Day One Hundred Seventy-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 211-226

From "It was sad for me to think that my love ..." through "... of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love."

_____

The narrator comes to realize that the emotions we experience in our relations with others outlive the relationships themselves:

I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted.... So that I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like the models for a painter.

He aphoristically remarks that "happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind." This echoes Nietzsche's "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," except that Proust appends, "Sorrow kills in the end." It also results in a somewhat more sophisticated spin on the cliché that artists must suffer to produce art:

let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life.

Sexual passion, in the narrator's scheme of things, is primary: "A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us." But the interrelationship between pleasure and pain is also key: "If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappiness would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless." The greater the experience of unhappiness, the more likely the work is to succeed: "one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart." There is no substitute for the painful experience: "Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion."

The narrator makes one of his digressions on homosexuality in reflecting on how his "encounters with M. de Charlus" had revealed "how utterly neutral matter is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion."

A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.... if M. de Charlus had not given to the "faithless one" over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d'octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love.

Similarly, Proust gave his male lovers feminine faces (and names like Albertine and Gilberte and Andrée that betrayed their masculine origins), reinforcing the point here that the emotion -- passion, obsession, desire for possession -- is universal, whatever physical form may inspire it. "The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself." (On the other hand, Schopenhauer warned, "Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.")

Reflecting on his life, he reiterates his premise of the primacy of emotion, which exists in the observer, not in the thing observed: "it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind." He had lost the physical presence of his grandmother long before he experienced grief for her death. "I had seen love placing qualities in a person which are only in the person who loves."

Dreams were another, very striking, fact of my life, and had probably done more than anything else to convince me of the purely mental nature of reality, and I did not spurn their help in the composition of my work... this nocturnal muse ... sometimes compensated for the other one.

And he comes to realize the central role that Swann has played in his life:

the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte. It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes,where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann.

But he also realizes that "I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine." Existence itself is an arbitrary, accidental thing.

Similarly, Albertine played an important role in bringing him to this point of realizing his mission as an artist: "she was so different from me.... If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them." 

Day One Hundred Sixty-Nine: Finding Time Again, pp. 43-63

From "It occurred to me that it was a long time..." through "...which he very much hoped to hear performed after the war."

_____

The narrator recalls the two months he spent in Paris in 1914 before returning to the sanatorium, and the contrasting views of Bloch and Saint-Loup toward the war, Bloch being the more chauvinist of the two. Saint-Loup maintains that those who don't fight are afraid and counts himself among the number who are afraid, but later the narrator learns that Saint-Loup is working to re-enlist. And Bloch, who expects to be exempt from service because of nearsightedness, shows up in a panic a few days later because he has been declared fit to serve. Bloch resents Saint-Loup as one of "the 'favoured sons' in their braided uniforms, strutting around at headquarters."

I sensed that parading about was not at all what Robert wanted to do, even though I was not so fully aware of his intentions then as I later became when, the cavalry continuing inactive, he obtained permission to serve as an officer with the infantry, and then with the light infantry, or when finally occurred the sequel which the reader will discover later.

During his conversation with the narrator, Saint-Loup asks if he has heard the rumor that the Duchesse de Guermantes is filing for divorce, but the narrator cites no confirmation of the rumor. We also learn that Saint-Loup, on a recent visit to Balbec, had tried to seduce the manager of the restaurant, who had inherited it from M. Nissim Bernard, whose lover he had once been. Saint-Loup was unsuccessful because the manager was one of those "promiscuous youths" who become "men of principle." Saint-Loup has given up the heavy use of cocaine in which he had indulged at Tansonville because "heroism -- as one remedy replaces another -- was curing him.

The narrator also notes that Saint-Loup now demonstrates a "horror of effeminacy" that causes him "to find any contact with virility intoxicating" -- an attitude once displayed by Charlus: "By adopting the habits of M. de Charlus, Robert found that he had also taken on, albeit in a very different form, his ideal of masculinity." In Saint-Loup this resembles the stiff-upper-lip attitude toward death that "appears in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, a fact which would be simply ridiculous if it were not also ugly and terribly sad, because it is the way that people who think that that grief does not matter, who think that there are more important things in life than partings, etc., experience grief."

The ideal of masculinity found in homosexuals like Saint-Loup is not the same, but it is equally conventional and dishonest.... War, which renders capital cities, where only women remain, the despair of homosexuals, is at the same time a story of intense romance for homosexuals.... [F]or Saint-Loup war was ... the very ideal he imagined himself pursuing in his much more concrete desires, clouded in ideology though they were, an ideal he served alongside the kind of people he liked best, in a purely masculine order of chivalry, far removed from women, where he could risk his life to save his batman, and die inspiring a fanatical love in his men.

Not that the narrator doesn't respond positively to this Hemingwayesque homoerotic romanticizing of war: "I admire Saint-Loup's asking to be set to the positions where there was greatest danger infinitely more than M. de Charlus's avoiding wearing brightly coloured cravats."

From Saint-Loup he also learns that "the lift" from the Balbec hotel has joined up and has asked Saint-Loup to recommend him for the flying corps.

Returning to the sanatorium, he receives letters from Gilberte and Saint-Loup. She reports that the air-raids on Paris caused her to return to Tansonville, but that she had had to billet officers of the invading Germans there. Fortunately, they had "good manners which she contrasted with the disorderly violence of the French deserters, who had devastated everything as they passed through the property." The letter from Saint-Loup is characteristic of the man he had known when they first met at Balbec: "Saint-Loup ... remained intelligent and artistic, and, while halted at the edge of some marshy forest, with characteristic good taste would note down descriptions of the landscape for me, in the same way as he would have done if he had been out duck-shooting." Saint-Loup also eschews anti-German chauvinisim:

If Saint-Loup happened to mention a melody by Schumann, he would only give its title in German, nor did he have recourse to circumlocution to tell me that, when he had heard the first twitterings of the dawn chorus at the edge of the forest, he had been as intoxicated as if he had just been spoken to by the bird in that "sublime Siegfried," which he very much hoped to hear performed after the war.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 609-658*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, concluded, from "After lunch, whenever I did not set out to wander around Venice...."
Chapter IV: A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup

_____

Okay, first off: I think the telegram announcing Albertine's resurrection is a mistake that Proust would have corrected in revising The Fugitive. The reaction to the telegram is not at all what we expect from the intensely obsessive narrator, who more characteristically would have endlessly pondered Albertine's motives in both faking her death and then announcing that she had done so. And he is also paranoid enough to wonder if the telegram is a hoax, and if so, who is playing the trick on him and to what end. But instead he stuffs it in his pocket and goes off to prowl the back alleys of Venice. It can be argued that it has thematic significance, in fusing Albertine with Gilberte, but that has already occurred in his imaginings. And the explanation that the errors in the telegram are the result of Gilberte's faulty penmanship is awkward at best. The telegram is a melodramatic gimmick that the novel would have been better off without.

But accepting what the novel gives us, we set out on a bit of a travelogue, ostensibly so the narrator can take notes for a "study of Ruskin." (Proust, of course, translated Ruskin, as the note reminds us.) It's striking in this chapter how often Venice is likened to, or contrasted with, Combray, and not, as one might expect, Paris. The reason, I think, is that Proust wants to bring us back to the beginning of the novel as he nears its conclusion -- and at this point, the end of The Fugitive looks like a conclusion, with its assemblage of revelations about many of the principal characters.

Albertine still hovers in his mind, of course, despite his assertions that he has forgotten her. A painting by Carpaccio "almost revived my love for" her because one of the costumes worn by a figure in it resembles the Fortuny coat she wore on their trip to Versailles on the eve of her departure. And he even wonders if a young Austrian woman he meets also "loved women" the way Albertine did.

A figure from the past -- the Baroness Putbus -- almost makes him stay in Venice after his mother leaves because of the promiscuous lady's maid that Saint-Loup once told him about. But he makes a mad dash for the train and joins her, carrying three letters -- two for her, one for him -- that had been handed him at the last moment. The letters announce two marriages: Gilberte's to Saint-Loup and Mme. de Cambremer's son to Jupien's niece. Of the latter marriage, the narrator reflects:

It allows the Cambremers to drop anchor at the Guermantes', where they never dared hope pitch their tent; what is more, the child, since she was adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable for the Cambremers since they had lost their own; and finally she is the adopted and, according to the Cambremers, probably the real -- that is, the natural -- daughter of someone whom they consider to be a prince of the blood.

