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a broken-down tram results in the Narrator bumping into Cottard at Incarville. In the casino, where they pass the time, a scene unfolds that profoundly alters the Narrator’s perception of Albertine. She and her friends are there; Albertine is waltzing with Andrée. The Narrator comments to Cottard how well they dance, whereupon the doctor, ignoring that the Narrator knows the girls, remarks that ‘they are certainly keenly roused. It’s not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement through their breasts. And theirs, as you see, are touching completely’ (SG, 225; 1356). Once more, a contingent event throws the Narrator into a spin: a man of science identifies in Albertine evidence of the vice he most fears, and hereafter almost every girl he sees becomes his rival.

Subsequently the Narrator’s suspicions grow about Albertine’s avowals of interest or apathy towards this or that outing or activity. After one exchange of leading questions and evasive answers, he concludes that ultimately he ‘had no desire … to enter upon the terrible path of investigation, of multiform, unending vigilance’ (SG, 231; 1360). The irony of this statement is extremely bitter, for this is just what he does: The Captive is the narrative of his journey down precisely that path. Moreover, already at this stage he lies, claiming, for instance, that he has long loved Andrée and not Albertine, in order to talk her round to a reconciliatory intimacy he did not have the confidence to seek without the safety net of artfully woven lies. His actions are based upon deep insecurities about whether anyone could actually love him. As ever, he has mental agility in surfeit, but common sense in short supply; he summarizes his position as that of ‘those … whose self-analysis outweighs their self-esteem’ (SG, 264; 1381). Characteristically, he pays scant acknowledgement to the pain his actions might inflict on Albertine. Indeed, sympathize periodically with him as we might, admiring his turns of phrase and his nimble mind, just as often in Sodom and Gomorrah and The Captive we see quite how self-centred, hypocritical and inconsistent he can be. He has no qualms about fantasizing about Mme Putbus’s maid, for example, but when he remembers that Saint-Loup mentioned her possible taste for women, he trembles, fearful that she might find Albertine at Balbec and ‘corrupt her’ (SG, 277; 1390).

Balancing the tensions of jealousy and suspicion, the social scenarios of Sodom and Gomorrah are studded with portraiture and anecdotes which send up human vanities, illuminate desire’s sway over the individual and repeatedly reveal how, despite the great diversity of humankind, in the grips of passion we very often have much in common. The figure of Mme de Cambremer, ‘toothless’, frothing at the mouth at the mere thought of Chopin (SG, 239; 1366) is hard to forget; similarly it is difficult to read without smirking the anecdote of the short-sighted M. Nissim Bernard propositioning the wrong rosy-faced twin and receiving a beating that puts him off tomatoes for life (SG, 291–3; 1400–1). Proust’s text persistently switches between high and low, drawing a vast array of human experience into its purview.

Charlus, resembling the dandified old man feigning youth with cosmetics in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), meets Morel at Doncières station, a chance encounter reminiscent of that with Jupien at the start of the volume. The relationship between the aristocrat and the valet’s son is nurtured then torn apart by the Verdurins. Just as the Prince and the Duc de Guermantes changed their allegiance during the Affair, so now Mme Verdurin is ‘a sincere Dreyfusard’ (SG, 327; 1423), she whose ‘latent bourgeois anti-Semitism’ had, we were told in The Guermantes Way, ‘grown to a positive fury’ (G, 288; 939). The Verdurins are just as capable of insensitivity and cruelty as their titled counterparts: ‘ “It’s dreadful” ’, M. Verdurin responds ‘cheerfully’ to the news of the death of their faithful pianist Dechambre and reports that his ‘morbidly sensitive’ wife ‘almost wept’ when she