My Year With Proust - Day 282

   "Ornessan is a witty fellow, and he has every reason to be, his mother was a Montjeu.  He's in a very bad way now, poor Ornessan."

   This name had the magic virtue of interrupting the flow of stale witticisms which otherwise would have gone on forever.  For M. de Guermantes went on to explain that M. d'Ornessan's great-grandmother had been the sister of Marie de Castille Montjeu, the wife of Timoleon de Lorraine, and consequently Oriante's aunt, with the result that the conversation drifted back to genealogies, while the imbecile Turkish Ambassadress breathed in my ear: "You appear to be very much in the Duke's good books; have a care!" and, on my demanding an explanation: "I mean to say, you understand what I mean, he's a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son." Now if ever, on the contrary, there was a man who was passionately and exclusively a lover of women, it was certainly the Duc de Guermantes.  But error, untruth fatuously believed, were for the Ambassadress like a vital element out of which she could not move.  "His brother Meme, who is, as it happens, for other reasons altogether" (he ignored her) "profoundly uncongenial to me, is genuinely distressed by the Duke's morals.  So is the their aunt Villeparisis.  Ah, now, her I adore!"

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 560

I threw in this section mainly to act as a bit of foreshadowing of an early theme from Cities of the Plain, the fourth volume of Remembrance of Things Past, which I finally started a few days ago (and which we're fast closing in on).  The Ambassadress, leaning in to gossip with Marcel about the Duke, states, "I mean to say, you understand what I mean, he's a man to whom one could safely entrust one's daughter, but not one's son."  Of course, this statement can be read a couple different ways, either that the Duke would be a bad influence on the son because of his constant womanizing, but she seems to be implying that, instead, the Duke would be interested in the young men sexually.  Marcel ignores her, and remarks that, "Now if ever, on the contrary, there was a man who was passionately and exclusively a lover of women, it was certainly the Duc de Guermantes."  That said, Proust then records that Meme, the Baron de Charlus, is "genuinely distressed by the Duke's morals."  As I often say to my students, there are no accidents in art, and Proust is clearly setting us up for what will unfold early in the next volume.