May I call you tu?: The Guermantes Way

As narrator, Marcel, in Proust's The Guermantes Way heads off to the military-training camp at Doncieres, we embark on one of them most ludicrous - funny and poignant at the same time, like much of In Search of Lost Time - section in the novel. Marcel goes in search of his good friend Saint-Loup in hopes that S-L can arrange for him to have dinner with his crush (much, much older), Mme Geurmantes. So among the oddities of this section: there's probably no scene in the novel more brimming with (repressed) homo-eroticism: Marcel arriving at the training camp and fearing that he will not be able to sleep unless he can share a room w/ Saint-Loup, S-L getting permission to let Marcel stay in his barracks room, his tender solicitude for all of Marcel's needs and whims, the gushy way in which these two guys talk to each other, culminating in the plaintive request: May I call you tu? And so on. It's also broadly comic in the way that Marcel keeps asking S-L about his aunt, even asking if he can keep a photograph of her, and thinking all the while that S-L is so dense he has no idea that Marcel's approach to him is an attempt to get close to Mme G. (of course he knows, but he may not suspect that it's about a crush). Also, the section is a kind of hilarious indictment of the French military, with all these rich boys in training seeming to do little more than dine on pheasant and have plenty of time to hang around with this civilian boy-toy who just showed up out of the blue. They're training for what, exactly? And then there's the poignancy: all these silly war games and marching bands seem so quaint and jolly, until we realize that maybe 15 years down the line France will be at war (and very poorly prepared) - all of which will have its place in the final volumes of this series.