Sodom and Gomorrah
Finished — 2026-06-18
Started — 2025-09-12
It’s a miracle that the Katsushika Central Library had four whole volumes of In Search of Lost Time, and I have now exhausted all of them. This one, like volume II, is kept in the stacks and thus I needed to request that it be taken out a few times, and did my best to keep renewing it rather than returning it entirely. I took a break in the middle, but could not stay away for long.
“You mean to write a book,” she turned to myself, “you ought to make a note of Charleval and Merlerault. You will find nothing better.”
We’ve obviously been too easygoing, and the gaffe Swann is committing will reverberate all the more inasmuch as he was held in high esteem, received even, and was just about the only Jew whom one knew. People will say to themselves, “Ab uno disce omnes.” (The satisfaction of having found in his memory, at the appointed moment, so opportune a quotation, alone caused a proud smile to illuminate the melancholy of the great nobleman betrayed.)
But what suddenly revealed the Princesse’s love to me was a particular fact that I shall not dwell on here, for it forms part of the very different story in which M. de Charlus allowed a queen to die rather than miss the hairdresser who was to use the curling tongs on him to impress a bus conductor by whom he found himself prodigiously intimidated.⁸⁹
- the very different story… intimidated: sadly, Proust did not include this episode in the finished text.
And I began once again to listen, and to suffer; when we are waiting, the double trajectory, from the ear that gathers in the sounds to the mind that processes and analyzes them, and from the mind to the heart to which it transmits its results, is so rapid that we are unable even to perceive its duration, and we seem to be listening directly with our hearts.
Dennettesque
[…] the French words we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only “howlers” made by Gallic mouths in mispronouncing Latin or Saxon, our language being simply the defective pronunciation of a few others. The genius of the language in its living state, and the future and past of French, that is what should have interested me in Françoise’s mistakes. Was her “amender” for “mender” not equally as curious as those animals surviving from remote epochs, such as the whale or the giraffe, which demonstrate to us the stages through which animal life has passed?
Spinneyesque
So it is that women far better qualified than Mme Swann are ranked at the very bottom of the social scale, either on account of their origins or because they do not like dining out or the soirees at which they are never seen, which is wrongly supposed to be due to their not having been invited, or because they never talk about their friendships in society but only about literature or art, or because people keep quiet about having visited them, or they, so as not to show impoliteness to others, keep quiet about having entertained them, in short for a thousand reasons that end by making one or another of them, in the eyes of some, the woman one does not receive. So it was with Odette. Mme d’Épinoy, looking at the time for a contribution to the Patrie Française, having had to go and call on her, as if she were going into her haberdasher’s, convinced moreover she would find only faces not despised even but unknown, remained as if transfixed when the door opened, not on the drawing room she had imagined, but on a magic chamber in which, as if thanks to a change of lighting in a fairy play, she recognized in the dazzling female extras, half reclining on divans or sitting on armchairs, addressing their hostess by her first name, the Highnesses and duchesses that she, the Princesse d’Épinoy, had the greatest difficulty in luring to her own house, and to whom, at that moment, beneath the benevolent gaze of Odette, the Marquis du Lau, the Comte Louis de Turenne, the Prince Borghese, and the Duc d’Estrées were acting as pantlers and as cupbearers, carrying the orangeade and the petits fours. Since, without her being aware of it, the Princesse d’Épinoy saw people’s place in society as internal to them, she was obliged to disincarnate Mme Swann and reincarnate her in a fashionable woman.
When I tried to find what the great pleasure was that I felt on going to Mme de Montmorency’s, I was myself somewhat disappointed. She lived in an old place in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, filled with detached houses divided by small gardens. Under the archway, a statuette, said to be by Falconet, represented a spring, from which, indeed, there welled a perpetual moisture. A little farther on, the concierge, her eyes permanently red, whether from grief, or neurasthenia, or a migraine, or a cold, never answered you, but gestured vaguely to indicate that the Duchesse was in and allowed a few drops to fall from her eyelids over a bowl filled with forget-me-nots. The pleasure I got from seeing the statuette, putting me in mind as it did of a small plaster gardener that had stood in a garden in Combray, was as nothing compared with that produced in me by the great, damp, resonant staircase, full of echoes, like that in certain bathing establishments of old, from the vases filled with cinerarias—blue against blue—in the anteroom, and above all from the tinkling of the bell, which exactly matched that in Eulalie’s room. This tinkling raised my enthusiasm to new heights, but seemed too humble for me to be able to explain it to Mme de Montmorency, so that that lady always saw me in a state of euphoria whose source she never divined.
