Day One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Prisoner, pp. 67-82

From "That was how I answered her; among the expressions of carnality..." to "...and plans for further, ardent lovers' meetings."

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The narrator claims that he is "slowly coming to resemble all my relatives," including, in his reclusiveness and insistence on spending the day in bed, his Aunt Léonie. "Thus, all my past since my earliest years, and beyond those, my relatives' past, mixed into my carnal love for Albertine the sweetness of a love both filial and maternal." But the carnal seems to predominate, especially in his description of Albertine naked, in which he notes "the place which, in men, is made ugly by something like the metal pin left sticking out of a statue when it is removed from its mould." That particular bit of observation isn't ascribed to any of his relatives, and one wonders how many heterosexual men would describe the absence of a penis quite that way.

Their playfulness in bed is characterized as "happy, cheerful moments, innocent in appearance but hiding the growing possibility of disaster: this is what makes the life of lovers the most unpredictable of all, a life in which it can rain sulphur and pitch a moment after the sunniest spell and where, without having the courage to learn from our misfortunes, we immediately start building again on the slopes of the crater which can only spew catastrophe." For catastrophe has loomed for their relationship since its beginning. He recalls the last visit to Balbec, when Aimé reported to him that she was in town and "was looking 'not quite the thing,'" a phrase whose ambiguity led him to imagine that "perhaps he meant a lesbian look" -- whatever that might be. It sent his imagination into overdrive in any case.

For the narrator, "love is an incurable ailment," marked by a jealousy that can strike at any moment, including "after the event, which arises only after we have left the person in question, a 'staircase jealousy' like staircase wit." He reflects that "modern Gomorrah is a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces from the most unlikely places." And that "Jealousy is often nothing but an uneasy desire for domination, applied in the context of love."

Most often love has for its object a body only if an emotion, the fear of losing the loved object, the uncertainty of finding it again, are fused with that body.... Had not I recognized in Albertine one of those girls under whose fleshly covering there palpitate more hidden beings, not just than in a deck of cards still in its box, in a locked cathedral or a theatre before the doors open, but in the whole vast, ever-changing crowd?

Day Forty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 217-234

From "By the time my grandmother and I..." to "...for once as a single lasting picture." 
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Proust begins the section called "Place-Names: The Place" with a recapitulation of what might be called the "madeleine theory" of memory, or as the narrator puts it, "the general laws of remembering," which are predicated on the fact that memories are often spontaneously generated by similar sensory events that, when we experienced them in other contexts, we thought too trivial to notice: sights, sounds, scents, tastes -- like that of the tea-soaked crumbs of a madeleine.

Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Having finally made the journey to Balbec, and convincing himself that he "had reached a state of almost complete indifference toward Gilberte," he still finds that life is "unchronological" and "anachronistic in its disordering of our days." He sometimes finds himself "living farther back in time than I had been on the day or two before, back in the much earlier time when I had been in love with Gilberte." Overhearing some words spoken by a passing stranger recalls a similar phrase from a conversation Gilberte had once had with her father.

The temporal disorientation lasts only briefly, however, because "his life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it prevail."

Habit may weaken all things, but it also stabilizes them; it brings about a dislocation, but then makes it last indefinitely. For years past, I had been roughly modeling my state of mind each day on my state of mind the day before. At Balbec, breakfast in bed -- a different breakfast -- was to be incapable of nourishing the ideas on which my love for Gilberte had fed in Paris.The trip itself puts him once again in the hands of the women who have coddled him, not only his mother but also his grandmother and Françoise. And this man whom we have seen holding his own with Bergotte, listening to the grownup conversations in Mme. Swann's salon, selling his Aunt Léonie's bequest to woo Gilberte, and spending his time with prostitutes, is once again reduced to the emotional state of a little boy fearing separation from his mother.

Or as he puts it another way: "the best way to gain time is to change place."

