Day Ninety-Five: The Guermantes Way, pp. 379-390

Book II, Chapter II, from "There was nothing delightful about the days..." to "...Morocco or on his way back by sea."

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From the moment the narrator began obsessing about Mme. de Stermaria it was pretty clear that disillusionment lay ahead. We've seen him in the throes of overactive imagination often enough before, and this time he takes it to ludicrous heights. 

He begins today itching for the coming assignation with her, and with his usual fantasy of possession: "What I needed was to possess Mme de Stermaria ... on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I had asked her to dine with me." Of course, it has to be in this particular setting. He associates the Bois with Odette, although Proust doesn't make the association explicit, and the Île des Cygnes "seemed to be the perfect setting for pleasure." In fact, it is an odd setting at best, given that it is autumn, cold and foggy and windy. Proust emphasizes the antithetical nature of the setting, having the narrator observe "a first red leaf already blooming like a last rose," the rain falling "noiselessly on the ancient water, which, in its divine infancy, still still changes constantly with the conditions of the moment, and continually forgets the reflections of clouds and flowers," and the geraniums which, "by intensifying their brilliant color, have put up a vain struggle against the gathering twilight." And he emphasizes the kinkiness in the narrator's lust for her: "by walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water's edge, I should be behaving in the same way as other men who, unable actually to penetrate a convent, do at least, before possessing a woman, dress her up like a nun." 

And if that weren't enough, when Albertine stops by to visit, he asks her to go with him to the restaurant on the island to help select the menu. She "seemed to hesitate." Well, duh. But for whatever reason, Albertine agrees to do so. He considers making an "assignation" with Albertine "very late the same evening" as his date with Mme. de Stermaria in case it doesn't work out, "in order to forget during an hour of purely sensual indulgence ... the emotions and possible disappointments of this incipient love for Mme de Stermaria." But he assures himself that "Saint-Loup's letter was sufficient assurance ... that ... Mme de Stermaria would give herself on the very first evening, so I should have no need to summon Albertine to the house as a last resort." 

The narrator has often behaved foolishly, but he seems particularly blind this time: 

When I found myself alone again at home, reminding myself that I had spent the afternoon on an excursion with Albertine, that I was dining in two days with Mme de Guermantes, and that I needed to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, it occurred to me that our social life, like an artist's studio, is filled with abandoned sketches depicting our momentary attempts to capture our need for a great love, but what did not occur to me was that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, we may return to it and transform it into a completely different work, possibly more important than the one we had originally planned.

In fact, his infatuation with Mme. de Stermaria is already waning: He realizes that what he really wants to do is "seek out some of the women I had seen in Rivebelle." Still, when she breaks their date, it's a blow. 

What added to my despair at not seeing Mme de Stermaria was that her answer led me to believe that, while I, hour after hour since Sunday, had been living for this dinner alone, she had probably never given it a second thought. I learned later on that she had married, an absurd love match with a young man she must already have been seeing at this time, who had probably made her forget my invitation. 

And the pain of the memory lingers: "I did not see her again. It was not she that I loved, but it could well have been." The saddest words of tongue or pen.                               

Day Thirty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 107-119

From "Though I did not understand..." to "...'you'll get an invitation.'" 

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Swann, we learn, will apparently always associate Vinteuil's sonata with the Bois de Boulogne, and "the charm of certain nights" there, "about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette." Indeed, we have already seen Odette in her element in the Bois. She proposes that the narrator join them on an outing to the Zoo in the Bois, which also reminds her of Mme. Blatin, giving her occasion to make fun of the narrator's misapprehension that that the Swanns were friends of hers. "Even nice Dr. Cottard, who wouldn't speak evil of a soul, says the woman's a pest." And she tells the story of Mme. Blatin calling a "Singhalese" man a "blackie," to which the man retorted, "'Me blackie,' he bellowed at Mme Blatin, 'you camel!'" For the reader, however, Mme. Blatin remains an odd enigma.

