Day One Hundred Forty: The Prisoner, pp. 117-136

From "In any case, I was pleased that Andrée was going..." to "...without thereby giving any more reality to my love."

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You know when the narrator is happy that Albertine is doing something that it's bound to end badly. So he's all chirpy about Andrée and Albertine going to the Trocadéro instead of to the Verdurins'. It seems to have something to do with the chauffeur's not keeping an eye on her when he drove her to Versailles recently, letting her go off in an carriage on her own. Has he become so obsessed with Albertine's possible homosexuality that he doesn't feel jealousy of the "handsome young" chauffeur of carrying on with her? The narrator reveals that he didn't know then that the chauffeur "was a friend of Morel's" because "he was so superior to the violinist in intelligence and taste." But not to have suspected that she and the chauffeur could have gotten together to make up a story that explained what she had been doing during the seven hours they were supposedly apart in Versailles? He has recently discovered, from talking to Gilberte's maid, that she had been seeing someone else during the time that he was obsessed with her, so he decides that he "would only let her go out escorted by Andrée, whereas before I had thought the chauffeur was protection enough."

Meanwhile, he has developed one of his little fascinations with a girl who works in the dairy: "extravagantly blond in colouring, very tall though still childish-looking, and who, among the other errand girls, seemed to be far away, with a proud, dreamy look." He has Françoise send this girl to his room to run an errand for him:

If one wanted to reduce to a formula the laws of amorous curiosity, one would have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman seen and a woman caressed.... [W]e cannot rest until we have tried to see whether the haughty seaside girl, the shop-girl with her worries about what people will think, the preoccupied fruit-seller cannot be persuaded, by crafty manoeuvres on our part, to soften their unbending attitude, to wind round our neck the arms that carried the fruit, to turn upon our mouth, with a smile of consent, those hitherto chilly or faraway eyes.

But this little experiment in Don Juanism ends badly for the narrator when, asking her to hand him a copy of the Figaro so he can find the address to which he wants her to deliver a message, he sees an article in it revealing that Mlle. Léa is to appear in the program Albertine is attending at the Trocadéro. "Léa was the actress who as friendly with the two young girls whom Albertine had looked at in the glass that afternoon at the casino, without seeming to see them." He dismisses the dairy girl and resolves "to stop Albertine going to the Trocadéro and meeting those friends of Léa's" -- even though he doesn't know whether the friends will be there. And so the obsession returns.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 419-434

Part II, Chapter III, from "I was naturally most surprised to learn..." to "...and has never acknowledged me since."

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Morel's success in getting the coachman fired and the chauffeur hired to replace him coincides with a change in his attitude toward the narrator, who notes that Morel had not only "ceased to keep his distance from me" but would even "literally bound toward me in an effusion of delight." The narrator assumes that Charlus had a hand in this change, but he adds a bit of foreshadowing: 

How at the time could I have guessed what I was told afterward (and of which I have never felt certain, Andrée's assertions concerning anything connected with Albertine, later on especially, having always struck me as needing to be taken with caution, for, as we saw earlier, she was not genuinely fond of my loved one but was jealous of her), what in any event, if it were true, had been remarkably well hidden from me by the two of them: that Albertine knew Morel well?

The narrator then attempts an analysis of Morel's character, which "was full of contradictions." Morel would do anything for money, except that he was "truly a past master" of the violin, having "put ahead of money his diploma as first-prize-winner at the Conservatoire." Morel trusts no one, and had recognized in the chauffeur "one of his own kind, ... a man mistrustful in the proper meaning of the word, who remains stubbornly silent when with decent people but at once sees eye to eye with a debauchee" -- again, a foreshadowing of what is to happen after the narrator returns to Paris. "In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are."

