to bottom." She has stayed there "not only to save the house but to save those precious collections my dear father set so much store by." Combray itself is held half by the French and half by the Germans after the battle of Méséglise, which lasted eight months.

And he is visited by Saint-Loup, inspiring in him "that feeling of shyness, that sense of eeriness which in fact all soldiers on leave made me feel, and which one experiences when one comes into the presence of someone suffering from a fatal illness, who none the less still gets up, gets dressed, and goes for walks." They talk about a recent Zeppelin raid and "the beauty of the aeroplanes as they climbed into the night," a scene that Saint-Loup calls "Wagnerian" and "seemed rather pleased with this comparison between airmen and Valkyries."

On the street, the narrator encounters Charlus. The narrator has just contrasted him with Saint-Loup, who had "aligned himself with that section of the aristocracy which put France above everything else, while M. de Charlus was a defeatist at heart." Charlus is no longer the figure in society that he once was, partly by choice, partly by virtue of having quarreled with Mme. Verdurin, who "had now summed up her condemnation, and alienated everybody from him, by pronouncing him 'pre-war.'" Furthermore, she is trying to persuade them that Charlus, who has always boasted of his German kin, is a spy: "I used to have a house that was situated high above a bay. I'm convinced the Germans told him to set up a base there for their submarines."

Mme. Verdurin's campaign against Charlus "had found a tireless and particularly cruel spokesman in Morel, who writes cruel satires on him for the gossip columns, attacking not only his patriotism but his homosexuality. The narrator observes that the style of the pieces is "derived from Bergotte," but not from Bergotte's prose; rather, Morel writes in the tone of voice that he used to use when he imitated Bergotte's manner of speech. But Morel has finally enlisted, going against Mme. Verdurin's wishes: She is reluctant to let any of her inner circle go, "regarding the war as a great 'bore' which made them abandon her."

Cottard receives another brief resurrection, just long enough to prescribe croissants to be dipped in Mme. Verdurin's breakfast coffee as a preventative to her migraines: Though the wartime shortages have made croissants unavailable, Cottard obtains an order for them to be custom-made for her.

This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand from the croissant she was soaking, she said: "How awful! It's worse than the most horrific tragedy." But ... the look which lingered on her face, probably induced by the taste of the croissant, so valuable in preventing migraine, was more like one of quiet satisfaction.

As for Cottard, he dies again, "followed soon afterwards by M. Verdurin, whose death upset only one person, that, oddly enough, being Elstir." M. Verdurin had been one of the painter's earliest patrons, before he split with the little set. 

The shortage of grown men has caused Charles to do "the same as some Frenchmen, who in France had loved women, but who now lived in the colonies: he had, out of necessity, developed first the habit of, and then a taste for, little boys," though by "keeping up a plentiful correspondence with men at the front, he was not short of sufficiently mature soldiers when they came on leave." Charlus "was mad about Moroccans, but most of all, about Anglo-Saxons, whom he viewed as living statues by Phidias."

Charlus does indeed have pro-German sentiments, partly because of his tendency to take the side of the underdog, though the "Germans, in his eyes, were very ugly, perhaps because they were too close to his own blood." 

He may have believed that taking sides against the Germans would be acting as he acted only during his periods of sexual pleasure, that is, in opposition to his compassionate nature, burning with desire for seductive evil, and crushing virtuous ugliness.

Day One Hundred Fifty-One: The Prisoner, pp. 305-321

From "We had arrived at my door...." to "...it is difficult for me now to say."

_____

From the moment the narrator returns, it's as if he and Albertine had been spoiling for a fight. She is angry when he tells her that he has been to the Verdurins', and he is provoked when she asks, "Wasn't Mlle Vinteuil supposed to be there?" He brings up a trip she made to Balbec with the chauffeur, the postcards from which arrived much later, and she says she really went to Auteuil to see some friends and arranged for the chauffeur to have the postcards mailed from Balbec:

"I didn't even dare go out in Auteuil for fear someone would see me. I only went out once and then I was dressed as a man, just for a laugh. And with my luck, of course the first person I bumped into was your sheeny friend Bloch. But I don't think he can have been the one who told you that our trip to Balbec only ever existed in my imagination, for I don't think he recognized me."

This incident, which looms so large here, seems not to have been mentioned before. Did Proust intend to revise the incident at Versailles into one involving Balbec?

Then the narrator begins to talk about Mlle. Vinteuil and her partner, intending to reveal to Albertine that he knows about their relationship, but she interrupts him to confess that she had made up her friendship with them: "I saw you getting so passionate about this fellow Vinteuil's music that, seeing one of my friends -- this is really true, I swear -- had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, I had the silly idea of making myself more interesting to you by pretending that I'd know those two girls very well."

The narrator is touched by her revelation and by her feeling "insignificant in the Verdurin circle," and he offers to give her the money to "give a grand dinner and ask M. and Mme Verdurin." But she is offended by the condescension, and says, "Thanks a lot! Spend money on those old gargoyles, I'd much rather you left me alone for once, let me go out and get ..." Then she breaks off in evident embarrassment. He presses her to continue what she was saying, but she says she was on the brink of saying "something horribly vulgar" that she had ''heard the most terrible people saying in the street." He is convinced she's lying, and begins to try to puzzle out what she must have been about to say. Here there's a bit of a translation problem, because the  word in the French before she interrupted herself was casser, which means "break," though Clark has translated it as "get," probably because "let me go out and break..." would have made no sense. (Is the translator's interpretation "get laid"?) So the narrator has to run through several idiomatic expressions involving the word casser before he hits on one referring to anal sex.

Horrors! That is what she would have preferred. Horror upon horror! For even the lowest prostitute, who lends herself to that activity, or even welcomes it, will not use in speaking to the man who performs it such a revolting expression. She would feel herself too humiliated. Only with another woman, if she prefers women, will she use it, as if to excuse herself for yielding to a man.

And the inference, whether or not it's correct, is enough to cause the narrator to make this proposal:

Darling Albertine, I said gently, with deep sadness, you must see that your life here is depressing for you, we should separate, and as the quickest separations are the best, I will ask you, to make my suffering a little less, to say good-bye this evening and leave tomorrow morning before I wake up, so that I do not have to see you again.

He proposes to ask Bloch to send his cousin Esther to stay with her, which puzzles her. He does it "to try to force a confession from Albertine," but it doesn't work.

Truthfully, I find this scene something of a muddle, not only because of the translation problem, but also because Proust has not fully externalized the drama, relying instead on the narrator's internal musings and giving us no clear glimpse of what's going on inside Albertine. While Proust has no reluctance to violate point of view elsewhere, and give us the thoughts of characters like the Verdurins, the veil he draws around Albertine's inner life keeps her something of a mystery to us -- which of course is what she is to the narrator -- at some sacrifice to dramatic effect.

Day One Hundred Fifty: The Prisoner, pp. 285-305

From "While we were talking, M. Verdurin, at a signal from his wife..." to "...still the best place to pursue the dream of life."

_____

The Verdurins accomplish their coup: "drunk on melodrama, Mme Verdurin had impressed on her husband that he must take the violinist on one side and, at all costs, speak to him." Once he has done so, she continues to pour salt into Morel's wounds: "I believe that you should no longer accept this shameful familiarity with a disgraced creature who is not received anywhere, she added, quite unconcerned that this was a lie and forgetting that she herself received him in her house almost daily." More lies follow: She tells Morel that Charlus is "mixed up in all sorts of scandals" and that he's almost bankrupt, that "everything is mortgaged to the hilt, his town house his country estate, etc." And Morel believes them all. "'I don't know how to thank you,' said Charlie in the tone one uses to a dentist who has just been causing one excruciating pain to which one does not want to admit."

