Sodom and Gomorrah, still

“The faithful” of the “little clan,” as the regulars at the Verdurins’ Wednesday-evening salon are known, have shifted a bit over the years since Odette and Swann were part of the group, and even those that are familiar faces from Swann’s Way may have changed a bit..but not too much. Dr. Cottard is no longer so prone to malapropisms, but is otherwise as self-important and silly as ever; Madame Verdurin herself is older, more tired, but just as self-important herself. Speaking of Swann: even knowing, from earlier in the book, that he was ill and surely would die soon, it is a surprise to learn of his death the way we do: it’s mentioned in passing, a tangent of a sentence in the story of the Verdurins and their “latent social success” (364). It’s apt, though, since the section on the Verdurins often focuses on people’s shallowness and callowness: we learn about how they don’t grieve at all for the deaths of friends, preferring instead to focus on their social lives; we learn about how deluded and self-centered they are, imagining themselves at the center of society, when it’s really only their own society that they’re at the center of. Brichot, a professor, is as full of himself as Cottard is, though the narrator is young enough and easily impressed enough to find him interesting. On the train to the Verdurins’, Brichot talks to the narrator about the etymologies of local place-names, telling him all the ways in which the author of a book the narrator’s just mentioned has gotten it all wrong, over and over again. Rather than being bored or annoyed, though, the narrator is really interested: there’s still that child-like wonder at place-names from the earlier books, the idea of the name and the magic of it, which rather endears him to me.

Once the narrator arrives at the Verdurins’, when we hear about the great new musician they’ve engaged for their recent Wednesday gatherings, we realize we’re in for a bit of fun: it’s immediately clear that the musician is Morel, the son of the narrator’s uncle’s valet, whom the narrator’s just run into recently at the train station, and that his companion for the evening will be the Baron de Charlus. And so worlds overlap, the narrator’s childhood/family world and the high society of the Guermantes and the second-tier society of the Verdurins. The dinner itself is a bit of a drag, though, with one squirm-inducing moment after another: there’s the Verdurins’ mocking of Saniette, who stutters and blushes, and everyone’s secret eye-rolling at Brichot, and Charlus’s aristocratic bragging, and the narrator’s belated realization that he’s the only one who finds Brichot interesting. As he realizes this, the narrator tells us that he doesn’t have “an observant mind,” though of course he does, noticing so many details of light, of mood, noticing some of society people’s hypocrisies or foolishness, even as he misses others (473). The dinner’s awkwardness continues: Cottard tells his wife she looks “like an old peasant,” after she wakes from a post-dinner nap, M. de Cambremer rambles about heraldry (492-493), and we are as relieved as the narrator when the evening comes to an end, with a breath of fresh night air.

“It looks as though the weather has changed.” 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. Merely by opening the door on to the garden, before leaving, one felt that a different weather had, at that moment, taken possession of the scene; cooling breezes, one of the joys of summer, were rising in the fir plantation (where long ago Mme de Cambremer had dreamed of Chopin) and almost imperceptibly, in caressing coils, in fitful eddies, were beginning their gentle nocturnes.
(509).

(All page numbers are from the Modern Library paperback edition of Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright)


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