“Really?” replied the Princess, astonished by the assertion that life is horrible. “At least,” she added, “one can do a great deal of good.”
“Not even that, when you come down to it,” said the Duchess, fearful lest the conversation should turn to philanthropy, which she found boring. “How can one do good to people one doesn’t understand? And besides, one doesn’t know which people to do good to—one tries to do good to the wrong people. That’s what is so frightful. But to get back to Gilbert and his being shocked at your visiting the Iénas, Your Highness has far too much sense to let her actions be governed …”
Additional passage of dialogue in the manuscript:
“I think he’s mainly preoccupied by a Villeparisis-Norpois rapprochement,” said the Duchess, in order to change the subject.
“But is there any room for a closer rapprochement in that direction?” asked the Prince. “I thought they were already very close.”
“Good heavens!” said the Duchess with a gesture of alarm at the image of coupling which the Prince conjured up for her, “I believe at any rate that they have been. But I’m told, ridiculous though it may seem, that my aunt would like to marry him. No, seriously, it seems incredible, but I gather she’s the one who wants it, and he doesn’t because she already bores him enough as it is. Really, she can’t have any sense of the ridiculous. Why, I wonder, when one has so seldom ‘resisted’ in the course of one’s life, should one suddenly feel the need to sanction a liaison with matrimony, after dispensing with it on so many other occasions? There really isn’t much point in having caused every door to be closed to one if one cannot bear the idea of a union remaining illicit, especially when it’s as respectable as this one, and, we all hope, as platonic.”
Synopsis
PART ONE
Move into a new apartment in a wing of the Hôtel de Guermantes. Poetic dreams conjured up by the name Guermantes dispelled one by one.
Françoise holds court at lunch-time below stairs. Jupien; his niece.
The name Guermantes, having shed its feudal connotations, now offers my imagination a new mystery, that of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Guermantes’ doormat: threshold of the Faubourg.
A gala evening at the Opéra. Berma in Phèdre once more. The Prince of Saxony?. The Faubourg Saint-Germain in their boxes. The Princesse de Guermantes’s baignoire: the water-goddesses and the bearded tritons. Berma in a modern piece. Berma and Elstir. The Princesse and the Duchesse de Guermantes. Mme de Cambremer.
My stratagems for seeing the Duchesse de Guermantes out walking; her different faces. Françoise’s impenetrable feelings. I decide to visit Saint-Loup in his garrison, hoping to approach the Duchess through him.
Doncières. The cavalry barracks. The Captain, the Prince de Borodino. Saint-Loup’s room. Noises and silence. My Doncières hotel. The world of sleep. Field manoeuvres. Saint-Loup’s popularity. The streets of Doncières in the evening. Dinner at Saint-Loup’s pension. I ask him to speak to his aunt about me. He wants me to shine in front of his friends. He denies the rumour of his engagement to Mlle d’Ambresac. Major Duroc. The Army and the Dreyfus case. Aesthetics of the military art. Saint-Loup and his mistress. Captain deBorodino and his barber. My grandmother’s voice on the telephone. Saint-Loup’s strange salute.
Return to Paris. I discover how much my grandmother has changed as a result of her illness. End of winter. Mme de Guermantes in lighter dresses. Work-plans, constantly postponed. Mme Sazerat a Dreyfusard. Legrandin’s professed hatred of society. Visit to the suburbs to meet Saint-Loup’s mistress. I recognise her as “Rachel when from the Lord”. Pear-trees in blossom. Jealous scenes in the restaurant. In the theatre after lunch. Rachel’s cruelty. Her transformation on stage. Rachel and the dancer. Saint-Loup and the journalist. Saint-Loup and the passionate stranger.
An afternoon party at Mme de Villeparisis’s. Her social decline; her literary qualities. The social kaleidoscope and the Dreyfus case. Mme de Villeparisis’s Memoirs. The three Parcae. The portrait of the Duchesse de Montmorency. Legrandin in society. Mme de Guermantes’s face and her conversation lack the mysterious glamour of her name. Mme de Guermantes’s luncheons; the Mérimée and Meilhac and Halévy type of mind. Bloch’s bad manners. Entry of M. de Norpois. Entry of the Duc de Guermantes. Norpois and my father’s candidature for the Academy. Generality of psychological laws. Various opinions on Rachel, on Odette, on Mme de Cambremer. Norpois and the Dreyfus case. The laws of the imagination and of language. Mme de Villeparisis’s by-play with Bloch. The Comtesse de Marsantes. Entry of Robert de Saint-Loup. Mme de Guermantes’s amiability towards me. Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim. Oriane refuses to meet Mme Swann. Charles Morel pays me a visit; Mme Swann and the “Lady in pink”. Charlus and Odette. Charlus’s strange behaviour to his aunt. Mme de Marsantes and her son. I learn that Charlus is the Duc de Guermantes’s brother. The affair of the necklace. Mme de Villeparisis tries to prevent me from going home with M. de Charlus. Charlus offers to guide my life. “Terrible, almost insane” remarks about the Bloch family. M. d’Argencourt’s coldness towards me. Strange choice of a cab.
