Angels

Angels in the novel are at once figures of religious ceremony, motifs in sacred art, and objects through which private memory acquires a sense of the sacred. Their appearances link M. de Charlus’s devotional imagination to Albertine’s painting and to the narrator’s power to make remembered scenes persist.

Ceremony and Devotional Imagination

At a dinner, M. de Charlus explains his wish to remain for the feast of Saint Michael on September 29 at the Abbey on the Mount. When Madame Verdurin questions whether he cares about such matters, he insists that Saint Michael is one of his patrons and imagines the Offertory: Michael stands by the altar in a white robe, swinging a golden censer whose piled perfumes rise toward God. His description makes the angel a focus for an intensely visual and sensory form of devotion.

M. de Charlus extends the image into a proposed performance. He pictures the young violinist Palestrinising and performing an aria by Bach as the Offertory begins, with the abbot delighted and the faithful edified. Madame Verdurin suggests that the group might go together, but M. de Charlus continues his vision without taking up the interruption. The angelic ceremony thus becomes both an object of genuine religious feeling and a scene that he composes around music, spectacle, and his own authority to define what would count as homage.

Angels in Art and Place

At the church of Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise, Albertine paints the angels carved across the tympanum. The stonework appears to blossom, and its figures seem to continue celebrating thirteenth-century ceremonies before the modern couple who have arrived to look at them. Following Elstir’s instruction, Albertine works in sweeping strokes and tries to capture the distinctive rhythm of these angels. Their representation brings artistic practice into contact with a sacred past preserved in the church’s surface.

The scene does not stop at the painted image. After Albertine gathers her things, she and the narrator walk back up the sunken path together, leaving the church beside the brook. Their departure sets the angels’ enduring ceremonial presence against the couple’s brief visit: the figures appear to belong to a rite that continues beyond the visitors’ moment, while the church returns to its quiet surroundings.

Memory, Patronage, and the Sacred

The novel also frames the earlier encounter between M. de Charlus and Jupien through the narrator’s comparison of their gestures with flowers attracting insects. The first meeting remains bound, in memory, to afternoon sunlight and a blossoming plant. M. de Charlus later changes the time of his visits to Madame de Villeparisis, and the narrator suggests that the hour and the flowering plant have become linked for him with the remembered encounter. This is not an angelic episode in itself, but it shows how an observed scene can take on the persistence and charged significance of a private ritual.

That personal attachment develops into material patronage. M. de Charlus recommends Jupien’s family to an illustrious clientele, helps make the young seamstress’s position increasingly lucrative, and eventually employs Jupien as his secretary. The narrator notes that Charlus’s patronage can also become punitive toward women who resist or delay accepting his authority. In this context, sacred language and generosity coexist with social leverage: the novel places devotion beside the practical power to reward, promote, or retaliate.

A different form of imagined sacred intervention appears in M. de Charlus’s letter to Aimé. Charlus explains that Aimé’s resemblance to a deceased friend revived his attachment and led him to hope that the dead man might, through the Communion of Saints, intervene in the destiny of the living. He had considered treating Aimé as he had treated that friend, whom he loved as a father loves a son and for whom he had been willing to devote much of his fortune. The spiritual claim gives emotional meaning to a proposed act of material generosity, but Aimé’s repeated refusals end the possibility of the relationship Charlus had imagined.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, angels are never merely decorative figures. In the Offertory, they belong to a formal religious vision; on the church tympanum, they become an artistic subject whose medieval presence Albertine tries to recover through painting. Elsewhere, the novel shows how an encounter or a resemblance can be invested with an almost sacred force, shaping later actions and expectations. Together, these uses set durable images and imagined continuities against the changeable, often unequal relationships of ordinary social life.