A Skeleton In An Open Dress

It's not often, in my digestion of Proust's insights and sentiments, that so clear a connection can be made between my initial recognition of a subject and its expansion and explanation via the lives and behaviors of characters over the story's development. Tonight, though, I repeatedly found outcroppings of clarity in regards to the cultural acceptance of what are typically deemed "deviant" actions and choices. Specifically, I am referring to the rampant indulgence in the buying and selling of sex and in the keeping of multiple partners, despite or in spite of committed, sometimes married, relationships.

A quote grabbed me just now, that I had studiously underlined (nerd), which I may well have forgotten. Had I not been lost in my 780 loose pages from this second volume and their dog-eared, underlined, bracketed glory, I may well have just missed this connection entirely. I think, though, that I have found a reason for statements such as these, made in regards to a favorite brothel of a friend of the narrators':

"You'll see, there are young girls there, even...Anyhow, you have only to see the child... She looks to me a marvellous [sic] proposition. The parents are always ill and can't look after her. Gad, the child must have some amusement, and I count upon you to provide it!" (Proust, 719)

Of course, the narrator is not an old man himself at this stage of the story, but he had earlier remarked upon his propensity for interest in little girls, and this quotation illustrates just what he may be referring to. He and his friends appear to have developed a certain taste for, well, children. Basically. 

And in regards to another young lady: 

"Oh, if I only had a little time in Paris, what wonderful things there are to be done! And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know, I've finished with all that." (Proust, 721)

Ah, there. The thread begins to show in the stitches. At first, it seems that maybe these men are simply pigs, as men are and have been throughout all of time. But with that second passage, it begins to grow obvious to me that there is a sort of nihilism at work here. There's this permeating "ah, fuck it" running through people at this time in regards to moral decision making. Because, after all, it's "all rot, you know." However, on page 742, Proust tries to write this all off to the greater construct of society with his remark, made in passing in regards to (of all things, after the discussion of sexual interactions with children) a homosexual relationship taken up between two purported "sisters" in a rented home out in the country:

"...for there is no vice that does not find ready tolerance in the best society..." (Proust, 742)

I know, I know. I'm slinging quotes at you pretty rapid fire right now, but I'm going to let this be one of those delightful Young Indiana Jones: Choose Your Own Adventure novels I loved as a younger man. I'll sort of bookend here with the remark made by Proust in regards to a short declaration by the Duchesse de Guermantes that made all the math work, where she claimed that "beautiful things are such a bore," (Proust, 713) amongst other things, including "pictures" and "letters," (Proust, 713). Though it preceded the above remarks by several tens of pages, it appears to me to be a sort of thematic foreshadowing. I was detecting a sort of existential commonality between many characters, and their justifications for certain depraved choices, as well as Proust's own social commentary upon certain topics, when I saw this quote. This quote that I nearly forgot.

"Finally, it was life itself that she declared to be boring, leaving you to wonder where she took her term of comparison." (Proust, 713)

If that didn't just crack the knuckles of the nihilist baby I've been growing inside my embittered heart for the past nine months, I don't know what could. Now, choose your own adventure.