The narrator of course knows the truth of the relationship between Charlus and Jupien, and between Charlus and Morel, who once was going to marry Jupien's niece. Moreover, he recognizes that both marriages signal the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain's definition of society, with Saint-Loup, a Guermantes, marrying "the daughter of Odette and a Jew." Money, which Jupien's daughter will inherit from Charlus and which Gilberte already possesses, is the key, and it has been, as the narrator tells us, the cause of much behind-the-scenes intrigue among the various families involved. The narrator's mother has heard "that it was the Princess of Parma who arranged the marriage of the young Cambremer." Meanwhile, the rumors have started that both grooms are gay. Charlus, on learning from the Princess that Cambremer is the nephew of Legrandin, is pleased: "If he took after his uncle, after all, that shouldn't put me off, I have always said that they make the best husbands."

The effect on society of the marriages is colossal: "the magical charm that Mme de Cambremer had imagined the Duchesse de Guermantes to possess evaporated as soon as she found herself solicited by the latter." And "Gilberte started to show her contempt for what she had so desired, to declare that the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were fools unfit for company, and, matching words with deeds, did indeed cease to seek their company." And when Jupien's niece dies of typhoid soon after the wedding, because she is thought to be related to Charlus the effect is extraordinary: "the death of a petty commoner throws all of the princely families into mourning." Meanwhile, Legrandin has begun styling himself Comte de Méséglise. And Charlus  discovers that his widowed son-in-law shares his sexual orientation.

Gilberte and Saint-Loup decide to live at Tansonville, but the neighbors at Combray are not impressed with the fact that Odette's daughter lives there now. The narrator goes to visit them, leaving his current girlfriend in the apartment he now rents and under the supervision of a friend "who was not attracted to women." His visit is particularly to try to cheer up Gilberte, "since Robert was deceiving her, but not in the manner which everyone believed and which perhaps even she still believed, or at any rate declared. For "Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, showed himself off in public with women whom he compromised and whom everyone, no doubt even Gilberte, believed to be his mistresses." In fact Saint-Loup is having an affair with Charles Morel.

Reviewing the past, the narrator comes to realize that Saint-Loup had been giving signals of his homosexuality for a long time. He had once told the narrator:

"It's a shame that your girlfriend from Balbec does not have the fortune required by my mother, I think that the two of us would have got on well together." He had meant to imply that she was from Gomorrah as he was from Sodom.... In the end it was the same factor that had inspired both in Robert and in me the desire to marry Albertine (that is, her love for women). But the causes of our desire, like its ends, were opposite. I had been driven to it by the despair I had felt at the discovery, Robert by his satisfaction; I in order to prevent her through constant surveillance from yielding to her inclination; Robert in order to cultivate it and to enjoy the freedom that he would allow her to offer him her girl-friends.

Saint-Loup "ceaselessly" impregnates Gilberte, but he flirts with waiters in restaurants. And the narrator learns from Aimé that Saint-Loup had put the moves on "the lift" during the narrator's first visit to Balbec, causing a scene that had to be hushed up. The narrator thinks Aimé may be lying, but he can't be sure. He also remembers that Saint-Loup had looked "rather lingeringly" at Morel one time at the Verdurins, and remarked "It's strange how this lad remind me of Rachel." But Saint-Loup's acceptance of his homosexuality also affects his friendship with the narrator: "It was only as long as he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, at least for a period of time, the men who did not interest him directly were subject to a display of indifference."

Odette now finds herself in the role of being protected by Saint-Loup: "The fact that she was no longer in her prime was of little importance in the eyes of a son-in-law who did not love women."

Thus, thanks to Robert, she was able, on the threshold of her fiftieth (some said her sixtieth) year to dazzle with extraordinary luxury at any dinner-table and very soirée to which she was invited. Without needing as she had done before to have a "friend," who now would no longer have forked out, or even acted his part. Thus she embarked on a final period of chastity, which seemed definitive, and she had never been more elegant.

The narrator's views on homosexuality also seem to have mellowed: "I found that it made no difference from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human to take it wherever one could find it." But Saint-Loup's "liaison" with Morel offends him because Saint-Loup is married, and to Gilberte, and he feels the pain of losing his friendship.

He feels another pain when he visits Combray and no longer experiences the love he had once felt for the place. "I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte." Moreover, Gilberte reveals that she had fallen in love with him the first time they saw each other, and she explains the "indecent gesture" she made at the time: "I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I'm ashamed of it now." For his part, he now realizes that his life might have been different "if I had not met two shadowy figures coming towards me side by side in the twilight" and decided to break with Gilberte. But he also observes that the torment of that love and separation has vanished:

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

In Search of Lost Time might well have ended right there.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Two, The Prisoner, pp. 321-333

From "The vague fear I had felt at the Verdurins'..." to "...Then I slipped away so as not to wake her."

_____

So the narrator's telling Albertine to leave was all a trick. "Arriving home, I had had the feeling of being a prisoner, not at all of returning to a female captive," he says, but her pique at the information that he had been to the Verdurins' bothered him. "I had thought it best to give her the impression that her slavery would not last for ever, and that I myself wished to bring it to an end." But then comes an admission from her that she once spent three weeks with Léa. "And that morning she had told me she did not know Léa at all!" The impact this confession makes on the narrator is a significant one: "I watched as sudden flames tore through a novel I had spent ten million minutes composing." The narrator, in short, is treating his life -- and more important, Albertine's -- as if it were a fiction of his own creation. (Try not to linger on the metafictional hall-of-mirrors effect here: Proust writing a novel whose narrator is writing a novel in which....)

He decides that Albertine's confession comes out of her fear that Léa herself had revealed this fact to him. And here he goes into yet another discussion of homosexuality: "Lesbians are rare enough but also common enough that wherever they go, in whatever crows, they cannot fail to spot another of their kind." And he tells the story of two women who met when they accompanied two men to a restaurant and immediately fell for each other: "The two girls became great friends, were seen everywhere together, one dressed as a man and went around picking up little girls and taking them home to the other to initiate them. The other had a little boy and used to pretend to be angry with him so that the other could punish him, with a heavy hand."

This is one of the more distasteful passages in Proust's novel, based as it is on the myth of the predatory, male-hating lesbian. We can, of course, ascribe it to the narrator and not to the author, as another instance of the narrator's neurotic obsession with possessing the love object, and his fear of her being lured away, not just by another man, but by another woman. Once again he sees "the unburnt portion of the novel ... slowly crumbling into ashes." Tormented by "the thought of the orgiastic life Albertine must have lived before she knew me," he concocts his complicated plan to pretend to break with her in order to keep her. "I suddenly felt I must keep Albertine because I felt her being was dissipated among various other people whom I could not prevent her from joining." He sees it as a battle for possession. And

so that Albertine would not think I was exaggerating and to keep her for as long as possible in the belief that we were going to separate, I had begun to plan the time which was to begin the following day and last for ever, the time when we should be apart, making all the same recommendations to Albertine as if we were not going to end our quarrel in a moment.... This scene of fictitious separation in the end caused me almost as much unhappiness as if it had been true, perhaps because one of the actors, Albertine, believed that it was, and so added to the illusion for the other.

The faux separation "turned out to be like those medicines that are to cure our sufferings in the long run, but whose first effect is to make them worse."

He feels "a kind of hatred for her which only made me the more desperate to keep her with me" when he thinks that "while she had given up the Verdurins and gone to the Trocadéro to please me, all the same, Mlle Vinteuil was supposed to have been at the Verdurins', and at the Trocadéro, which she had also given up in order to come out with me, there had been, as a reason to bring her back from there, Léa, that same Léa about whom I seemed to be worrying needlessly but whom, in words that I had not forced out of her, Albertine said she knew." Lesbians to the left of him, lesbians to the right of him.

So then he calls off her expulsion:

'Listen, Albertine, you say you're happier here this [than?] elsewhere, that you're going to be unhappy if you leave. -- Of course I am. -- That makes me wonder; do you think you'd like us to try to go on for a few more weeks after all? You never know, a week at a time, we might manage to go on for a good long time, you know some temporary things can go on for ever. -- Oh, that would be lovely!

