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The nature of Charlus’s designs becomes retrospectively clearer in the opening section of Sodom and Gomorrah, but for the remainder of The Guermantes Way intrigues of gender and desire are placed on hold as a few final layers are peeled from the social onion. When the Narrator receives an invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes his insecurities lead him to doubt its authenticity. Fearful of the ignominy of gatecrashing a society soirée he seeks confirmation from the Duc and Duchesse. Gazing over the courtyard, awaiting their return, the Narrator’s thoughts turn to artistic matters. He ponders the multiplicity of the vista, recalling Venetian skylines and Dutch townscapes of paintings he has admired. These references are not contingent: they prepare the reader for Bergotte’s death scene and the Venetian section of The Fugitive; they also underscore how solitude is necessary for the engagement of the Narrator’s artistic vision. The Duc and Duchesse appear but have to prepare themselves for a series of evening engagements. Swann arrives, bringing the Duchesse outsized photographs of some rare coins he has recently discovered. The Narrator steals a moment to talk to Swann about the Affair; this permits Proust to remind readers of the positions of various prominent figures, positions which, as Sodom and Gomorrah shows, are far from definitively fixed.

The humour of the scene (for example, the Duc’s stating that he is happy for the photographs to go in the Duchesse’s room where he will not see them, ‘oblivious of the revelation he was thus blindly making of the negative character of his conjugal relations’; G, 686; 1200) is tempered by the pathos of Swann’s announcement of his illness. This refocuses attention on the theme of mortality, latent since the grandmother’s death, now painfully present in the blundering Duc’s choice of idioms (‘she’ll reach the dinner-table quite dead … I’m dying of hunger’; G, 690; 1203). Proust exhibits here his extraordinary ability to expose human foibles whilst balancing pain with laughter. Mme de Guermantes ‘could find nothing in the code of conventions’ indicating the right course of action between ‘two duties as incompatible as getting into a carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die’, and so, tellingly, she thinks ‘that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed’ (G, 688; 1202). This ostrich-like response neatly encapsulates the vision of high society that emerges from The Guermantes Way. It is not a snobbish celebration of the old aristocracy; the Narrator may at times be entranced by them, but he also offers an uncompromising critique of the blinkered self-centredness that contributed in large measure to their demise.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Part One

A voyeuristic scene reminiscent of that involving Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain in ‘Combray’ opens the volume: the Narrator observes Charlus and Jupien meeting by chance in the Guermantes’ courtyard. After watching Charlus’s initial overtures, he eavesdrops on them having sex in Jupien’s workshop. Thus enlightened, extrapolating from this episode, the Narrator subsequently discusses the plight of the ‘descendants of Sodom’, describing the various types of ‘invert’.

Part Two

Chapter One begins with an extensive account of the Princesse de Guermantes’ reception: Dreyfus is much discussed, as are various individuals’ shifts in allegiance. The Narrator receives a late-night visit from Albertine: his behaviour anticipates his later, neurotic possessiveness. Returning to Balbec he experiences the delayed realization that his grandmother is dead. In Chapter Two happiness with Albertine seems possible but is tinged with suspicions, as when Cottard remarks on how she dances with Andrée. Various developments fuel the Narrator’s anxieties: Bloch’s sister’s relation with an actress; M. Nissim Bernard’s proclivities; Charlus’s first meeting with Charlie Morel, son of Uncle Adolphe’s valet. A long sequence narrates an evening party at ‘La Raspelière’, the residence