Mme. Verdurin, "not wishing to disrupt the inner circle," reassures Morel that he doesn't have to stop meeting the Baron, that he can continue to see him at her salon. But she sinks her hooks in: "But insist on your independence, and don't let him drag you to all those two-faced old trouts' houses; I wish you could have heard what they said behind your back." She assures him that the artists who come to her house "know they can trust me, she said in the sweet, simple tone she knew how to assume at a moment's notice." And she claims that Charlus's efforts to get Morel the cross of the Légion d'honneur -- which he has been pursuing this very evening -- was a joke: "his recommendation would be enough to make sure you didn't get it." And then the coup de grâce:

Like the way he laughed aloud when he sid that you really wanted the decoration to please your uncle, and your uncle was a flunkey. -- He said that!' cried Charlie, convinced by these carefully remembered last words that everything Mme Verdurin had said was true.

Charlus, Brichot and the narrator return to the drawing-room, where Charlus walks right into the trap by proclaiming to Morel that he will soon be Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. "'Leave me alone, don't you dare come near me, cried Morel to the Baron. I bet this isn't your first time, you must have tried to corrupt other people before me.'"

The narrator expects to "see Morel and the Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus, I had had to face his insane rages for a thousand times less than this, no one was safe from them, a king would not have intimidated him." Instead, Charlus collapses before them.

And the gestures expressive of panic terror have changed so little, that the old gentleman to whom something unpleasant was happening in a Paris drawing-room struck again, without knowing it, the small number of stylized attitudes which in archaic Greek sculpture indicated the alarm of nymphs being pursued by the god Pan.

Charlus does receive one gesture of support, however, when the Queen of Naples, whom Morel has been wanting to meet, returns to pick up a fan she had left behind. Made aware of the situation, the queen snubs Morel and the Verdurins out of "an unshakeable attachment to people whom she loved, to her relations, to all the princes of her family, one of whom was M. de Charlus, then to all the middle-class or humbler people who showed respect to those she loved, who had the proper feelings towards them." And so Charlus leaves with the queen, "without having let Morel be presented to her."

A few days later, Charlus, the narrator tells us, "contracted one of those infectious pneumonias that were so common at the time, was judged by his doctors and judged himself to be at death's door, and then spent several months suspended between life and death.... It exhausted the Baron so completely that it left him little chance to think about the Verdurins. He was half-dead."

Then there's one of those "continuity errors," as Carol Clark calls them in her introduction, in which we are told that Cottard wasn't at the party (even though we have had both a reference to his death and several sightings of him there) because he was tending to Saniette (whom we have also seen there, being berated by Verdurin and suffering a stroke) because "Saniette had some kind of a stroke" resulting from his losses in the stock market. The purpose of the scene seems to be to soften our judgment of the Verdurins, because they decide to become anonymous benefactors of Saniette, setting up a fund for his support to be overseen by Cottard. The narrator says that Cottard told him "about the whole thing some years later, at Saniette's funeral in fact." (Earlier, when Saniette suffered his stroke outside the party, we were told that he "lived for some weeks more.") And he adds, "by changing my opinion of M. Verdurin, whom I was coming to think the very worst of men, Cottard's revelation, if he had made it earlier, would have dispelled the suspicions I had about the role the Verdurins might play in my relationship with Albertine." In short, it's all very much of a muddle.

Brichot and the narrator share a carriage on the ride home from the Verdurins, in which Brichot expresses his regret at what had happened to Charlus and his surprise at how violently Morel had reacted to the Verdurins' lies.

Day One Hundred Forty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 236-256

From "It is not that musicians can remember this lost homeland..." to "...they had been less friendly to her than she had hoped."

_____

The andante of the Vinteuil septet (which for some reason has ten musicians) draws to a close and there is a pause in the concert. The narrator reflects,

The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be; and we can do that with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil; with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star.

Art is the vehicle of the imagination in which all may ride.

As Swann did with Odette, so the narrator connects a phrase from Vinteuil's music with Albertine, in this case the final phrase of the andante. But when the music resumes, it seems to transcend his relationship with her:

Then the phrases faded away, except one which I saw pass by again up to five or six times, not letting me see her face, but so tender, so different -- as the little phrase from the sonata no doubt was for Swann -- from anything that any woman had yet led me to desire, that that phrase, offering me in such a gentle voice a kind of happiness which would have truly been worth attaining -- that invisible creature whose language I could not understand and yet whom I understood so well -- was perhaps the only Unknown Woman it has ever been granted to me to meet.

The irony is that he would not have been listening to this music at all if one of the women he most fears coming in contact with Albertine, Mlle. Vinteuil's friend, hadn't rescued it from the chaotic and indecipherable notes left by the composer. The narrator ingeniously finds ways to reconcile the desecration he had witnessed of Vinteuil's image by Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as "a form of madness." And for a moment, all the threads of his past seem to be coming together:

the memories connected with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, especially, spoke to me of Combray and also of Albertine, that is to say of Balbec, since it was because I had once seen Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain and then learned of her friend's association with Albertine, that I would be going home in a moment to find not solitude but Albertine awaiting me; and my memories of Morel and M. de Charlus's first meeting on the platform at Doncières, spoke to me of Combray and its two walks, for M. de Charlus was one of those Guermantes who lived in Combray without having a house there, half-way to heaven like Gilbert the Wicked in his stained-glass window, while Morel was the son of the old valet who had let me in to meet the lady in pink and had been the means of my recognizing her, so many years later, as Mme Swann.

But we return to the party, where Saniette, whom M. Verdurin has ordered to leave because of his inability to "form a considered judgment" on the music they have heard, apparently has a stroke outside. Verdurin's first thought is not to spoil the party, like "those grand hotels where sudden deaths are swiftly concealed so as not to frighten the guests, and where the dead man may be hidden in a larder ... until he can be smuggled out of the back door." The matter is hushed up, and Saniette "lived for some weeks more, but without regaining consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time."

As the guests start to leave, Charlus becomes the head of a receiving line formed by the people he has invited. "No one would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme Verdurin, any more than to an old usherette at a theatre where some great lady has invited the whole aristocracy for one evening." One of the guests even asks the narrator if Mme. Cottard is Mme. Verdurin. Several of them take the opportunity, while talking to Charlus, of booking Morel to play at their homes, "but none of them dreamed of inviting Mme Verdurin to hear him. She was consumed with rage, when M. de Charlus, floating on a cloud and unable to register her fury, magnanimously chose to invite the Patronne to share his joy." Charlus is unaware that Mme. Verdurin is intensely jealous of any outside relationships her "little set" may form: "Every suppressed laugh from Odette as she sat next to Swann had formerly gnawed at her heart, as had, recently, every private conversation between Morel and the Baron; she could find only one consolation for her pain, which was to destroy the happiness of others." And so Mme. Verdurin begins to plot to separate Morel from Charlus, and to have the violinist for her own.

Day One Hundred Forty-Five: The Prisoner, pp. 206-218

From "As we were about to enter the courtyard of the Verdurins' house..." to "...she immediately stopped speaking."

_____

Entering the Verdurins', they are joined by Saniette, who brings word that the Princess Sherbatoff has just died. As usual, M. Verdurin treats Saniette brutally, making him wait in the drafty vestibule while others have their coats checked, just because Saniette has been affecting an archaic manner of speaking. When the others offer condolences on the Princess's death, Verdurin insists that she is just very ill, and in response to Saniette's insistence that she had died at six o'clock: "'You're always exaggerating,' said M. Verdurin brutally, for, the party not having been put off, he preferred to stick to the story of illness."

Tension has arisen between Charlus and Mme. Verdurin, partly because of Morel and "the ridiculous and distasteful part which M. de Charlus was making him play." She still relies on Charlus to supply Morel for concerts, and she resents the fact that he continues to hold sway over the invitation list. Charlus

at the first mention of names that Mme Verdurin put forward as possible guests, pronounced the most categorical sentence of exclusion, in a peremptory tone in which the vindictive pride of the testy great noble mingled with the dogmatism of the expert party organizer who would take off his play and refuse his collaboration sooner than descend to concessions which, according to him, would spoil the overall effect.