And so she stays. And he looks in on her when she's fast asleep, not so much as her lover as her murderer: "And it was a dead woman that I saw when I went into her room a moment later. She had fallen asleep the minute she lay down; her sheets, wrapped around her body like a shroud, had fallen into fine folds with the apparent hardness of stone." Her body is now "meaningless," "twisted," an "allegorical figure of what? Of my death? Of my love?" Chilling.

Day One Hundred Forty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 271-285

From "'But what's wrong with him? That's my overcoat....'" to "...going into the room to ask 'May we come in?'"

_____

When Brichot returns with Charlus's overcoat instead of the narrator's, Charlus drapes it around him and says, flirtatiously, "You know that's very compromising, dear boy? It's like drinking out of the same glass, I shall be able to read your thoughts." And he strokes the narrator's chin. When Brichot suggests that Charlus should kiss the narrator on both cheeks, too, "'Kiss him on both cheeks, really! cried the Baron with shrill delight. I tell you, dear boy, he thinks he's still at a school prize-giving, he's dreaming of his little pupils, I bet he sleeps with them." And Charlus is off on a kind of verbal fan-dance, coyly revealing and concealing his gayness. Brichot eggs him on, with a mention of a recent discovery of a letter by Michelangelo about his love for a woman, which counters his homosexual reputation.

From the moment Brichot had begun talking about men's reputations, M. de Charlus's whole face had betrayed the particular kind of impatience that we see in an expert on medical or military matters, when lay people who know nothing about them begin to say foolish things about therapeutics or strategy.

Charlus startles them with an estimate that only "between thirty and forty per cent" of men are truly heterosexual, ascribing "inversion to the great majority of his contemporaries, excepting only those with whom he had himself had relations; their case -- provided the relations had been in the smallest degree romantic -- he regarded as more complex." 

When Brichot learns that Charlus had been a friend of Swann's, he asks, "Was he one of them?" Charlus replies, "No, I don't think so." And then talks about introducing Swann to Odette: "She caught my eye in a semi-breeches part, when she was playing Miss Sacripant." And he claims, "She used to force me to organize the most dreadful sessions for her, four, five people at a time." He talks about how Swann was "as jealous as a tiger," and had called on him to be second in a duel.

Brichot next asks about Ski, whom Charlus dismisses as "just people's idea of that sort of man, people who don't know anything about it." Called on to produce names, Charlus claims to "live in a world of abstraction, these things only interest me from a transcendental point of view." The narrator comments,

But these moments of annoyed reaction in which the Baron tried to hide his real life were few and fleeting as compared with the hours during with he constantly let it show through, or displayed it with an irritating self-satisfaction, the need to confide being much stronger in him than the fear of self-revelation.

In the midst of a discussion of homosexuality in the court of Louis XIV, Charlus says, enigmatically, "I have a young friend in the army who is making quite a name for himself, who has done great things; but let me not gossip...." If the "young man" is Morel, it's certainly an odd reference, since Brichot and the narrator know about him. Could he be referring to Saint-Loup?  And in commenting on the way society has changed, Charlus says,

But I will admit that the thing that has changed most of all is what the Germans call homosexuality*. Good heavens, in my day, if one set aside the men who simply hated women, and those who, while actually preferring them, did other things for money or their careers, homosexuals were good family men and really only kept mistresses as a blind.

Charlus then surprises Brichot by revealing the Prince de Guermantes' homosexuality. And Brichot proposes, "if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once."

Throughout all this, the narrator has been chafing with the urge to get home to see Albertine: "I now had only one wish, to escape from the Verdurins' before the execution of Charlus was carried out."

*The first recorded appearance of the word "homosexuality"was in Austria in 1869; Richard von Krafft-Ebing popularized the term in Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886.

Day One Hundred Forty-Six: The Prisoner, pp. 218-236

From "To our great astonishment, when Brichot said how sad..." to "...transposition, into the realm of sound, of profundity."

_____

Mme. Verdurin surprises them with her open indifference to the death of the Princess Sherbatoff, even claiming that the Princess had a bad reputation. Her attitude "had a curiously modern, 'problem-play' sound to it, and also it was gloriously convenient; for want of feeling or immorality, once confessed, simplify life as effectively as loose morals: they remove the need to find excuses for blameworthy actions, and transform them into obligations of sincerity." But Charlus puts his foot in it by saying, "I'm glad the evening wasn't cancelled, because of my own guests."

The narrator notes that Mme. Verdurin has about her a "rather disagreeable smell of nose-drops," which she explains by saying they were prescribed to her because of her tendency to cry while listening to Vinteuil's music. "My nose gets all congested, and two days later I look like an old drunkard and to get my vocal cords working again I have to have days of inhalations." And here we learn that another member the little group has died: Cottard. And Mme. Verdurin's response to his death is similarly callous: "Well, there you are, he's dead, we all die, he'd killed patients enough, it was time to take his own medicine." (This is one of the inconsistencies Carol Clark notes in her preface: Proust has Cottard at the party talking with Mme. Verdurin and Ski only 11 pages earlier, and he is spotted again at the party later.)

The narrator asks her if Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are present. "No, I've just had a telegram, said Mme Verdurin evasively, they've had to stay in the country." When Morel comes over to say hello, he asks him about their absence, but he seems "to know very little about it." And, apropos Charlus's attitude toward Morel, we get another of the narrator's little observations about homosexuality:

The invert who has been able to nourish his passion only with a literature written for men who love women, who thought of men as he read Musset's Nights, feels a need to share, in the same way, all the social roles of the man who is not an invert, to keep someone as the admirer of chorus-girls does, or the old habitué of the Opéra, and also to settle down, to marry or live with a man, to be a father.

The narrator continues to establish his heterosexuality by commenting on his eye for the single women at the party, and contrasting it with "the furtive messages" that Charlus and the other gay men at the party -- who include "two dukes, an eminent general, a famous writer, great doctor and distinguished lawyer" -- are exchanging, in which they comment on young men as "she." He also comments on Mme. Verdurin's tolerance of homosexuality, which he refers to as "Charlisme": "Like every ecclesiastical power, she regarded mere human weaknesses as less serious than anything that could weaken the authority principle, damage orthodoxy, alter the ancient creed, in her little church." Unfortunately, Charlus is about to do just that: "What doomed M. de Charlus on that evening was the bad manners -- so common among society people -- of his guests, who were now beginning to arrive." They are determined to snub their hostess, referring to her as "old Mother Verdurin."

And M. de Charlus, as his guests pushed their way through the crowd to come and congratulate him, to thank him as if he had been the host, did not think to ask them to say a word to Mme Verdurin. Only the Queen of Naples, in whose veins ran the same noble blood as in her sisters, the Empress Elizabeth and the Duchesse d'Alençon, began to talk to Mme Verdurin as if she had come to the house for the pleasure of seeing Mme Verdurin, more than for the music or to see M. de Charlus. 

The rudeness is stilled when the concert begins: "respect for the music -- thanks to the prestige of Palamède -- had suddenly been instilled into a crowd as ill-mannered as it was smart." Mme. Verdurin also assumes her role in the concert, "a divinity presiding over the musical solemnities, a goddess of Wagnerism and migraine, a kind of almost tragic Norn, summoned up by genius in the midst of all these bores." 

And here begins one of the narrator's lengthy internal monologues, Proust's attempt to re-create the experience of listening to a concert, with the narrator's thoughts not only about the music but also about the images and feelings it elicits from him. The piece by Vinteuil is unfamiliar to him because it has not previously been performed, but in the midst of it,  "more wonderful than any girl, the little phrase, wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and still as scarves, came towards me, still recognizable under these new ornaments." (The "little phrase," of course, is the one that Swann adopted for him and Odette; here the narrator, in one of those fusions of himself with Swann, has made it his own.) But as caught up as he is in the music, he is distracted enough from it to notice Mme. Verdurin's usual poses as she listens to it. "And I stopped listening to the music to wonder again whether Albertine had seen Mlle Vinteuil in the past few days or not, as one reinvestigates an inward pain from which one has been for a moment distracted. For it was inside me that all Albertine's actions took place." But he returns to the music for an extended impression of its effect on him.  

Day One Hundred Forty-Four: The Prisoner, pp. 180-206

From "As my carriage went along the embankment..." to "...in a blur which cannot cause real suffering."

