Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 5)

She caught sight of me when I was a few feet away and, what left me no longer in any doubt that I had been the victim of a conspiracy, instead of remaining seated as for the other guests, she got up and came toward me. A second later, I was able to heave the sigh of relief of Huxley's patient when, having made up her mind to sit down on the chair, she found it was unoccupied and realized that it was the elderly gentleman who was a hallucination. The Princesse had just held out her hand to me with a smile. She stayed standing for a few moments, with the kind of graciousness peculiar to the stanza in Malherbe which ends, "And to do them honor the Angels stand."

She apologized for the fact that the Duchesse had not yet arrived, as though without her I must be bored. In order thus to bid me welcome, she performed about me, holding me by the hand, a very graceful pirouette, in whose vortex I felt swept away. I was almost expecting her then to hand me, like the leader of a cotillion, an ivory-knobbed cane or a wristwatch. Truth to tell, she gave me nothing like that, but as if, rather than dancing the Boston, she had been listening to a sacrosanct Beethoven quartet, the sublime strains of which she was afraid of disturbing, she halted the conversation there, or, rather, did not begin it, and, still radiant from having seen me enter, merely informed me of where the Prince was to be found.

I moved away and did not dare approach her again, sensing that she had absolutely nothing to say to me and that, in her immense goodwill, this marvelously tall and beautiful woman, noble as so many great ladies were who mounted the scaffold with such pride, could only, not daring to offer me some melissa cordial, have repeated what she had already twice told me: "You'll find the Prince in the garden." But to go up to the Prince was to feel my doubts revive in a different form.

At all events, someone had to be found to present me. Dominating every conversation could be heard the inexhaustible prattle of M. de Charlus, who was talking with His Excellency the Duc de Sidonia, whose acquaintance he had just made. As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice. M. de Charlus and M. de Sidonia had each immediately nosed out that of the other, which was, for both, to be, when in company, monologuists, to the extent of being unable to bear any interruption. Having at once adjudged that the malady was without remedy, as a famous sonnet has it, they had made a resolve, not to stay silent, but each to speak without concerning himself with what the other would say. This had created that jumble of sound which, in Molière's comedies, is produced by several people saying different things at one and the same time. The Baron, with his resonant voice, was certain in any case of having the better of it, of drowning out the feeble voice of M. de Sidonia, without discouraging the latter, however, for, whenever M. de Charlus drew breath for a moment, the interval was filled by the susurration of the Spanish grandee, who had imperturbably continued discoursing. I might well have asked M. de Charlus to present me to the Prince de Guermantes, but I was afraid (with only too good reason) that he might be angry with me. I had behaved toward him in the most ungrateful fashion in not taking him up on his offer for a second time, and in not showing him any sign of life since the evening when he had seen me home so affectionately. Yet I had certainly not had as an anticipated excuse the scene that I had just witnessed, that very afternoon, taking place between Jupien and him. I had suspected nothing of the sort. It is true that, a little time before, when my parents were reproaching me for my laziness and for not having yet taken the trouble of dropping M. de Charlus a line, I had reproached them furiously for wanting to make me accept dishonorable propositions. But anger alone, and the desire to find the words that would be most disagreeable to them, had dictated this untruthful reply. In actual fact, I had not imagined there to have been anything sensual, or even sentimental, in the Baron's offers. I had said that to my parents out of sheer foolishness. But the future sometimes dwells in us without our knowing it, and the words thought to be untruthful describe an imminent reality.

M. de Charlus would no doubt have forgiven me my lack of gratitude. But what made him furious was that my presence that evening at the Princesse de Guermantes's, as for some little time past at her cousin's, seemed to make a mockery of his solemn declaration, "The only entrée to those salons is through me." A grave fault, an inexpiable crime perhaps: I had not followed the hierarchical path. M. de Charlus well knew that the thunderbolts that he brandished at those who did not submit to his commands, or to whom he had taken a strong dislike, were beginning to pass, in the eyes of many, and however much fury he put into them, for thunderbolts of cardboard, and no longer had the strength to expel anyone from anywhere. But perhaps he thought that his power, although diminished, was still great and remained intact in the eyes of a novice such as myself. So I did not consider it the wisest course to ask a service of him at a party where my mere presence seemed like an ironic challenge to his pretensions.