But Mme. Verdurin has risen in social stature thanks to her support of artists, and as a consequence is able to challenge Charlus's authority. Charlus's propensity to quarrel with people means that certain people were excluded from Mme. Verdurin's only because of his whim. "Now these outcasts were often people at the top of the tree, as they say, but who in M. de Charlus's eyes had fallen from that position as soon as they fell out with him." One of these victims of Charlus was the Countess Molé, whom Mme. Verdurin wanted to welcome to her circle. And Charlus's lofty idea of aristocracy, to which he was entitled as a Guermantes, meant that he snubbed "some of the smartest people whose presence would have made Mme Verdurin's salon one of the foremost in Paris.

The Dreyfus affair also continues to have its effect on society:

Because they were nationalists, the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain fell into the habit of receiving ladies of another social milieu; when nationalism disappeared, the habit persisted. Mme Verdurin, thanks to Dreyfusism, had attracted to her salon some good writers who at that time were no value to her social schemes because they were Dreyfusards. But political passions, like other passions, wane. New generations spring up who no longer understand them, even the generation which first felt them changes, experiences new political passions which, as they do not correspond exactly to the earlier ones, rehabilitate a certain proportion of the excluded, the reasons for their exclusion having altered.

During the Dreyfus affair, then, Mme. Verdurin, by gathering Dreyfusard artists to her salon, built the foundation of her post-affair success: "The Dreyfus Affair has passed, she still had Anatole France." 

Mme. Verdurin is now credited with a genuine interest in the arts, and she has become a chief patron of the Russian ballet, being seen by the crowd at the Opéra "in a grand circle box, ... flanking the Princess Yourbeletieff." Her suppers,

jointly presided over by Princess Yourbeletieff and the Patronne, brought together the dancers who had not yet eaten, so as to be able to jump even higher, their director, the scene-painters, the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, an unchanging inner circle around which ... the greatest ladies in Paris and foreign Highnesses did not disdain to go ... to observe close at hand these great men who were revolutionizing taste in the theatre and who, in an art perhaps somewhat more artificial than painting, had produced a renewal as radical as Impressionism.

So Charlus is beginning to lose his usefulness to Mme. Verdurin, "and one day soon the two halves of society that M. de Charlus wanted to keep apart would be brought together, at the cost, of course, of not inviting him that evening."

Day One Hundred Twenty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 344-368

Part II, Chapter II, from "The piece having finished, I took the liberty..." to "...imploring heaven, beneath his monocle, for a martyr's crown."

_____

The narrator's request that Morel play something by César Franck is met with dismay by Mme. Verdurin, who requests Debussy's Fêtes instead. As Sturrock's note points out, these are orchestral pieces not readily transcribable to a solo violin. Morel knows only the beginning in any case, so he segues from that to a Meyerbeer march -- musically about as far away from Debussy as one can get. But "everyone thought it was still Debussy, and they went on calling out, 'Sublime!' By revealing that the composer was that not of Pelléas but of Robert le Diable, Morel cast a certain chill."

The rest of the evening is full of the same kind of comedy -- the whole "Wednesday" is one of Proust's funniest scenes. Ski informs the hostess that Charlus is not really a prince, "his family's bourgeois merely, of minor architects." When the narrator corrects him, Ski shrugs off the correction, "no more apologizing for his mistake than a few hours earlier for that which had almost caused us to miss the train."

Mme. Verdurin, who used to respond to anything funny by burying her face in her hands, now, on hearing a witticism from Brichot, "the Patronne would clutch at the Princesse's armpit, digging in her nails, and hide her head there for a moment or two like a child playing hide-and-seek." Once her phony spasm of laughter ends, "she could now let go of the Princesse's bruised shoulder, and she allowed her face to reappear, not without pretending to wipe her eyes and to catch her breath two or three times." 

Saniette remains the butt of every Verdurin joke, and when he admits that he doesn't know how to play whist, spoiling M. Verdurin's desire to play the game, "M. Verdurin, furious, marched on Saniette wearing a terrible expression: 'You don't know how to play anything, then!' he shouted, furious at having lost an opportunity for a game of whist, but overjoyed at finding one for insulting the former archivist." 

The Marquis de Cambremer, listening to Cottard's lame puns, demands of Verdurin, "Who is that gentleman playing cards? What's his occupation in life? What does he sell? I rather like to know who I find myself with, so as not to become intimate with just anyone at all." Verdurin seizes the opportunity to aggrandize himself, asserting that the man is "our family doctor," the more to astonish the Marquis when he reveals that this is the famous Professor Cottard. As for Cottard, he's annoyed when his wife drops off to sleep in her armchair. He succeeds in waking her: 

"My bath is just the right temperature," she murmured, "but the feathers of the dictionary..." she exclaimed, coming upright. "Oh, good heavens, I'm so silly! What am I saying? I was thinking about my hat, I must have said something foolish, I was just about to doze off, it's that wretched fire." Everyone started to laugh, for there was no fire.

Charlus, who is watching Morel play cards, "could not restrain himself from pinching the violinist's ear" and saying, "This young man is astonishing.... He plays like a god." When Mme. Verdurin suggests that they stay the night, Charlus replies that Morel's leave from Doncières extends only till midnight. "'He must go back there to sleep, like a very good, very obedient little boy,' he added, in a voice at once self-satisfied, affected, and insistent, as though he were deriving a sadistic and voluptuous pleasure from employing this chaste comparison, as well as letting his voice dwell in passing on what concerned Morel, from touching him with, for want of a hand, words that seemed to be palpating him." 

The narrator observes that Charlus's voice and mannerisms have become more effeminate. At the same time, the Baron has begun to utter witticisms at Mme. Verdurin's expense. "This was the first of the skirmishes between them.... There were, alas, to be others in Paris." But the Baron is still on guard against having his homosexuality exposed, and when Mme. Verdurin, referring to a little trip her husband is planning, says, "'I'm none too sure who he's invited. M. de Charlus, are you one of them?' The Baron, who heard only these final words and did not know they had been talking about an excursion to Arembouville, gave a start." 

Meanwhile, Mme. Verdurin has begun trying to sink her hooks into the narrator. She has invited him to bring Albertine -- whom the narrator is pretending is his cousin -- to her Wednesdays, and she makes disparaging remarks about Swann, partly because Swann had been part of the Duchesse de Guermantes' circle. "'And who's this Robert de Saint-Loup you were talking about?' she said anxiously, for she had heard that I was due to go and visit him in Doncières and was afraid he might cause me to default." She claims to have heard about Saint-Loup from Morel, "a complete lie, because Saint-Loup and Morel did not even know of each other's existence." 

Finally, the carriages arrive and the little group disperses.                                                                 

Day One Hundred Twenty-One: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 318-344

Part II, Chapter II, from "Even as I replied to the questions..." to "...And this may have been true."

_____

While talking with Mme. de Cambremer, the narrator recalls his conversation with his mother earlier that day in which she revealed that she has heard that Mme. Bontemps has said that a marriage between Albertine and the narrator "would be her aunt's dearest wish." He is inclined to "wait a little ... to try and find out whether I truly loved her," and thinks of bringing her to one of the Verdurins's "Wednesdays." Meanwhile, Mme. de Cambremer says that "everyone's talking about" Saint-Loup's "marriage with the Princesse de Guermantes's niece." The narrator, who knows of no such arrangement, is "seized by a fear of having spoken unsympathetically in front of Robert about a girl whose originality was false and whose mind was as second-rate as her character was violent." 

