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By Root 565 0

heard the news (SG, 344; 1434). Saniette is remorselessly mocked for sport, with no concern for the effects on his psyche. Their world is bizarrely binaristic: the fawning faithful are ‘intelligent’; those who do not or will not come, or whose fidelity lapses, are ‘boring’ or ‘stupid’, although just a glance at the frequent occurrences of these terms shows how their conventional meanings have been all but entirely evacuated. The Cambremers tolerate their tenants since the rent provides for the upkeep of their residence at Féterne; their gardener’s attitude, however, depicts in miniature the true relations across the class divide: ‘[he] groaned beneath the Verdurins’ yoke, as though the place were … occupied by an invading army of roughneck soldiery’ (SG, 365; 1447).

Charlus’s presence among the Verdurin clan provokes some fascinating tensions relating to class and to sexuality. His ‘morals’ are generally overlooked and certainly not discussed in high society; chez Verdurin, however, he is less discreet and more notorious. M. Verdurin, seeking to dissimulate his ignorance regarding social protocol, remarks to Charlus that ‘from the first words we exchanged, I realised that you were one of us! … you are one of us, it’s as clear as daylight’ (SG, 393; 1464). The construction ‘en être’ (translated in italics) is used to refer to homosexuality throughout the Search; Charlus accordingly fears what his blundering host is about to blurt out. Fortunately (laughably), Verdurin is referring to social belonging. Charlus, bristling, corrects the error that he is ‘only a baron’, reeling off his remarkable string of titles, concluding with a characteristically dismissive ‘however, it’s not of the slightest importance’ (SG, 395; 1465).

As the evening draws to its end, Mme Verdurin tries to dissuade the Narrator from accepting a dinner invitation from the Cambremers (‘the place is infested with bores’); in his fudged response he claims to ‘have a young cousin [he] can’t leave by herself’ as a means of excusing his spending time with Albertine (SG, 425; 1484–5), thus contributing his own measure of obfuscation to the swirl of half-truths and lies circulating amongst the faithful. This evening with the Verdurins is the only one narrated in full, but it represents, metonymically we might say, many other such events. This technique of narrating once what was a repeated or customary event has been called ‘iterative narrative’ by Gérard Genette in his important essay ‘Discours du récit’ [Narrative Discourse]. These hours spent in bourgeois society are no more profitable in artistic terms than those spent chez Guermantes. When M. Verdurin comments that the weather seems to have changed as the Narrator prepares to leave, the effect is profound: ‘these words filled me with joy, as though the dormant life, the resurgence of different combinations which they implied in nature, heralded other changes, occurring in my own life, and created fresh possibilities in it’ (SG, 433; 1489). The sudden sentiment of joy here comes from a change in the weather (‘le temps’) but also from stepping outside the social bubble into a new relation with time: simply by opening the front door, ‘on sentait qu’un autre “temps” occupait depuis un instant la scène’ (‘one felt that another time/weather had just taken possession of the scene’: Proust’s inverted commas around ‘temps’ draw attention to the polysemous value that cannot quite be captured in translation).

Given that dreams can have the clarity of consciousness, ‘might consciousness have the unreality of a dream?’ So ponders the Narrator at the start of Chapter Three (SG, 445; 1497). The mind’s activity during sleep offers evidence of powerful creative potential the artist must harness in his or her work. The Narrator, however, spends much of his time fearfully testing the potential ‘unreality’ of whatever presents itself to him in his waking hours rather than channelling his creative capacities into a work of art.

Travelling alone while Albertine paints near Balbec, he recognizes that the feelings he has for her