Reading Proust: Continuing Sodom and Gomorrah
At the end of Part Two: Chapter One there is a short section of the novel entitled “The Intermittencies of the Heart.” The narrator, upon learning that Mme Putbus will be staying at Balbec, immediately arranges a visit there as well, along with his mother and Francoise, in hopes of taking advantage of a possible opportunity to fulfill his sexual fantasies with Mme. Putbus’ “gorgeous” chambermaid. But things don’t turn out that way. All his planning a scheming and anticipation is abruptly shattered.
“Upheaval of my entire being.” With that simple phrase the narrative takes an unexpected turn. The narrator is suddenly struck with “cardiac fatigue” at the realization of being at Balbec without his deceased grandmother. Although she died in the middle of The Guermantes Way, some 560 pages ago in the novel, the full weight of her passing hits the narrator only now. For Proust, this is due to how memory works.
“For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart. It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually our possession…of they remain with us, for most of the time it is an unknown region where they are of no use to us…But if the context of the sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them…The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken…” (pp. 211 – 212)
All the love and tenderness and sadness stored up for his grandmother are immediately released upon his return to the seaside resort where he spent time with her back in Within a Budding Grove. He cannot bear to look at the sea or to socialize with anyone. Albertine, who has rearranged her schedule to meet him there, is refused when she asks to see him. He declines party invitations and wallows in his room over his grandmother’s death instead. He recalls her face, her expressions, the little things she did for him. His mother, concerned at her son’s sudden depression, insists that he go lie on the beach, but he chooses to lie in the folds of the dunes where no one can see him.
When he finally feels up to seeing Albertine again, she is in an unpleasant mood about how “dull” life at Balbec seems this year. He escorts her back to where she is staying and then decides to take the carriage back along a route that he used to travel with his grandmother. And he is surprisingly lifted out of his despair by seeing a natural place in a different season.
“But on reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle. Where I has seen with my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvelous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight…But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring.” (pp. 244 – 245)
Throughout the novel, Proust uses nature as a companion to strongly felt intimate experiences. An example in Swann’s Way would he the boy’s fascination with the hawthorns just before he sees Gilberte for the first time. The seascapes and surrounding flora are connected to “the little band” of girls in Within a Budding Grove. I have previously considered in detail the use of fog and mist in various parts of The Guermantes Way. Earlier in Sodom and Gomorrah it was the orchid and the bumble-bee just before the narrator’s discovery of M. de Charlus’ homosexuality. Now we see it again, a profound experience of natural beauty, as apple-tree blossoms, acts as a tonic to the depressed young man. Perhaps above all else, Proust is an aficionado of the aesthetics of beauty in nature, art and literature. He shows us the importance of such things to a richly lived life as the novel proceeds.
Slowly, the narrator emerges out of his funk. “Certain dreams of shared affection” with Albertine renews his desire for happiness, though he has yet to experience the need for carnal pleasure again. She makes sure he is aware of certain days she will be traveling and won’t be available, so they can maximize their time together.
Then, we encounter another example of the multiple levels of narration in the novel. His renewed interest in Albertine leads his reminiscences of previous encounters with “the little band” that have not been revealed to the reader until now. "I must confess that many of her friends – I was not yet in love with her – gave me, at one watering-place or another, moments of pleasure. The obliging young playmates did not seem to me to be very many. But recently I thought of them again, and their names came back to me. I counted that, in that one season, a dozen conferred on me their ephemeral favors. Another name came back to me later, which made thirteen. I then had a sort of childish fear of settling on that number. Also, I realized that I had forgotten the first, Albertine who was no more and who made the fourteenth." (pp. 255 – 256)
This is a remarkable piece of text for a variety of reasons. First of all, it directs our attention to three possible subjectivities of the narrator – the self having moments of pleasure with young playmates, the self recollecting upon the experiences and fearing the recall of only 13 encounters, and the overarching self summarizing all this. Secondly, with so much minutia and intimate detail given to the reader during the course of the novel, it is easy to trust that Proust is telling you everything in the his story, but he isn’t.