Brichot is still going on about place-name etymologies, dominating the dinner-table conversation, which is a relief to Saniette, who is nervously anticipating some attack from M. and Mme. Verdurin, who use him as a kind of whipping boy. Saniette "had been touched to hear M. Verdurin ... telling the maître d'hôtel to set a jug of water beside M. Saniette, who drank nothing else. (The generals who get the most soldiers killed insist that they be well fed.)" Also at the table is "an illustrious Norwegian philosopher" who speaks French so slowly and carefully that he can barely get a complete sentence out. 

The narrator, who has come to the soirée in part to get information about Mme. Putbus and the lady's maid he fears might be a potential seducer of Albertine, learns from Mme. Verdurin that she "tried hard to divert her holidays to Venice, we're rid of her for this year." He also overhears a conversation between Cottard and Ski that reveals they know of the rumors about Charlus's sexual orientation. 


Saniette falls into a trap with an innocent remark that allows the Verdurins to make fun of him. "Hardly one of the faithful could forbear from guffawing, and they looked like a band of cannibals whose taste for blood has been reawakened by a wound inflicted on a white man." And even when Saniette tries to redeem himself with a little pun, Verdurin claims to have heard the joke "a hundred times," when in fact he heard it once from Ski, who pretended it was his own invention. (It's worth noting that, throughout this episode at the Verdurins', Proust makes no effort to stick to the narrator's point of view, instead providing information about the characters' thoughts and their past history which would likely have been unavailable to his narrator.)


The narrator mentions some sketches he has seen at Elstir's, which allows Mme. Verdurin to reveal her former acquaintance with the painter they called Tiche, and that she doesn't "like at all, not at all" the paintings he has done since he broke with the "little set." "Basically a second-rater. I can tell you, I sensed that right away. All in all, he never interested me." When Cottard asks why Mme. Verdurin doesn't invite Elstir and his wife,

"No prize tart enters my house, M. le Professeur," said Mme. Verdurin, who had, on the contrary, done her very best to get Elstir to return, even with his wife, but before they got married she had tried to come between them, she had told Elstir that the woman he loved was stupid, dirty, immoral, and had stolen. Instead, Elstir had broken with the Verdurin salon.

As they leave the dinner table, there's another moment when, as with Cottard earlier, Charlus wonders if his secret is being alluded to. Verdurin says to him, "'I realized you were one of us from the very first words we exchanged!' M. de Charlus, who had placed a very different interpretation on this expression, gave a sudden start." But it quickly turns out that Verdurin was referring to the preference given to the Marquis de Cambremer because Charlus is "only a baron." This naturally raises Charlus's hackles, and he goes on to inform Verdurin that he is "also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, and Prince d'Oléron, de Carency, de Viareggio, and des Dunes." But then he reassures Verdurin that he's not offended, while at the same time condescending to him. 


While Mme. Verdurin is showing the narrator her painting by Elstir, and proclaiming that "the man was finished" the moment he broke with "the little nucleus," the Cambremers are inspecting the redecorating that the Verdurins have done with the property they are renting from them and pronouncing the Verdurins' taste bad. Charlus and Cambremer do a little one-upping and name-dropping with each other. ("The dukedom of Aumale was in our family for a long time before entering the House of France," M. de Charlus was explaining to M. de Cambremer, in front of an open-mouthed Morel, for whom this whole discourse was, if not addressed to him, intended.") And the narrator finds that his praise of Brichot's etymologizing has made him "appear stupid in the eyes of Mme Verdurin, who could see that I had 'swallowed' Brichot." 


The selection ends with Charlus accompanying Morel in Fauré's sonata for piano and violin, and with the narrator's comment about the decadent Baron: 

His sadness following the death of his wife did not, thanks to his habit of lying, debar M. de Charlus from a way of life that was out of keeping. Later on, he stooped so low as to let it be understood that, during the funeral ceremony, he had found a means of asking the altar boy for his name and address. And this may have been true.

Day One Hundred Twenty: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 288-318

Part II, Chapter II, from "The coachman, though very young..." to "...if only in order to pass it on to his sister."

_____

Brichot and Cottard are disturbed to hear the news of Dechambre's death, fearing that Mme. Verdurin will be so upset that the Wednesday will be spoiled. But the narrator observes that "Like almost all society people, Mme Verdurin, precisely because she had need of the company of others, never gave them another thought after the day they died." And that "M. Verdurin would pretend that the death of the faithful so affected his wife that, in the interests of her health, it was not to be mentioned." Which is precisely what happens when they arrive at La Raspelière. 

The journey from the station is filled with such spectacular scenery that the narrator is "intoxicated" by it, unlike the rest of the travelers. The Princesse "later confessed to Cottard that she found me very enthusiastic; he replied that I was too emotional, that I would have needed sedatives and to take up knitting." 

As for any suspicions we might have about the identity of the missing violinist, they're confirmed when they arrive and M. Verdurin reports that they will be entertained by "a youngster my wife discovered, just as she discovered Dechambre, and Paderewski and the others: Morel." And that he will be accompanied by "an old friend of his family's who he's met again and who bores him to death...: the Baron de Charlus." Ski, the sculptor, is "surprised to learn that the Verdurins had consented to receive M. de Charlus." But it turns out that outside the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Baron has "been confused with a certain Comte Leblois de Charlus, who was not even faintly, or only distantly related to him, and who had been arrested, perhaps in error, during a police raid that was still talked about." So it turns out that although the Baron deserves his reputation, he has achieved it falsely. And when Ski brings it to Mme. Verdurin's attention, she dismisses it as rumor and says that even if it's true, it wouldn't compromise her in any way. She is "furious" with Ski because "Morel being the principal ingredient of her Wednesdays, she was anxious before all else not to upset him." 

When Morel and Charlus arrive, the latter is "as self-conscious as a schoolboy entering for the first time into a brothel and overdoing his respects to the madam." He adopts an effeminate manner, "fluttering affectedly, and with the same ampleness to his waddlings as though they were hobbled and made broader by his being in a skirt, that he made for Mme Verdurin, wearing so flattered and honored an expression that you might have thought that to be introduced to her was for him a supreme favor." 

But the narrator is more surprised by Morel, who had previously treated him "condescendingly." This time he fawns on the narrator, asking him to conceal from Mme. Verdurin the fact that his father had been the valet to the narrator's uncle, and "to say that, in your family, he was the steward of estates so vast that it made him the equal practically of your parents." The narrator is annoyed by the request, "But so unhappy and so urgent was his expression that I did not refuse." As it turns out, Mme. Verdurin had known the narrator's family and responds with a story about his great-grandfather's stinginess. And after he has accomplished this task, Morel reverts to his original "disdainful familiarity" toward the narrator, "and for a time he avoided me even, contriving to make it look as though he despised me.... I concluded ... from that first evening that he must be base by nature, that he would not shrink when need be from obsequiousness and knew nothing of gratitude." We also learn that Charlus becomes a manager of Morel: "You are to imagine some merely skillful performer from the Ballets Russes, trained, taught, and brought on in every sense by M. de Diaghilev." 

Charlus does make a powerful impression on one member of the gathering:  When Mme. Verdurin says, "The Baron was just saying...," Cottard responds with "'A baron! Where, where's a baron? Where's a baron?' he exclaimed, looking around for him with an astonishment bordering on incredulity." 

Meanwhile, the Cambremers arrive, and the narrator treats us to a description of the Marquis's nose: "not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; ... the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most readily." We also learn that, in the army, he had been given the nickname "Cancan." As for Mme. de Cambremer, "She was furious to be jeopardizing her reputation this evening at the Verdurins' and had done so only at the entreaties of her mother-in-law and husband, for the sake of the tenancy." But she brightens when she sees Charlus there, because she has not yet managed to be introduced to him. Charlus "had given Odette -- and kept -- his word that he would not allow himself to be presented to Mme de Cambremer." 