- “Sappho”: legend has the poetess Sappho throwing herself into the sea off Lesbos as a result of her unrequited love for a boatman.
Pretty sure “legend has” something more relevant about Sappho…
“We had appointed to the benefice at Criquetot, despite all the difficulties there are in changing dioceses, the dean of a place where I myself have estates, a long way from here, in Combray, where the good priest felt he was becoming neurasthenic. Unfortunately, the sea air didn’t succeed at his great age; his neurasthenia increased, and he went back to Combray. But while he was our neighbor, he amused himself by going to consult all the old charters, and he wrote a rather intriguing little booklet on the local place-names. That gave him a taste for it, moreover, for it seems he’s occupying his closing years writing a large book on Combray and its surroundings. I shall send you his booklet on the region around Féterne. It’s a labor of love. You’ll read the most interesting things in it about our old Raspelière, about which my mother-in-law speaks much too modestly.”
Writing a booklet about place-names sounds pleasant
Because she saw herself as “advanced” and (in art only) “never far enough to the left,” as she put it, she imagined that music not only progresses, but does so along a single line, and that Debussy was some sort of super-Wagner, a little more advanced even than Wagner. She had not realized that, if Debussy was not as independent of Wagner as she herself was to believe in a few years’ time, for we use the weapons won in battle after all finally to liberate ourselves from him whom we have momentarily vanquished, he was nevertheless seeking, people beginning to have had their fill of works that were too complete, in which everything is expressed, to satisfy a contrary need. This reaction had been bolstered momentarily, of course, by theories similar to those that, in politics, come to the support of laws against the Congrégations, or wars in the East (teaching against nature, Yellow Peril, etc.). An age of haste called, it was said, for rapidity in art, absolutely as they might have said that a future war could not last more than a fortnight, or that the out-of-the-way spots beloved of the stagecoaches would be forsaken by the railways but restored to honor by the motorcar. It was recommended not to tire the listener’s attention, as though we did not have at our command different degrees of attention, the highest of which it is in fact up to the artist to awaken. For those who yawn with fatigue after ten lines of some second-rate article have been making the journey to Bayreuth year after year to hear the Tetralogy. The day was coming, moreover, 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. But that time had not yet come.
Moreover, he loved that whole labyrinth of corridors, secret offices, halls, cloakrooms, larders, and galleries that was the Balbec hotel. He had the atavistic love of an Oriental for harems, and when he left in the evenings, he was to be seen furtively exploring its byways.
This of course makes me want to play Dwarf Fortress
Discovered the endnote about Céleste Albaret, Proust’s housekeeper who lived until… 1984!? And who wrote a book about him in the 1970s.
Apart from making coffee and serving the croissants, one task that Albaret was not called upon to perform was cooking her employer’s meals. Cooking did not take place at home. She was, however, mandated to telephone meal orders to the fine city restaurants: these were dispatched with minimal delay to the address at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Permanently ill by this time, Proust ate little by the (middle-and upper class) standards of Paris at those times, and he hardly drank. A meal might consist of a little of the white meat from a chicken or a filet of sole, washed down, on rare occasions, with a little flute of Champagne or of Bordeaux, which would suffice. The only meal which he really revered was the coffee and croissants, which he consumed as his tea-time “breakfast”. Sources speculate that a more varied diet might have buttressed his failing health more effectively. It would, however, be wrong to think that he was wholly inflexible in his “breakfast” routine. Towards the end of the war, in 1917, croissants disappeared from the bakeries and he developed a taste for Sablé biscuits that replaced the croissants on his breakfast tray.Proust’s celebrity status meant that many suppliers were willing to adapt to his unconventional timetable. The kitchens at the Hotel Ritz remained open longer than those of most establishments, but even here the kitchens were not, for most of his purposes, staffed and accessible through the night. Albaret held her own key, however, in order that she might be able to access the hotel kitchens at any point during the night, should her employer require a chilled beer.
“But isn’t the Princesse on the train?” asked Brichot in a quavering voice, whose enormous spectacles, resplendent like the reflectors that laryngologists attach to their foreheads to shine down their patients’ throats, seemed to have borrowed their vitality from the professor’s eyes and, perhaps because of the effort he was making to adjust his vision to them, seemed, even at the most insignificant moments, to be themselves gazing with a sustained attention and an extraordinary fixity. Moreover, by gradually depriving Brichot of his sight, his illness had revealed to him the beauties of this sense, just as we often need to have decided to part with an object, by making a present of it for example, to look at it, to miss it, and to admire it.