The Dreyfus case below-stairs. My grandmother’s illness. The thermometer. Dr du Boulbon’s diagnosis. Expedition to the Champs-Elysées with my grandmother. The “Marquise”. My grandmother has a slight stroke.
PART TWO
Chapter One
My grandmother’s illness and death. Professor E——. “Your grandmother is doomed”. Cottard. The specialist X——. My grandmother’s sisters remain at Combray. Visits from Bergotte, himself ill. Time and the work of art. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg. The leeches. The Duc de Guermantes. My grandmother’s brother-in-law the monk. Professor Dieulafoy. My grandmother’s death.
Chapter Two
Morning visits. The water-heater. Saint-Loup breaks with Rachel. Mme de Stermaria’s divorce. Visit from Albertine. New words in her vocabulary. Françoise. Successive images of Albertine. Her kiss. My mother cures me of my infatuation with Mme de Guermantes. Indiscreet behaviour of a “tall woman” whom I shall later discover to be the Princesse d’Orvillers. Reception at Mme de Villeparisis’s: conversation with Mme de Guermantes; she invites me to dinner, speaks to me about her brother-in-law. Charlus’s strange attitude towards Bloch. Albertine accompanies me to the Bois, where I am to dine next day with Mme de Stermaria. Mme de Stermaria cancels our appointment. Visit from Saint-Loup. Reflections on friendship. Memory of Doncières. Night and fog. The Prince de Foix and his coterie: the hunt for “money-bags”. The Jews. A pure Frenchman. Saint-Loup’s acrobatics. An invitation from M. de Charlus.
Dinner with the Guermantes. The Elstirs. The flowermaidens. The Princesse de Parme. The family genie. The Courvoisiers. The Duke a bad husband but a social ally to Mme de Guermantes. The Princesse de Parme’s receptions. The Guermantes salon. The Duchess’s mimicry. “Teaser Augustus”. Oriane’s “latest”. The handsome supernumeries. Disillusionment with the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The charm of the historic name of Guermantes detectable only in the Duchess’s vocal mannerisms: traces of her country childhood. Misunderstanding between a young dreamer and a society woman. Why Saint-Loup will return to a dangerous post in Morocco. The ritual orangeade. The Duchess praises the Empire style. The Guermantes divorced from the name Guermantes. Norpois at once malicious and obliging. The Turkish Ambassadress. The poetry of genealogy. Exaltation in the carriage on the way to M. de Charlus.
Waiting in M. de Charlus’s drawing-room. His strange welcome. Gentleness succeeding rage. He accompanies me home in his carriage.
Letter from the young footman to his cousin. Invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes. Diversity of society people in spite of their apparently monotonous insignificance. Visit to the Duke and Duchess: view of the neighbouring houses. Remarkable discovery which will be described later. The Duc de Bouillon. The coins of the Order of Malta. The Duc de Guermantes’s “Philippe de Champaigne”. Swann greatly “changed”. His Dreyfusism. The Duke’s ball and Amanien’
s illness. Swann’s illness. The Duchess’s red shoes.
Notes
1 The French is s’ennuyer de, which can mean to miss, to suffer from the absence of.
2 Françoise says avoir d’argent instead of avoir de l’argent.
3 Ce n’est pas mon père: celebrated remark by the môme Crevette in Feydeau’s La Dame de chez Maxim’s. It became a popular all-purpose catch-phrase. John Mortimer translated it as “How’s your father?” in his adaptation of the Feydeau play for the National Theatre.
4 The French is plaindre, to pity, which used also to mean to deplore or regret. The sense here is that Mme Octave did not regret her expenditure on rich fare.
5 A somewhat inaccurate quotation from Pascal’s famous “memorial.”
6 The allusion is to the Romanian-born Comtesse Anna de Noailles (née Brancovan), friend and correspondent of Proust, who was an extravagant admirer of her verse.
7 Popular abbreviation of the newspaper l’Intransigeant.
8 The Academy in question is l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, one of the five (including the Académie Française) which comprise the Institut de France.