While Gilberte is readying herself for their outing, the Swanns enjoyed "telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter," whose "thoughtful kindness" and "desire to please" he had already observed. He also notes that, "Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents," and that when he mentioned Mlle. Vinteuil to her, Gilberte replies, "She's a person I'll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn't nice to her father -- I've heard she made him unhappy."

His infatuation with the Swanns and their household continues, and he observes,

For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter-hour after I first stepped into her drawing room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her that had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility which has been abolished by the fulfillment of a different possibility.

In the Bois, the Swanns encounter the Princesse Mathilde, whom Swann identifies to the narrator as "the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her." While they are chatting with the Princesse, listening to her say that Hippolyte Taine "behaved like a pig" and that Alfred de Musset once arrived an hour late and "dead drunk" when she invited him to dinner, the narrator's friend Bloch makes an appearance. But Mme. Swann is under the impression that Bloch, who has "been introduced to her by Mme. Bontemps" is "on the minister's staff, which was news to me ... and that his name was M. Moreul."

Day Thirty: Swann's Way, pp. 423-444

From "He responded politely to..." to "...as fleeting, alas, as the years." 

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The narrator develops an obsession with Gilberte's parents. He knows that Swann has "quarreled" with his family and that they don't accept Mme. Swann into their circle of friends, but this hardly matters to him: "for me Swann was preeminently her father, and no longer Swann of Combray." But now he must prepare for a separation from Gilberte, who prattles on about the various things that will be occupying her in the coming days, including the fact that they may be leaving Paris for the holidays. He is devastated by the way "in which Gilberte had exploded with joy at the prospect of not coming back to the Champs-Élysées for such a long time."

Like Swann suffering Odette's absence, he relishes his sorrow, clinging to the gifts she has given him: a book by Bergotte and an agate marble. He wallows in "the perpetual concern I felt to show myself to advantage in her eyes, because of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue ostrich feather" like Gilberte's governess. And although he realizes "that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved," he is determined to "ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one."

His parents, by not indulging his infatuation with the Swanns -- he pulls at his nose and rubs his eyes in an effort to make himself look like Swann, causing his father to say, "The child has no sense, he'll make himself quite hideous" -- are a source of constant frustration, and sometimes of disillusionment, as when his mother identifies the old lady who is always in the park as Mme. Blatin, and as "horrible," "rather mad," "frightfully vulgar, and a troublemaker into the bargain." On the other hand, when his mother reports that she ran into Swann at the umbrella counter in Trois Quartiers and that he mentioned that the narrator played with his daughter, he is stunned "with the prodigious fact that I existed in Swann's mind."

Of the household, only Françoise is a source of any consolation, as when she reports what the governess has told her about Mme. Swann, that "she puts a good deal of trust in her medals. You won't find her going off on a trip if she's heard an owl hooting, or something ticking like a clock inside the wall, or if she's seen a cat at midnight, or if the wood furnniture creaks. Oh, yes! She's a person of great faith!" And so he's able to persuade Françoise to take him on walks in the Swanns' neighborhood and in the Bois de Boulogne.

It's in the Bois that he sees Mme. Swann in her element, among the "famous Beauties" who rode and strolled there. And here the narrator begins his shift from the boy's point of view to his current one, reconstructing the conversations that might have been had by on-lookers, which the boy simply perceived as "the indistinct murmur of celebrity":

"Do you know who that is? Mme. Swann! That means nothing to you? Odette de Crécy?"

"Odette de Crécy? Why in fact I was just wondering. ... Those sad eyes. ... But you know she can't be as young as she once was! I remember I slept with her the day MacMahon resigned."

"You'd better not remind her of it. She's now Mme. Swann, wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club who's a friend of the Prince of Wales. But she's still superb."

"Yes, but if only you'd known her then -- how pretty she was. She lived in a very strange little house filled with Chinese bric-a-brac. I remember we were bothered by the newsboys shouting outside, in the end she made me get up."