_____

On the way to the Verdurins', the narrator meets Brichot, and their conversation introduces the topic of Swann's death. And we have yet another of those curious interminglings of the narrator's and the author's voice, along with a reference to an actual painting that includes the supposed model for Swann, Charles Haas:

Swann ... was an outstanding personality in the artistic and intellectual world, and so, even though he had not "produced" anything, his name was able to survive a little longer. And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Gallifet, Edmond de Polignac, and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Here we have Proust pretending that the narrator is the author of Swann's Way, and that the figure of Charles Haas (above in the doorway on the right) in James Tissot's painting is Swann. Or do we have Proust admitting that he is the narrator and that Swann is Haas?

Arriving at the Verdurins', the narrator and Brichot encounter Charlus, who continues to make Brichot uneasy with his increasingly flamboyant manner. Brichot, the narrator tells us, "reassured himself by repeating pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because ... he could not understand that in those days loving a boy (Socrates' jokes make it clearer than Plato's theories) was like keeping a dancer today, before one becomes engaged and settle down." But, the heterosexual narrator (apparently not to be identified here with the gay Proust) tells us, today "all everyday homosexuality -- that of Plato's young men or Virgil's shepherds -- has disappeared, and all that survives and multiplies is the involuntary kind, the nervous disease, the kind that one hides from others and disguises from oneself." Narrator/Proust continues with the usual stereotyping: gay men seem to have a greater sensibility for the arts and even (when Charlus discusses Albertine's wardrobe with the narrator) "an inborn taste, a passion for the study, the science of female dress."

Certainly Charlus has changed from the man we met earlier in the novel, the one who railed against effeminacy.

In any case, it was not only in the cheeks, or rather jowls, of the painted face, in the plump breasts and bouncing buttocks of the self-indulgent body invaded by fat, that there now floated on the surface, visible as oil, the vice once so carefully hidden away by M. de Charlus in the furthest depths of his being. It now overflowed in his speech.

Charlus even chides the narrator and Brichot for looking "like two lovers. Arm in arm, Brichot, I must say, you are going a bit far!" The narrator wonders if Charlus his lost his grip, if his words were "the sign of an aging mind," or if he is simply showing "the disdain for middle-class opinion that all the Guermantes had underneath." He speculates that "the narrow range of pleasures offered by his vice had come to bore him, and that sometimes "he would go and spend the night with a woman, in the way a normal man might, once in his life, want to sleep with a boy, out of the same kind of curiosity, each the mirror-image of the other, and each equally unhealthy." And he observes that Charlus

now emitted, quite without thinking, something like the little squeals -- involuntary in his case, and therefore all the more revealing -- that homosexuals produce -- in their case deliberately -- when they call out to each other -- "darling!"; as if this purposely "camp" manner, which M. de Charlus had so long avoided like the plague, were nothing but a brilliant, faithful imitation of the intonations that the Charluses of the world inevitably develop when they reach a certain phase of their disease. 

It's difficult to read these passages today, with their stereotyping and their references to homosexuality as "vice" or "disease," but in their time they constituted shrewd social analysis.

But in the context of the novel, this analysis is really heading toward a crisis in the relationship of Charlus and Morel, which the narrator anticipates by skipping ahead "several weeks" to Charlus's opening of a letter to Morel from the actress Léa, "known for her exclusive attraction to women." In the letter, Léa addressed Morel in the feminine, calls him "Dirty girl!" and says that "you are one and no mistake!" The significance of the letter is left to tantalize us, as is the narrator's statement, "We shall see, in fact, in the last volume of this work, M. de Charlus doing things that would have been even more astonishing to his family and friends than the life revealed by Léa was to him." The narrator notes that Charlus could only feel jealous of Morel when he was with men: "Women had no such effect. This is, in fact, nearly always the rule with Charluses. The love that the man they love has for a woman is something else, happening within a different species (lions don't go after tigers), and does not worry them; indeed, it may reassure them." Unless, the narrator adds, they regard heterosexual intimacy as "disgusting" and "a degradation."

There is one further bit of foreshadowing: a reference to the effect of society gossip. "We shall see later how that verbal press could annihilate the power of a Charlus once he had ceased to be fashionable, and elevate above him a Morel who was not worth a millionth part of his former protector."

Meanwhile, the narrator gets a shock: Charlus tells him that Vinteuil's daughter and her friend are to be at the Verdurins, "and they are two young women of dreadful reputation." As if the narrator didn't know that already. And of course, the Pandora's box of suspicion, regarding Albertine's plans to visit the Verdurins and what she and Andrée had been doing when not under his eagle eye, is opened: "Andrée had said to me, 'We walked a bit, here and there, we didn't meet anyone,' and during which in fact Mlle Vinteuil had obviously arranged to met Albertine at Mme Verdurin's."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 67-82

From "That was how I answered her; among the expressions of carnality..." to "...and plans for further, ardent lovers' meetings."

_____

The narrator claims that he is "slowly coming to resemble all my relatives," including, in his reclusiveness and insistence on spending the day in bed, his Aunt Léonie. "Thus, all my past since my earliest years, and beyond those, my relatives' past, mixed into my carnal love for Albertine the sweetness of a love both filial and maternal." But the carnal seems to predominate, especially in his description of Albertine naked, in which he notes "the place which, in men, is made ugly by something like the metal pin left sticking out of a statue when it is removed from its mould." That particular bit of observation isn't ascribed to any of his relatives, and one wonders how many heterosexual men would describe the absence of a penis quite that way.

Their playfulness in bed is characterized as "happy, cheerful moments, innocent in appearance but hiding the growing possibility of disaster: this is what makes the life of lovers the most unpredictable of all, a life in which it can rain sulphur and pitch a moment after the sunniest spell and where, without having the courage to learn from our misfortunes, we immediately start building again on the slopes of the crater which can only spew catastrophe." For catastrophe has loomed for their relationship since its beginning. He recalls the last visit to Balbec, when Aimé reported to him that she was in town and "was looking 'not quite the thing,'" a phrase whose ambiguity led him to imagine that "perhaps he meant a lesbian look" -- whatever that might be. It sent his imagination into overdrive in any case.

For the narrator, "love is an incurable ailment," marked by a jealousy that can strike at any moment, including "after the event, which arises only after we have left the person in question, a 'staircase jealousy' like staircase wit." He reflects that "modern Gomorrah is a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces from the most unlikely places." And that "Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love."

Most often love has for its object a body only if an emotion, the fear of losing the loved object, the uncertainty of finding it again, are fused with that body.... Had not I recognized in Albertine one of those girls under whose fleshly covering there palpitate more hidden beings, not just than in a deck of cards still in its box, in a locked cathedral or a theatre before the doors open, but in the whole vast, ever-changing crowd?

Day One Hundred Thirty-Five, The Prisoner, pp. 35-46

From "Since I tried as far as possible to have left the Duchesse..." to "...related ideas to form a powerful force for break-up."

_____

When he leaves the Duchesse to return home, the narrator often encounters Charlus and Morel on their way to Jupien's, where they took tea every day. Charlus was once offended when Jupien's niece said "I'll treat you to tea," a phrasing that was apparently considered "a vulgar one, particularly in the mouth of someone he was planning to make his almost-daughter-in-law." For Charlus is seeing to it that Morel and Jupien's niece are to be married. Meanwhile, Charlus has been flirting with a pageboy at a gambling club, who has written to him, and he is so delighted with the intimacy that he shows off the letter to M. de Vaugoubert, whom he usually avoids.

For the diplomat, with his monocle stuck in his eye, stared in all directions at the lads passing by. What was more, when he was with M. de Charlus, he grew more daring, and began to use a language which the Baron hated. He put all men's names in the feminine and, as he was very stupid, thought this was the height of wit and was constantly bursting out laughing.

The narrator comments to the reader that it shouldn't be surprising that this kind of "degeneracy" is often found in the upper classes: "As time passes, old families develop peculiarities -- a red, hooked nose, a deformed chin --" and "among these persisting and ever intensifying traits, there are some which are not visible: tendencies and tastes." Proust's references to homosexuality as "degeneracy" and "inversion" are sometimes read as his attempt to cover up his own gayness, but others think that with them he is widening the scope of his satire to include his narrator.

As for Charlus's enthusiasm for marrying Morel to Jupien's niece (despite her vulgar turn of speech, which, after he denounces it to Morel, she never utters again), it is a move to continue his control over his protégé. The reasoning is that "once he was married his fears for his household, for his flat, for his future would give M. de Charlus's wishes a stronger purchase upon him." 

