Day One Hundred Seventy-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 85-108

From "The war seemed to be continuing indefinitely. ..." through "... And he began to roar with laughter as if we had been alone in a drawing-room."

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As the narrator and Charlus stroll along the boulevard, the latter holds forth on the war, though with occasional asides on other topics, such as his estrangement from Morel. "The boy is mad about women, and never thinks about anything else," Charlus says, which the narrator has reason to doubt, "having with my own eyes seen Morel agree to spend a night with the Prince de Guermantes for fifty francs." But he has also known men who were once willing to yield to such enticements give them up out of "religious scruples," fear of exposure "when certain scandals broke, or by a fear of non-existent diseases in which they had been made to believe.... Thus it was that the former lift-boy at Balbec would no longer have accepted, for love or money, propositions which now seemed to him as dangerous as approaches from the enemy." And Morel "had fallen in love with a woman with whom he was still living and who, being more strong-willed than he was, had been able to demand absolute fidelity from him."

Charlus goes on to talk about Norpois' enthusiastic support of the war -- "I think the death of my aunt Villeparisis must have given him a new lease of life" -- in his newspaper articles, and to talk about the old aristocracy of Europe in familiar terms; "As for the Tsar of the Bulgars, he is a complete nancy, a raving queer, but very intelligent, a remarkable man. He likes me very much." The narrator finds Charlus "obnoxious when he started on topics like these. He brought to them a self-satisfaction as annoying as that which we feel in the presence of an invalid who is always pointing out how good his health is." 

The narrator takes an opportunity to digress about "the relations between Mme Verdurin and Brichot." The latter's articles in the newspaper have "literally dazzled" society, to the annoyance of Mme. Verdurin, who,  "exasperated by the success that his articles were having in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now took care never to have Brichot to her house when he was likely to meet there some glittering woman whom he did not yet know and who would hasten to entice him away." The narrator himself doesn't care much for Brichot's articles: "The vulgarity of the man was constantly visible beneath the pedantry of the literary scholar." And Mme. Verdurin "never started an article by Brichot without the prior satisfaction of thinking that she was going to find ridiculous things in it." And when she does, she makes a practice of mocking them to her guests, and by extension to mock her society rivals, such as Mme. Molé, who profess to admire them. Mme. Molé, the narrator tells us, "was cowardly enough to disown Brichot, whom in reality she thought the equal of Michelet."

Meanwhile, Charlus continues to talk about the war from his own peculiar point of view: "all those great footmen, six feet tall, who used to adorn the monumental staircases of our loveliest female friends, have all been killed." And he claims to be less distressed by the damage done to the cathedral at Rheims than to "the annihilation of so many of the groups of buildings which once made the smallest village in France both charming and edifying." The narrator thinks of Combray, and hopes Charlus won't talk about it, but he does, noting the destruction of Saint-Hilaire: "The church was destroyed by the French and the English because it was being used as an observation-post by the Germans. The whole of that mixture of living history and art that was France is being destroyed, and the process is not over yet." He goes on to proclaim pro-German sentiments, making the narrator uneasy:

He had developed the habit of almost shouting some of the things he said, out of excitability, out of his attempt to find outlets for impressions of which he needed -- never having cultivated any of the arts -- to unburden himself.... On the boulevards this harangue was also a mark of his contempt for passers-by, for whom he no more lowered his voice than he would have moved out of the way.

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."

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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 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."

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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 Thirteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 180-192

Part II, Chapter II, from "In my fear that the pleasure found..." to "...at all events be with me before 1 a.m."

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The dazzling sight of the apple trees in blossom seems to mark a turning point for the narrator, who notes that "my grief at my grandmother's death was diminishing." There is a concomitant change: "Albertine was beginning, meanwhile, to fill me with something like a desire for happiness." The parallel he uses for this experience is, however, somewhat bathetic: "Are married couples not soon to be found once again intertwined, in the very bedroom where they have lost a child, in order to give the dead little one a brother?"

When he sets out by train to see Albertine, and to invite her on a visit to Mme. de Cambremer and Mme. Verdurin, he is suddenly visited by the specter of his grandmother.

what could I have done with Rosemonde when across the whole of my lips there was passing only a desperate desire to kiss a dead woman? What could I have said to the Cambremers and the Verdurins when my heart was pounding because the sorrow that my grandmother had endured was constantly re-forming there? I could not remain in that carriage.

(Sturrock's note informs us that "Rosemonde" in this passage is "a slip of the pen for Albertine." Knowing of Proust's admiration for George Eliot, I wonder if he may have had in mind Rosamond Vincy, who became the destructive obsession of Lydgate in Middlemarch.)

He gets off the train in Maineville-la-Teinturière, where he notes the presence there of "an establishment to which we shall be returning, ... the first brothel for the smart set that anyone had thought to build on the coasts of France." But he doesn't stop there now. Returning to the hotel, he sends Françoise to fetch Albertine for him. And once again he foreshadows for us: "I think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume." This time, however, Albertine's arrival "dispelled my happiness," although he is forced once again to suffer a warning from Françoise: "Monsieur shouldn't see that young lady. I can easily tell the sort of character she has; she'll cause you unhappiness." 

But foreshadowing is about all this section does. The remainder of it is taken up with observations about life in the hotel and the character of the "lift," the elevator operator who also figured in the previous visit to Balbec.

Day Fifty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 380-391

From "I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert..." to "...the waiters who were about to serve us."

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Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.