Meanwhile, Charlus has become "the most faithful" of Mme. Verdurin's set, even though he has been at least partially "outed" among them, and Cottard frets to Ski "whether I can allow him to travel with us after what you've told me." Mme. Cottard, overhearing this conversation, decides that Charlus must be Jewish, which leads to some comic misunderstanding between her and Charlus. Moreover, the others in the group, not knowing of Charlus's social status, conclude that they're doing him a favor by accepting him into their set, and they pride themselves in their tolerance: 

In fact, ... if M. de Charlus did not come, they felt disappointment almost at traveling only among people who were like everyone else and not to have next to them this bedizened, potbellied, and impenetrable personage, reminiscent of a box, of some suspect and exotic provenance, that gives off a curious smell of fruit, the mere thought of sampling which would turn the stomach.

Charlus, the narrator tells us, still believes that only a very few people know that he's gay, "and that none of them were on the Normandy coast." He doesn't know that "on a day when he and Morel were late and had not come by the train," Mme. Verdurin had announced to the group, "We won't wait for the young ladies any longer!" And he evidently doesn't get her true meaning when, on the nights when he and Morel stay over at La Raspelière, she gives them adjoining rooms and announces, "If you feel like making music, don't hesitate; the walls are like that of a fortress, you've no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like the dead."


Meanwhile, the narrator is still struggling with his feelings for Albertine, still persuading himself that he "no longer felt jealousy or scarcely any love for her, and gave no thought to what she might be doing on the days when I did not see her." But if, on the train to the Verdurins, she goes into another compartment with the other women in the group, he can't sit still. He has to get up and check "too see whether something abnormal might not be going on." 

He also manages to alienate the Princesse Sherbatoff when, one day on the train, he sees Mme. de Villeparisis and talks to her in the Princesse's presence. "I had absolutely no idea, however, that Mme de Villeparisis knew very well who my companion was but had no wish to meet her.... When I said goodbye to the Princesse, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not even offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since." 

Day One Hundred Twenty-Six: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 407-419

Part II, Chapter III, from "After dinner the car brought Albertine back..." to "...capable on certain days of genuine kindness." 

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The narrator describes a romantic evening with Albertine, although his attitude is hardly romantic, since he tells himself "that we must be in love after all, to have spent the night kissing." He is continually prey to jealousy, so that he even restricts visits from Saint-Loup: "I had preferred to forgo seeing Albertine rather than risk his meeting her, jeopardizing the state of contented calm in which I had been for some time now, and reviving my jealousy. I felt easy in my mind only once Saint-Loup had left again." He's afraid that Saint-Loup will ask to be introduced to the Verdurins, which would "mar all the pleasure that I enjoyed there with Albertine," but Saint-Loup has no interest in sets like the Verdurins: "'They're circles,' he said, 'where they play at being tribes, where they play at being congregations and chapels. You're not going to tell me it isn't a small sect; they're all sweetness and light to the people who belong, and couldn't be more contemptuous of the ones who don't.'" 

On one of his outings with Albertine, the narrator sees his first airplane: "fifty meters or so above me, in the sunlight, between two great wings of glittering steel that were bearing him away, a being whose indistinct face I fancied resembled that of a man." The sight moves him to tears. Meanwhile, other twentieth century technology is taking hold in his life, as the chauffeur asks Morel to persuade the Verdurins to hire him and replace their coachman. Morel does this by first getting the Verdurins' servants to "steal from the coachman everything he needed to harness up," so that the Verdurins will be angry when he is delayed getting ready to take them places. And then, when the chauffeur puts pressure on Morel by threatening to return to Paris, he gets the servants to beat the coachman up and sabotage the carriage. Morel then tells the Verdurins that the coachman drinks and has several times overturned the carriage. The result, when they see the damaged carriage and the bloodied coachman, is that he's fired and the chauffeur hired in his place. 

We get a hint that all this business with the chauffeur and Morel is foreshadowing, when the narrator tells us of the former: "I, all unknowing, employed him by the day in Paris; but I am getting too far ahead of myself, all this will be met with again in the story of Albertine." And as for Morel, "since I have been running ahead, I do not want all the same to leave the reader under the impression that Morel might have been wicked through and through. Rather, he was full on contradictions, capable on certain days of genuine kindness."    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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