At the dinner table, the Baron finds himself seated by Cottard, who is so smitten with Charlus's title that there is a moment of misinterpretation: "The Baron, who was quick to find men of his own kind wherever he was, did not doubt that Cottard was one such, and was giving him the eye." The narrator gives us some reflections on the usual course of events when one "invert," as he calls them, meets another, but 

M. de Charlus's error was short-lived. A godlike discernment showed him a moment later that Cottard was not of his own kind and that he had no need to fear his advances, either for himself, which would merely have exasperated him, or for Morel, which would have seemed to him more serious.

Day Sixty-Four: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 450-465

From "On arriving at Elstir's..." to "...conditional on differing circumstances.'"

_____

The introduction to Albertine is treated to Proustian microanalysis. First, the narrator tells us that, "On going into a fashionable gathering as a young man, one takes leave of the person one was, one becomes a different man." And that the introduction itself was pleasurable only in retrospect: "Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present." 

And if he is a different person in the situation, so is Albertine, his perception of her and her charms constantly changing, "as each part of her made out of imagination and desire was replaced by a perception much less." Her speech is different from what he expected, suggesting "a level of cultivation far above what I would have imagined to be that of the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf course." He finds himself focusing on "one of her temples, flushed and unpleasant to look at, instead of the singular expression in her eyes, which until then had been the thing about her that had always been in my thoughts." 

But then he discovers himself from her point of view, as she mentions things that she had noticed about him as he crossed the room, pretending not to  focus on the impending introduction to her: "everything that I believed, not to be of importance only to myself, but to have been noticed only by me, and yet here they were, transcribed in a version I had not suspected existed, in the mind of Albertine." 

Now, feeling "a moral obligation toward the real Albertine to keep the promises of love made to the imaginary one," he begins a process of reconciling "the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted" with "the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea" of his imagination. He has noticed a beauty mark on her face, but can't seem to decide where it is. Today it was "on her cheek, just below the eye." But when he had seen her before, "when she had greeted Elstir in passing, I had seen it on her chin. Each time I saw Albertine, I noticed she had a beauty mark, and my misguided memory moved it about her face, sometimes putting it in one place, at other times another." 

He also experiences the disappointment that he had felt on the first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes, on seeing the church at Balbec, on watching La Berma in Phèdre, and on meeting Bergotte for the first time: "Disappointed as I was with Mlle Simonet, a young girl not very different from others I knew, I consoled myself with the thought ... that even though she had not lived up to my expectations, at least through her I would be able to meet her friends in the little gang." 

But when he sees her again a few days later on the esplanade, she has changed again. He almost doesn't recognize her as "a young girl with a little flat hat and a muff" and, "remembering the good manners which had so struck me, I was now surprised by their opposite, her coarse tone and her 'little gang' manners." Even the peripatetic beauty mark has relocated: 

Just as a phrase of Vinteuil that had delighted me in the sonata, and which my memory kept moving from the andante to the finale, until the day when, with the score in hand, I was able to find it and localize it where it belonged, in the scherzo, so the beauty mark, which I had remembered on her cheek, then on her chin, came to rest forever on her upper lip, just under her nose.

The citation of a phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, the leitmotif for Swann's infatuation with Odette, is a pretty obvious signal that the narrator will undergo a similarly dramatic relationship with Albertine. 

He begins an integration with Albertine's world when they meet Octave, "[a] young man with regular features and tennis racquets" who is "the son of a very wealthy industrialist." He and Albertine chat about golf while the narrator seethes with jealousy, noting that Octave "had no idea of how to use certain words, or even of the most elementary rules of good grammar." But he's gratified when Albertine dismisses him as "a lounge lizard ... incapable of conversing with you. He's good at golf and that's all he's good at." 

And then Bloch turns up, informing the narrator that he's going to Doncières to see Saint-Loup. When he leaves them, Albertine informs the narrator, "'I don't like him at all!'" When he tells her Bloch's name, "she exclaimed, 'I wouldn't have minded betting he was a Jew boy! They always know how to get your back up!'" 

They agree to go out together sometime, and the narrator parts from her in some perplexity, finding her "upbringing ... inconceivable," her "inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, a mystery.... Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses." (If that last phrase seems enigmatic, it's because, as Grieve notes, scholars can't decipher Proust's handwriting and tell whether he wrote reposant -- "restful" -- or passionnant -- "exciting." Though either way it remains enigmatic.)

They do go out again, and this time they meet Andrée, the tall girl in the "little gang," who joins them but remains silent. They briefly encounter Octave again, who when the narrator alludes to Octave's family connection to the Verdurins, "disparaged the celebrated Wednesdays, and added that M. Verdurin was ignorant of the proper wearing of the dinner jacket." They pass the d'Ambresac sisters, and when both he and Albertine exchange greetings with them, she comments on the shared acquaintance, giving him some hope "that my situation with Albertine might improve." 

Albertine also surprises him with the information that the older d'Ambresac sister is betrothed to Saint-Loup, with whom the younger was also in love. "I felt very sad to realize that Saint-Loup had concealed his engagement from me and that he should be contemplating such an immoral thing as to marry without first giving up his mistress." 

But Albertine is not inclined to introduce him to the rest of the gang of girls: "It's very sweet of you to bother about them. But they're nobody, just pay attention to them. I mean, a fellow as clever as you should have nothing to do with a group of silly girls like that. Actually, Andrée's very clever, and she's a very nice girl, although perfectly skittish. But honestly, the others are just silly." And when he tries to set up a meeting with Andrée a few days later, she fibs by saying her mother is ill, when in fact, as he learns from Elstir, she had another engagement.

Day Sixty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 439-450

From "I had to rejoin Elstir...." to "...would have been in a state of panic.'"

_____

Catching up with Elstir after avoiding an introduction to the girls, the narrator tells the artist that he would have been "so happy to meet them," to which Elstir replies quite sensibly, "Well, in that case, what did you stand miles away for?"  The narrator takes umbrage at the reply, retreating into self-consciousness: "I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them."  

When Elstir offers to give him a sketch "as a memento of our friendship," the narrator tells him what he really wants is a photo of the portrait of "Miss Sacripant," the sexually ambiguous watercolor he had examined earlier. Suddenly the narrator realizes the truth: The woman in the picture is Odette. (The note of sexual ambiguity is not new with Odette: She has admitted to relations with members of her own sex.) And then he's struck by another realization: 

the identity of Elstir himself. He had painted a portrait of Odette de Crécy -- could such a brilliant man, a solitary, a philosopher, who had accumulated wisdom, who stood above all things, whose conversation was so enthralling, possibly be the painter, vacuous and devious, adopted long ago by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether they had not nicknamed him "M. Biche." He answered, in a very simple manner, that this was indeed the case, as though speaking of a part of his life that was rather remote, as though not realizing his answer caused me an acute disappointment.

(A question: How does the narrator know so much about the Verdurins' "little set" at this point? Has Swann already unburdened himself of the full story that the narrator recounts in "Swann in Love"? Or have Swann and Odette simply gossiped to him about the old days of the little set? In Swann's Way the painter is seldom mentioned, at least in comparison to the pianist, who plays for Swann the theme from Vinteuil's sonata that figures so much in his wooing of Odette. Or is this just one of Proust's narrative inconsistencies?) 

Elstir then goes on to defend himself, claiming that there has never been a man who "has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory.... Wisdom cannot be inherited -- one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things." Sensible enough, but he goes on for too long about it, leading Grieve to append a footnote in which he comments that Proust himself wrote a marginal note, "This is all badly written." So it is. 

The narrator leaves, heartened by the knowledge that he will get his introduction to the girls one day. In the meantime he's engaged in preparations for Saint-Loup's return to the garrison where he is stationed. Things are muddled a bit when Bloch shows up, "to Saint-Loup's great displeasure," and manages to get himself invited to visit him at Doncières, despite Saint-Loup's efforts to discourage the visit. 

