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By contrast, on just the following page we read of the ‘rare moral qualities’ of Charlus (TR, 103; 2191), who criticizes at length the biased presentation of the conflict in the newspapers, vital organs of communication in times of war. Charlus shows more compassion and feeling than Mme Verdurin can muster for fellow human beings when he relates to the Narrator the fate of the Combray church. Structurally, thematically and symbolically important as a site of continuity between past and present (SW, 68–75; 55–60), it was ‘destroyed by the French and the English because it served as an observation post to the Germans’. Charlus laments the destruction of ‘all that mixture of art and still-living history’ (TR, 130; 2207); when Saint-Loup is killed his body is returned and buried at Combray, an addition to the line of illustrious Guermantes whose presence below the ground contributed to the ‘four-dimensional’ feel of the church when it still stood.

Having parted ways with Charlus (TR, 147; 2218), the Narrator walks on, but, fatigued, seeks somewhere to rest before returning home. One establishment in the almost deserted streets shows signs of life: an officer leaves whose face the Narrator does not see but whose gait is very similar to Saint-Loup’s. The conversation he overhears of the men sitting in a room near the door offers scant interest until mention is made of someone being tied up and beaten. Keen to satisfy his curiosity and his thirst, he enters ‘with the pride of an emissary of justice and the rapture of a poet’ (TR, 150; 2220).

The hotel, it soon transpires, is a male brothel. The talk of those inside the establishment, mainly working-class men and servicemen on leave, offers a counterbalance to the views of the war we have already encountered from Charlus and Saint-Loup. After taking a room and having a drink, the Narrator creeps upstairs out of curiosity. ‘Stifled groans’ emanate from the room he finds there. Peering in through a small, fortuitously un-curtained window, he sees the recipient of the blows, ‘chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock’: Charlus (TR, 154; 2223). He has visible bruising from previous beatings and very real blood runs down his back, but this scene, like many others in the Search, is about illusion and desire. Jupien enters – he is the proprietor of the establishment, the Narrator-voyeur discovers – and Charlus hectors him about his assailant, Maurice, who is neither ‘sufficiently brutal’ nor suitably convincing in his verbal abuse (TR, 156; 2224). Jupien offers the services of a man from a slaughter house and, when this individual enters, the Narrator notices that both men vaguely resemble Morel. Just as the Narrator and Saint-Loup sought satisfaction in the arms of others resembling their lost loves, Charlus seeks a substitute satisfaction at the hands of men who look like his inaccessible object of desire. Maurice and the slaughter-man, however, are in fact a jeweller’s assistant and a hotel worker, playing roles under Jupien’s direction to fulfil the baron’s fantasy. Afterwards, when Charlus performs a sort of inspection of Jupien’s employees, it becomes clearer still how far his satisfaction is determined by his imagination: Jupien swears his men are thugs, murderers and pimps, which pleases Charlus, but when one denies he would kill a woman and another says he will share his payment with his parents and his brother at the front, remarks that suggest underlying virtue, Charlus cannot contain his angry disappointment.

There is a commotion at the hotel about a croix de guerre that has been found. An air-raid delays the Narrator’s return home, but on his arrival he finds that he has missed Saint-Loup, who called in looking for his missing medal: progressively, it seems, the paths of uncle and nephew converge in their pursuit of pleasure, an endeavour which for so many of the novel’s characters takes precedence over all other concerns. Before leaving Jupien’s hotel the Narrator witnesses an obstreperous