On the other hand, the process of changing place seems to cast him back into a second childhood, in which all his childish attachment to his mother is restored. And his enthusiasm for seeing this place he has dreamed of is tempered by his awareness that he will probably be in some way disappointed or disillusioned: "Long before going to see La Berma, ... I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit; and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."

Day Forty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 198-217

From "What helped me to bear the thought..." to "...the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria."

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The narrator finally makes the break with Gilberte -- after selling his Aunt Léonie's Chinese vase for ten thousand francs so he can send Gilberte flowers every day -- when he sees her walking down the street "with a young man in the twilight." (Actually, he says he "thought" he saw her -- few things happen definitively to our narrator.) He is "now determined never to see her again," and he spends the money so he can "lie weeping in the arms of other women, whom I did not love."

And then there's a bit of foreshadowing:

On one occasion there was an unpleasant scene at home because I declined to accompany my father to an official function, at which M. and Mme Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, who was then little more than a child. The different periods of our life overlap. Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others).

He also tells us that "all the diverse modes of sorrow will be described in connection with a later love affair." The reader is left to decide whether to take that as a threat or a promise.

But for now he is beginning to experience "the peace of mind of lasting sadness." His imagination dwells on things that might have been, "sweet and constantly regenerated images" that "came to occupy more space in my mind than the glimpse of her with the young man, which weakened for lack of nourishment." He stops visiting Mme. Swann's because "the memory of Gilberte was inseparable from such visits," though he and Gilberte continue to write letters to each other. Hers "were fully as considerate as any I wrote to people who meant nothing to me."

As they slowly grow apart, he begins to regret having decided against a diplomatic career -- a choice he made "so as not to absent myself from a girl whom I would not now be seeing again, whom I had already more or less forgotten." He resumes his visits to Mme. Swann's, which "now caused me no grief at all," but to avoid seeing Gilberte, he more often meets Odette (and her entourage that includes Swann and other men) on her Sunday morning walk. His fascination with Odette is such that he continues to notice the minutest hidden details of her dress, "like the fine Gothic stonework hidden eighty feet up a cathedral, on the corner face of a balustrade, just as perfectly executed as the bas-relief statues in the main doorway, but which no one had ever set eyes on until an artist on a chance visit to the city asked to be allowed to climb up there."

He pinpoints the Swanns' niche in society: "though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic idea and purposes -- in was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile." And he witnesses the Prince de Sagan's attention to Odette as "homage to Woman, even though she was embodied in a woman whom his mother or sister would never stoop to frequent."

And so, at the end of the section "At Mme Swann's," the narrator reports that "the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria."

Day Forty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 150-161

From "It was about this time that Bloch..." to "...personal freedom, has not yet acquired."

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Bloch turns up again, this time to take the narrator to his first brothel, and to give him "the truly divine gift ... which can be acquired only from reality: the charm of the individual." One individual that a madam thrusts upon him is "a Jewess" whom she calls Rachel, and whom the narrator nicknames "Rachel, when of the Lord," a rather arch allusion to an aria in Halévy's opera La Juive: "Rachel, quand du seigneur."

The madam doesn't get the joke. And the narrator doesn't get the girl -- she is "busy" on later visits, and he stops visiting the brothel, though not before giving the madam several pieces of furniture, including "a large couch," that he has inherited from his Aunt Léonie. "But as soon as I set eyes on them again in that brothel, put to use by those women, I was assailed by all the virtues that had perfumed the air in my aunt's bedroom at Combray, now defiled by the brutal dealings to which I had condemned the dear, defenseless things. I could not have suffered more if it had been the dead woman herself being violated." And here Proust plays an ironic memory trick -- ironic, given that it was the madeleine soaked in tea that caused the memory of Aunt Léonie and of Combray to surface so dramatically earlier in the novel -- by noting that "memory does not usually produce recollections in chronological order, but acts more like a reflection inverting the sequence of parts," so that "it was not until much later that I remembered this was the couch on which, many years before, I had been initiated into the pleasures of love by one of my cousins."

