In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (78 page)
Read In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV Online
Authors: Marcel Proust
William Styron
·
Gore Vidal
A N
OTE ON THE
T
YPE
The principal text of this Modern Library edition was composed in a digitized version of Horley Old Style, a typeface issued by the English type foundry Monotype in 1925. It has such distinctive features as lightly cupped serifs and an oblique horizontal bar on the lowercase “e.”
Notes
1
Altesse
, like
majesté
, being feminine, takes the feminine pronoun.
2
Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté
: from Alfred de Vigny’s
La Colère de Samson
.
3
The reference is to Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador in St Petersburg during the Great War.
4
Emile Loubet, President of the Republic from 1899 to 1906.
5
Vert
= spicy, risqué.
6
Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denis: a distinguished French sinologist.
7
Of the two French versions of the
Arabian Nights
, Galland’s
Les Mille et Une Nuits
(1704-17) is elegant, scholarly but heavily bowdlerised, and Mardrus’s
Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit
(1899-1904) coarser and unexpurgated.
8
A popular tune from Offenbach’s
Les Brigands
. A
courrier de cabinet
is the equivalent of a King’s or Queen’s Messenger.
9
Better known under his pen-name Saint-John Perse.
10
Mme Récamier’s property on the outskirts of Paris, where she held her salon.
11
Jachères
= fallow land;
gâtines
= sterile marshland.
12
Francisque Sarcey: middlebrow drama critic noted for his avuncular style.
13
The French has
le cheveu
instead of the normal
les cheveux
.
14
Untranslatable pun. The French of course is
Watteau à vapeur, echoing bateau à vapeur = steamer
.
15
Monseigneur
is the formula for addressing royalty.
16
Philipp, Prince Eulenburg, a close friend and adviser of William II, was involved in a homosexual scandal in 1906.
17
The French say
une veine de cocu
for “the luck of the devil.”
18
Tapette
can mean both “chatterbox” and “nancy boy.”
19
Idiomatic expression meaning “the moment of reckoning.”
1993 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York,
This edition was originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London, in 1992.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of
Cities of the Plain
by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
Sodom and Gomorrah
first appeared in The Modern Library as
Cities of the Plain
in 1938.
Jacket portrait courtesy of Culver Pictures
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922.
[Sodome et Gomorrhe. English]
Sodom and Gomorrah/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p. cm.—(In search of lost time; 4)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Title. II. Series: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du
temps perdu. English;
PQ2631.R63S6313 1993
843'.912—dc20 92-27272
eISBN: 978-0-679-64181-0
v3.0