From "On the third evening,..." to "...answering my questions with unstinting goodwill."
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The narrator makes a friend of one of Saint-Loup's fellow soldiers, "one of those instinctive likings between men that, when they are not based on physical attraction, are the only ones that are altogether mysterious." He likens it to the friendship that he and Saint-Loup share, "free from any physical attachment, invisible, and yet experienced by him as the inner presence of a sort of phlogiston, or gas, sufficient to bring a smile to his lips when he referred to it." And yet, oddly, the narrator doesn't tell us the name of his new friend.
As for Saint-Loup, when the narrator asks him about the rumored marriage to Mlle. d'Ambresac, "He made it quite clear that, not only was it not settled, but there had never been any question of such a thing, that he had never set eyes on her, that he did not know who she was." The denial contradicts not only Albertine's information about their betrothal, but also the belowstairs gossip about the engagement relayed by Françoise. Saint-Loup does reveal that only he and one other soldier in the group are among the supporters of Dreyfus.
The narrator is pleased, if a little embarrassed, by Saint-Loup's "delight ... in showing me off to his friends," calling him "the cleverest man I know" along with Elstir. The narrator's conversation reminds a soldier named Gibergue of Major Duroc, an officer whom Saint-Loup has previously praised. "Ah yes, Major Duroc, the man I was telling you about who lectures to us on military history. He's someone who, from all accounts , is deeply in support of our views [i.e., on Dreyfus]. I'd have been surprised to learn that he wasn't, because he's not only supremely intelligent but a Radical Socialist and a Freemason as well."
And so ensues a long discourse on military history, which Saint-Loup compares to art:
So that, if you know how to interpret military history, what is a jumbled account for the ordinary reader becomes a logical sequence, which is as rational as a painting is for a lover of pictures who knows how to look at what a person is wearing in a portrait, what he is holding in his hands, whereas the ordinary visitor to an art gallery is bewildered and develops a headache amid the dizzying blur of color.
The narrator (perhaps more than the reader) is fascinated by the topic, and especially by the analogy to art, which causes him to ask if "the genius of the commander" -- the artist -- really plays a role in the art of war. Saint-Loup replies, "But of course! You find Napoleon not attacking when all the rules said he should, but some vague intuition warned him not to."
Saint-Loup also adds, "You remember that philosophy book we read together in Balbec, the richness of the world of possibility compared with the real world." The enthusiasm that Saint-Loup and the narrator share here for "the art of war" had a deep irony for the first readers of the novel, who had just been through the nightmare of World War I. Proust reinforces this note when he has Saint-Loup say, "With the amazing advances in artillery, the wars of the future, if there are any, will be so short that peace will have been declared before there is time to put our lessons into practice."
From "Despite the apparent haughtiness of their butler..." to "...immense bird of paradise, soft, glittering, and velvety."
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Françoise is the narrator's principal source of information about their new home. She tells him
that the Guermantes did not occupy their hôtel because of some immemorial right, but were fairly recent tenants, and that the garden they overlooked on the side that was unknown to me was quite small and no different from all the other neighboring gardens; so I discovered at last that it contained no feudal gallows or fortified mill, no fishpond or pillared dovecote, no communal bakehouse, tithe barn, or fortress, no fixed bridges or drawbridges, not even flying bridges or toll bridges, no pointed towers, wall charters, or commemorative mounds.
Nevertheless, he persists in his fascination with the name "Guermantes," and the images it rouses in his imagination, and is further intrigued when a friend of his father's says of the Duchesse: "She has the highest status in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hers is the leading house in the Faubourg." He recalls how his glimpse of her in the church at Combray had been disillusioning at first, "like a god or a nymph changed into a swan or a willow and henceforth subjected to natural laws." His frequent sightings of her now as she comes and goes from the hôtel could also be disillusioning:
she played out the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked the position of her veil, smoothed her cuffs, arranged her cape, as the divine swan goes through all the movements of his animal species, keeps his painted eyes on either side of his beak without any sign of movement in them, and then darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, behaving like a swan and forgetting that he is a god.
But he persists in wanting to "know what was really enclosed within the brilliant orange-colored envelope of her name." He is amazed "that this leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was situated on the Right Bank and the fact that, every morning, from my bedroom, I could hear its carpets being beaten." Nor is he fazed by the arrogance of the Duc de Guermantes, "who stood there on the pavement, a giant, enormous in his light-colored clothes, a cigar between his teeth, his head in the air, his monocle alert," waiting for the horse that would take him to "his mistress in the Champs-Élysées."
Françoise continues to be a conduit for information about the family that she gleans from the servants, including the Duchesse's plans to visit the Duchesse de Guise at Cannes and her attending the Opéra in the box of the Princess of Parma. (Françoise also reports that "there had been a good deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d'Ambresac, and that it was virtually settled.")
And then the narrator comes in possession of a ticket to a gala at the Opéra, where La Berma will be doing an act from Phèdre. His disappointment at his first experience of La Berma's performance makes that part of the gala of less interest to him than the opportunity to glimpse society in its element. And as he waits for the gala to begin, he, like others in the orchestra, gawks at the "white deities" in the boxes, imagining them as "water goddesses," as "radiant daughters of the sea ... constantly turning round to smile at the bearded tritons who hung from the anfractuous rocks of the ocean depths, or at some aquatic demigod, whose skull was a polished stone, around which the tide had washed up a smooth deposit of seaweed, and whose gaze was a disc of rock crystal." (In other words, a balding man with a monocle.)
The Princesse de Guermantes, in her parterre box, particularly draws his attention.
The imagination being like a barrel organ that does not work properly and always plays a different tune from the one it should, every time I had heard anyone mention the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection of certain sixteenth-century masterpieces began to sing in my head. I was forced to rid myself of the association now that I saw her there before me, offering crystallized fruit to a stout gentleman in tails.
And then the performance of the act from Phèdre begins.
From "On arriving at Elstir's..." to "...conditional on differing circumstances.'"
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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.