After a lovely passage in which the narrator describes commonplace things -- "knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet" and so on -- to show how Elstir's art has attuned him to "beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things," he receives an invitation to a reception where he can meet Albertine. And now the trinity of forces determining his personality -- will, sensibility and mind, which are rough analogues of Freud's triad of id, ego, and superego -- take hold again in the anticipation of "the pleasure of making her acquaintance."

My mind saw this pleasure, now that it was assured, as being worth not very much. But the will in me did not share that illusion for an instant, being the persevering and unwavering servant of our personalities, hidden in the shadows, disdained, forever faithful, working unceasingly, and without heeding the variability of our self, making sure it shall never lack what it needs. ... So my mind and sensibility set up a debate on how much pleasure there might be in making the acquaintance of Albertine, while in front of the mirror I considered the vain and fragile charms that they would have preferred to preserve unused for some better occasion. But my will did not lose sight of the time at which I had to leave; and it was Elstir's address that it gave to the coachman. My mind and sensibility, now that the die was cast, indulged in the luxury of thinking it was a pity. If my will had given a different address, they would have been in a state of panic.

One note: in the previous account of this battle between the will and the other two elements of personality, Grieve's translation was "sensitivity" rather than "sensibility." Again, it would be worth knowing what the French original was.

Day Forty-Four: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 183-198

From "That New Year's Day was especially painful...." to "...the following afternoon, before dinnertime."

_____

There are times when Proust reminds me of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, that infamously interminable eighteenth-century epistolary novel that Henry Fielding parodied in Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Not, of course, that I've actually read Pamela, but I've read in it and about it -- including Fielding -- enough to know that it requires a certain patience and persistence to get through a thousand-plus pages about a woman defending her virtue. (Apologies and kudos to those who have read it.) Today is one of those times, with the narrator wallowing in self-inflicted misery about Gilberte's not making the next move to restore their relationship.

He begins by waiting for the New Year's Day letter he expects her to write. And waiting and waiting, having decided it must have been held up in the mail.

Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die. This is the amulet that protects individuals, and sometimes nations, not from danger, but from the fear of danger, or, rather, from belief in danger, which can lead to the braving of real dangers by those who are not brave.

There's enough wisdom and psychological insight in passages like that one to win us over, to keep us going through what might otherwise be sheer ennui -- the kind of insight that, again reportedly, Proust shares with Richardson (despite Fielding's mockery). Proust also makes us realize that what the narrator is going through is a kind of addiction: "I was as distressed as an invalid who has finished his vial of morphine without having another one available." And indeed, the narrator has his own physiological addiction: "My heart palpitations had become so violent that I was ordered to reduce my consumption of caffeine. This having put a stop to them, I began to wonder whether the caffeine might not be partly responsible for the anguish I had felt when I more or less chose to fall out with Gilberte."

Well, yes, but he might as well face it, he's addicted to love. (Catchy line, that.) "I detested the thought that one day I might have these same feelings for someone else, as this deprived me not only of Gilberte, but also of my love and my pain, the very love and pain through which, as I wept, I tried to grasp the real Gilberte, though I was obliged to admit they did not belong to her in particular, but would sooner or later devolve to another woman." He fancies going to Gilberte to tell her that one day he would love another, but decides that this would only show her how great his love for her is now, "and she would have been more irked than every by the sight of me." You're caught in a trap, you can't get out, because you love her too much, baby.

Sorry for the pop song references, but they make a point: What the narrator is going through here is familiarly adolescent posturing, of a different order from the fevered obsession of Swann for Odette. "So, with tears, courage, and consolation, I sacrificed the happiness of being with her to the possibility of one day seeming lovable in her eyes, though knowing it would be a day when the prospect of seeming lovable in her eyes would leave me cold."

We know that the narrator's infatuation is a shallow one because he's so easily distracted from self-pity by the goings-on at the Swanns', particularly by Odette herself, who is constantly upgrading her style:

She was in the habit of maintaining that she would go without bread sooner than be deprived of art and cleanliness, and that she would have be more upset by the burning of the Mona Lisa than by the annihilation of "swarms" of her acquaintance. These conceptions appeared paradoxical to her lady friends, giving her among them the renown of a high-minded woman, and brought the Belgian ambassador to visit her once a week; and in the little world that revolved about her sun, everybody would have been astounded that elsewhere -- at the Verdurins', for example -- she was seen as stupid.

The narrator's observations of the way Odette has changed, even in the eyes of Swann, are another of Proust's violations of point of view -- it's unlikely that the still-naive narrator would have seen so clearly that Swann "could still see her as a Botticelli" while Odette "had no time for Botticelli."

In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel's inkwell, before writing in the holy book where the word Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, "Be sure not to mention it to her! One word -- and she'd make sure it wouldn't happen again!"

Similarly, the nuanced analysis of of Odette's clothing -- "One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization" -- is a bit beyond the young narrator's sensibility. But why quibble, when it gets us away, if only temporarily, from his musings about Gilberte?

Day Thirty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 3-30

From "When it was first suggested..."to "'...Of course I'm not disappointed!'"

_____

The narrator's comment in Swann's Way about "the mystery of personality" seems to apply particularly well here at the opening of the second volume, in which we learn that the foolish Dr. Cottard we met at the Verdurins in the first volume has now become "a scientific man of some renown," and that Swann is now regarded as "nothing but a vulgar swank," at least by the narrator's father. "This statement of my father's may require a few words of explanation," the narrator interjects, "as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion."

Both men have reinvented themselves -- in Swann's case an adaptation to "a new position for himself, ... far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it." The narrator notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the current view of the sudden vulgarity of "this man (who in former days, and even now, could show exquisite tact in not advertising an invitation to Twickenham or Buckingham Palace) braying out the fact that the wife of an undersecretary's undersecretary had returned Mme. Swann's visit."

In his gushing ways with these new friends and his boastful citing of their exploits, Swann was like the great artist who takes up cooking or gardening late in life and who, though modest enough to be untroubled by criticism of his masterpieces, cannot bear to hear faint praise of his recipes or flower beds.

As for Cottard, now "Professor Cottard," "it is possible to be unread, and to like making silly puns, while having a special gift that outweighs any general culture, such as the gift of the great strategist or the great clinician." And Cottard has apparently emerged as a gifted diagnostician. The narrator observes that "the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a turning inside out." So Cottard has shaved his beard and mustache and cultivated a cold and taciturn manner -- except when he's with the "little circle" at the Verdurins "where he instinctively became himself again."

These transformations of personality are, I think, central to the novel, which is not only a search for lost time but often also a search for the lost self that time has carried away. In his introduction, Grieve notes how often Proust switches point of view from the narrator as a young man to the narrator in his later years, sometimes to the confusion of the reader. And that Proust doesn't specify the narrator's age, so that we're never quite sure how old he is at any given time in his remembrances of things past. I think this is key to Proust's examination of memory. We assume that the narrator is a mature man, telling us about what it was like to be a child anxiously awaiting his mother's goodnight kiss, but in telling us the story he becomes that child again, giving us more than any mere scouring of our memories could really supply. We are what we create ourselves to be.

But we are not the sole creators of ourselves. One theme apparent in the opening pages of this volume is the influence of others, not only family and friends, but of society as a whole in shaping the person. Both Swann and Cottard are who are they have become because they are responding to the expectations of others. And the pompous Marquis de Norpois, the narrator's father's new friend, holds sway over the narrator's parents.

By strengthening in my father's mind the high opinion he had of M. de Norpois, and thereby also fostering in him a higher opinion of himself, she felt she was fulfilling the wifely duty of making life sweet for her husband, just as she did when she saw to the excellence of the cooking and the quietness of the servants.

