Chapter four of Sodom and Gomorrah begins with the narrator explaining to his mother that he would not marry Albertine. He didn’t even wish to see her anymore. Instead, he decided to love Andree. But on page 701, when the narrator talks to Albertine for what he intends to be the last time, he is given a shocking piece of information.

“You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I’m expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together? Well, this friend… is the best friend of your Vinteuil’s daughter. And I know Vinteuil’s daughter almost as well as I know her. I always call them my two big sisters.”

The narrator immediately goes into a panic because both Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend are, as he puts it, “practicing and professional Sapphists.” He begins to associate Albertine with lesbianism as well. From page 705,

“What I had long dreaded, had vaguely suspected of Albertine, what my instinct deduced from her whole personality and my reason controlled by my desire had gradually made me repudiate, was true! Behind Albertine I no longer saw the blue mountains of the sea, but the room at Mountjouvain where she was falling into the arms of Mlle Vinteuil with that laugh in which she gave utterance as it were to the strange sound of her pleasure.”

The narrator, at this point, has been given no concrete evidence of Albertine’s sexuality. All he knows for certain is that she has friends who are lesbians. In contrast to Swann, who, when in the same situation, directly asked Odette about her history with women, the narrator does something he often does. He reanalyzes and interprets his memories through the lens of his newly accepted reality.

“With a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vinteuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them? And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarreled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased. And that graceful movement with which Albertine laid her chin upon Rosemonde’s shoulder, gazed at her smilingly, and deposited a kiss upon her neck…”

After contemplating Albertine’s sexuality, the narrator decides that he cannot let Albertine be alone with a girl, that she must always stay with him instead, despite the fact that just a few pages ago he was essentially disgusted with her. He is so desperate to keep her away from her homosexual tendencies, that on page 706 he makes up a story about a broken engagement.

“When I came here, I left a woman whom I was to have married, who was ready to sacrifice everything for me. She was to start on a journey this morning, and every day for the last week I have been wondering whether I should have the courage not to telegraph to her that I was coming back. I did have the courage, but it made me so wretched that I thought I would kill myself. That is why I asked you last night if you would come and sleep at Balbec. If I had to die, I should have liked to bid you farewell.”

The narrator seems to be driven more by a fear of Albertine in a lesbian relationship, rather than a desire to actually win her love. On page 714, he says, “I was too inclined to believe that, once I was in love, I could not be loved in return, and that pecuniary interest alone could attach a woman to me.” So through pity and money, the narrator convinces Albertine to stay with him, and on page 715, he kisses her neck, a parallel to his memory of Albertine kissing Rosemonde’s neck.