Morel has given up his previously expressed desire to seduce and abandon a young virgin, and the prospect of marrying Jupien's niece instead of raping her appeals to him especially after he experiences cramps in his hand that raise the possibility that he will have to give up the violin. "Since, in everything outside his art, he was unbelievably lazy, he would need to find someone to keep him, and he felt he would rather it were Jupien's niece than M. de Charlus." Morel has also borrowed money from Bloch, befriending him during the transaction and then denouncing him after he realizes that he's going to have to repay it: "anti-Semitism was, in Morel, the natural result of having been lent five thousand francs by a Jew."

Day One Hundred Seventeen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 248-259

Part II, Chapter II, from "We were, Albertine and I, in front of the Balbec station..." to "...the parallel ranges of distant, blue-colored foothills."

_____ 

At the Balbec train station, Albertine and the narrator see M. Nissim Bernard sporting a black eye, given him by the twin brother of a farmboy he had been having sex with. Then the "lift" arrives with a message for the narrator: Mme. Verdurin had telephoned the hotel to invite him to dine with her at one of her "Wednesdays." The narrator is eager to go so he can see if Mme. Putbus has arrived with her lady's maid. He wants to check out the maid's plans to visit Balbec "so as to take Albertine well away on the day in question." 

They are on their way to Doncières to meet Saint-Loup, and are forced to share a carriage with "a lady with an enormous, ugly old face, and a mannish expression, very overdressed, who was reading the Revue des deux mondes." He had been hoping "to kiss Albertine all through the journey," but the "extremely dignified" lady, who the narrator decides must be "the manageress of some large brothel," stays on for the whole trip. 

At Doncières, Saint-Loup is able to visit with them for only an hour, which turns out to be fine with the narrator because "no sooner had she alighted from the carriage than Albertine's attention was all for Saint-Loup." Fortunately, Saint-Loup resists her flirting. When he leaves them at the station, he mentions that Charlus will be arriving there shortly to take the train for Paris. And soon the Baron arrives,

in a light-colored traveling suit that made him look fatter, waddling as he walked, swinging a belly that was becoming a paunch and an almost symbolic behind, the cruelty of the broad daylight had broken down, into rouge on his lips, into rice powder fixed by cold cream on the tip of his nose, into black on the dyed mustache whose ebony color contrasted with his graying hair, everything that in an artificial light would have seemed to be enlivening the complexion of someone still young. 

Charlus asks the narrator to call over a young soldier whose insignia show him to be a member of the regimental band, claiming that the man is a relative of his. But the narrator is surprised to find that the soldier is Charles Morel. Charlus continues his conversation with Morel after sending the narrator on his way, and the narrator watches from the carriage, realizing that "M. de Charlus had never in his life met Morel, nor Morel M. de Charlus." And when the Paris train arrives, Charlus doesn't get on it. The looks he gives Morel "would have been recognized by three out of four society people, who bowed to him, but not by the chief of police, who, a few years later, was to put him under surveillance." 

In the train, the narrator and Albertine talk about Saint-Loup, and he concludes, "Because she had seemed to feel desire for Saint-Loup, I felt more or less cured for some time of the idea that she loved women, which I imagined to be incompatible."                  

Day One Hundred Sixteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 230-248

Part II, Chapter II, from "Calmed by my discussion with Albertine, I began..." to "...whom Albertine had perhaps loved was in any case about abruptly to cease."

_____

The narrator's mother encourages him to read more, but he can't resist spending his time with Albertine and her old gang of girls. Chiefly, he's concerned with keeping an eye on Albertine because of his suspicion that she may be a lesbian. Every time he spots a new girl on the beach, he feels "uneasy and proposed the most distant excursions to Albertine, so that she might not make the acquaintance of, or even, if it were possible, set eyes on, the new arrival." He is even nervous that the lady's maid to Mme. Putbus whom Saint-Loup told him about, mentioning that she also liked women, will "try to corrupt her." 

Meanwhile, Bloch's sister has caused a scandal at the hotel by a public demonstration of affection for her actress girlfriend. (Proust had earlier said it was Bloch's cousin in the relationship with an actress.) But she has a protector in the person of M. Nissim Bernard, who keeps a young man who works at the hotel. M. Nissim Bernard takes his lunch at the hotel every day just to see the young man, a habit that Bloch père attributes to "a poetic liking for the beautiful light, the sunsets along this coast" and to "the inveterate idiosyncrasy of an old bachelor." 


The narrator then digresses into a portrait of "two sisters who had accompanied an old foreign lady to Balbec, as lady's maids," Mlle. Marie Gineste and Mme. Céleste Albert. (Sturrock's note identifies them as actual people; Céleste Albert was Proust's housekeeper from 1914 to his death in 1922.) They give us one of the few physical descriptions of the narrator, Céleste referring to him as a "little black devil with hair like a jay," "just like a bird," as fastidious, as having "cool and friendly cheeks like the inside of an almond, little satin hands all plush, nails like claws," and "pretty skin." Françoise is shocked at his friendship with servants, and even the hotel manager "pointed solemnly out to me that it was undignified for a guest to talk to" them. 

Returning to the subject of Bloch's sister's misbehavior, we learn that "everything that concerned M. Nissim Bernard was 'taboo' for the manager of the Balbec hotel," so that the manager doesn't bring the subject up to him but only asks her to maintain "a certain circumspection." Nevertheless, one evening, as the narrator, Albertine, and Bloch are leaving the casino the sister and her lover "came past, intertwined, kissing without stopping, and, having drawn level with us, gave vent to giggles, laughter, and indecent shouts. Bloch looked down, so as to appear not to have recognized his sister, while I was in torments at the thought that this private and atrocious language was perhaps directed at Albertine." 

And then the narrator sees a newcomer, a beautiful young woman, in the casino where "she never stopped letting the alternating and revolving light from her glances rest on Albertine." The narrator suspects that Albertine knows the young woman, but she doesn't acknowledge her. And a few days later he witnesses a flirtation between the young woman and Bloch's cousin.

Words followed, a conversation got under way, and the young woman's innocent husband, who had been looking for her everywhere, was astonished to find her making plans for that same evening with a girl he did not know. His wife introduced Bloch's cousin to him as a girlhood friend, under some unintelligible name, for she had forgotten to ask her what her name was. But the presence of the husband advanced their intimacy by a step, for they addressed each other as tu, having met at the convent, an incident at which they laughed heartily later on, as well as at the deluded husband, with a merriment that was an opportunity for further intimacies.

But the section ends with the narrator's assurance that "the jealousy caused in me by the women whom Albertine had perhaps loved was in any case abruptly to cease."    

Day One Hundred Fourteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 192-211

Poussin, "Landscape With Calm"

Part II, Chapter II, from "It was not even on that evening, however that my cruel mistrust..." to "...continuance. But that time had not yet come."

_____

The narrator decides to pay a call on Mme. Verdurin, but the train breaks down in Incarville, where he meets Dr. Cottard in the station. While waiting for the repairs to take place, they enter a little casino to which Albertine, Andrée and several of their friends have gone. Because of the lack of male partners, several girls were dancing together. Cottard and the narrator watch Albertine and Andrée waltzing, and Cottard remarks that "the parents are very unwise who let their daughters pick up such habits.... I've forgotten my eyeglass and I can't see properly, but they're certainly at the height of arousal. It's not sufficiently well known that it's chiefly through the breasts that women experience it." And to the eyes of the susceptible narrator, Cottard's observation seems to be correct: "Albertine seemed to be demonstrating, to be making Andrée acknowledge, some secret and voluptuous tremor."

The narrator's suspicions and jealousy increase. They have an argument one day because she wants to leave him to "call on a lady who was 'at home,' it seemed, every day at five o'clock in Infreville." They argue back and forth until the narrator declares that he will go with her, whereupon "Albertine looked as if she had received a terrible blow" and resorts to "an abrupt change of tack," deciding that they should go to dinner on "the other side of Balbec." He turns the argument around, insisting that she should stick to her original plan. 

I sensed that Albertine was giving up on my account something she had arranged that she did not want to tell me about, and that there was someone who would be as unhappy as I had been. Finding that what she had wanted was not possible, since I wanted to go with her, she gave it up unhesitatingly.

