Cities of the Plain: Part II Chapters III and IV (24th post)

 
 The third chapter of the second part of Cities of the Plain in some ways echoes the second part of Swann's Way and could, for the sake of symmetry, have been called Charlus in Love. As in Swann's affair with Odette (and also Saint-Loup's with Rachel), the relationship is unbalanced: the pursuer's passion is far greater than that of the pursued. Morel, like Odette and Rachel, is inconstant and repeatedly fobs off Charlus, sometimes resorting to fabrication. And Charlus, like Swann, bluffingly responds with pretence as each player struggles for dominance in a game of make-believe.

A violinist by Vlaho Bukovac

Matters come to a head when Morel tells Charlus that he has an engagement and leaves Charlus alone and disappointed, “the tears trickling down and melting* the paint beneath his eyes”. Charlus, “waddling obesely”, goes to a café, where he drinks beer to fortify himself and writes a letter to Morel saying that he is going to fight a duel the next day against someone who had spoken ill of them. Upon first receiving the letter, Morel refuses to read it because of “all the lies, the infernal tricks that old scoundrel's up to. It's a dodge to make me go and see him.” But as soon as he learns about the duel, he dashes off to find Charlus and they are reconciled. He has thereby fallen for one of the old scoundrel's infernal tricks, because we later discover that the duel is a fiction (pp.289-293 VIII Scott Moncrieff, pp.1098-1100 II Kilmartin).

However, “this reconciliation gave but a temporary respite to M de Charlus's torments”. One problem is “the disproportion [...] between the importance that Morel attached to keeping certain hours free, and the triviality of the occupations to which he pretended to devote to them”. For instance, whenever he wants an evening to himself, he pretends he has to give a violin lesson or is attending an algebra class, which does not end until 2am (pp.304-309 VIII SM, pp.1110-1113 II TK).

Another problem is Morel's infidelity. A low point is reached in their relationship when, during an evening he should have been teaching the violin or learning algebra, Morel is picked up by the Prince de Guermantes, who offers to pay him to visit a brothel together near Balbec. Neither party knows the other. Somehow Charlus discovers where Morel is going, but without realising that it is his own cousin who is the other party. Charlus gets Jupien to bribe the madam to hide them both in the brothel so they can spy on Morel. The episode ends in disaster: Morel finds out that he is being watched; so the prince is spirited away and replaced by three women; and whilst Charlus has a poor view of Morel, the latter “had a perfect view of the Baron” (pp.309-314 VIII SM, pp.1113-1117 II TK).

Chapter III is not solely devoted to Charlus and Morel's unhappy affair: it also follows the vicissitudes of Marcel and Albertine's romance. As autumn advances, Marcel notices a change of mood within himself. He is in his hotel room at Balbec, getting ready to dine with Albertine. “The round, red sun had already sunk half way down the slanting sheet of glass, which formerly I had detested, and, like a Greek fire, was inflaming the sea in the glass fronts of all my bookcases. Some wizard’s gesture having revived, as I put on my dinner-jacket, the alert and frivolous self that was mine when I used to go with Saint-Loup to dine at Rivebelle and on the evening when I looked forward to taking Mme de Stermaria to dine on the island in the Bois, I began unconsciously to hum the same tune that I had hummed then; and it was only when I realised this that by the song I recognised the resurrected singer, who indeed knew no other tune. The first time that I sang it, I was beginning to be in love with Albertine, but I imagined that I would never get to know her. Later on, in Paris, it was when I had ceased to be in love with her and some days after I had enjoyed her for the first time. Now it was when I was in love with her again and on the point of going out to dinner with her” (pp.248-249 VIII SM, p.1068 II TK). And yet ten pages later, without any apparent reason for the change, Marcel says of Albertine: “For I, who no longer felt any jealousy and scarcely any love for her, never thought of what she might be doing” (p.259 VIII SM, p.1076 II TK). We are left even more puzzled by the restlessness of Marcel's emotions when, after an extended passage on how the place-names and the places themselves where the little train stopped on his visits to la Raspelière had lost their mystery as he had become acquainted with the countryside and some of the local inhabitants, the chapter ends with the non-sequitur that this change of perception made him realise that to marry Albertine would be “madness” (p.357 VIII SM, p.1149 II TK).

The fourth and last chapter starts where the previous one left off, when Marcel gives his mother news that pleases her: he has decided not to marry Albertine and is going to stop seeing her. While he and Albertine are on the little train returning from la Raspelière, he is on the verge of informing her of this decision, until she happens to mention that she is going travelling with a friend, the friend of Mlle Vinteuil, with whom she is also close. Marcel immediately starts to suffer from this disclosure and, as Albertine stands up to alight at her stop, he realises that she has become part of him: she is “inside him”. He grabs her by the arm and begs her to come back to Balbec with him, where he starts to torment himself with the idea that Mlle Vinteuil has seduced her in the past. For some not immediately obvious reason, Marcel then tells Albertine that he is suicidal over his having ended an involvement with a Parisian woman. Whether the invention of this fictitious relationship was inspired by Charlus' imaginary duel or not, the tactic similarly pays off: Albertine promises to stay with him. He then becomes anxious to prevent her leaving in a few days' time for her travels with Mlle Vinteuil's lesbian friend. He therefore proposes that they live together in Paris (pp.359-367 VIII SM, pp.1150-1156 II TK). And so over the course of this short chapter, the situation has been completely reversed: Marcel felt that Albertine's soul had been distant from his “but something need only effect a violent change in the relative position of that soul to ourself, to show us that she is in love with others and not with us, then by the beating of our dislocated heart we feel that it is not a yard away from us but within us that the beloved creature was” (p.379 VIII SM, p.1165 II TK). And this realisation leads him to tell his mother: “It is absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine” (p.384 VIII SM, p.1169 II TK). And with those words, Cities of the Plain ends.

* “Fondre” would have been better translated here as “to dissolve” rather than “to melt”.