At which moment I was stopped by a somewhat vulgar man, Professor E - - . He had been surprised to see me at the Guermantes'. I was no less so to find him there, for never before, and never again subsequently, had a person of his sort been seen at the Princesse's. He had just cured the Prince, who had already received the last rites, of an infectious pneumonia, and the very particular gratitude that Mme de Guermantes felt toward him for this was the reason why they had broken with custom and invited him. Since he knew absolutely no one in these drawing rooms and could not prowl about there indefinitely on his own like a minister of death, having recognized me, he had felt that, for the first time in his life, he had infinitely many things to say to me, which enabled him to keep in countenance and was one of the reasons why he had come toward me. There was a second reason. He attached great importance to never being mistaken in a diagnosis. Now, so many letters did he receive that he could not always remember clearly, when he had only seen a patient once, whether the illness had indeed followed the course he had assigned to it. It has not been forgotten perhaps that, at the time of my grandmother's stroke, I had taken her round to him on the evening when he was having all those decorations sewn on. Some time having elapsed, he no longer remembered the announcement he had been sent at the time. "Madame your grandmother is indeed dead, is she not?" he said to me, in a voice in which near certainty had stilled a slight apprehensiveness. "Ah, indeed! Anyway, from the very first moment I saw her, my prognosis was altogether gloomy, I remember very well."

Thus it was that Professor E - - learned or relearned of my grandmother's death, and I have to say to his credit, which is that of the medical body as a whole, without manifesting, or perhaps feeling, any satisfaction. The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome. "Wine? In moderation it can't do you any harm, it's a tonic when all's said and done.... Physical pleasure? It's a function, after all. I permit it, but not to be overdone, you understand. Excess of any kind is a mistake." What a temptation all of a sudden for the patient to give up those two resuscitators, water and chastity! If, on the other hand, you have a heart or an albumin problem, or something of the kind, then there is not long to go. Grave but functional troubles are readily ascribed to an imaginary cancer. There is no point in keeping on with visits that could never stay an ineluctable disease. Should the patient, left to his own devices, now impose an implacable regimen on himself, and then be cured or at the very least survive, the doctor, greeted by him on the Avenue de l'Opéra when he thought him long since in the Père-Lachaise, will see in this tipping of the hat a gesture of sarcastic insolence. An innocent walk taken under his very nose would arouse no greater fury in the Assize Court judge who, two years before, had pronounced sentence of death on the seemingly fearless stroller. Doctors (this does not apply to all of them, naturally, and I do not omit, mentally, some admirable exceptions) are in general more disgruntled, more irritated by the quashing of their verdict than joyful at its execution. Which explains why Professor E - - , whatever intellectual satisfaction he will have felt no doubt at finding he had not been mistaken, was able to speak only with sadness of the misfortune that had struck us. He was not keen to cut short the conversation, which was keeping him in countenance and was a reason for staying. He spoke to me of the heat wave we had been having in recent days, but although he was literate and could have expressed himself in good French, he said, "This hyperthermia doesn't upset you?" The fact is that medicine has made some small progress in knowledge since Molière, but none in its vocabulary. My interlocutor added: "What you need to do is to avoid the sudations weather like this causes, especially in overheated drawing rooms. You can remedy them, when you return home and want something to drink, by heat" - which means, obviously, hot drinks.

Because of the manner of my grandmother's death, the subject interested me, and I had recently read in a book by a great scientist that perspiration harmed the kidneys by causing what should issue elsewhere to pass through the skin. I had deplored the canicular weather during which my grandmother died, and had come close to holding it responsible. I made no mention of this to Dr. E - - , but he said without being prompted, "The advantage of this very hot weather, when perspiration is very abundant, is that the kidney is correspondingly relieved." Medicine is not an exact science.

Now that he had hold of me, Professor E - - asked only not to leave me. But I had just caught sight, making deep bows to the Princesse de Guermantes to left and to right, having taken a step backward, of the Marquis de Vaugoubert. M. de Norpois had recently introduced me to him, and I hoped that in him I would find someone capable of presenting me to our host. The proportions of the present work do not allow me to explain here the incidents during his youth in consequence of which M. de Vaugoubert was one of the few men (perhaps the only man) in society who found himself in what is known in Sodom as "confidence" with M. de Charlus. But if our minister to King Theodosius had some of the same faults as the Baron, they ranked as no more than the palest reflections of them. It was only in an infinitely milder, sentimental, and simpleminded form that he displayed those alternations between sympathy and loathing through which the desire to charm and then the fear - equally imaginary - of being, if not despised, then at least discovered, caused the Baron to pass. M. de Vaugoubert nonetheless displayed these alternations, but rendered absurd by a chastity, a "Platonism" (to which, highly ambitious as he was, he had, ever since the days of the Foreign Ministry examination, sacrificed all pleasure), above all by his intellectual nullity. But whereas, in M. de Charlus's case, immoderate praises were trumpeted in a veritable sunburst of eloquence, and salted with the subtlest, most mordant raillery, which marked a man forever, with M. de Vaugoubert, on the contrary, sympathy was expressed with the banality of an utter mediocrity, a man of the fashionable world, and a functionary, and his grievances (generally a complete invention, as with the Baron) by a malevolence that was untiring but mindless and all the more shocking in that it was usually in contradiction of remarks the minister had been making six months earlier and would perhaps be making again before very long: a regularity of change that lent an almost astronomical poetry to the various phases of M. de Vaugoubert's life, even though, this aside, no one could have put one less in mind of a heavenly body.

© 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.