And so the identity of Mme. Swann, which the reader has probably already surmised, is confirmed, along with the knowledge that Gilberte is the daughter of a "woman whose reputation for beauty, improper behavior, and elegance was universal." (The narrator has already hinted that, "as will be seen," his parents "did not like my playing with her.")

In the final section of the novel, the narrator shifts into his present-day voice, an extended and nostalgic reverie on the beauty -- and the Beauties -- of the Bois de Boulogne: "My consolation is to think about the women I once knew, now that there is no more elegance." The motorcar has replaced the carriages, and the women who stroll there are "ordinary women, in whose elegance I had no faith and whose dress seemed to me unimportant.... Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women had vanished."

And so the novel concludes with a kind of realization about the search for lost time:

what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.... The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions whch formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

Day Twenty-Seven: Swann's Way, pp. 369-396

From "One day he received an anonymous letter..." to "'...a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!'"

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A poison-pen letter arrives, accusing Odette of numerous affairs, including some with women, and even frequenting "houses of ill-repute." But Swann is not outraged so much by the accusation as he is by the anonymity of the letter-writer, and begins to compile a list of suspects, starting with M. de Charlus, M. des Laumes, and M. d'Orsan, and eventually including his coachman Rémi, the writer Bergotte, the Verdurins and their friend the painter, and even the narrator's grandfather. But he remains unconvinced that any of these is guilty.

He is initially less concerned by the charges included in the letter because "Swann, like many people, had a lazy mind and lacked the faculty of invention." That is, he tended to assume that people were the same in moments when he wasn't in their company as they were when he was. But the allegations gradually nag at him, especially the ones "that she went to procuresses, took part in orgies with other women, that she led the dissolute life of the most abject of creatures." His suspicions, reinforced by some suddenly surfacing memories of things she had done or said, eventually lead him to question Odette, though he tries to find ways at first of introducing the subject casually or obliquely.

"Odette," he said to her, "my dear, I know I'm being hateful, but there are a few things I must ask you. Do you remember the idea I had about you and Mme. Verdurin? Tell me, was it true, with her or with anyone else?"

She shook her head while pursing her lips.... When he saw Odette make this sign to him that it was untrue, Swann understood that it was perhaps true.

And he tries to make her swear on her medal of Our Lady of Laghet that she has never been sexually involved with other women, because he knows she's pious enough not to bear false witness on the medal. Hesitating, she finally blurts out that she may have done so "a very long time ago, without realizing what I was doing, maybe two or three times." And under Swann's scrutiny, she recalls an incident in the Bois de Boulogne involving a woman she says she rejected.

Swann is startled by his own homophobia: "He marveled that acts which he had always judged so lightly, so cheerfully, had now become as serious as a disease from which one may die." And in the days that followed, he finds more fuel for his disillusionment with Odette. When he asks her "if she had ever had any dealings with a procuress," she replies, "'Oh, no! Not that they don't pester me,'... revealing by her smile a self-satisfied vanity which she no longer noticed could not seem justified to Swann." She also admits that she had lied to him once, not admitting that she had been to Forcheville's because he "asked me to come and look at his engravings." (I almost wrote "etchings.") But Swann doesn't break things off with Odette, and her presence "continued to sow Swann's heart with affection and suspicion by turns." Though they continue to "make cattleya," Swann visits brothels, thinking he may find her name mentioned there.

They are also separated by Odette's frequent voyages with the Verdurins. "Each time she had been gone for a little while, Swann felt he was beginning to separate from her, but as if this mental distance were proportional to the physical distance, as soon as he knew Odette was back he could not rest without seeing her." But Swann discovers that, "corresponding to the weakening of his love there was a simultaneous weakening of his desire to remain in love." And after a dream, a nightmare in which he symbolically yields Odette to Forcheville, he decides to leave Paris for Combray, "having learned that Mme. de Cambremer -- Mlle. Legrandin -- was spending a few days there."

He now decides that he's cured.

And with the intermittent coarseness that reappeared in him as soon as he was no longer unhappy and the level of his morality dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: "To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!"