For whatever reason, certain facts are held back and there is a mere illusion of completeness through excessive detail. When exactly did the narrator enjoy these “ephemeral favors”? Did he go to Balbec on other occasions which we do not know about? Or did he fool around with 13 other girls while he was chasing Albertine during his first stay, with his grandmother, at Balbec? Thirdly, it introduces another problem for the novel that I will dwell on later, exactly when does he fall in love with Albertine? Lastly, this text features the mechanics of memory itself, and the struggle to recall past events both in the short term and over a distance of time.
Most of the rest of Sodom and Gomorrah is about jealousy, although it is about quite a lot of other things too. The narrator gradually becomes more jealous of Albertine, without ever telling her that he loves her. The concern here is, realizing how Proust connects jealousy with love, it would seem that he does in fact love her if only because he becomes so obsessively jealous of her. Perhaps the novel gives us a negative declaration of love. That would be rather Proustian.
So things don’t become too tedious, Proust gives us the side story of M. de Charles meeting a fantastic young violinist, Morel, and how jealousy enters that relationship as well. It can be used by the reader for comparative purposes as examples of Proust’s philosophy of love and jealousy. But it is also a break from the narrator’s relationship with Albertine. It offers us the dynamics of this other relationship that plays out on the Normandy coast during summer holidays. In either case, it is remarkably well-written, as I have given ample quotations to prove, and highly entertaining to read. Taken as a whole, Sodom and Gomorrah is my favorite complete book in the novel and is in many ways consistently the strongest writing of Proust’s work.
One of the many things that attract him to Albertine is her laugh. It is that that he recalls coming out of his funk over his grandmother’s death. The memory of her laughter makes him desire happiness again. And it is with that laugh that she and several other girlfriends carry on around a piano inside a train station, as they are all awaiting the train. While he watches with an older physician acquaintance, Dr. Cottard. “The fact was I just heard her laugh. And this laugh at once evoked the fleshy-pink, fragrant surfaces with which it seemed to carry with it, pungent, sensual, and revealing as the scent of geraniums, a few almost tangible and secretly provoking particles. One of the girls, a stranger to me, sat down at the piano, and Andree invited Albertine to waltz with her.” (page 263)
As they watch, the narrator remarks on how well the two of them dance together. Dr. Cottard does not have his spectacles with him. He remarks: “’…I can’t see very well, but they are certainly keenly aroused. It’s not sufficiently known that women derive most of their excitement through their breasts. And theirs, as you can see, are touching completely.’ And indeed the contact between the breasts of Andree and of Albertine had been constant. I do not know whether they heard or guessed Cottard’s observation, but they drew slightly apart while continuing the waltz. At that moment Andree said something to Albertine, who laughed with the same deep and penetrating laugh that I had heard before. But the unease it roused in me this time was nothing short of painful; Albertine appeared to be conveying, to be making Andree share, some secret and voluptuous thrill.” (page 264)
From this moment forward, the narrator becomes ever increasingly obsessed with Albertine’s possible bi-sexuality. First, a word about Andree. She was a significant character in Within a Budding Grove, close to Albertine and at the center of “the little band.” At several points, the narrator finds himself attracted to her body and charm. And, apparently from what we read earlier, he has perhaps made-out with Andree previously. The narrator is, frankly, neurotic about Albertine’s possibly fluid sexuality, but it has nothing to do with Andree. The interesting thing is, he isn’t upset or annoyed with her in the least, as subsequent interactions prove. The narrator only sees Andree as a possible means to learn more about Albertine’s true sexuality.