A few days later, they see Bloch's sister and cousin in the casino at Balbec. The cousin is openly in a lesbian relationship with an actress. Andrée tells the narrator that she and Albertine disapprove: "there's nothing the two of us find more disgusting." But the narrator senses something different in Albertine's attitude toward Bloch's cousin and, "perhaps on the hypothesis, though I did not as yet consciously entertain it, that Albertine liked women," he tells her that Bloch's sister and cousin paid them no attention. Whereupon, "unthinkingly," Albertine contradicts him. And he realizes that, although she had her back to them, she had been watching them in a mirror.

His suspicions about Albertine cause him to grow angry. 

I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann's love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine's whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped me to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.

But before we enter into another extended passage of obsession, of the narrator's desire to possess and control, we take a break with the arrival of the dowager Marquise de Cambremer and her daughter-in-law, Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin. (It gets a little hard to follow which of the Mmes. de Cambremer is talking or being talked about at any given moment.) They have come to call on the narrator at the hotel, having been urged to do so by Saint-Loup. "You know he's due shortly to come and spend a few days locally," the dowager tells the narrator. "His uncle Charlus is staying in the country at his sister-in-law's, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de Saint-Loup will take the opportunity to go and greet his aunt and to revisit his old regiment, where he is greatly loved, greatly esteemed." The narrator is accompanied by Albertine and her friends, and introduces them to the dowager Marquise, who then presents Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin to them. 

The conversation that ensues is largely about art, with the younger Mme. de Cambremer determined to impress them with her enthusiasm for Monet and Debussy. "Mme de Cambremer liked to 'get the blood coursing' by 'squabblng' about art, as others about politics." When she dismisses Poussin as "an untalented old hack," the narrator takes delight in "rehabilitating Poussin" by telling her, 

"M. Degas assures us that he knows of nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly." "Oh yes? I don't know the ones at Chantilly," said Mme de Cambremer, who did not want to be of a different opinion from Degas, "but I can talk about those in the Louvre, which are horrors." "Those, too, he admires enormously." "I shall have to look at them again. It's all a bit old in my head," she replied after a moment's silence, and as if the favorable judgment she would certainly soon be delivering on Poussin must depend, not on the news I had just conveyed to her, but on the supplementary and this time definitive examination to which she was relying on subjecting the Poussins in the Louvre so as to facilitate the reversing of her verdict.

The narrator reflects to himself on the vicissitudes of taste: "The day was coming ... when, for a time, Debussy would be declared to be as fragile as Massenet, and the joltings of Mélisande demoted to the rank of those of Manon. For theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour one another and, by their struggles, ensure life's continuance."               

Day One Hundred Five: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 37-59

Part II, Chapter I, from "As I was not in any hurry to arrive..." to "...moved away to let him welcome the new arrivals." 

_____

And so the narrator goes to the reception at the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes's, still uncertain whether he has been invited or been the victim of a practical joke.

Outside, he encounters the Duc de Châtellerault, who has been "outed" to him by yesterday's conversation between Jupien and Charlus. Somehow, the narrator has learned of a liaison between the Duc and the Princesse's doorman, in which the Duc managed to keep his identity secret by pretending to be an Englishman. So when the Duc and doorman meet again at the entrance to the reception, there's a comical recognition scene: "As he asked his 'Englishman' of two days before what name he should announce, the doorman was not merely moved, he judged himself to be indiscreet, tactless.... On hearing the guest's reply, 'the Duc de Châtellerault,' he felt so overcome with pride that he remained speechless for a moment." 

The narrator, on the other hand, expects social ruin when his own name is "roared out, like the sound preceding a possible cataclysm," fearing that the Princesse will order the footmen to haul him away. Instead she rises and approaches him graciously, then dismisses him with the words, "You'll find the Prince in the garden." But now he faces another dilemma: finding someone who will introduce him to the Prince. He sees Charlus, who could have done so, but is afraid that the Baron will not forgive him for arriving at the reception without his prior intercession -- he had earlier assured the narrator, "The only entrée to those salons is through me."
 

Then he's stopped by someone else he knows, "Professor E--," the physician he encountered when his grandmother suffered her stroke, and who seemed more interested in getting ready for his dinner with the minister of commerce than in helping the ill woman. Now, Professor E--, who knows no one at the reception, having been invited because of his recent successful treatment of the Prince, wants to cling to the narrator. But the latter manages to shrug him off to talk to the Marquis de Vaugoubert, who "was one of the few men (perhaps the only man) in society who found himself in what is known in Sodom as 'confidence' with M. de Charlus." That is, Vaugoubert had committed youthful homosexual indiscretions known to Charlus. But ambitious to make his way in the Foreign Ministry, Vaugoubert has devoted himself to chastity: 

Having gone from an almost infantile debauchery to absolute continence on the day his thoughts turned to the Quai d'Orsay and the desire to make a great career, he wore the look of a caged beast, casting glances in all directions expressive of fear, craving, and stupidity.

He has married, but Mme. de Vaugoubert is as masculine as her husband is effeminate. "I felt, alas, that she looked on me with interest and curiosity as one of the young men who appealed to M. de Vaugoubert, and whom she would have so much liked to be, now that her aging husband preferred youth."

However, the narrator still hasn't persuaded anyone to introduce him to the Prince. Next he sees Mme. d'Arpajon, and his inability for a moment to remember her name sends him off into a reverie about how we remember names. And here Proust begins to craft a dialogue between the narrator and the reader, playing off the latter's frustration with his seeming ability to move his story forward: 

"All of which," the reader will say, "teaches us nothing about this lady's disobligingness; but since you've been at a standstill for this long, let me, M. l'Auteur, make you waste one minute more to tell you how regrettable it is that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he is not yourself), you should already have so little memory as to be unable to recall the name of a lady whom you knew very well." It is very regrettable, you are right, M. le Lecteur.

And he goes on with more reflections on the topic of remembering things until the reader interrupts again: "'So Mme d'Arpajon finally introduced you to the Prince?' No, but be quiet and let me take up my story again." This bit of authorial raillery perhaps reflects Proust's interest in English fiction, where such author-reader interchanges often take place, and it also raises the question of the narrator's identity, on which Proust had no doubt already been challenged by readers and critics.

In any case, Mme. d'Arpajon doesn't introduce him to the Prince, leaving him venturing to approach Charlus again, only to be interrupted by Mme. de Gallardon, who wants to introduce her nephew, Adalbert, Vicomte de Courvoisier, to Charlus. The Baron responds to her with his customary surliness, but the narrator persists with his own request. 

[P]erhaps -- in spite of his ill-humor against me -- I would have succeeded with him when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not had the unhappy idea of adding, out of scrupulousness, and so that he should not suppose me tactless enough to have entered on the off chance, relying on him to enable me to stay, "You know that I know them very well, the Princesse has been very kind to me." "Well, if you know them, what need have you of me to introduce you?" he snapped at me and, turning his back, resumed his make-believe game of cards with the nuncio, the German ambassador, and a personage whom I did not know. 

Finally, he succeeds when he encounters M. de Bréauté, who obligingly effects the introduction. He finds the Prince aloof, in contrast with the agreeableness of the Duc de Guermantes, but paradoxically "realized at once that the fundamentally disdainful man was the Duc, who spoke to you from your first visit 'as an equal,' and that, of the two cousins, the truly simple one was the Prince."

Day One Hundred Four: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 3-33

Part I, from "As we know, well before going that day..." to "...fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." 

_____

Actually, Part I in the Penguin/Viking edition begins with a portentous phrase: "First appearance of the men-women, descendants of those inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven." And then comes an epigraph: 

Woman will have Gomorrah and man will have Sodom.

--Alfred de Vigny

Still, we can't much blame Proust for laying it on a bit thick. He knew that the book was bound to attract bluenoses and censors, and that it had to have at least the appearance of moralizing if it had any hope of attracting even partly sympathetic heterosexual readers. Hence the long, dense, occasionally obscure portrait of the underground gay network, an embryonic version of what today is a community.

The section is a flashback to the concluding section of The Guermantes Way, and was originally written as a part of it. The narrator is lurking, on the lookout for the Guermantes carriage, so he can go ask the Duc and Duchesse if he really was invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's reception. And so he sees a startling encounter between Charlus, "potbellied, aged by the full daylight, graying," and Jupien.