9 Jules Méline, Prime Minister for two years during the Dreyfus Case.
10 Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1777), the best-known member of an illustrious family of botanists.
11 La barbe has the colloquial meaning “tedious” or “boring.”
12 Duc Decazes: minister and favourite of Louis XVIII.
13 Carmen Sylva was the pen-name of Elizabeth, Queen of Romania (1843-1916).
14 “Qu’importe le flacon pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse!”—the line is in fact by Alfred de Musset.
15 Le Syndicat was the term used by anti-semites to describe the secret power of the Jews.
16 Prince Henri d’Orléans, son of the Duc de Chartres, publicly embraced the notorious Esterhazy after he had given evidence at the Zola trial.
17 “Quand on parle du Saint-Loup!” is what the Duchess says. The French for “Talk of the devil” is “Quand on parle du loup.” The pun doesn’t work in English.
18 Paraphrase of a famous line from Molière’s Le Misanthrope: “Ah, qu’en termes galants ces choses-là sont mises!”
19 A word introduced by Pierre Loti from the Japanese musume, meaning girl or young woman.
20 There is a complicated pun here, impossible to convey in English. Françoise says: “Faut-il que j’éteinde?” instead of “éteigne.” Albertine’s “Teigne?” is not only a tentative correction of Françoise’s faulty subjunctive; it also suggests that she is an old shrew (a secondary meaning of teigne = tinea, moth).
21 i.e., Venice. For an elucidation of this passage, see “Place-names: the Name”: Swann’s Way pp. 554-59.
22 A Proustian joke here: Edouard Detaille was a mediocre academic painter known especially for his paintings of military life. Alexandre Ribot was a familiar middle-of-the-road political figure, twice Prime Minister under the Third Republic. Suzanne Reichenberg was for thirty years the principal ingénue at the Comédie-Française.
23 Ventre affamé—from the expression “Ventre affamé n’a pas d’oreilles,” meaning “Words are wasted on a starving man.”
24 A riverside restaurant/cabaret with “tree-houses” where, the notion was, patrons could imagine themselves the Swiss Family Robinson. It gave its name to the spot where it was situated, now incorporated in the Paris suburb of Le Plessis-Robinson.
25 La Fille de Roland was a popular verse drama by Henri de Bornier. The Duchess’s joke refers to Princess Marie, daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte, who married Prince George, second son of King George I of Greece.
26 An aria from Hérold’s Le Pré-aux-Clercs.
27 A seventeenth-century poetess noted for rather mawkish verses.
28 A reference to the playwright Edouard Pailleron, noted for his quick, sharp-witted, rather shallow comedies.
29 Euphemism for merde (shit), hence the joke about capital C or M.
30 A reference to La Fontaine’s fable The Miller and His Son, in which the third party is an ass.
31 A well-known French opera singer, who had little connexion with Wagner.
IN SEARCH OF
LOST TIME
VOLUME IV
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
MARCEL PROUST
TRANSLATED BY
C.K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND TERENCE KILMARTIN
REVISED BY D. J. ENRIGHT
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
1993 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York,
This edition was originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London, in 1992.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of Cities of the Plain by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
Sodom and Gomorrah first appeared in The Modern Library as Cities of the Plain in 1938.
Jacket portrait courtesy of Culver Pictures
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922.