The next time she is unavailable to meet him, he grows suspicious. “I thought I could detect the presence of pleasures, of people, whom she had preferred to me.” Obsession will turn into possessiveness as the narrative moves forward. Every little thing she does arouses vague visions of other people enjoying themselves with her. But where is love in all this? “…in the future, my imagination played with the idea that Albertine might, instead of being the good girl that she was, have had the same immorality, the same capacity for deceit as a former prostitute, and I thought of all my sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me if I had happened to love her.” (page 276)
The remainder of Sodom and Gomorrah is filled with deflective declarations of love like this. Is he saying he loves her? It seems he is just hypothesizing about a love for her. And yet, much earlier, recall that, as an aside, reflecting on his 14 sensual exploits with the band of girls, he clearly states “I was not yet in love with her.” So, it seems that he falls in love with her at some point. But the novel itself makes it difficult to know exactly when. The reader never reads where he declares his love for Albertine openly to Albertine, it is always only mentioned as a possibility or referred to objectively as “my love for her.” In this way Proust is the ultimate tease.
The narrator, in his budding neurotic jealousy and possessiveness, whisks Albertine away to Doncieres to show her off to his friend, Saint-Loup. Albertine is obviously attracted to Robert, which actually relieves the narrator somewhat. At least it is another guy. But, soon, even her simple, youthful flirting with Saint-Loup is a source of resentment for her. How could she!
The rest of the chapter, some 150 pages, is consumed with another social gathering. It is an evening event at Mme Verdurin’s summer villa. This gives the reader a break from the increasingly neurotic relationship of our narrator with his girlfriend and also introduces us to the relationship between M. de Charles and Morel.
One of the most shocking things for me as a reader, and it affects me as much this third time through as it did the first, is the off-handed manner with which the narrator informs us of the death of Charles Swann, who has played such a fundamental role in the novel so far. We learn of this third-handedly, as it were. Mme Verdurin is speaking of her association with the Princess de Caprarola who, in turn, “even mentioned the Verdurins’ name in the course of a visit of condolence which she had paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband…” (page 364)
I am floored. After all these pages, Proust only bothers to tell the reader of Swann’s end through gossip, with no details whatsoever, without even mentioning his name. By trivializing the death of Swann is such a way, Proust is showing us the ultimate triviality of all our lives. The man who is the focus of much of the first book, who loved Odette so passionately, who somehow ended up marrying her after she had lost all interest in him, with whom she had given birth to Gilberte, ends up as nothing more than a passing phrase of party conversation. Very harsh.
Shortly after this, amidst the small talk of the gathering, the overarching narrator returns for a moment to project Proust’s philosophy of sexuality into old age. He recalls “a glorious girl,” smoking a cigarette, with “…magnolia skin, her dark eyes, the bold and admirable composition of her forms.” He only saw her one time and never identified her, but she keeps returning to his memory. “I find myself at times, when I think of her, seized by a wild longing…We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left…One can no longer face the strain of keeping up with the young. Too bad if carnal desire increases instead of languishing!” (pp. 381 – 382)
The narrator’s memories continue to drift throughout the party. He is worried about a conversation he had with his mother earlier that afternoon. It pertains, almost abruptly, to his consideration of marrying Albertine. His mother thinks Albertine “has good qualities” but that he “could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage.” This throws him into a “state of doubt” about his relationship with Albertine and he decides to wait a little longer “so as to find out whether I really loved her.” Again, love is expressed objectively and with hesitation, never directly with confidence. Our slightly (thus far) neurotic narrator is experiencing psychological turmoil.
The party continues with the arrival of various guests, some of their back stories, conversations on gardening and art, typical Proustian stuff by this point in the novel. At one point M. de Charlus and Morel, already in a relationship, play some music together. Mme Verdurin has a competent sense for music and art, and Morel, a rising, greatly gifted violinist, is one of the prized “possessions” of her salon. What is unexpected is the “exquisite” piano accompaniment by the Baron of the difficult sonata for violin and piano by Faure. Other short pieces are performed afterward until Morel, tired of being put on display, insists on a game of cards to pass the remainder of the evening.