Meanwhile, he is also selling off his aunt's silverware so he can buy flowers for Mme. Swann. However, things are not going so well with Gilberte. He notes that he gave up the idea of becoming a diplomat because the career might have separated him from Gilberte, but his obsession with her and the Swanns has also distracted him from his writing -- to the dismay of his parents and his grandmother. He details the long chain of excuses and rationalizations -- familiar to any procrastinator -- that keep him from sitting down to write.

Moreover, he begins to sense that Gilberte is not quite so enamored of him as he is of her.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity that in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual, and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since if one had not obtained what one desired.

The Swanns, "who were more and more convinced I was an improving influence on" Gilberte, don't help when they stop her from going to a dancing class and instead make her stay to entertain the narrator. "Gilberte's face was devoid of all joy, laid waste, a blank, melancholy mask, which for the rest of the afternoon seemed to grieve privately for those foursome reels being danced without her, because of my presence here." And so he finds himself "on the threshold of one of those difficult junctures which most of us encounter several times in our lives," when pride and self-indulgence cause an avoidable pain.

Day Thirty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 3-30

From "When it was first suggested..."to "'...Of course I'm not disappointed!'"

_____

The narrator's comment in Swann's Way about "the mystery of personality" seems to apply particularly well here at the opening of the second volume, in which we learn that the foolish Dr. Cottard we met at the Verdurins in the first volume has now become "a scientific man of some renown," and that Swann is now regarded as "nothing but a vulgar swank," at least by the narrator's father. "This statement of my father's may require a few words of explanation," the narrator interjects, "as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion."

Both men have reinvented themselves -- in Swann's case an adaptation to "a new position for himself, ... far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it." The narrator notes that there is some anti-Semitism in the current view of the sudden vulgarity of "this man (who in former days, and even now, could show exquisite tact in not advertising an invitation to Twickenham or Buckingham Palace) braying out the fact that the wife of an undersecretary's undersecretary had returned Mme. Swann's visit."

In his gushing ways with these new friends and his boastful citing of their exploits, Swann was like the great artist who takes up cooking or gardening late in life and who, though modest enough to be untroubled by criticism of his masterpieces, cannot bear to hear faint praise of his recipes or flower beds.

As for Cottard, now "Professor Cottard," "it is possible to be unread, and to like making silly puns, while having a special gift that outweighs any general culture, such as the gift of the great strategist or the great clinician." And Cottard has apparently emerged as a gifted diagnostician. The narrator observes that "the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a turning inside out." So Cottard has shaved his beard and mustache and cultivated a cold and taciturn manner -- except when he's with the "little circle" at the Verdurins "where he instinctively became himself again."

These transformations of personality are, I think, central to the novel, which is not only a search for lost time but often also a search for the lost self that time has carried away. In his introduction, Grieve notes how often Proust switches point of view from the narrator as a young man to the narrator in his later years, sometimes to the confusion of the reader. And that Proust doesn't specify the narrator's age, so that we're never quite sure how old he is at any given time in his remembrances of things past. I think this is key to Proust's examination of memory. We assume that the narrator is a mature man, telling us about what it was like to be a child anxiously awaiting his mother's goodnight kiss, but in telling us the story he becomes that child again, giving us more than any mere scouring of our memories could really supply. We are what we create ourselves to be.

But we are not the sole creators of ourselves. One theme apparent in the opening pages of this volume is the influence of others, not only family and friends, but of society as a whole in shaping the person. Both Swann and Cottard are who are they have become because they are responding to the expectations of others. And the pompous Marquis de Norpois, the narrator's father's new friend, holds sway over the narrator's parents.

By strengthening in my father's mind the high opinion he had of M. de Norpois, and thereby also fostering in him a higher opinion of himself, she felt she was fulfilling the wifely duty of making life sweet for her husband, just as she did when she saw to the excellence of the cooking and the quietness of the servants.

