“The women shall have Gomorrah and the men shall have Sodom”

“The women shall have Gomorrah and the men shall have Sodom” is an epigraph attributed to Alfred de Vigny, placed before Part One. Its compact division of women and men into separate realms of desire establishes a frame for the book’s investigation of same-sex life and its concealed social worlds.

Wording and Attribution

The line is presented in two parts: women are assigned Gomorrah, men Sodom, followed by the attribution to Alfred de Vigny. The paired biblical names make the sentence both an epigraph and a miniature map, separating the forms of desire by gender while binding them in a single parallel construction.

Placement and Narrative Frame

The epigraph appears immediately before Part One, so its significance is prospective rather than a comment attached to one later scene. It prepares the reader for a narrative that will uncover what ordinary social appearances leave unspoken. In particular, the book’s account of the narrator’s discovery concerning M. de Charlus is introduced as something whose importance has been deliberately withheld until it can receive fuller treatment. The epigraph’s stark division offers a frame for that disclosure without itself explaining its circumstances.

Significance

The sentence turns two names associated with biblical condemnation into headings for distinct worlds of desire. Its symmetry is decisive: women and men are not gathered under one undifferentiated category, but placed in parallel domains. As an opening threshold, it gives the book’s treatment of hidden sexuality both a broad social scope and an organizing distinction, while leaving the particular lives and encounters that fill those domains to the narrative that follows.