To be continued…
“Upheaval of my entire being.” With that simple phrase the narrative takes an unexpected turn. The narrator is suddenly struck with “cardiac fatigue” at the realization of being at Balbec without his deceased grandmother. Although she died in the middle of The Guermantes Way, some 560 pages ago in the novel, the full weight of her passing hits the narrator only now. For Proust, this is due to how memory works.
“For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart. It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually our possession…of they remain with us, for most of the time it is an unknown region where they are of no use to us…But if the context of the sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them…The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken…” (pp. 211 – 212)
All the love and tenderness and sadness stored up for his grandmother are immediately released upon his return to the seaside resort where he spent time with her back in Within a Budding Grove. He cannot bear to look at the sea or to socialize with anyone. Albertine, who has rearranged her schedule to meet him there, is refused when she asks to see him. He declines party invitations and wallows in his room over his grandmother’s death instead. He recalls her face, her expressions, the little things she did for him. His mother, concerned at her son’s sudden depression, insists that he go lie on the beach, but he chooses to lie in the folds of the dunes where no one can see him.
When he finally feels up to seeing Albertine again, she is in an unpleasant mood about how “dull” life at Balbec seems this year. He escorts her back to where she is staying and then decides to take the carriage back along a route that he used to travel with his grandmother. And he is surprisingly lifted out of his despair by seeing a natural place in a different season.
“But on reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle. Where I has seen with my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxuriant, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvelous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight…But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a day in spring.” (pp. 244 – 245)
Throughout the novel, Proust uses nature as a companion to strongly felt intimate experiences. An example in Swann’s Way would he the boy’s fascination with the hawthorns just before he sees Gilberte for the first time. The seascapes and surrounding flora are connected to “the little band” of girls in Within a Budding Grove. I have previously considered in detail the use of fog and mist in various parts of The Guermantes Way. Earlier in Sodom and Gomorrah it was the orchid and the bumble-bee just before the narrator’s discovery of M. de Charlus’ homosexuality. Now we see it again, a profound experience of natural beauty, as apple-tree blossoms, acts as a tonic to the depressed young man. Perhaps above all else, Proust is an aficionado of the aesthetics of beauty in nature, art and literature. He shows us the importance of such things to a richly lived life as the novel proceeds.
Slowly, the narrator emerges out of his funk. “Certain dreams of shared affection” with Albertine renews his desire for happiness, though he has yet to experience the need for carnal pleasure again. She makes sure he is aware of certain days she will be traveling and won’t be available, so they can maximize their time together.
Then, we encounter another example of the multiple levels of narration in the novel. His renewed interest in Albertine leads his reminiscences of previous encounters with “the little band” that have not been revealed to the reader until now. "I must confess that many of her friends – I was not yet in love with her – gave me, at one watering-place or another, moments of pleasure. The obliging young playmates did not seem to me to be very many. But recently I thought of them again, and their names came back to me. I counted that, in that one season, a dozen conferred on me their ephemeral favors. Another name came back to me later, which made thirteen. I then had a sort of childish fear of settling on that number. Also, I realized that I had forgotten the first, Albertine who was no more and who made the fourteenth." (pp. 255 – 256)
This is a remarkable piece of text for a variety of reasons. First of all, it directs our attention to three possible subjectivities of the narrator – the self having moments of pleasure with young playmates, the self recollecting upon the experiences and fearing the recall of only 13 encounters, and the overarching self summarizing all this. Secondly, with so much minutia and intimate detail given to the reader during the course of the novel, it is easy to trust that Proust is telling you everything in the his story, but he isn’t.