Jupien ..., at once shedding the humble, kindly expression I had always seen him wear, had -- in perfect symmetry with the Baron -- drawn back his head, set his torso at an advantageous angle, placed his fist on his hip with a grotesque impertinence, and made his behind stick out, striking poses with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee.

The botanical metaphor, based on a conversation at the dinner party in The Guermantes Way that the Duchesse had with the Princess of Parma about the pollination of a particularly beautiful plant which bore only female flowers, continues throughout the section. Meanwhile, Jupien leaves the courtyard, throwing flirtatious come-hither looks at Charlus, and is pursued by the Baron, who returns with him and disappears into his shop. 

The narrator has "lost sight of the bumblebee," but he realizes that he has just witnessed "the good fortune reserved for men of the Baron's kind by one of those fellow creatures who may even be, as we shall see, infinitely younger than Jupien and better-looking, the man predestined so that they may receive their share of sensual pleasure on this earth: the man who loves only elderly gentlemen." He is self-conscious about his voyeurism, recalling "the scene in Montjouvain, hidden in front of Mlle Vinteuil's window," but he persists in it nevertheless -- to an almost absurd extent, sneaking into the empty shop that adjoins Jouvain's, listening through the "exceedingly thin partition" and climbing a ladder to peer through a transom. "From which I later concluded that if there is one thing as noisy as suffering it is pleasure, especially when there is added to it ... an immediate concern with cleanliness." 

He also overhears the conversation between Charlus and Jupien, in which the former uses the opportunity to network, to explore with Jupien the erotic potential of the neighborhood. When Charlus asks him about any gay "young society men" who visit the Duc and Duchesse, Jupien tries to describe one but is unable to give a portrait that Charlus recognizes. To the narrator, however, "the portrait seemed an accurate reference to the Duc de Châtellerault" -- the one who seemed to take delight in the embarrassment of the footman serving him at the Duchesse's dinner party. 

The incident has obviously put Charlus in a whole new light for the narrator: "Until now, because I had not understood, I had not seen.... an error dispelled lends us an extra sense." He understands the need for concealment, for fear of suffering the fate of Oscar Wilde, "the poet who was yesterday being fêted in every drawing room and applauded in every theater in London, only to be driven on the morrow from every lodging house, unable to find a pillow on which to lay his head." And he launches into a lengthy account of the "freemasonry" of gays that "rests on an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeship, of knowledge, of commerce, and of vocabulary, ... all of them obliged to protect their secret." He also touches on the closeted, the self-denying, the young men ignorant of the meaning of their own desires. 

And then he realizes what his recent encounter with Charlus had been.

There were indeed certain individuals that he found it enoiugh to have come to him, and to hold them for a few hours under the sway of his tongue, to appease the desire kindled in him by some encounter.... On occasions, as had no doubt transpired in my own case one the evening when I had been summoned by him after the Guermantes dinner party, assuagement came about thanks to a violent dressing down cast by the Baron into his visitor's face.... M. de Charlus had passed from being the dominated to the dominator, and, feeling himself calmed and purged of his anxiety, dismissed the visitor he had at once ceased to find desirable.

Part I ends with the narrator regretting that his voyeurism has perhaps made him miss "the fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee." It's an effective overture to the novel.

Day One Hundred Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 510-595

Part II, Chapter II, from "In the time that followed, I was continually to be invited..." to "..."'You'll live to see us all in our graves!'" 

_____

A long stay in a waiting room today left me with nothing to do but read much more than my ten-page minimum, taking me to the end of The Guermantes Way.  In this final section, we learn of the narrator's continued involvement with the social circle to which the Duchesse's dinner party invitation introduced him; of the bizarre behavior of Charlus, who thinks the narrator has been not only showed ingratitude for not taking advantage of the opportunities the Baron has offered him, but also somehow slandered him; and of Swann's terminal illness.  

The narrator describes the dinner party as "a sort of social Eucharist," but insists with florid irony that "the manducation of the ortolan was not obligatory." He continues to comment on the shallowness of the society of which he has become part, sometimes by entering into the characters' heads, as when the Duchesse, in conversation with the Princess of Parma, makes a reference to "'Gustave Moreau's Young Man and Death. Your Highness is of course acquainted with the masterpiece.' The Princess of Parma, who had never even heard of Moreau, nodded in vigorous assent and smiled warmly in order to demonstrate her admiration for this painting." And he once more exposes the Duchesse's hypocrisy. Having previously called Elstir's portrait of herself "ghastly," she now claims, "Elstir has done a fine portrait of me.... It's not a good likeness, but it's intriguing." And yet the narrator continues to forgive her: "That Mme de Guermantes should be like other women had been a disappointment to me at first; I reacted to it now, with the help of so much fine wine, as something almost wondrous." But he also takes himself to task, recalling "those hours spent in society when I lived on the surface, my hair well groomed, my shirtfront starched -- that is to say, hours in which I could feel nothing of what I personally regarded as pleasure."

At one party, there are some foreshadowings of events to come, when Prince Von, "who could not endure the English" is attempting to advance the idea of an alliance between France and Germany, denouncing Edward VII and the British army, and insisting "it's us you ought to make friends with, it's the Kaiser's dearest wish, but he wants it to come from the heart. He puts it this way: 'What I want to see is a hand clasped in my own, not someone touching their hat to me!' With that you would be invincible." 

But what most attracts the narrator to the company of Ducs and Princes and Barons is the sense of times past, of European history embodied in family pedigrees. The people he meets in society are dull, stupid, and prejudiced, but "these prejudices from the historical past instantly restored to the friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes their lost poetry." 

M. de Guermantes had a command of memories that gave his conversation the fine feel of an ancient mansion, lacking in real masterpieces but still full of authentic pictures, of middling interest and imposing, giving an overall impression of grandeur.... Thus does the heavy structure of the aristocracy, with its rare windows, admitting a scant amount of daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar, but also the same massive, blind force as Romanesque architecture, enclose all our history within its sullen walls.

Still, the company he keeps is full of fools, of the misinformed and casually malicious, such as the Turkish ambassadress who warns the narrator that the decidedly heterosexual Duc de Guermantes is "a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son." The narrator notes that "error, gullibly credited untruth were for the ambassadress like a life-sustaining element without which she could not function." But he also credits the inanity of conversation at these affairs to his own presence: "The talk was trivial, no doubt because I was present, and, seeing all these pretty people kept apart, it pained me to think that my presence was preventing them from proceeding, in the most precious of its salons, with the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain." 

As he leaves the Hôtel de Guermantes for his appointment with Charlus, the narrator reflects on the occasion as one of his epiphanies: 

I was prey to this second sort of exhilaration, very different from that afforded by a personal impression, like those I had received in other carriages: once in Combray, in Dr. Percepied's gig, from which I had seen the Martinville steeples against the setting sun; another day in Balbec, in Mme de Villeparisis's barouche, when I tried hard to work out what it was I was reminded of by an avenue of trees. But in this third carriage, what I had before my mind's eye was those conversations that had seemed so tedious at Mme de Guermantes's dinner party -- for example, Prince Von's story about the Kaiser, General Botha, and the British Army. I had just slid these into the inner stereoscope we use, as soon as we are no longer ourselves, as soon as we adopt a society spirit and wish to receive our life only from others, to bring into solid relief what they have said and done. Like a man who has had too much to drink and feels full of kindness and consideration for the waiter who has been serving him, I marveled at my good fortune -- something I had not felt, for sure, at the actual moment -- in having dined with someone who knew Wilhelm II so well and had told stories about him that were, upon my word, extremely witty.

But whatever euphoria he might be feeling in the carriage is soon to dissipate at the Baron de Charlus's. For Charlus, after making him wait a long time, receives him "stretched out on a sofa" and after the narrator speaks to him "the cold fury on M. de Charlus's face seemed to intensify." He tells the narrator to sit in the Louis XIV chair and then mocks him for his ignorance when he sits in a "Directory fireside chair." Charlus has the "magnificent head" of "an aging Apollo; but it was as if an olive-greenish, bilious juice was about to seep out of his malevolent mouth." 

