Returning from an evening with the Princess of Guermantes, where Swann tells him he has changed his mind about Dreyfus, the narrator waits for Albertine. They end the evening together, but his jealousy turns to “distrust” after a remark by Cottard alerts him to the fact that Albertine and Andrée are waltzing “close together” at the Incarville casino. Riddled with doubt, he sets out to spy on Albertine—and his own heart troubled by the suspicion of sapphism.
These lineaments are reminiscent of an episode in Sodom and Gomorrah II, published by Gallimard in 1922, the year of Proust’s death, with variants.
Proust had published them in Les Œuvres libres, in November 1921. Fayard had emphasized Proust’s “extraordinary analytical force”, and he was less than indignant at being called an “original and complete novel” to the taste of the NRF. Paulhan was furious, all the more so as these pages were among the crudest, the ones in which Charlus and Saint-Loup appear. They were also the pages in which Proust invented autofiction.