For whatever reason, certain facts are held back and there is a mere illusion of completeness through excessive detail. When exactly did the narrator enjoy these “ephemeral favors”? Did he go to Balbec on other occasions which we do not know about? Or did he fool around with 13 other girls while he was chasing Albertine during his first stay, with his grandmother, at Balbec? Thirdly, it introduces another problem for the novel that I will dwell on later, exactly when does he fall in love with Albertine? Lastly, this text features the mechanics of memory itself, and the struggle to recall past events both in the short term and over a distance of time.
Most of the rest of Sodom and Gomorrah is about jealousy, although it is about quite a lot of other things too. The narrator gradually becomes more jealous of Albertine, without ever telling her that he loves her. The concern here is, realizing how Proust connects jealousy with love, it would seem that he does in fact love her if only because he becomes so obsessively jealous of her. Perhaps the novel gives us a negative declaration of love. That would be rather Proustian.
So things don’t become too tedious, Proust gives us the side story of M. de Charles meeting a fantastic young violinist, Morel, and how jealousy enters that relationship as well. It can be used by the reader for comparative purposes as examples of Proust’s philosophy of love and jealousy. But it is also a break from the narrator’s relationship with Albertine. It offers us the dynamics of this other relationship that plays out on the Normandy coast during summer holidays. In either case, it is remarkably well-written, as I have given ample quotations to prove, and highly entertaining to read. Taken as a whole, Sodom and Gomorrah is my favorite complete book in the novel and is in many ways consistently the strongest writing of Proust’s work.
One of the many things that attract him to Albertine is her laugh. It is that that he recalls coming out of his funk over his grandmother’s death. The memory of her laughter makes him desire happiness again. And it is with that laugh that she and several other girlfriends carry on around a piano inside a train station, as they are all awaiting the train. While he watches with an older physician acquaintance, Dr. Cottard. “The fact was I just heard her laugh. And this laugh at once evoked the fleshy-pink, fragrant surfaces with which it seemed to carry with it, pungent, sensual, and revealing as the scent of geraniums, a few almost tangible and secretly provoking particles. One of the girls, a stranger to me, sat down at the piano, and Andree invited Albertine to waltz with her.” (page 263)
As they watch, the narrator remarks on how well the two of them dance together. Dr. Cottard does not have his spectacles with him. He remarks: “’…I can’t see very well, but they are certainly keenly aroused. It’s not sufficiently known that women derive most of their excitement through their breasts. And theirs, as you can see, are touching completely.’ And indeed the contact between the breasts of Andree and of Albertine had been constant. I do not know whether they heard or guessed Cottard’s observation, but they drew slightly apart while continuing the waltz. At that moment Andree said something to Albertine, who laughed with the same deep and penetrating laugh that I had heard before. But the unease it roused in me this time was nothing short of painful; Albertine appeared to be conveying, to be making Andree share, some secret and voluptuous thrill.” (page 264)
From this moment forward, the narrator becomes ever increasingly obsessed with Albertine’s possible bi-sexuality. First, a word about Andree. She was a significant character in Within a Budding Grove, close to Albertine and at the center of “the little band.” At several points, the narrator finds himself attracted to her body and charm. And, apparently from what we read earlier, he has perhaps made-out with Andree previously. The narrator is, frankly, neurotic about Albertine’s possibly fluid sexuality, but it has nothing to do with Andree. The interesting thing is, he isn’t upset or annoyed with her in the least, as subsequent interactions prove. The narrator only sees Andree as a possible means to learn more about Albertine’s true sexuality.
The next time she is unavailable to meet him, he grows suspicious. “I thought I could detect the presence of pleasures, of people, whom she had preferred to me.” Obsession will turn into possessiveness as the narrative moves forward. Every little thing she does arouses vague visions of other people enjoying themselves with her. But where is love in all this? “…in the future, my imagination played with the idea that Albertine might, instead of being the good girl that she was, have had the same immorality, the same capacity for deceit as a former prostitute, and I thought of all my sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me if I had happened to love her.” (page 276)
The remainder of Sodom and Gomorrah is filled with deflective declarations of love like this. Is he saying he loves her? It seems he is just hypothesizing about a love for her. And yet, much earlier, recall that, as an aside, reflecting on his 14 sensual exploits with the band of girls, he clearly states “I was not yet in love with her.” So, it seems that he falls in love with her at some point. But the novel itself makes it difficult to know exactly when. The reader never reads where he declares his love for Albertine openly to Albertine, it is always only mentioned as a possibility or referred to objectively as “my love for her.” In this way Proust is the ultimate tease.