[Sodome et Gomorrhe. English]
Sodom and Gomorrah/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p. cm.—(In search of lost time; 4)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Title. II. Series: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du
temps perdu. English;
PQ2631.R63S6313 1993
843'.912—dc20 92-27272
eISBN: 978-0-679-64181-0
v3.0r1jc
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Notes
Addenda
Synopsis
SODOM AND
GOMORRAH
PART ONE
The women shall have Gomorrah and
the men shall have Sodom
ALFRED DE VIGNY
The reader will remember that, well before going that day (the day on which the Princesse de Guermantes’s reception was to be held) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit I have just described, I had kept watch for their return and in the course of my vigil had made a discovery which concerned M. de Charlus in particular but was in itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence and treat it with the fullness that it demanded, postponed giving an account of it. I had, as I have said, left the marvellous point of vantage, so snugly contrived at the top of the house, commanding the hilly slopes which led up to the Hôtel de Bréquigny, and which were gaily decorated in the Italian manner by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frécourt’s coach-house. I had thought it more practical, when I suspected that the Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself on the staircase. I rather missed my Alpine eyrie. But at that time of day, namely the hour immediately after lunch, I had less cause for regret, for I should not then have seen, as in the morning, the footmen of the Bréquigny household, converted by distance into minute figures in a picture, make their leisurely ascent of the steep hillside, feather-brush in hand, behind the large, transparent flakes of mica which stood out so pleasingly upon its ruddy bastions. Failing the geologist’s field of contemplation, I had at least that of the botanist, and was peering through the shutters of the staircase window at the Duchess’s little shrub and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with which mothers “bring out” their marriageable offspring, and aski
ng myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. My curiosity emboldening me by degrees, I went down to the ground-floor window, which also stood open with its shutters ajar. I could distinctly hear Jupien getting ready to go out, but he could not detect me behind my blind, where I stood perfectly still until the moment when I drew quickly aside in order not to be seen by M. de Charlus, who, on his way to call upon Mme de Villeparisis, was slowly crossing the courtyard, corpulent, greying, aged by the strong light. Nothing short of an indisposition from which Mme de Villeparisis might be suffering (consequent on the illness of the Marquis de Fierbois, with whom he personally was at daggers drawn) could have made M. de Charlus pay a call, perhaps for the first time in his life, at that hour of the day. For with that eccentricity of the Guermantes, who, instead of conforming to the ways of society, tended to modify them to suit their own personal habits (habits not, they thought, social, and deserving in consequence the abasement before them of that worthless thing, society life—thus it was that Mme de Marsantes had no regular “day,” but was at home to her friends every morning between ten o’clock and noon), the Baron, reserving those hours for reading, hunting for old curios and so forth, paid calls only between four and six in the evening. At six o’clock he went to the Jockey Club, or took a stroll in the Bois. A moment later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien. It was nearly time for him to set out for the office, from which he would return only for dinner, and not always even then during the last week since his niece and her apprentices had gone to the country to finish a dress for a customer. Then, realising that no one could see me, I decided not to let myself be disturbed again for fear of missing, should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond the possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far away as ambassador to the virgin who had been waiting for so long. I knew that this expectancy was no more passive than in the male flower, whose stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily receive their offering; similarly the female flower that stood here would coquettishly arch her “styles” if the insect came, and, to be more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way. The laws of the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by increasingly higher laws. If the visit of an insect, that is to say the transportation of the seed from another flower, is generally necessary for the fertilisation of a flower, that is because self-fertilisation, the insemination of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in the same family, to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by insects gives to the subsequent generations of the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears. This invigoration may, however, prove excessive, and the species develop out of all proportion; then, as an antitoxin protects us against disease, as the thyroid gland regulates our adiposity, as defeat comes to punish pride, as fatigue follows indulgence, and as sleep in turn brings rest from fatigue, so an exceptional act of self-fertilisation comes at the crucial moment to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the curb, brings back within the norm the flower that has exaggeratedly overstepped it. My reflexions had followed a trend which I shall describe in due course, and I had already drawn from the visible stratagems of flowers a conclusion that bore upon a whole unconscious element of literary production, when I saw M. de Charlus coming away from the Marquise’s door. Only a few minutes had passed since his entry. Perhaps he had learned from his elderly relative herself, or merely from a servant, of a great improvement in her condition, or rather her complete recovery from what had been nothing more than a slight indisposition. At this moment, when he did not suspect that anyone was watching him, his eyelids lowered as a screen against the sun, M. de Charlus had relaxed that artificial tension, softened that artificial vigour in his face which were ordinarily sustained by the animation of his talk and the force of his will. Pale as a marble statue, his fine features with the prominent nose no longer received from an expression deliberately assumed a different meaning which altered the beauty of their contours; no more now than a Guermantes, he seemed already carved in stone, he, Palamède XV, in the chapel at Combray. These general features of a whole family took on, however, in the face of M. de Charlus a more spiritualised, above all a softer refinement. I regretted for his sake that he should habitually adulterate with so many violent outbursts, offensive eccentricities, calumnies, with such harshness, touchiness and arrogance, that he should conceal beneath a spurious brutality the amenity, the kindness which, as he emerged from Mme de Villeparisis’s, I saw so innocently displayed upon his face. Blinking his eyes in the sunlight, he seemed almost to be smiling, and I found in his face seen thus in repose and as it were in its natural state something so affectionate, so defenceless, that I could not help thinking how angry M. de Charlus would have been could he have known that he was being watched; for what was suggested to me by the sight of this man who was so enamoured of, who so prided himself upon, his virility, to whom all other men seemed odiously effeminate, what he suddenly suggested to me, to such an extent had he momentarily assumed the features, the expression, the smile thereof, was a woman.
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