M. de Norpois also plays a key role in fulfilling the narrator's desire to see the actress La Berma. Although the doctor has forbidden him from going to the theater, fearing that the overexcitement would be hazardous to his health, the narrator, under the influence of the praise of the writer Bergotte (in the little book given him by Gilberte), continues to plead for the opportunity: "By day and night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal." And it is de Norpois who sanctions his going to see La Berma perform in two acts from Phèdre.

But the experience is disillusioning, not at all the transport that the narrator has been expecting: "I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma's talent seeming to add anything at all to them.... [S]he blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out." When the applause breaks out, he is momentarily lifted out of his disappointment:

I let the cheap wine of this popular enthusiasm go to my head. Even so, once the curtain had fallen, I was aware of being disappointed that the enjoyment I had longed for had not been greater, but also of wishing that, such as it was, it would continue, and that I was not obliged to leave behind me forever, as I walked out of the auditorium, this life of the theater in which I had just shared for a few hours.

We've seen the narrator disappointed before: in his first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes. But he conquered that disappointment quickly, overcoming the ordinariness of her appearance by dwelling on the cultural and historical significance of the family she represents. Now he hopes that de Norpois will illuminate him on the excellence of La Berma. But he receives only platitudes and received opinions from the Marquis:

"I have never seen Mme. Berma in Phèdre, but I have been told she is outstanding. It must, of course, have been quite a thrill for you.

M. de Norpois, being incomparably cleverer than I was, must be in possession of the truth that I had been unable to derive from La Berma's acting.... Concentrating my whole attention on my impressions, which were hopelessly confused, with no thought of shining or finding favor, but in the hope of gaining from him the truth I sought, I made no effort to substitute set phrases for the words that failed me, I made no sense, and eventually, so as to have him say straight out what was so admirable about La Berma, I owned up to my disappointment.

"What's that?" exclaimed my father, appalled at the poor impression my ineptness might make on M. de Norpois. "How can you say you didn't enjoy it? Your grandmother told us you didn'[t miss a word, that you just stared and stared at her, that nobody else in the whole auditorium lapped it up the way you did!"

"Well, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, to see what was so great about her. I mean, she's very good..."

"Well, then, if she's very good, what more do you want?"

And after de Norpois delivers himself of some more inanities about the reputation of La Berma, the narrator finally concludes, "He's right, you know! ... What a lovely voice, what simple costumes! How clever of her to think of doing Phèdre! Of course I'm not disappointed!"

On the one hand we have here an amusing but fairly commonplace bit of satire on bourgeois received opinions and their potentially deleterious effect on the bright and inquisitive mind of an original and aspiring artist. But what makes this more than just a comic moment is the way the experience of disillusionment works on the narrator. Just a few pages earlier, his father has touted de Norpois as an authority on becoming a published writer. We have learned that the narrator inherited Aunt Léonie's estate, so he has the wherewithal to make his way in whatever career he chooses. So his father urges him to show de Norpois something he has written. What he produces is the piece about the three steeples that he wrote on their ride back from a walk on the Guermantes way. "I had written it in a state of exhilaration which I felt it must convey to anyone who read it. But my exhilaration must have failed to touch M. de Norpois; and he handed it back to me without a word."

What we have here is failure to communicate.
 

Day Thirteen: Swann's Way, pp. 158-169

From "My walks that autumn ..." to "... form assumed by cruelty." 

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This section sent me back to Wordsworth, to "The Prelude" and the "Intimations of Immortality" ode, those poems that trace the process from boyish exhilaration to the disillusionment of maturity in which

nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

On his solitary walks in the autumn of his aunt's death the narrator begins to discover the disjunction between himself and the world, to be "struck for the first time by this discord between our impressions and their habitual expression."

And seeing on the water and on the face of the wall a pale smile answering the smile of the sky, I cried out to myself in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn." But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at those opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.

But from the grumpy way with which his enthusiasm is received by a passerby, he "learned that the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men."

And mostly what he discovers in himself is the limits of his adolescent erotic longings, which merge with the landscape.