The splendor in which the people with whom we associate appear clothed is no more intrinsic than that of those characters on the stage, to dress whom it is quite pointless for a director to spend hundreds of thousands of francs on authentic costumes and real jewelry that will have no effect, when a great designer will create an impression of luxury a thousand times more sumptuous by directing a beam of artificial light at a doublet of coarse cloth strewn with glass bottletops, and a cloak made of paper. A man may have spent his life amid the great ones of the earth, who to him were either tedious relatives or tiresome acquaintances, because in his eyes a habit contracted from the cradle had stripped them of all glamour. But in return, this same glamour needed only, by some accident, to be added to the most obscure individuals for Cottards without number to live bedazzled by titled women whose salons they imagined to be the center of aristocratic elegance, and who were not even what Mme de Villeparisis and her friends were (great ladies fallen from favor with whom the aristocracy that had been brought up with them no longer associated); no, were the many people who took pride in their friendship with such ladies to publish their memoirs, citing their names and those of the women whom they re-ceived, no one, Mme de Cambremer any more than Mme de Guermantes, would be able to identify them. But what matter! In this way, a Cottard has his Baronne or his Marquise, who for him is “the Baronne” or “the Marquise,” just as in Marivaux, where the Baronne’s name is never spoken and we have no idea even that she ever had one. Cottard believes all the more strongly that he has here found the very essence of the aristocracy—which has no knowledge of this lady—because, the more doubtful the titles, the more space the coronets occupy on the glasses, the silver, the notepaper, and the luggage. Numerous Cottards, who thought they were spending their lives in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, have had their imaginations more bewitched perhaps by feudal dreams than those who have lived among princes in actuality, just as, for the small shopkeeper who on Sundays goes now and again to visit “olde-world” buildings, it is sometimes from those buildings all of whose stones are of our own world, and whose ceilings have been painted blue and strewn with gold stars by pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, that they get the strongest sense of the Middle Ages.
Let it be said in a word that Mme Verdurin, aside even from the changes made inevitable by age, no longer resembled what she had been in the days when Swann and Odette were listening to the little phrase in her house. Even when it was being played, she was no longer obliged to wear that look of exhausted admiration she had adopted in the old days, for it had become her face.
But whereas in M. de Charlus the immoderate praises were proclaimed with a positive burst of eloquence, and seasoned with the subtlest, the most mordant banter which marked a man forever, by M. de Vaugoubert, on the other hand, the affection was expressed with the banality of a man of the lowest intelligence, and of a public official, the grievances (worked up generally into a complete indictment, as with the Baron) by a malevolence which, though relentless, was at the same time spiritless, and was all the more startling inasmuch as it was invariably a direct contradiction of what the Minister had said six months earlier and might soon perhaps be saying again: a regularity of change which gave an almost astronomic poetry to the various phases of M. de Vaugoubert’s life, albeit apart from this nobody was ever less suggestive of a star.
He replied with an air of wonder and delight, his eyes continuing to stray as though there had been a patch of clover on either side of me upon which he was forbidden to graze.
“All this,” the reader will remark, “tells us nothing as to the lady’s failure to oblige; but since you have made so long a digression, allow me, gentle author, to waste another moment of your time in telling you that it is a pity that, young as you were (or as your hero was, if he be not yourself), you had already so feeble a memory that you could not recall the name of a lady whom you knew quite well.” It is indeed a pity, gentle reader.
“In a word, did Mme. d’Arpajon introduce you to the Prince?” No, but be quiet and let me go on with my story.
And he gave a little laugh that was peculiar to him, a laugh that had probably come down to him from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who had herself got the identical laugh from one of her forebears, so that it had been ringing out like this, unchanged, for a good few centuries in the lesser courts of old Europe, and its precious quality had been enjoyed, like that of certain old musical instruments now grown very uncommon. There are times when, in order to depict someone in their entirety, a phonetic imitation would need to be added to the description, and that of the character which M. de Charlus was playing risks incompleteness for want of this little laugh, so delicate and so light, just as certain of Bach’s suites are never rendered accurately because the orchestras lack the “little trumpets,” with their particular tone, for which the composer wrote one or another part.