M. de Norpois also plays a key role in fulfilling the narrator's desire to see the actress La Berma. Although the doctor has forbidden him from going to the theater, fearing that the overexcitement would be hazardous to his health, the narrator, under the influence of the praise of the writer Bergotte (in the little book given him by Gilberte), continues to plead for the opportunity: "By day and night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal." And it is de Norpois who sanctions his going to see La Berma perform in two acts from Phèdre.

But the experience is disillusioning, not at all the transport that the narrator has been expecting: "I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma's talent seeming to add anything at all to them.... [S]he blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out." When the applause breaks out, he is momentarily lifted out of his disappointment:

I let the cheap wine of this popular enthusiasm go to my head. Even so, once the curtain had fallen, I was aware of being disappointed that the enjoyment I had longed for had not been greater, but also of wishing that, such as it was, it would continue, and that I was not obliged to leave behind me forever, as I walked out of the auditorium, this life of the theater in which I had just shared for a few hours.

We've seen the narrator disappointed before: in his first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes. But he conquered that disappointment quickly, overcoming the ordinariness of her appearance by dwelling on the cultural and historical significance of the family she represents. Now he hopes that de Norpois will illuminate him on the excellence of La Berma. But he receives only platitudes and received opinions from the Marquis:

"I have never seen Mme. Berma in Phèdre, but I have been told she is outstanding. It must, of course, have been quite a thrill for you.

M. de Norpois, being incomparably cleverer than I was, must be in possession of the truth that I had been unable to derive from La Berma's acting.... Concentrating my whole attention on my impressions, which were hopelessly confused, with no thought of shining or finding favor, but in the hope of gaining from him the truth I sought, I made no effort to substitute set phrases for the words that failed me, I made no sense, and eventually, so as to have him say straight out what was so admirable about La Berma, I owned up to my disappointment.

"What's that?" exclaimed my father, appalled at the poor impression my ineptness might make on M. de Norpois. "How can you say you didn't enjoy it? Your grandmother told us you didn'[t miss a word, that you just stared and stared at her, that nobody else in the whole auditorium lapped it up the way you did!"

"Well, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, to see what was so great about her. I mean, she's very good..."

"Well, then, if she's very good, what more do you want?"

And after de Norpois delivers himself of some more inanities about the reputation of La Berma, the narrator finally concludes, "He's right, you know! ... What a lovely voice, what simple costumes! How clever of her to think of doing Phèdre! Of course I'm not disappointed!"

On the one hand we have here an amusing but fairly commonplace bit of satire on bourgeois received opinions and their potentially deleterious effect on the bright and inquisitive mind of an original and aspiring artist. But what makes this more than just a comic moment is the way the experience of disillusionment works on the narrator. Just a few pages earlier, his father has touted de Norpois as an authority on becoming a published writer. We have learned that the narrator inherited Aunt Léonie's estate, so he has the wherewithal to make his way in whatever career he chooses. So his father urges him to show de Norpois something he has written. What he produces is the piece about the three steeples that he wrote on their ride back from a walk on the Guermantes way. "I had written it in a state of exhilaration which I felt it must convey to anyone who read it. But my exhilaration must have failed to touch M. de Norpois; and he handed it back to me without a word."

What we have here is failure to communicate.
 

Day Twenty-Two: Swann's Way, pp. 300-317

From "So the salon which had brought ..." to "... one cannot foresee in the old." 

_____

Proust further analyzes "the very chemistry of [Swann's] disease."

Cut off from the Verdurins' circle, Swann experiences more separations from Odette, as she's invited to places with them. He "would read in Odette's eyes a fear that he would ask her not to go, which once upon a time he would not have been able to keep himself from kissing as it passed over his mistress's face, and which now exasperated him." When he tries to explain himself to her, in a long-winded, intensely convoluted and somewhat insulting speech, he fails:

Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of "scoldings" and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not make such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, that they would be only more in love afterward.

One begins here to suspect that Swann has greatly underestimated her intelligence -- or at least her cunning and her knowledge of the relationships between men and women.

Even the change in her physical appearance -- "she was growing stout" and has lost some of her youthful freshness -- doesn't deter him, "knowing that under the new chrysalis, what lived on was still Odette, still the same will, evanescent, elusive, and guileful."

As the weather grows warmer, the Verdurins invite Odette to join them on more travels outside Paris, torturing Swann because he can't join them and also can't just show up in the places they're visiting without revealing his obsession and thereby losing face. The cruel fact is that Odette frequently returns to Paris without even letting him know -- sometimes "only after several days." She lies to him about her returns, and for once he fails to see through the lie.

Sometimes, especially after she torments him by flirting with Forcheville, he hates her.

And because his hatred, like his love, needed to manifest itself and to act, he took pleasure in pursuing his evil fantasies further and further, since, because of the perfidies he imputed to Odette, he detested her still more and could, if -- something he tried to picture to himself -- they were found to be true, have an occasion for punishing her and for satiating on her his increasing rage.

She even asks him for money, so she can go to Bayreuth with the Verdurins. He is rightly outraged by the request, but softens at the thought that if he "went out of his way to make it pleasant for her, she would come running to him, happy, grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her, a joy which he had not experienced for almost a week and which nothing could replace."

Proust's analysis of this almost sadomasochistic relationship is so thorough, so dense in its particularities, that it comes as a bit of a shock when the novel's narrator surfaces again, likening the tormented Swann to himself: "as anxious as I myself was to be some years later on the evenings when he would come to dine at the house, at Combray." It's a startling interruption because we have at this point almost forgotten that the story of Swann in love is being told to us by someone who could not have witnessed the events, who claims to have been told these stories by Swann years later.

What purpose does this interjection by the narrator serve? I think it must be at least in part a preparation for the narrator's own experiences later in the book -- a suggestion that the narrator could not have analyzed Swann's experiences in such detail, have imagined them so specifically, if he had not undergone something similar. It's this identification of the narrator with Swann (and obviously of Proust with both of them) that enables him to write sentences like these:

Like all those who enjoy the possession of a thing, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it he had removed that thing from his mind, leaving everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.

Day Twenty-One: Swann's Way, pp. 287-300

From "One day when Swann ..." to "... Swann was never mentioned again."

_____ 

Can this relationship be saved?

Swann arrives at Odette's in the middle of the day, rings the bell, thinks he hears footsteps inside, but no one comes to the door. When he comes back an hour later, Odette tells him she was asleep and by the time she got to the door he was gone. He knows she's lying, but he doesn't accuse her of doing so, "because he thought that, left to herself, Odette would perhaps produce some lie that would be a faint indication of the truth." Her expression as she lies reminds him once again of Botticelli's women, of "their downcast and heartbroken expression which seems to be succumbing beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them."

When he leaves, she gives him some letters to post for her, one of which is for Forcheville. He mails the others, but takes the one for Forcheville with him and reads it by holding it up to a candle, ingeniously rationalizing "that by not looking, I'm behaving with a lack of delicacy toward Odette, because this is the only way to free myself of a suspicion which is perhaps calumnious for her, which is in any case bound to hurt her, and which nothing would be able to destroy, once the letter was gone." The letter betrays nothing conclusive.

His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.

It changes him radically:

And so he who ... had sought out new people, large groups, now appeared unsociable, appeared to be fleeing the company of men as if it had cruelly wounded him. And how could he not be misanthropic, when he saw every man as a possible lover of Odette's.

And he finds himself shut out from the one social group he had relied on, the Verdurins and their "little set." When he discovers that he has not been invited on one of their outings, he is mortified, so visibly that "his coachman looked at him and asked if he was not ill or if there had not been an accident." He sends the coachman away and walks home, railing against the "sublimely bourgeois" Verdurins, and even against Odette: "He could see Odette in clothes far to formal for this country outing, 'because she's so vulgar and worst of all, poor little thing, such a fool!!!'" He professes to be through with the Verdurins for good: "Thank God -- it was high time I stopped condescending to mix in utter promiscuousness with such infamy, such excrement."