For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they would have appeared to a grown man. And I made no distinction between earth and people. I desired a peasant girl from Méségliese or Rossainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méségliese and Balbec.

The narrator assumes an availability of women from the "lower" classes, keeping his imagination distant from women of his own class. And he "has not yet abstracted [sexual] pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, [or] reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." Even in the sly passage in which he masturbates "at the top of our house in Combray in the little room smelling of orris root," he's at one with nature "until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail added itself to the leaves of the wild black currant that leaned in toward me."

And then adolescent eroticism gives way to detachment, disillusionment, depression:

I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance and was no more than a conventional framework for my life, as is, for the fiction of a novel, the railway carriage on the seat of which a traveler reads it in order to kill time.

This is followed by the scene, which takes place a few years later, in which the narrator spies on Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as they mock the portrait of the late M. Vinteuil. It is a moment "that remained obscure to me at the time" but will eventually form in him the idea of sadism. Throughout the scene, the narrator's sympathetic understanding remains with Mlle. Vinteuil, in whom he "recognized her father's obsequious and reticent gestures, his sudden qualms.... And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a touch and swaggering brawler."

Proust is, I think, rather self-conscious in his somewhat overheated treatment of this incident: He tries to downplay its melodramatic theatricality by drawing attention to it.

It was true that in Mlle. Vinteuil's habits, the appearance of evil was so complete that it would have been hard to find it so perfectly represented in anyone other than a sadist; it is behind the footlights of a popular theater rather than in the lamplight of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging her friend to spit on the portrait of a father who lived only for her; and almost nothing else but sadism provides a basis in real life for the aesthetics of melodrama.

But the narrator discerns in Mlle. Vinteuil something of the prudishness of her father. "It was not evil which gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed agreeable to her; it was pleasure that seemed to her malign." And he ends by (somewhat heavy-handedly, I think) drawing a moral from the incident:

Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, and to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty.

Day Twelve: Swann's Way, pp. 146-158

From "'Léonie,' said my grandfather ..." to "... one of life's vulgar scenes."

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After the encounter with Gilberte, there are no more visits to Tansonville, but the family's walks continue. Along them, they sometimes encounter Mlle. Vinteuil -- Montjouvain, Vinteuil's home, lies along their route -- "driving a cabriolet at top speed." And then one year, "she was always accompanied by an older friend, a woman who had a bad reputation in the area and who one day moved permanently into Montjouvain." As the local gossips put it, Vinteuil "can be sure she's not dabbling in music when she's with his daughter."

Though "prudish," as the narrator has called him, Vinteuil is "incapable of any effort whose direct goal was not his daughter's happiness." The narrator comments that

it is remarkable how a person always inspires admiration for her moral qualities in the family of the person with whom she is having carnal relations. Physical love, so unfairly disparaged, compels people to manifest the very smallest particles they possess of goodness, of self-abnegation, so much that these particles glow even in the eyes of those immediately surrounding them.

Nevertheless, Vinteuil "saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and because of this his manner had recently acquired that humility, that respect for those who were above him and whom he saw from below (even if they had been well below him until then)." When Vinteuil encounters Swann, whose "inappropriate marriage" has also put him in disgrace in the eyes of Combray, Swann invites him to "send his daughter to play at Tansonville." The invitation was one "which two years before would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with such feelings of gratitude that he believed he was obliged by them not to have the indiscretion of accepting it."

We jump ahead to

the autumn in which we had to come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate, because she had at last died, proving correct both those who had claimed that her enfeebling regimen would end by killing her, and those who had always maintained that she suffered from an illness that was not imaginary but organic, to the evidence of which the skeptics would certainly be obliged to yield when she succumbed to it.

Françoise's grief is "savage," and "some demon" leads the narrator to tease her with his lack of sentiment over his aunt's death. She is especially provoked because the plaid wrap that the narrator puts on for his solitary walks in the direction of Tansonville, where he still hopes for a glimpse of Gilberte, is so out of keeping with the mourning for his aunt that she feels has been sadly deficient.

