Part 1

Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4
by Marcel Proust, John Sturrock (Translator)

The fourth volume in Penguin's acclaimed new translations of In Search of Lost Time.

Sodom and Gomorrah - now in a superb translation by John Sturrock - takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust's novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.

Chapter 1

M. de Charlus in society - A doctor - Characteristic face of Mme de Vaugoubert - Mme d'Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain, and the merriment of Grand Duke Vladimir - Mme d'Amoncourt, Mme de Citri, Mme de Saint-Euverte, etc. - Curious conversation between Swann and the Prince de Guermantes - Albertine on the telephone - Visits while awaiting my second and last stay in Balbec - Arrival in Balbec - Jealousy with regard to Albertine - The intermittences of the heart.

As I was not in any hurry to arrive at the Guermantes soirée, to which I was not certain of having been invited, I whiled away the time outside; but the summer daylight seemed in no greater haste to move than I was. Although it was after nine o'clock, it was still the daylight that, on the Place de la Concorde, had given to the Luxor obelisk an appearance of pink nougat. Then it modified the tint and turned it into a metallic substance, with the result that the obelisk did not merely become more precious, but seemed thinner and almost flexible. You fancied that you might have been able to twist it, that this jewel had already been bent slightly out of true perhaps. The moon was in the sky now like a quarter of an orange, delicately peeled but with a small bite out of it. Later it would be made of the most resistant gold. Huddled all alone behind it, a poor little star was about to serve as the solitary moon's one companion, while the latter, even as it shielded its friend, but more daring and going on ahead, would brandish, like an irresistible weapon, like a symbol of the Orient, its marvelous, ample golden cresent.

In front of the Princesse de Guermantes's hôtel, I met the Duc de Châtellerault; I no longer remembered that half an hour before I was still haunted by the fear - which was soon indeed to take hold of me again - of coming without having been invited. We feel uneasy, and it is sometimes long after the moment of danger, forgotten thanks to our distraction, that we remember our unease. I said good day to the young Duc and made my way into the house. But here I must first note a trifling circumstance which will enable a fact that will follow shortly to be understood.

On that, as on the preceding evenings, there was someone who had the Duc de Châtellerault very much on his mind, without, however, suspecting who he was: this was Mme de Guermantes's doorman (known in those days as the "barker"). M. de Châtellerault, very far from being an intimate - as he was of the cousins - of the Princesse, was being received in her drawing room for the first time. His parents, who had quarreled with her ten years ago, had made it up two weeks ago, and, obliged to be away from Paris on that evening, had asked their son to stand in for them. Now, a few days before, the Princesse's doorman had met a young man in the Champs-Élysées whom he had thought charming but whose identity he had been unable to establish. Not that the young man had not proved as amiable as he was generous. All the favors that the doorman had imagined having to grant so young a gentleman, he had, on the contrary, received. But M. de Châtellerault was as cowardly as he was imprudent; he was the more determined not to disclose his incognito inasmuch as he did not know whom he had to deal with; he would have felt an even greater fear - though ill founded - had he known. He had merely passed himself off as an Englishman, and to all the doorman's impassioned questions, who was eager to see someone to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and largesse again, the Duc had merely answered in English, all the way along the Avenue Gabriel, "I do not speak French."

Although, in spite of everything - because of his cousin's maternal origins - the Duc de Guermantes affected to find something a trifle Courvoisier-like about the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière's salon, the general verdict on that lady's spirit of initiative and intellectual superiority was based on an innovation not to be met with anywhere else in those circles. After dinner, and whatever the importance of the rout that was to follow, the seats at the Princesse de Guermantes's were arranged in such a manner that you formed small groups, which, if need be, had their backs to one another. The Princesse would then mark her social sense by going and sitting in one of these, as if from preference. She was not afraid, however, of selecting and calling on a member of another group. If, for example, she had remarked to M. Detaille, who had naturally agreed, what a pretty neck Mme de Villemur had, whose position in another group showed her from behind, the Princesse did not hesitate to raise her voice: "Mme de Villemur, M. Detaille, great painter that he is, is busy admiring your neck." Mme de Villemur understood this as a direct invitation to join in the conversation; with an agility born of her hours in the saddle, she caused her chair slowly to pivot through an arc of three-quarters of a circle and, without the least disturbance to her neighbors, sat almost facing the Princesse.