As Charlus's insults mount, the narrator, though still bewildered by the malevolence, becomes angry: "I grabbed hold of the Baron's new top hat, threw it to the ground, trampled on it, and, bent on pulling it to pieces, I ripped out the lining, tore the crown in two." But when he tries to leave, the Baron prevents him and changes his tone. Though he continues to insult the narrator and to charge him with ingratitude and slander, he also begins to court him, "taking my chin between two fingers, drawn there, it seemed, as if by a magnet, and, after a moment's resistance, running up to my ears like the fingers of a barber. 'Ah, how pleasant it would be to look at 'the blue moonlight' in the Bois with someone like yourself,' he said with sudden and almost involuntary gentleness, than added sadly: 'For you're nice, really. You could be nicer than anyone,' he added, laying his hand paternally on my shoulder." 

"Paternally" is not exactly the word that comes to my mind here. 

Finally, the Baron takes the narrator home in his carriage, still proclaiming that their friendship is over, and that because of his alleged behavior the narrator has blown any chance of being invited to the Princesse de Guermantes's.  So when, a few days later, he receives an invitation from the Princesse, he suspects it of being a hoax or a cruel practical joke. To try to find out if the invitation is real, he goes to visit the Duc and Duchesse, where he encounters Swann and learns that he is suffering from the same illness "that carried off his mother, who had been struck down by it at exactly the age he now was." He talks with Swann about the Dreyfus case and the anti-Semitism of the Prince de Guermantes who, Swann claims, let a wing of his country house burn down "rather than send to the neighboring property -- it belongs to the Rothschilds -- for hoses." Swann, too, he learns, is invited to the Princesse's reception, and they agree to go there together. But the novel ends with the self-absorption of the Duc and Duchesse, who treat their own concerns -- whether the Duchesse should wear red shoes or black -- as more important than Swann's illness. 

Day Eighty-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 160-177

From "She seemed concerned to concur..." to "...part of the afternoon in my company."

_____

The narrator discovers that "Rachel, when from the Lord" is intelligent and articulate, if a bit given to slang -- "the irritating jargon of literary cliques and artists' studios." She likes the same works of art -- Impressionism, Wagner -- that he does. He also notes that she was "clumsy with her hands," and that "She recovered her dexterity only when she was making love, with the touchingly intuitive foresight of women who are so in love with men's bodies that they immediately sense what will give most pleasure to those bodies, which are yet so different from their own." How does he know this? 

In talking of the theater, she says that La Berma's "way of doing things no longer appeals to us." He is irritated by the "ironic superiority" with which she talks of other actors, "because I believed -- quite wrongly, as it happened -- that it was she who was inferior to them." He also gives a foreshadowing hint in a remark about "all great talent that is not yet recognized, as hers was not at the time." Throughout this, he refers to her as "Saint-Loup's mistress" more often than he does to her as Rachel.

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup's jealousy continues to flare up, as when he notices that she was "making eyes at a young student who was lunching with a friend at one of the next tables." Then word comes that someone outside the restaurant is asking for him. It is Charlus, his uncle. "My family track me down everywhere," Saint-Loup says angrily, and has a waiter sent to say that he's not there. "An old womanizer like him, and still at it, preaching at me and coming here to spy on me!" And when Rachel continues to flirt with the student, Saint-Loup leaves the restaurant angrily, only to return by another entrance and send word for Rachel and the narrator to join him in a private dining room. 

The narrator begins to get drunk, and his antipathy toward Rachel fades somewhat when she gives him champagne, a Turkish cigarette, and a rose that she unpins from her bodice.

At which point I thought, "I needn't feel I've spent the day too badly; the time spent in the company of this young woman has not been wasted, since I have had from her -- gracious things that cannot be bought too dear -- a rose, a scented cigarette, a glass of champagne." I thought this because it seemed to me that such thoughts would lend an aesthetic flavor to these hours of boredom, and so justify and redeem them. I ought perhaps to have been aware that the very need of a justification to make my boredom bearable was sufficient proof that my feelings were anything but aesthetic.

Suddenly, with an abruptly dreamlike shift that perhaps is intended to reflect the narrator's intoxication, we are at the theater, where he is upset by the efforts of Rachel and a claque of her friends to hoot an untalented young singer from the stage. He also notices that Rachel, whom Saint-Loup had first seen onstage, "had one of those faces that distance ... throws into sharp outline, and which, seen close up, crumble to dust." 

The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by the woman one has dreamed of, means that it can take no time at all to settle all one's chances of happiness on someone who a few days earlier was no more than a fortuitous, unknown, commonplace apparition on the boards of a theater.

Or, he might have added, in a garden full of hawthorn like Gilberte or with a gang of girls on an esplanade like Albertine. 

During the intermission they go backstage, where the narrator mentions to Saint-Loup that he was sorry that they didn't get a chance to say a proper goodbye in Doncières, and Saint-Loup reveals that he was upset because he had only been able to give him a cold salute as he rode by on his way to the garrison. 

I had already observed in Balbec that, compared with the spontaneous sincerity of his face, with that transparent skin which revealed the sudden surge of his emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a number of the dissimulations demanded by etiquette, and that, like a truly skilled actor, he had the ability, in his regimental and in his society life, to play a succession of different roles. 

That this conversation is being had backstage in a theater highlights the observation. Meanwhile he notices a heavily made-up young male dancer rehearsing his moves, who "seemed so entirely of another species from the sensible people in conventional dress among whom he was pursuing his ecstatic trance like a madman." Rachel knows the dancer (whom, translator Mark Traherne tells us in a note, Proust modeled on Nijinsky) and calls him "a beautifully made man." This sparks a quarrel between her and Saint-Loup, who threatens to leave. 

Saint-Loup also notices some cigar-smoking men, a group of journalists, and expresses concern that the smoke will exacerbate the narrator's asthma. When he asks one of them to throw away his cigar, the man replies, "I'm not aware of any rule against smoking. If people are ill they should stay at home." In the background, Rachel is flirting boldly with the dancer, to whom she says, "You look like a girl yourself. I'm sure I could have a really exciting time with you and a girl I know. ... The things we could do together!" Whereupon Saint-Loup slugs the journalist. 

Saint-Loup and the narrator leave the theater without Rachel, but when the narrator pauses for a moment at a spot he associates with Gilberte, Saint-Loup walks on ahead and is accosted by "a somewhat shabbily dressed gentleman." Suddenly, as the narrator catches up with his friend, Saint-Loup begins pummeling this stranger, "who seemed to be losing his self-possession, his jaw, and a great deal of blood." It turns out that the man, "seeing Saint-Loup as the handsome soldier he was, had propositioned him." 

Proust doesn't describe action. He describes the impression of action. So we see both fights, with the man in the theater and the man on the street, through the narrator's unprepared eyes. In the first, Saint-Loup raises his arm "vertically above his head, as if he were signalling to someone I could not see, or like an orchestra conductor" before bringing his hand down and delivering "a resounding smack on the journalist's cheek." And on the street Saint-Loup's fists become "ovoid bodies assuming with dizzying speed all the positions they needed to form an unstable constellation.... Hurled out like missiles from a catapult, there seemed to me to be at least seven of them." The imagery rather suggests a panel from a superhero comic book. 

What we have just witnessed from Saint-Loup is, of course, a gay-bashing. And also, perhaps, an instance of what has been called "gay panic" by lawyers who have defended gay-bashers in court -- the theory that homophobia provokes some men to violence when they are propositioned by gay men. This is Saint-Loup's own defense: 

My friend could not get over the effrontery of this 'clique' who no longer even waited for the shades of night before they ventured out, and he spoke of the proposition with the same indignation that can be found in newspaper reports of armed assault and robbery in broad daylight in the center of Paris. Yet the victim of Saint-Loup's blows was excusable in on respect: the downward slope brings desire quickly enough to the point of fulfillment for beauty alone to be seen as consent. That Saint-Loup was beautiful was beyond question.... [But] thrashings of this sort, even when they reinforce the law, do nothing to bring uniformity to morals.

That last phrase is a strangely tacked-on bit of moralizing over the disturbing scene that has just been presented to us. What's more important here is the subtext. Throughout this selection, Saint-Loup has been more tender toward and more defensive of the narrator than he has been toward his mistress. The love between the two men is stronger. And the eruption of violence takes place first in the ambiguously sexualized ambience of the theatrical backstage, with Rachel's teasing suggestion that the epicene dancer join her another woman in a three-way -- an ironic parody of the trio of narrator, Rachel and Saint-Loup, among whom sexual tension has been bristling all day. It's no surprise that violence should erupt when there is a forthright challenge to Saint-Loup's sexual identity. Note also that the sexually ambiguous Charlus has a cameo role in this episode.