Day Ten: Swann's Way, pp. 118-129

From "If Saturday, which began ..." to "... often leave us with some doubts."

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Thus far, Aunt Léonie and Françoise have been rather narrowly defined comic figures, so set in their routines as to be almost mechanical. But now Proust delves into their psychology, adding perverse and contradictory qualities to their characters. For Proust, as for Austen, George Eliot, Flaubert, Faulkner and any number of other novelists, provincial life, with its limited and circumscribed relationships, provides a laboratory for character analysis and moral commentary.

Léonie's utter self-absorption leads to the narrator's conclusion that "she would have taken pleasure in mourning us," that if the rest of the family were wiped out in one fell swoop, it would have allowed "her to savor all her tenderness for us in an extended grief and to be the cause of stupefaction in the village as she led the funeral procession, courageous and stricken, dying on her feet." He asserts that "she would from time to time resort to introducing into her life, to make it more interesting, imaginary incidents which she would follow with passion," Françoise being a prime player in these fantasies, which Léonie would act out over the board on which she played solitaire, speaking the roles aloud.

"Sometimes, even this 'theater in bed' was not enough for my aunt, she wanted to have her plays performed." So she would set Françoise and Eulalie against one another to watch the consequences. She demonstrates the paranoia of the idle imagination, or as the narrator calls her, "an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness."

Françoise, the dutiful servant, is similarly perverse. She "would for her daughter, for her nephews, have given her life without a murmur, [but] was singularly hard-hearted toward other people." So when the kitchen maid who has given birth is seized by postpartum pains, Françoise is sent for the medical book to find a treatment and is discovered weeping over the "hypothetical" patient in the book, but she treats the maid herself with harshness and indifference. And she drives away another kitchen maid who is allergic to asparagus by repeatedly forcing the girl to clean them.

This section ends with the family's puzzlement over the behavior of M. Legrandin, who had "barely responded" to the father's greeting him after church, "walking by the side of a lady from a neighboring château whom we knew only by sight." Then the next evening, Legrandin greets them in a friendly manner, paying especial attention to the narrator. But several Sundays later, they have an encounter with Legrandin similar to the one that puzzled them earlier, in which he is walking with the same lady, and exhibits "a love-smitten eye in a face of ice," as he pretends not to see them. Despite the family's doubts, they allow the narrator to accept an invitation to dinner that Legrandin has extended to him, and him alone, the day before.

Day Nine: Swann's Way, pp. 102-117

From "While I read in the garden ..." to "... all the way to my bed like a little child." 

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We focus again on Aunt Léonie and Françoise, as they await the arrival of Eulalie with news about the church service. Rain begins to fall, and Françoise reports that Mme. Amédée, the narrator's grandmother (who has previously been identified as "Bathilde"), has gone out for a walk.

"That doesn't surprise me at all," said my aunt, lifting her eyes to the heavens. "I've always said that her way of thinking is different from everyone else's...."

"Mme. Amédée is always as different as she can be from everyone else," said Françoise gently, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants from saying that she believed my grandmother was a little "touched."

Finally, Eulalie arrives, but her visit coincides with that of the garrulous curé -- "an excellent man," the narrator observes, "with whom I am sorry I did not have more conversations, for if he understood nothing about the arts, he did know many etymologies." His visit tires out Aunt Léonie, who sends Eulalie away without learning the "important" information whether "Mme. Goupil arrived at Mass before the elevation."

Françoise, who detests Eulalie, is unhappy that Aunt Léonie always gives Eulalie money.

She would not, however, have seen any great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, so long as it went to rich people. Perhaps she thought that they, having no need of gifts from my aunt, could not be suspected of showing fondness for her because of them.

