Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871. He began work on In Search of Lost Time sometime around 1908, and the first volume, Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Two subsequent installments—The Guermantes Way (1920–21) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. The remaining volumes were published following Proust’s death on November 18, 1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.

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"Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of "In Search of Lost Time. While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guer-mantes's orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. "Flower and plant have no conscious will," Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust's representation of sexuality. "They are shameless, exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust's men and women . . . shameless. There is no question of right and wrong."
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of "A la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).

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Sodom and Gomorrah

Modern Library

Chapter One

As I was not in any hurry to arrive at the Guermantes soirie, to which I was not certain of having been invited, I whiled away the time outside; but the summer daylight seemed in no greater haste to move than I was. Although it was after nine o'clock, it was still the daylight that, on the Place de la Concorde, had given to the Luxor obelisk an appearance of pink nougat. Then it modified the tint and turned it into a metallic substance, with the result that the obelisk did not merely become more precious, but seemed thinner and almost flexible. You fancied that you might have been able to twist it, that this jewel had already been bent slightly out of true perhaps. The moon was in the sky now like a quarter of an orange, delicately peeled but with a small bite out of it. Later it would be made of the most resistant gold. Huddled all alone behind it, a poor little star was about to serve as the solitary moon's one companion, while the latter, even as it shielded its friend, but more daring and going on ahead, would brandish, like an irresistible weapon, like a symbol of the Orient, its marvelous, ample golden cresent.

In front of the Princesse de Guermantes's httel, I met the Duc de Chbtellerault; I no longer remembered that half an hour before I was still haunted by the fear-which was soon indeed to take hold of me again-of coming without having been invited. We feel uneasy, and it is sometimes long after the moment of danger, forgotten thanks to our distraction, that we remember our unease. I said good day to the young Duc and made my way into the house. But here I must first note a trifling circumstance which will enable a fact that will follow shortly to be understood.

On that, as on the preceding evenings, there was someone who had the Duc de Chbtellerault very much on his mind, without, however, suspecting who he was: this was Mme de Guermantes's doorman (known in those days as the "barker"). M. de Chbtellerault, very far from being an intimate-as he was of the cousins-of the Princesse, was being received in her drawing room for the first time. His parents, who had quarreled with her ten years ago, had made it up two weeks ago, and, obliged to be away from Paris on that evening, had asked their son to stand in for them. Now, a few days before, the Princesse's doorman had met a young man in the Champs-Ilysies whom he had thought charming but whose identity he had been unable to establish. Not that the young man had not proved as amiable as he was generous. All the favors that the doorman had imagined having to grant so young a gentleman, he had, on the contrary, received. But M. de Chbtellerault was as cowardly as he was imprudent; he was the more determined not to disclose his incognito inasmuch as he did not know whom he had to deal with; he would have felt an even greater-fear-though ill founded-had he known. He had merely passed himself off as an Englishman, and to all the doorman's impassioned questions, who was eager to see someone to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and largesse again, the Duc had merely answered in English, all the way along the Avenue Gabriel, "I do not speak French."

Although, in spite of everything-because of his cousin's maternal origins-the Duc de Guermantes affected to find something a trifle Courvoisier-like about the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavihre's salon, the general verdict on that lady's spirit of initiative and intellectual superiority was based on an innovation not to be met with anywhere else in those circles. After dinner, and whatever the importance of the rout that was to follow, the seats at the Princesse de Guermantes's were arranged in such a manner that you formed small groups, which, if need be, had their backs to one another. The Princesse would then mark her social sense by going and sitting in one of these, as if from preference. She was not afraid, however, of selecting and calling on a member of another group. If, for example, she had remarked to M. Detaille, who had naturally agreed, what a pretty neck Mme de Villemur had, whose position in another group showed her from behind, the Princesse did not hesitate to raise her voice: "Mme de Villemur, M. Detaille, great painter that he is, is busy admiring your neck." Mme de Villemur understood this as a direct invitation to join in the conversation; with an agility born of her hours in the saddle, she caused her chair slowly to pivot through an arc of three-quarters of a circle and, without the least disturbance to her neighbors, sat almost facing the Princesse.

"You don't know M. Detaille?" asked her hostess, for whom her guest's skillful but modest about-face was not enough. "I don't know him, but I know his work," replied Mme de Villemur, with a winning and respectful expression, and an aptness that many envied, even as she was directing an imperceptible nod at the celebrated painter, her being summoned not having amounted to a formal introduction to him. "Come, M. Detaille," said the Princesse, "I'm going to introduce you to Mme de Villemur." The latter then showed as much ingenuity in making room for the author of The Dream as a little earlier in turning toward him. And the Princesse brought a chair forward for herself; indeed, she had summoned Mme de Villemur only so as to have a pretext for leaving the first group, where she had spent the regulation ten minutes, and granting an equal duration of her presence to a second. Within three-quarters of an hour, all of the groups had received her visit, which seemed every time to result from a sudden inspiration or a predilection, but which had the object above all of throwing into relief how naturally "a great lady knows how to entertain." But now the guests at the soirie were starting to arrive, and the hostess had taken her seat not far from the entrance-erect and haughty, in her quasi-royal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own incandescence-between two plain-looking Highnesses and the Spanish ambassadress.

I lined up behind several guests who had arrived ahead of me. Facing me I had the Princesse, whose beauty, among so many others, is no doubt not the only one to remind me of that particular party. But our hostess's face was so perfect, had been struck like some beautiful medal, that for me it has preserved a commemorative value. The Princesse was in the habit of saying to her guests, when she met them a few days before one of her soiries, "You will come, won't you?," as if she felt a strong desire to talk with them. But since, on the contrary, she had nothing to say to them, the moment they arrived in front of her she contented herself, without getting up, with breaking off for a moment from her vacuous conversation with the two Highnesses and the ambassadress to thank them, by saying, "It's kind of you to come," not because she thought that the guest had given proof of kindness by coming, but in order to enhance even further her own; then, at once throwing him back into the river, she would add, "You'll find M. de Guermantes at the...