The irony, of course, is that the Verdurins are equally glad to rid themselves of Swann, whom Mme. Verdurin calls "deadly dull, stupid, and ill-mannered."

Day Twenty: Swann's Way, pp. 276-287

From "Most of the time, at least, he met Odette ..." to "'... does a man no harm at any age.'"

_____

Swann has gone nuts. Even if we hadn't been alerted to the unfortunate outcome of his relationship with Odette earlier in the novel, it would be quite apparent by now that it can't end well. But there's no talking him out of it, even with warnings that she's more interested in his social status or his money. As he sees it, those things will only bind her to him the more: "self-interest ... would prevent the day ever coming when she would be tempted to stop seeing him." A "dilettante of immaterial sensations," he regards Odette as worth the price:

as we observe that people who are uncertain whether the sight of the sea and the sound of the waves are delightful convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality and disinterest of their own taste, by paying a hundred francs a day for a hotel room that allows them to experience that sight and that sound.

His "mental laziness" deters him from investigating her reputation as a "kept woman," and his behavior begins to attract comment like that of the Princesse des Laumes, whose dinner party he leaves early so as to meet Odette: "Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, one would excuse him for running off like that. But the fact is he doesn't care what people think." Indeed, he's pleased when Odette reveals to the Verdurins and the "little set" that Swann will be seeing her at home later.

Moreover, the depth of his obsession is revealed when, after Odette pleads a headache, meaning "no cattleyas tonight," he sneaks back to her house later and, seeing a light at what he thinks is her window, he fancies that she is entertaining a lover there. In fact, it fills him with a perverse, almost masochistic, joy.

And yet he was glad he had come: the torment that had forced him to leave his house had become less acute as it became less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, back then, a sudden helpless suspicion, was now in his grasp.... And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress; it was a pleasure in knowledge.

Characteristically, Swann intellectualizes his obsession:

[T]he curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

Of course, this "scientific investigation" ends in farce, when he knocks on the window and discovers that what he thought was her room is actually in the house next door.

At this point, Swann's love has turned to neurosis, and however he might try to shut out the embarrassment of this misstep, "To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it." And "every pleasure he enjoyed with her, ... he knew that a moment later, ... would supply new instruments for torturing him."

This section ends with a further unmasking of the "real" Odette, the woman who takes pleasure in Forcheville's cruelty to his brother-in-law, Saniette, and casts "him a glance of complicity in evil." It's an expression that tortures Swann.

Day Nineteen: Swann's Way, pp. 250-276

From "And in fact she found Swann ..." to "... with the eyes of his love." 

_____

So much of the Swann-Odette affair has been seen from his point of view, that we're almost overdue seeing it from hers. When we do, we find that she regards Swann as "intellectually inferior to what she would have imagined" and that he's "reserved" -- partly because he's aware that she's incapable of understanding him. "She would marvel more at his indifference to money, his kindness to everyone, his refinement." Rather surprisingly, perhaps, though she's awed by his "position in society," she is not inclined to use him as a vehicle for social climbing, partly because she dreads the world's cruelty, and partly because, being ignorant of this more fashionable world, she fears it. And so she begins to imagine barriers between herself and Swann:

People who liked collecting curios, were fond of poetry, despised crass calculations, dreamed of honor and love, she saw as an elite superior to the rest of humanity. One did not really have to have these predilections, provided one proclaimed them.... But men who, like Swann, had these tastes, yet did not talk about them, left her cold.... [I]n fact, what spoke to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

And so it falls to Swann to try "to see that she enjoyed being with him, not to oppose the vulgar ideas, the bad taste, which she displayed in all things, and which he loved, moreover, like everything else that emanated from her." He "sought to enjoy the things she liked" rather than make the considerable effort to educate her tastes. The affair intoxicates him so that "he did not dare to say to himself, afraid that he would not believe it, that he would always love Odette." Because he thinks that he will always be able to see her at the Verdurins, he convinces himself that they possess virtues that they don't actually have: "How fundamentally real their life is! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are there than high-society people!... More and more, that is where I will find my companionship and live my life."

The trouble is, the Verdurins don't reciprocate his enthusiasm. And their suspicions that Swann isn't really one of them come to a head at the dinner party at which Swann's honesty is judged inferior to the hypocrisy of the snobbish Comte de Forcheville, and his intellect to the pretentiousness of Brichot, a professor at the Sorbonne whose wit "would have been considered pure stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his youth." It's Forcheville in particular who puts Swann on the spot with the Verdurins by revealing some of his connections to the aristocracy whom the Verdurins regard as "bores."

Swann's unwillingness to renounce such connections unequivocally draws Mme. Verdurin's fire: "she was feeling the rage of a grand inquisitor who cannot manage to extirpate the heresy." She presses Swann to speak ill of his friends, but he persists in saying, "They're charming people." It outrages Mme. Verdurin "that because of this one infidel she would be prevented from creating a complete moral unanimity among the little clan."

The evening ends with Swann "still unaware of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins'" and with M. Verdurin, because "Swann wants to play the society man with us, defender of duchesses," suggesting that "Odette really seems to prefer Forcheville" who is, after all, he notes, the "Comte de Forchevile."

Day Seventeen: Swann's Way, pp. 220-239

From "And while Mme. Verdurin was saying ..." to "... and painful need to possess him." 

_____

Swann's infatuation with Odette deepens, even though the conniving of the Verdurins to bring them together is sometimes clumsy. The theme from Vinteuil's sonata becomes "like the anthem of their love," which causes him some perturbation because "when Odette, capriciously, had begged him to, he had given up the idea of having some pianist play him the entire sonata.... 'Why would you need the rest?' she said to him. 'This is our piece.'" Proust, who has earlier given us an account of the complexity of musical composition, is obviously demonstrating Odette's shallowness here, as she reduces a sonata to background music.

But then Proust pulls out all stops to alert us to Odette's deficiencies. The neighborhood in which she lives is denoted by its "short streets," the "monotony" of the houses, the "sinister street stall, the historic sign and sordid vestige of a time when these districts were in bad repute." Even her handwriting gives her away:

an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution.

And Swann is forced to overlook the deficiencies in her beauty,

to limit what he imagined of her cheeks only to her fresh, pink cheekbones since the rest was so often yellow, languid, sometimes marked with little red specks, distressed him, as it seemed to prove that the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre.

So he lets himself fall into the fantasy that she resembles the figure of Zipporah (above) in the fresco by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel. It is a way of bringing grace to "those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated." Once again, as with the theme from Vinteuil's sonata, he falls into the habit of reducing works of art to suit his personal circumstances: "The words 'Florentine painting' did Swann a great service. They allowed him, like a title, to bring the image of Odette into a world of dreams to which it had not had access until now and where it was steeped in nobility." And so he contemplates Odette "sometimes with the humility, spirituality, and disinterestedness of an artist, and sometimes with the pride, egotism, and sensuality of a collector."

We learn, perhaps with some surprise, that they have not yet slept together. Certainly the Verdurins are surprised: Mme. Verdurin tells her husband and others in the "little circle," "As she hasn't anyone just now, I told her she ought to sleep with him." M. Verdurin, to his credit, sees Odette clearly: "I don't know if you heard what he was declaiming to her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata; I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."

Which is pretty much what Swann has become in his infatuation, as he pursues the trail of Odette through the clubs and restaurants of Paris:

Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation which now and then sweeps over us. Then our fate is sealed, and the person whose company we enjoy at the time is the one we will love. It is not even necessary for us to have liked him better than anyone else up to then, or even as much. What is necessary is that our predilection for him should become exclusive.

Is it worth pointing out that although this passage is a comment on Swann's passion for Odette, the generalizing pronouns that Proust uses are "him" and not "her"?