Oh Marcel, didn't you see this coming? The attraction Charlus felt for you and all the other pretty young men? And what did it take for you to understand? Another descent into voyeurism as you spied the Baron de Charlus with Jupien the tailor, followed them (not on the path you deign best for surveillance but the quick way your lazy self deems easiest) and listened to their passionate tryst through the thin wall dividing shops. Is this violence or is this ...?
"For from what I heard first in Jupien's quarters, which was only a series of inarticulate sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that these sounds were so violent that, if they had not always been taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away traces of the crime. I concluded from this later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely pleasure ..."
All of this first section is encased in the language of the "laws of the vegetable kingdom," a system governed by "increasingly higher laws," a clever metaphor for the decaying aristocracy and their impotence, their sterility created through intermarriage and the exclusion of other "species." Their rituals, salons and parties and such, represent an artifice for the benefit of lesser beings. "Parties of this sort ... have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited." The hidden realities of the aristocracy in this fourth volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time turn to appetite. Of the Sodom and Gomorrah variety.
That all sounds so serious, doesn't it? Anti-semitism, classism, homophobia. The knowledge that the author himself occupies these uncomfortable positions as Jew in the day of Dreyfus and gay man at a time when this was taboo, illegal. But this book is surprisingly funny especially as Marcel projects his own appetites and curiosity upon those around him. One world has opened to him to the eyes of all as he finally gains access to the parties of the elite, but thanks to his experience spying upon Charlus, another world has opened to him as well. Everywhere he looks he sees inverts and their connections to high society. He pursues a whore whom Robert has identified as willing to go with women as well. He is introduced to the breast-rubbing habits of the practitioners of Sapphic love.
Something about all of this does seem familiar though. The party scenes, the salons, the re-appearing cast of characters. You know, the soiree of the Princess, the Verdurins". And just as Swann so long ago suspected Odette of having women as lovers, Marcel now suspects Albertine of the same. Marcel's grieving for his grandmother as he returns to Balbec is but a momentary distraction from these dramas he amusingly seems intent upon writing for himself - the only bit of the writer he once intended to be evident in him.
One favorite part of the book surrounded Charlus with his self-destructive tendencies and arrogant, emotional outbursts. The facade unravels, and his preferences are exposed finally providing his nearest and dearest with a reason to shun him. For his decades of obnoxious behavior and because he has exposed his reality beneath the role written for him in those "laws of the vegetable kingdom." His love Morel is used to peel back these layers, and then reduces Charlus to hilariously portrayed jealous lover. His descent is so deftly handled that a reader has the indulgence of both pity and humor simultaneously in his story.
And the end? Marcel will save Albertine from the Sapphists by marrying her.
"I absolutely must - and let's settle the matter at once, because I'm quite clear about it now, because I won't change my mind again, because I couldn't live without it - I absolutely must marry Albertine."
This "rescue" has been proven futile to him repeatedly throughout the book, but the ultimate romantic is attached to his idea. In love with words, with possibilties, with the contents of his own imagination without an ability to see its deficiencies.