It is strange that a certain category of secret actions should have as their external consequence a manner of speaking or of gesticulating that betrays them. If a gentleman believes, or not, in the Immaculate Conception, or in Dreyfus’s innocence, or in the plurality of worlds, but wishes to keep it to himself, you will find nothing in his voice, or ın his bearıng, that enables you to see his thoughts. But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that high-pitched voice, and with that smile and those movements of the arm, “No, I preferred its neighbor, the fraisett,” you could have said, “Aha, he likes the strong sex,” with the same certainty as that which enables a judge to condemn a criminal who has not confessed, or a doctor a general paralytic who perhaps does not know himself what is wrong with him but who has made certain mistakes in pronunciation from which it can be deduced that he will be dead within three years. Perhaps the people who infer from the way of saying, “No, I preferred its neighbor, the fraisette,” a so-called antiphysical love, have no need of so much science. But that is because in this case there is a more direct relationship between the telltale sign and the secret. Without quite putting it into words, we sense that it is a gentle, smiling lady who is answering and who appears affected because she is passing herself off as a man and because we are not accustomed to seeing men put on so many airs and graces. And it is more gracious perhaps to imagine that for a long time now a certain number of angelic women have been included by mistake in the male sex, where, as exiles, even as they vainly beat their wings at the men whom they fill with a physical repulsion, they know how to arrange a drawing room or create an “interior.”
I returned by the roads from which you can see the sea, and where once, before it appeared between the branches, I used to close my eyes to reflect that what I was about to see was indeed the plaintive ancestress of the earth, pursuing, as in the days when no human beings as yet existed, its crazed, immemorial agitation. Now they were nothing more for me than the means of going to rejoin Albertine; when I recognized them, quite un-changed, knowing how far they would run straight ahead, and where they would bend, I remembered that I had followed them thinking of Mille de Stermaria, and that I had been in just the same hurry to find Albertine again in Paris, when going down the streets along which Mme de Guermantes had passed; they had taken on for me the profound monotony and the moral significance of a sort of line that my character was following. It was natural, but not thereby a matter of indifference; they reminded me that my fate was to pursue only phantoms, beings whose reality lay in large part in my imagination; there are human beings indeed-and this had been my own case since my early days — for whom whatever has a fixed value, reconizabe be ther, fortune, success, a high position, counts for nothing; what they must have is phantoms. To this they sacrifice all the rest, use every eysible means, bend all their efforts, to encounter some phantom. But the latter is not long in vanishing; then they pursue some other phantom, while being ready to return later to the first one. This was not the first time that I had gone in search of Albertine, the girl glimpsed that first year in front of the sea. Other women, it was true, had been interposed between the Albertine loved on that first occasion and the one whom at present I hardly ever left; other women, notably the Duchesse de Guermantes. But, people will say, why agonize so over Gilberte, or go to so much trouble over Mme de Guermantes, if, having become the latter’s friend, it was solely in order not to think about her anymore, but only about Albertine? Swann, before his death, might have known the answer, he who had been a connoisseur of phantoms. These Balbec roads were full of them, of phantoms pursued, forgotten, sought after afresh, sometimes for a single interview and so as to touch an unreal life that had at once made its escape. Reflecting that their trees, pears, apples, and tamarisks would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them the advice finally to set to work while the hour of eternal rest had yet to sound.
But, quite to the contrary, the Baron was not simply a Christian, as we know, but pious in the fashion of the Middle Ages. For him, as for the sculptors of the thirteenth century, the Christian church was, in the living sense of the word, peopled by a crowd of beings he believed to be perfectly real: prophets, apostles, angels, sacred personages of every sort, surrounding the Word made flesh, his mother and her es-poused, the Eternal Father, all the martyrs and doctors, the race of whom, in high relief, crowd the porch or fill the nave of the cathedrals. From among them all, M. de Charlus had chosen as his patron intercessors the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, with whom he held frequent conversations so that they might convey his prayers to the Eternal Father, before whose throne they stand.
Love causes these veritable geological upheavals in our thoughts. In those of M. de Charlus, which, a few days before, had resembled a plain so smooth that, away into the distance, he would not have been able to spot an idea lying on the surface, there had abruptly arisen, hard as stone, a mountain massif, but of mountains so sculpted it was as if some statuary, instead of carrying the marble away, had carved it where it lay, and where there writhed, in giant, titanic groups, Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror, and Love.