“Love can be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind”

“Love can be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind” describes how M. de Charlus’s jealousy over Morel produces a dramatic reorganization of thought. The geological image gives inner feeling the force and structure of a changed landscape; elsewhere, the book’s account of shifting political convictions echoes the same instability, as personal relationships and social encounters reshape what people believe.

The Image of Inner Upheaval

The expression appears as M. de Charlus grows anxious about Morel’s unexplained evening absences. Morel says that he wants to keep some evenings free for algebra lessons, which he enjoys because they soothe his nerves, and at other times reserves them for the violin. The Baron suspects that these explanations conceal another purpose. When he learns that Morel has met the Prince de Guermantes, jealousy intensifies his uncertainty, and he enlists Jupien to help discover what Morel is doing.

The narrator contrasts the Baron’s newly agitated mind with a previously level mental plain. Love does not merely add one feeling to an otherwise unchanged interior: jealousy, curiosity, envy, hatred, suffering, pride, and terror rise together into a mountainous terrain. The metaphor makes emotional change at once geological and artistic. The upheaval seems to create solid features where there had been no visible elevation, while the mountains appear intricately carved rather than simply thrust up from the earth.

Morel’s Absences and the Baron’s Jealousy

The circumstances give the metaphor its immediate force. Morel’s stated commitments to algebra and music leave open the possibility that he is concealing other plans. When the Prince de Guermantes offers him money to spend the night at a brothel in Maineville, Morel accepts; the narrator notes both the payment and his pleasure in the company there. M. de Charlus hears of the arrangement but does not learn the identity of the man who made it. The discovery sharpens his jealousy without resolving the uncertainty that feeds it.

To identify the unknown man, the Baron sends for Jupien and asks him to arrange a concealed place from which they can observe Morel’s next absence. Jupien agrees, and the two set out for the establishment. The episode turns inward disturbance into action: the Baron’s new mental landscape is not an abstract reflection but a condition that directs his attention and conduct. The expression captures the scale of that change without presenting it as proof that he understands the situation clearly.

Conviction and Social Influence

The expression also resonates with the narrative’s treatment of political belief. M. de Guermantes initially regards Swann’s support for Dreyfus as a betrayal of social and patriotic loyalties. He sees Swann as a respected, level-headed man whose position makes his choice especially consequential, and fears that society will treat one Jewish supporter as evidence against Jews as a whole. His reaction shows how political conviction becomes entangled with class, reputation, and antisemitism.

Later, the Duke himself changes sides during a spa cure. Three women he meets there express confidence that Dreyfus will receive a new trial and be acquitted; they challenge the arguments he offers against Dreyfus until the Duke gradually adopts their view. He returns to Paris a Dreyfusard. The narrative does not reduce this reversal to a simple discovery of evidence: the Duke’s encounters and his deference to women he considers intellectually superior help alter his position. As with the Baron’s jealousy, a changed relation to other people becomes a force capable of remaking an established inner conviction.

Significance

The geological metaphor makes emotional intensity legible as a transformation of mental structure. M. de Charlus’s love and jealousy generate not a single, neatly separable response but a whole range of competing states, with consequences for what he notices and what he does. The image’s force comes from the difference between the apparent flatness of his earlier mental life and the sudden complexity of the terrain that feeling brings into being.

Set beside the Duke’s political reversal, the expression also belongs to a larger pattern: minds that seem settled can be rearranged by encounters, attachments, and the judgments of others. The parallel does not equate romantic jealousy with political conviction; it shows, more narrowly, how both private feeling and public belief may prove less fixed than their possessors suppose.