dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,” he said to the footman, “tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.” “But, my dear,” replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, “since we are late.” “No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’ld have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes. Besides, we shan’t be the last, I can tell you; the Sassenages are coming, and you know they never arrive before twenty to nine.” The Duchess went up to her room. “Well,” said M. de Guermantes to Swann and myself, “we poor, down-trodden husbands, people laugh at us, but we are of some use all the same. But for me, Oriane would have been going out to dinner in black shoes.” “It’s not unbecoming,” said Swann, “I noticed the black shoes and they didn’t offend me in the least.” “I don’t say you’re wrong,” replied the Duke, “but it looks better to have them to match the dress. Besides, you needn’t worry, she would no sooner have got there than she’ld have noticed them, and I should have been obliged to come home and fetch the others. I should have had my dinner at nine o’clock. Good-bye, my children,” he said, thrusting us gently from the door, “get away, before Oriane comes down again. It’s not that she doesn’t like seeing you both. On the contrary, she’s too 395fond of your company. If she finds you still here she will start talking again, she is tired out already, she’ll reach the dinner-table quite dead. Besides, I tell you frankly, I’m dying of hunger. I had a wretched luncheon this morning when I came from the train. There was the devil of a béarnaise sauce, I admit, but in spite of that I sha’nt be at all sorry, not at all sorry to sit down to dinner. Five minutes to eight! Oh, women, women! She’ll give us both indigestion before to-morrow. She is not nearly as strong as people think.” The Duke felt no compunction at speaking thus of his wife’s ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested him more, appeared to him more important. And so it was simply from good breeding and good fellowship that, after politely shewing us out, he cried “from off stage”, in a stentorian voice from the porch to Swann, who was already in the courtyard: “You, now, don’t let yourself be taken in by the doctors’ nonsense, damn them. They’re donkeys. You’re as strong as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!”

The End

In Search of Lost Time Vol 4, Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe) Marcel Proust

Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe) Marcel Proust

Contents
Part I
Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.
CHAPTER ONE M. de Charlus in Society—A physician—Typical physiognomy of Mme. de Vaugoubert—Mme. d’Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain and the merriment of the Grand Duke Vladimir—Mmes. d’Amoncourt, de Citri, de Saint-Euverte, etc.—Curious conversation between Swann and the Prince de Guermantes—Albertine on the telephone—My social life in the interval before my second and final visit to Balbec—Arrival at Balbec.
The Heart’s Intermissions
CHAPTER TWO The mysteries of Albertine—The girls whom she sees reflected in the glass—The other woman—The lift-boy—Madame de Cambremer.
Part II
CHAPTER TWO (continued) The pleasures of M. Nissim Bernard (continued)–Outline of the strange character of Morel—M. de Charlus dines with the Verdurins.
CHAPTER THREE The sorrows of M. de Charlus—His sham duel—The stations on the “Transatlantic”—Weary of Albertine, I decide to break with her.
CHAPTER FOUR Sudden revulsion in favour of Albertine—Agony at sunrise—I set off at once with Albertine for Paris,

Pisa, 1927

PART I
Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.

La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome.
Alfred de Vigny.

The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on the evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was to give her party) to pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just described, I had kept watch for their return and had made, in the course of my vigil, a discovery which, albeit concerning M. de Charlus in particular, was in itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I could give it the prominence and treat it with the fulness that it demanded, postponed giving any account of it. I had, as I have said, left the marvellous point of vantage, so snugly contrived for me at the top of the house, commanding the broken and irregular slopes leading up to the Hôtel de Bréquigny, and gaily decorated in the Italian manner by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frécourt’s stables.

I had felt it to be more convenient, when I thought that the Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself on the staircase. I regretted somewhat the abandonment of my watch-tower. But at that time of day, namely the hour immediately following luncheon, I had less cause for regret, for I should not then have seen, as in the morning, the foptmen of the Bréquigny-Tresmes household, converted by distance into minute figures in a picture, make their leisurely ascent of the abrupt precipice, feather-brush in hand, behind the large, transparent flakes of mica which stood out so charmingly upon its ruddy bastions. Failing the geologist’s field of contemplation, I had at least that of the botanist, and was peering through the shutters of the staircase window at the Duchess’s little tree and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that insistence with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil.

My curiosity emboldening me by degrees, I went down to the ground-floor window, which also stood open with its shutters ajar. I could hear distinctly, as he got ready to go out, Jupien who could not detect me behind my blind, where I stood perfectly still until the moment when I drew quickly aside in order not to be seen by M. de Charlus, who, on his way to call upon Mme. de Villeparisis, was slowly crossing the courtyard, a pursy figure, aged by the strong light, his hair visibly grey.

Nothing short of an indisposition of Mme. de Villeparisis (consequent on the illness of the Marquis de Fierbois, with whom he personally was at daggers drawn) could have made M. de Charlus pay a call, perhaps for the first time in his life, at that hour of the day. For with that eccentricity of the Guermantes, who, instead of conforming to the ways of society, used to modify them to suit their own personal habits (habits not, they thought, social, and deserving in consequence the abasement before them of that thing of no value, Society—thus it was that Mme. de Marsantes had no regular ‘day,’ but was at home to her friends every morning between ten o’clock and noon), the Baron, reserving those hours for reading, hunting for old curiosities and so forth, paid calls only between four and six in the afternoon. At six o’clock he went to the Jockey Club, or took a stroll in the Bois.

A moment later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien. It was nearly time for him to start for the office, from which he would return only for dinner, and not even then always during the last week, his niece and her apprentices having gone to the country to finish a dress there for a customer. Then, realising that no one could see me, I decided not to let myself be disturbed again, for fear of missing, should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond the possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far as ambassador to the virgin who had so long been waiting for him to appear.

I knew that this expectancy was no more passive than in the male flower, whose stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily receive their offering; similarly the female flower that stood here, if the insect came, would coquettishly arch her styles; and, to be more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way. The laws of the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by other laws, increasingly exalted. If the visit of an insect, that is to say, the transportation of the seed of one flower is generally necessary for the fertilisation of another, that is because autofecundation, the fertilisation of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in the same family, to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by the insects gives to the subsequent generations of the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears.

This invigoration may, however, prove excessive, the species develop out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin protects us against disease, as the thyroid gland regulates our adiposity, as defeat comes to punish pride, fatigue,