And so the routine goes on, interrupted only by the kitchen maid's suddenly going into labor, an event that deprives Aunt Léonie of Françoise's ministrations while she is sent to fetch a midwife. The narrator, sent to check on his aunt, looks in to find her awaking with a look of terror on her face. He lingers to hear her murmur, "I've gone and dreamed that my poor Octave had come back to life and was trying to make me go for a walk every day!" There are even subroutines within the routine, as when lunch is served early on Saturdays because Françoise goes to the market in the afternoon. Any stranger who is ignorant of this change in routine, or even any family member who forgets it, is subject to ridicule.

The surprise of a barbarian (this was what we called anyone who did not know what was special about Saturday) who, arriving at eleven o'clock to talk to my father, found us at table, was one of the things in her life which most amused Françoise.

We also meet the "extremely prudish" M. Vinteuil and his "tomboyish" daughter, and we go on a Sunday walk with the narrator and his parents, following a circuitous route familiar only to the father until they reach home.

And from that moment on, I would not have to take another step, the ground would walk for me through that garden where for so long now my actions had ceased to be accompanied by any deliberate attention: Habit had taken me in its arms, and it carried me all the way to my bed like a little child.

Day Six: Swann's Way, pp. 60-73

From "While my aunt was conferring ..." to "... the very nose of the composer."

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Sundays in Combray, starting with the narrator and his parents going to Mass, and with Proust's rhapsodic description of Saint-Hilaire. The passages describing the church are not only a tour de force, but they also serve a thematic purpose. The church becomes "an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions -- the fourth being Time -- extending over the centuries its nave which, from bay to bay, from chapel to chapel, seemed to vanquish and penetrate not only a few yards but epoch after epoch from which it emerged victorious." Saint-Hilaire is time recaptured itself, so that later, glimpsing "some hospital belfry, some convent steeple" in Paris reminiscent of the church in Combray, the narrator will "remain there in front of the steeple for hours, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep in myself lands recovered from oblivion draining and rebuilding themselves."

The narrator's grandmother, she who found the gardener's paths "too symmetrically aligned," has her own take on the church:

Without really knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, of pretension, of meanness, which made her love and believe rich in beneficent influence not only nature, when the hand of man had not, as had my great-aunt's gardener, shrunk and reduced it, but also works of genius.... I believe above all that, confusedly, my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what for her had the highest value in the world, an air of naturalness and an air of distinction.

In these pages we also meet M. Legrandin, the engineer-poet who spends his weekend in Combray, and whom the narrator's family regards as "the epitome of the superior man, approaching life in the noblest and most delicate way." The grandmother has reservations, of course. She

reproached him only for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not having the same naturalness in his language as in his loosely knotted lavalier bow ties, in his short, straight, almost schoolboy coat. She was also surprised by the fiery tirades he often launched against the aristocracy, ... going so far as to reproach the Revolution for not having had them all guillotined.

And we learn a little more about Aunt Léonie, who has banished all visitors but Eulalie, a former servant to Mme. de la Bretonnerie. Eulalie has the tact to avoid falling into either of the categories of people Léonie detests.

One group, the worst, whom she had got rid of first, were the ones who advised her not to "coddle" herself.... The other category was made up of the people who seemed to believe she was more seriously ill than she thought, that she was as seriously ill as she said she was.... In short, my aunt required that her visitors at the same time commen her on her regimen, commiserate with her for her sufferings, and encourage her as to her future.

Day Five: Swann's Way, pp. 49-60

From "Combray, from a distance ..." to "'Go and look after your lunch.'" 

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We begin our post-madeleine exploration of Combray, a village not that different from the ones in Austen and Trollope or Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. Or rather we begin in the bedroom of Aunt Léonie, who gradually retreated there after the death of her husband, Octave, and can be found there "always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession, and piety."

The vehicle that conveys the narrator there is the sense of smell, "the thousand smells given off by the virtues, by wisdom, by habits, a whole secret life, invisible, superabundant, and moral, which the atmosphere holds in suspension." Proust is careful to undercut the sentimentality evoked by these "linen smells, morning smells, pious smells" by characterizing them as "happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a prosiness that serves as a great reservoir of poetry for one who passes through it without having lived in it." It's a nice life, but you wouldn't necessarily want to live it, as Proust, himself a famous semi-recluse, is aware.

