Sphinx

The Sphinx is a sculpted, watchful presence in the Guermantes card-room, part of the room’s transformation into a magician’s cell. Its mythic association with riddles gives visual form to M. de Charlus’s concentrated, almost divinatory scrutiny of the young Comte de Surgis: the statue seems to pose a mystery, while the young man becomes the enigma to be read.

Appearance in the Card-Room

The narrator describes the card-room or smoking-room as an interior crowded with images and signs: its floor is pictorial, tripods and figures of gods and animals fill the space, and Sphinxes stretch along the arms of the chairs. A vast marble or enamelled-mosaic table bears symbols loosely imitated from Etruscan and Egyptian art. Together these objects make the room seem less like an ordinary setting for cards than a chamber furnished for occult interpretation.

The Sphinxes do not act independently; their force is architectural and symbolic. They gaze from the chairs, making the furniture itself appear to watch. Their presence joins the room’s other antique and magical-looking details, establishing a visual vocabulary of riddles before the narrator explains what M. de Charlus is studying.

The Riddle of the Young Comte de Surgis

At the glittering table, M. de Charlus sits without touching a card, so absorbed that he does not notice the narrator enter. He has set aside the cigar he had been holding, apparently unable to spare attention for smoking or for the movement around him. The narrator compares his fixed gaze to that of a Pythian priestess and imagines the crouching divine figures on the facing chair as witnesses to a struggle with the Sphinx’s riddle.

The apparent object of this concentration is not a card or an abstract problem, but the features of the young Comte de Surgis. M. de Charlus studies the young man as though trying to penetrate a rebus or solve an algebraic formula. In that figurative arrangement, the Sphinx supplies the riddle-image, while the young man’s appearance becomes the problem whose hidden meaning M. de Charlus seeks to decipher. The narrator’s language makes the Baron’s attention seem at once intellectual and desirous, without reducing it to a literal supernatural encounter.

Myth, Family, and Interpretation

When the young man’s brother comes up behind him to look at his cards, the narrator tells M. de Charlus that the two are brothers. The Baron’s admiration extends to the family’s ability to produce two striking but different beauties. The passage then invokes Jupiter’s many divine children and marriages to contrast mythical plurality with the brothers’ shared parents: both sons of Mme de Surgis-le-Duc have the same father as well as the same mother, yet each has received a distinct beauty from her.

This turn shifts the imagery of riddles from an individual face to the interpretation of resemblance and difference. The Sphinx belongs to a room where signs invite reading; the brothers likewise invite comparison, but their shared parentage does not make them alike. The episode uses the mythic furnishings to lend M. de Charlus’s intense looking an atmosphere of divination, while the narrator’s account of the brothers redirects that atmosphere toward the more ordinary, and more revealing, mystery of how beauty can be inherited in different forms.