The narrator, in his budding neurotic jealousy and possessiveness, whisks Albertine away to Doncieres to show her off to his friend, Saint-Loup. Albertine is obviously attracted to Robert, which actually relieves the narrator somewhat. At least it is another guy. But, soon, even her simple, youthful flirting with Saint-Loup is a source of resentment for her. How could she!
The rest of the chapter, some 150 pages, is consumed with another social gathering. It is an evening event at Mme Verdurin’s summer villa. This gives the reader a break from the increasingly neurotic relationship of our narrator with his girlfriend and also introduces us to the relationship between M. de Charles and Morel.
One of the most shocking things for me as a reader, and it affects me as much this third time through as it did the first, is the off-handed manner with which the narrator informs us of the death of Charles Swann, who has played such a fundamental role in the novel so far. We learn of this third-handedly, as it were. Mme Verdurin is speaking of her association with the Princess de Caprarola who, in turn, “even mentioned the Verdurins’ name in the course of a visit of condolence which she had paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband…” (page 364)
I am floored. After all these pages, Proust only bothers to tell the reader of Swann’s end through gossip, with no details whatsoever, without even mentioning his name. By trivializing the death of Swann is such a way, Proust is showing us the ultimate triviality of all our lives. The man who is the focus of much of the first book, who loved Odette so passionately, who somehow ended up marrying her after she had lost all interest in him, with whom she had given birth to Gilberte, ends up as nothing more than a passing phrase of party conversation. Very harsh.
Shortly after this, amidst the small talk of the gathering, the overarching narrator returns for a moment to project Proust’s philosophy of sexuality into old age. He recalls “a glorious girl,” smoking a cigarette, with “…magnolia skin, her dark eyes, the bold and admirable composition of her forms.” He only saw her one time and never identified her, but she keeps returning to his memory. “I find myself at times, when I think of her, seized by a wild longing…We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time. And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when one no longer seeks that girl, or any other, when to find her would actually scare one. For one no longer feels that one has attractions enough to please, or strength enough to love. Not, of course, that one is in the strict sense of the word impotent. And for loving, one would love more than ever. But one feels it is too big an undertaking for the little strength one has left…One can no longer face the strain of keeping up with the young. Too bad if carnal desire increases instead of languishing!” (pp. 381 – 382)
The narrator’s memories continue to drift throughout the party. He is worried about a conversation he had with his mother earlier that afternoon. It pertains, almost abruptly, to his consideration of marrying Albertine. His mother thinks Albertine “has good qualities” but that he “could certainly do a great deal better in terms of marriage.” This throws him into a “state of doubt” about his relationship with Albertine and he decides to wait a little longer “so as to find out whether I really loved her.” Again, love is expressed objectively and with hesitation, never directly with confidence. Our slightly (thus far) neurotic narrator is experiencing psychological turmoil.
The party continues with the arrival of various guests, some of their back stories, conversations on gardening and art, typical Proustian stuff by this point in the novel. At one point M. de Charlus and Morel, already in a relationship, play some music together. Mme Verdurin has a competent sense for music and art, and Morel, a rising, greatly gifted violinist, is one of the prized “possessions” of her salon. What is unexpected is the “exquisite” piano accompaniment by the Baron of the difficult sonata for violin and piano by Faure. Other short pieces are performed afterward until Morel, tired of being put on display, insists on a game of cards to pass the remainder of the evening.
To be continued…
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