Moncrieff: 506-518; Treharne: 366-374
by Dennis Abrams
After Albertine’s departure, Marcel receives a letter from Mme de Stermaria, accepting his invitation to dinner for Wednesday. “From Mme de Stermaria — that was to say, for me, not so much from the real Mme de Stermaria as from the one of whom I had been thinking all day before Albertine’s arrival.” Marcel arrives at Mme de Villeparisis’ too late to attend the play, so sits in the outer room, picking up the gossip as people depart that the Duc de Guermantes and his wife have separated. We learn some time earlier, Marcel, after having his mother tell him “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet Mme de Guermantes. you’re becoming a laughing-stock. Besides, look how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious to think a bout than waylaying a woman who doesn’t care a straw about you,” wakes as though from a hypnotist’s spell and is no longer in love with Mme de Guermantes. No longer in love with her, Marcel was free to start his morning walks again, freed from the worry of running into her, and learns “What troubled me now was the discovery that almost every house sheltered some unhappy person.” Jupien expands his shop. M. de Norpois “does not see” Marcel, although a tall woman frequently “would wait for me,…smile at me as though she were going to kiss me, make gestures indicative of complete surrender.” Leaving the performance, Mme de Guermantes catches sight of Marcel “on my bergere, genuinely indifferent and seeking only to be polite whereas while I was in love with her I had tried so desperately, without ever succeeding, to assume an air of indifference,” and asks permission to sit beside him. “…it had never occurred to me that my recovery, in restoring me to a normal attitude towards Mme de Guermantes, would have a corresponding effect on her and make possible a friendliness, even a friendship, which no longer mattered to me.” Mme de Villeparisis invites Marcel to dine with her on Wednesday along with Mme de Guermantes, but because of his previous engagement with Mme de Stermaria, he declines. She invites him for Saturday night, but because his mother was returning that night, he declines as well. Mme de Guermantes, finding Marcel ‘interesting” because of what she sees as his lack of interest in society, invites him to dine with her at her house. “To dine with the Guermantes was like traveling to a place I had long wished to see, making a desire emerge from my head and take shape before my eyes.”
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What an interesting little section. As once again, we see that while being single-mindedly in love can often bring contempt, indifference can attract.
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There seemed to be some interest in the comments regarding Marcel’s reference to having been in a duel a few pages back, and the seemingly improbability of him having done so. So I’m going to give you this excerpt from Edmund White’s biography of Proust, giving you the story of his real-life duel, which, truth be told, veers fairly close to farce.
“One of those experiences was challenging someone to a duel — and fighting it with pistols in the forest of Meudon, the traditional dueling ground southwest of Paris in the direction of Versailles. Jean Lorrain, a decadent novelist (and like Marcel a homosexual and inveterate partygoer), had a standing feud with Robert de Montesquiou. {My note: One of the models for Charlus — more about him at a later date.} As a result he negatively reviewed his protege’s book Pleasures and Days, saying that Proust was “one of those pretty little society boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant with literature”‘; seven months later, on February 3, 1897, Lorrain returned to the attack with a newspaper article in which he wrote (under a pseudonym) that Alphonse Daudet was bound to write the preface of Marcel’s next boo, ‘since he cannot refuse anything to his son Lucien.’
This suggestion that Proust was a homosexual having an affair with the young Daudet could not be allowed to pass by unchallenged. (My note: although he was.) Three days later the two men, standing at a distance of twenty-five yards, fired in the air above each other’s head: Proust reported that his bullet fell just next to Lorrain’s foot. Proust showed a surprising coolness under fire. Perhaps he was proudest of the cachet of his seconds, the painter Jean Beraud and a celebrated he-man duelist, Gustave de Borda. No one remarked on the absurdity of one homosexual ‘accusing’ another of being homosexual, which led to a duel to clear the ‘reputation’ of the ‘injured’ party. After the duel Lorrain left Proust alone, though he continued to attack Montesquiou (when the baron had his portrait painted by the society artist Boldini, Lorrain remarked in print that he had put himself in the hands of a painter of ‘little women,’ an artist known as ‘the Paganini of the Peignoir”) Proust challenged other men to duels over the years; none of them, fortunately, had tragic consequences. Although duels were considered anachronistic, most people still thought of a duelist as courageous and manly. It was this hypervirile image that Proust was eager to cultivate, as a way of offsetting his spreading reputation as a homosexual. To be labeled a homosexual in print (as opposed to living a homosexual life in private or even discreetly among friends) was social anathema, even in Paris, until the very recent past.”
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Wednesday’s Reading:
Moncrieff: Page 518 “I must however add that a surprise of a total different sort was to follow…” through Page 528 “…because one feels alone and can believe oneself to be far away.”
Treharne: Page 374 “But I have to say that an utterly different sort of surprise was in store for me…” through Page 382 “…to have a lover walking beside you.”
Enjoy.
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