"You don't know M. Detaille?" asked her hostess, for whom her guest's skillful but modest about-face was not enough. "I don't know him, but I know his work," replied Mme de Villemur, with a winning and respectful expression, and an aptness that many envied, even as she was directing an imperceptible nod at the celebrated painter, her being summoned not having amounted to a formal introduction to him. "Come, M. Detaille," said the Princesse, "I'm going to introduce you to Mme de Villemur." The latter then showed as much ingenuity in making room for the author of The Dream as a little earlier in turning toward him. And the Princesse brought a chair forward for herself; indeed, she had summoned Mme de Villemur only so as to have a pretext for leaving the first group, where she had spent the regulation ten minutes, and granting an equal duration of her presence to a second. Within three-quarters of an hour, all of the groups had received her visit, which seemed every time to result from a sudden inspiration or a predilection, but which had the object above all of throwing into relief how naturally "a great lady knows how to entertain." But now the guests at the soirée were starting to arrive, and the hostess had taken her seat not far from the entrance - erect and haughty, in her quasi-royal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own incandescence - between two plain-looking Highnesses and the Spanish ambassadress.

I lined up behind several guests who had arrived ahead of me. Facing me I had the Princesse, whose beauty, among so many others, is no doubt not the only one to remind me of that particular party. But our hostess's face was so perfect, had been struck like some beautiful medal, that for me it has preserved a commemorative value. The Princesse was in the habit of saying to her guests, when she met them a few days before one of her soirées, "You will come, won't you?," as if she felt a strong desire to talk with them. But since, on the contrary, she had nothing to say to them, the moment they arrived in front of her she contented herself, without getting up, with breaking off for a moment from her vacuous conversation with the two Highnesses and the ambassadress to thank them, by saying, "It's kind of you to come," not because she thought that the guest had given proof of kindness by coming, but in order to enhance even further her own; then, at once throwing him back into the river, she would add, "You'll find M. de Guermantes at the door into the gardens," so that you went off visiting and left her in peace. To some even she said nothing, contenting herself with displaying her admirable onyx eyes, as if you had come merely to an exhibition of precious stones.

The first person to go in ahead of me was the Duc de Châtellerault.

Needing to respond to all the smiles, all the waved greetings that came to him from the drawing room, he had not noticed the doorman. But the doorman had recognized him from the very first moment. In a moment, he was going to know the identity he had so longed to learn. As he asked his "Englishman" of two days before what name he should announce, the doorman was not merely moved, he judged himself to be indiscreet, tactless. He seemed to be about to reveal to all the world (who would suspect nothing, however) a secret that he was guilty of having uncovered in this way and of broadcasting publicly. On hearing the guest's reply, "the Duc de Châtellerault," he felt so overcome by pride that he remained speechless for a moment. The Duc looked at him, recognized him, saw himself ruined, as the manservant, meanwhile, who had regained control of himself and knew his armorial well enough to complete for himself an overmodest designation, shouted out with a professional vigor, mellowed by an intimate tenderness, "His Highness Monseigneur the Duc de Châtellerault!" But now it was my turn to be announced. Absorbed in contemplation of our hostess, who had not yet seen me, I had not reflected on the functions, terrible for me - though in another way than for M. de Châtellerault - of this doorman, clad in black like an executioner and surrounded by a troop of footmen in the most cheerful liveries, lusty fellows ready to lay hands on an intruder and show him the door. The doorman asked my name, and I gave it to him as mechanically as a condemned man allowing himself to be attached to the block. He at once raised his head majestically and, before I had been able to beg him to keep his voice down when announcing me so as to spare my amour-propre if I had not been invited, and that of the Princesse de Guermantes if I had been, he shouted out the disquieting syllables with a force capable of causing the roof of the house to vibrate.

The illustrious Huxley (he whose nephew currently occupies a preponderant place in the English literary world) recounts how one of his patients no longer dared go into society because often, in the very chair that was being politely indicated to her, she could see an elderly gentleman sitting. She was quite sure that either the gesture of invitation, or the presence of the elderly gentleman, was a hallucination, for they would not have been showing her to a chair that was already occupied. When Huxley, in order to cure her, forced her to return to a reception, she experienced a moment of painful hesitation, wondering whether the hospitable sign they made to her was the real thing, or whether, in order to obey a nonexistent vision, she was about to sit down in public on the knees of a flesh-and-blood gentleman. Her brief uncertainty was cruel. Less so perhaps than my own. From the moment I heard my own name being roared out, like the sound preceding a possible cataclysm, I had, so as at all events to plead my good faith and as if I were not tormented by any doubts, to advance toward the Princesse with a resolute air.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. His father, an eminent Professor of Medicine, was Roman Catholic and his mother was Jewish, factors that were to play an important role in his life and work. He was a brilliant, very literary schoolboy, and later a half-hearted student of law and political science. In his twenties he became an assiduous society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. During this period he published a volume of sketches and stories, Les Plaisirs et le jours, and between 1895 and 1900 wrote a novel, Jean Santeuil, which was in many ways a first draft for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu.

John Sturrock is a writer and critic who has previously translated Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and Rimbaud. A consulting editor at the London Review of Books, he lives in West Sussex, England.