Aunt Léonie, the daughter of the narrator's imperious great-aunt, who was his grandfather's cousin, "always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly." But she talks constantly "because she believed it was beneficial to her throat," and "she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance." She could be dismissed as a stock figure, the malade imaginaire, except that Proust devotes so much nuance to her portrayal. As he does with Léonie's dutiful servant Françoise, who

was one of those servants who, in a household, are at the same time those most immediately displeasing to a stranger, perhaps because they do not bother to win him over and are not attentive to him, knowing very well they have no need of him, that one would stop seeing him rather than dismiss them; and who are, on the other hand, those most valued by masters who have tested their real capacities, and do not care about the superficial charm, the servile chatter that makes a favorable impression on a visitor but that often cloaks an ineducable incompetence.

It is, I think, because Proust tells us so much about these relatively minor characters, analyzes them so individually, that we come to take them as real -- or rather as a remembered reality. Otherwise, they could be just dismissed as "comic relief" for their bits of idiosyncratic provincialisms, such as the conviction that "in Combray, a person 'whom one does not know at all' was a creature as scarcely believable as a mythological god."

One knew everybody so well, in Combray, both animals and people, that if my aunt had chanced to see a dog pass by 'whom she did not know at all,' she would not stop thinking about it and devoting to this incomprehensible fact all her talents for induction and her hours of leisure.

Day Four: Swann's Way, pp. 37-48

From "Mama spent that night in my room" to "... from my cup of tea." 

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And so we come to the scene everyone knows (or knows about), the "Proustian moment," the epiphany in a teaspoon. I admit that from my previous forays into Proust, I had thought it came at the very beginning of the novel, not 40-some pages in. (Although in a novel the size of In Search of Lost Time, 40-some pages in does rather qualify as "the very beginning.")

The narrator's account of the scenes of his childhood rising before him, awakened by the taste of crumbs from a madeleine steeped in tea, comes after his account of the rare, privileged night his mother spent in his room, reading to him from books that were supposed to be a gift from his grandmother. It is "a sort of puberty of grief, of emancipation from tears," "the beginning of a new era" that "would remain as a sad date."

It also reinforces the grandmother's role in forming the narrator's character as an aesthete, a man of discerning tastes. She "could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive a intellectual profit." And even when forced to select a gift that was utilitarian, preferred to give antique things in which "long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness."

We could no longer keep count, at home, when my great-aunt wnted to draw up an indictment against my grandmother, of the armchairs she had presented to young couples engaged to be married or old married couples which, at the first attempt to make use of them, had immediately collapsed under the weight of one of the recipients.

Of course, the narrator comes to rebel against the imbuing of art with "that moral distinction which Mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books."

But for years afterward, his childhood in Combray remained limited to what it has been in the first 40-some pages of the novel: "the theater and drama of my bedtime" -- "as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there." The rest of it comes to life when he pursues something ineffable awakened by the taste of the madeleine in tea. At first, he doesn't know what he has glimpsed: "Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me." Note here that he ascribes the volition to the memory, that he must meet the memory -- "struggling too far away" -- halfway.

Ten times I must begin again, lean down toward it. And each time, the laziness that deters us from every difficult task, every work of importance, has counseled me to leave it, to drink my tea and think only about my worries of today, my desires for tomorrow, upon which I may ruminate effortlessly.

For Proust this is, I think, the distinction between the artist and the layman, the willingness to struggle against the "laziness" that traps most of us in the quotidian.

And then he meets the memory, of aunt Léonie giving him a taste of madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea. It's the fortuitous combination of tea and madeleine that does it -- the intimate power of taste that proves more effective than sight alone in raising the past. He had seen madeleines in shops without awakening any distinct sensations. He even finds a way of moralizing the image of the little shell-shaped cake, "so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating."

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

And so rooms, roads, people and the town join themselves in his imagination. The stage is set.