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rented by the Verdurins. Much humour derives from the uneasy interaction between the bourgeois Verdurin ‘faithful’ and their social superiors: the Cambremers, owners of ‘La Raspelière’, and Charlus, accompanying his new love, Morel. Chapter Three brings revelations of Morel’s vices and further anxiety about Albertine’s true nature. After a tiff Charlus informs Morel he will fight a duel, a lie calculated to bring his lover back. And so the relations stumble on from deception to reconciliation, with little sense of enduring happiness or freedom. Loosely connected vignettes relate seaside life and the convivial train journeys of the Verdurin faithful. Tired of her company and strained by his suspicions, the Narrator decides that marrying Albertine would be madness. In the brief Chapter Four, however, he unexpectedly discovers her long-term acquaintance with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend. This ‘proof’ of Albertine’s lesbianism shatters his decision to break with her. Only suffering remains for him, yet he resolves to return to Paris with her, somehow to keep her from her vice; he informs his mother he must marry Albertine.

Part One provides a study in Proust’s remarkable manipulation of context and metaphor. Waiting, overlooking the Guermantes’ courtyard, the Narrator reflects on the chance events that must occur in order for certain flowers to be fertilized. He has his eyes on a particular plant and, eventually, a bee does enter his field of vision, but it is soon clear that the tropes relating the vagaries of plant fertilization have a more complex purpose than the illustration of his taste for amateur botany. The Narrator studies Charlus and Jupien in the way a botanist might scrutinize sub-varieties of plants. His initial discovery, afforded by perceiving the baron at ease, thinking himself unobserved, is that he resembles a woman. He then watches this previously unseen version of Charlus approaching Jupien, who ‘struck poses with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee’ (SG, 5; 1212). Each man recognizes the other’s nature and capitalizes on the opportunity offered him by circumstance. The penny drops: ‘everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, appeared self-evident’ (SG, 16–17; 1219). Contemporary attitudes classed homosexuality as a ‘vice’, ‘a curse’, ‘an incurable disease’ (SG, 17–18; 1219–20); Proust draws parallels with similar attitudes to Jews at the time, but suggests lyrically that homosexuality, like the vast, proliferating sentence that communicates the point, reaches far and wide, is dispersed through every stratum of society. Charlus is identified as one for whom ‘the satisfaction … of [his] sexual needs depends upon the coincidence of too many conditions, and of conditions too difficult to meet’ (SG, 32; 1229). Yet he and Jupien surmount the barriers to their pleasure, a succession of events ‘almost of the same order and no less marvellous’ than the fecundation of the orchid by the bee. Contrary to society’s dominant views, to the observing Narrator ‘everything about it seemed to me imbued with beauty’ (SG, 33, trans. mod.; 1229). Lesbian relations are not treated until much later; when they are, the Narrator’s perspective is quite different: they represent a ‘terra incognita’ for the heterosexual male, a profound threat like a rival with ‘different weapons’ (SG, 597, 603; 1593, 1597).

As Charlus and Jupien’s relation makes clear, desire pays little heed to social status; this phenomenon is repeatedly highlighted by Proust, often to comic ends, as evinced by the anecdote relating the Duc de Châtellerault’s encounters with the usher who ‘barks’ out guests’ names upon their arrival at the Princesse de Guermantes’ residence (SG, 39–40, 42–3; 1235–6, 1237–8). The Narrator, much to his relief, is not persona non grata at the reception. Desperately trawling his memory for the name of a woman who starts speaking to him leads to an illuminating aside. Flawed memory is key to our appreciating the wonders of recollection, he suggests: