Day Seventy-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 137-148

From "The weather had become milder...." to "...joined the banks of the Vivonne." 

_____

The narrator begins to go out for his daily walks again, inevitably crossing paths with Mme. de Guermantes, whose faint smile of greeting he sometimes perversely ignores. When Saint-Loup comes to Paris for a brief visit of a few hours, he surprises the narrator, "'Oriane's not at all nice,' he told me, without realizing he was going back on his previous words. 'She's not the Oriane she was, they've gone and changed her. It's not worth your bothering with her, I promise you.'" Aside from the fact that the narrator has previously tried to conceal from Saint-Loup his romantic interest in the Duchesse, this is a little odd because there's no mention of the promise to write to her about letting him see her paintings by Elstir. Instead, Saint-Loup offers to introduce him to his cousin who is married to the Duc de Poictiers, saying that she's younger and more intelligent than the Duchesse. There's some indication that Saint-Loup and Mme. de Guermantes may have had a falling-out over the Dreyfus case, because he indicates to the narrator that Mme. de Poictiers, though not a Dreyfusard, has shown signs of open-mindedness about the case.

Then we learn from the narrator's father that M. de Norpois is a friend of Mme. de Villeparisis and has suggested that the narrator "would be able to meet interesting people at her gatherings." Norpois also told him that Mme. de Villeparisis "keeps a Bureau of Wit," without elaborating on what that might mean. "As for myself," the narrator says, "lacking any very clear picture of this Bureau of Wit, it would not have come as any great surprise to find the old lady from Balbec installed behind a bureau, as in fact I eventually did." 

That the Dreyfus case has divided society is demonstrated to the narrator's father when Mme. Sazerat, a Dreyfusard, meets his greeting with "the sort of acknowledgment that is dictated by politeness toward someone who has done something disgraceful" and when she smiles at the narrator's mother "with vague melancholy, as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man." 

Meanwhile, Saint-Loup returns to Paris to see his mistress and invites the narrator to join him. On his way to Saint-Loup's for the trip to the mistress's home on the outskirts of the city, the narrator runs into Legrandin, whom he has not seen since the days when the family used to visit Combray regularly. Legrandin remarks with his usual candor on the narrator's fashionable dress, and says, "Your ability to stay for a single moment in the nauseating atmosphere of the salons -- it would suffocate me -- is its own condemnation, its own damnation of your future in the eyes of the Prophet.... Ah, those aristocrats! The Terror has a lot to answer for; it should have guillotined every one of them." He offers to send him his latest novel: "You will not care for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not fin-de-siècle enough for you; it is too frank, too honest. What you need is Bergotte -- you've admitted it -- gamy fare for the jaded palates of refined voluptuaries." 

Nevertheless, the narrator parts from Legrandin "without any particular ill-feeling for him."

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."

_____

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: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 138-150

From "Gilberte, who had already been asked..." to "...expected to take in to lunch."

_____

Gilberte, we learn, is "golden-skinned" with "fairish hair," unlike Odette, who is "dark." She "resembled a portrait of her mother, verging on a good likeness, but done by a fanciful colorist who had made her pose in semi-disguise." Sometimes, she has "the frankness of her father's fine, open gaze on the world." But "if you inquired about what she had been doing, those same eyes filled with the devious, forlorn embarrassment that used to cloud Odette's as, in answer to a question from Swann about where she had been, she told one of those lies which had once reduced her lover to despair, but which now made her husband, a prudently uninquiring man, quickly change the subject."

Swann was one of those men whose lives have been spent in the illusions of love, who, having afforded comforts and, through them, greater happiness to many women, have not been repaid by gratitude or tenderness toward themselves; but in their child they believe they can sense an affection which, by being materialized in the name they bear, will outlive them.

The dinner with Bergotte goes well: Swann compliments the narrator for raising the tone of the conversation, which the narrator takes to mean that their usual entertainment of Bergotte is more casual. It makes him realize that he had not been at all shy about sharing his opinions and feelings freely with the writer, and that "both my great attraction to the works of Bergotte and the unaccountable disappointment I had experienced at the theater were sincere, spontaneous reactions of my own mind," and that Bergotte "was very likely not so utterly alien and hostile to my disappointment, or to my inability to articulate it."

Just as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works.

When they share a carriage home after the dinner, Bergotte says he's sorry to hear from the Swanns that the narrator is "not in the best of health.... Although I must say I am not too sorry for you, as I can see you must enjoy the pleasures of the intellectual life." This strikes the narrator as at odds with de Norpois's attitude toward his intellectual and artistic pursuits:

M. de Norpois's words had made me see my moments of idle reflection, enthusiasm, and self-confidence as being purely subjective, devoid of reality. Yet Bergotte, who seemed quite familiar with the situation I found myself in, seemed to be implying that the symptoms to ignore were actually my self-disgust and doubts about my abilities.

Moreover, Bergotte has a radically different view of Dr. Cottard as physician from de Norpois's. Bergotte has met Cottard at the Swanns' and recognized him as "a prize idiot!"

"Cottard will bore you, and boredom alone will prevent his treatment from working. ... With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence. The thing they can't do without is a doctor who's aware of that form of illness. How on earth could Cottard cure you?"

The narrator remains skeptical of this advice, however.

Bergotte also suggests that Swann is in need of a good doctor because "here is a man who married a trollop, who accepts being snubbed every day of the week by women who choose not to know his wife, or looked down on by men who have slept with her."

The narrator decides that one reason Swann has introduced him to Bergotte was to impress his parents, who are among those who have been unwilling to receive Odette. But when he mentions to his parents that the Swanns introduced him to Bergotte, his father is scornful -- the more so when the narrator tells him that Bergotte "had nothing good to say about M. de Norpois." His father says that opinion shows "what a nasty and bogus mind" Bergotte has. Fortunately, the narrator is able to mention that Odette reported to him that Bergotte "thought I was highly intelligent." This of course delights his parents, even causing his father to admit that de Norpois is "not always full of goodwill."

Day Thirty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 71-82

From "When my attacks of breathlessness went on..." to "...improved my standing with the Swanns."

_____

Concerned by his "attacks of breathlessness," the narrator's parents call in Dr. Cottard, who prescribes "Drastic, violent purgatives. Milk and nothing but milk for several days. No meat. No alcohol." Quite sensibly, they reject this seemingly absurd treatment, but when the narrator keeps getting worse, they give in and follow Cottard's advice. It's sheer quackery of course, but it works, perhaps psychologically. "So it was that we realized that Cottard the buffoon was a great doctor."

When he gets better, however, they are convinced that the air of the Champs-Élysées is "unhealthy," endangering his meetings with Gilberte. But to his surprise, even disbelief, Gilberte invites him to tea at her house.

In love, it is not only the causes of catastrophe that may lie forever beyond our grasp: just as often we remain in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of sudden outcomes that are happier -- such as the one that Gilberte's letter brought to me -- or, rather, outcomes which appear to be happy, as there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling, which can generally look for no better reard than a shift in the side of the pain it entails.

The invitation is an accident: The narrator's friend Bloch is present one time when Cottard is making a call and comments that Mme. Swann is very fond of the narrator -- which is, as far as either of them knows -- untrue. But Cottard, always on the lookout to ingratiate himself, apparently speaks favorably of him to Odette, and the narrator becomes a regular visitor, welcomed cordially by the Swanns -- who have apparently forgotten their previous animus toward him (if it ever existed).

Such is the narrator's adulation of the Swanns that, when he reports to his parents that the staircase in the Swanns' home is a Renaissance antique and his father replies that it's a copy in a commonplace building where he once considered renting an apartment, the narrator clings to his faith: "I exercised the authority of my inner self and, despite what I had just heard, put behind me once and for all, as a true Catholic might shun Renan's Life of Jesus, the corrosive notion that the Swanns' apartment was a perfectly ordinary apartment, an apartment that we ourselves might have lived in."

And so the narrator is swept up in his adulation of the Swanns and his passion for Gilberte.

Day Thirty-Four: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 59-71

From "When New Year's Day came around..." to "... and I had a good mind to tell her so." 

_____

Having vowed that January 1 would be the start of "a new friendship" with Gilberte, the narrator nevertheless realizes that there's no intrinsic reason why it should become one. "I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year's Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me." He recognizes instead "the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity." In short, he's in the same mood as yesterday, when his father's remark -- "he's probably not going to change" -- cast him in such a funk. "Our desires interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."

Moreover, in Gilberte's absence, he is tormented by the realization that he "could not even remember her face." But then Gilberte returns to the park, and "Each time she came, she left me with new things to desire for the following day." And then Gilberte taunts him with the information that her parents "don't fancy you very much, you know!" He writes Swann a sixteen-page letter assuring him of his sincerity and trustworthiness and asks Gilberte to take it to him. But the result is devastating: Gilberte informs him that her father didn't believe what he had written.

The obvious question here is, since the narrator has given up superimposing his mature voice on that of the young narrator, whether Gilberte is telling the truth. Did she even give her father the letter? Is she tormenting the narrator out of some perverse impulse to power? But Proust has stopped tipping his hand, at least for now.

He and Gilberte are interrupted by Françoise, who wants him to accompany her to the "green-trellised pavilion" that houses the restrooms. While he's there, he recognizes, or perhaps imagines, the attentions of the woman who tends the restroom as having a sexual overtone. When he returns, Gilberte offers to return the letter to him, but, "attracted by her body," he improvises a game in which she will try to keep the letter from him:

I had her pinned between my legs as though she were the bole of a little tree I was trying to climb. In the middle of all my exertions, without my breathing being quickened much more than it already was by a muscular exercise and the heat of the playful moment, like few drops of sweat produced by the effort, I shed my pleasure, before I even had time to be aware of it.

This bit of "pleasure-shedding" turns into a somewhat unsavory version of the madeleine scene: the experience links itself with "the cool, almost sooty air of the little trellised booth," which reminds him of the "dampish redolence" of his uncle Adolphe's room at Combray, the one in which he masturbated, leaving "a natural trail like that left by a snail." He is overcome with a sense of shame because "I had experienced a moment of genuine rapture, not from some idea of importance, but from a musty smell."

As this section ends, he has fallen ill. "Neurotics ... are so used to detecting disorders in themselves, which they later come to realize were quite harmless, that they reach the stage of paying no attention to any of them." And even when he is not really ill, he masters the art of faking it because one of the medicines the doctor prescribes for him is "a drink of beer, champagne, or brandy" whenever he feels an attack coming on.

Day Thirty-Three: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 44-59

From "Fearing that the conversation might turn..." to "...to be at the Café Anglais!"

_____

M. de Norpois continues to hold sway over the narrator and his parents. When the narrator asks about Swann and the Comte de Paris, de Norpois recalls an occasion when the Comte saw Odette:

Now, of course, no one in his entourage saw fit to ask His Highness what he thought of her. ... But when the vagaries of conversation happened subsequently to bring up her name, His Highness appeared not averse to bring up her name, by means of certain signs, you understand, which, though they may verge on the imperceptible, are withal quite unambiguous, that his impression of the lady had been far from, in a word, unfavorable.

The "in a word" is a nice touch. No word in de Norpois' discourse ever goes it alone, always being accompanied by qualifiers and litotic undercuttings. No word, that is, until we get to the question of the narrator's cherished writer Bergotte. De Norpois dismisses the narrator's favorite as "a flute-player," a writer without substance whose "works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework." Worse still, he uses the narrator's enthusiasm for Bergotte to issue a harsh critique of the narrator's own writing -- "that little thing you showed me before dinner, about which, by the way, the less said the better." He dismisses it as, using the narrator's own words (which the narrator intended as a show of modesty), "mere childish scribbling." Returning to Bergotte, de Norpois comments,

"Nowadays, a chap sets off a few verbal fireworks and everyone acclaims him as a genius.... Believe you me, he's the perfect illustration of the idea of that clever fellow who once said that the only acquaintance one should have with writers is through their books."

Here the general reader can be grateful for Grieve's note that the "clever fellow" is Proust himself, in his essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve." (Grieve is not as thorough in annotating this volume, I think, as Davis was in hers, but here he gives us some essential information.)

The narrator is, of course, "devastated": "I became once more acutely aware of my own intellectual poverty and of the fact that I had no gift for writing." Feeling "deflated and dumbfounded," he changes the subject by asking if Gilberte was at the dinner where de Norpois met Odette. De Norpois recalls "A young lady of fourteen or fifteen" -- the first more or less precise indication we've had of the age of Gilberte (and the narrator) at this point in the novel. And so the narrator presses de Norpois to speak about him to Gilberte and Odette, and when de Norpois agrees, "I was suddenly so overcome by tender feelings for this important man, who was going to exercise on my behalf the great prestige he must enjoy in the eyes of Mme Swann, that I had to retrain myself from kissing his soft hands." But his enthusiasm "was so chilling in its effect that ... I caught a glimpse of hesitancy and annoyance flitting across the ambassador's face." He has gone too far with this overinflated egotist.

Still, despite the harshness of de Norpois' criticism of his work, and of his idol Bergotte, the narrator is so awed by the man's reputation that he assumes that his own opinions are worthless. His sense of his own inadequacy is reinforced when his father shows him a newspaper review of La Berma's performance, which accords with de Norpois' conventional opinion of the actress. The narrator learns that the newspaper critic regards the performance he has seen, and been disappointed by, as "a triumph than which, in the whole course of her illustrious career, she has rarely had a greater," that it was "a veritable milestone in the theater," and that "the best-qualified judges are as one" in acclaiming it "as the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art that any of us have been privileged to witness in this day and age." Too naive to recognize the critique for what it is -- vapid and banal -- the narrator is all too ready to convince himself that he agrees with it.

Moreover, he now begins to have serious doubts about his vocation as a writer, which his father has endorsed for the wrong reasons. His father's statement -- "He's not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he's probably not going to change, he's old enough to know what'll make him happy in life" -- depresses him. It implies that "the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed." And more important for the theme of the novel is the implication "that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws." His father's statement "suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness."

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

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

_____

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 Eleven: Swann's Way, pp. 129-146

From "He had in fact asked my parents ..." to "... the Champs-Élysées where she lived in Paris." 

_____

The narrator goes to dinner at M. Legrandin's but finds him no less enigmatic. When the narrator tries to inquire into Legrandin's acquaintance with "the ladies of Guermantes," Legrandin retreats into florid evasions: "Deep down, I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books, scarcely more paintings, and the light of the moon when the breeze of your youth brings me the fragrance of the flower beds that my old eyes can no longer distinguish." He claims that he is still a radical, "a Jacobin in my thinking." But the narrator senses that

another Legrandin whom he kept carefully concealed deep inside himself, whom he did not exhibit because that Legrandin knew some compromising stories about our own, about his snobbishness, had already answered by the wound in his eyes, by the rictus of his mouth, by the excessive gravity in the tone of his answer, by the thousand arrows with which our own Legrandin had been instantly larded, languishing like a Saint Sebastian of snobbishness.

The narrator takes this knowledge of the second Legrandin home with him, and his parents take delight in what they have learned about their friend. "My mother was infinitely amused each time she caught Legrandin in flagrante delicto in the sin that he would not confess, that he continued to call the sin without forgiveness, snobbishness." And the father, who knows that Legrandin's sister, Mme. de Cambremer, lives near Balbec, where the grandmother plans to spend a summer vacation, delights in trying to make Legrandin confess that he knows someone in the area. But he evades the question with extravagant circumlocutions, and they conclude that

M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would have ended by constructing a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that his own sister lived a mile from Balbec and be obliged to offer us a letter of introduction.

This glimpse of the social mores of Combray yields to another when the family goes out on one of its walks and decides to go "Swann's way" rather than "the Guermantes way." The narrator informs us that his parents "had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's marriage," but believing that Swann's wife and daughter were in Paris, they decide to take a shortcut through the park. They're mistaken, however, and the narrator gets his first glimpse of Swann's daughter, Gilberte.

Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough "power of observation," as they say, to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterward, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes -- which struck one so the first time one saw her -- I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.

The setup for this encounter is telling: The narrator has just been admiring a pink hawthorn.

Inserted into the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in a party dress among people in everyday clothes who are staying at home, the shrub was all ready for Mary's month, and seemed to form a part of it already, shining there, smiling in its fresh pink outfit, catholic and delicious.

Only about twenty pages earlier, the narrator has described for us the hawthorns adorning the altar at Saint-Hilaire for the celebration of "Mary's month." Mary is, of course, the emblem of virginity -- like the "young girl in a party dress." But the narrator dwells on the pinkness of the flower, on the buds "which revealed, when they began to open, as though at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, reds of a bloody tinge." The language here is sensual, hinting at pubescence and menstruation. And Gilberte's behavior toward the narrator is hardly virginal:

she allowed her glances to stream out at full length in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but with a concentration and a secret smile that I could only interpret, according to the notions of good breeding instilled in me, as a sign of insulting contempt; and at the same time her hand sketched an indecent gesture for which, when it was directed in public at a person one did not know, the little dictionary of manners I carried inside me supplied only one meaning, that of intentional insolence.

(I'm trying not to venture too far into Proust commentary and criticism at this point, but I couldn't resist Googling "Proust Gilberte 'indecent gesture'," and there's plenty of discussion of this passage.)

And then Gilberte is called away by her mother, who is accompanied by Charlus. And the narrator is left to reflect on the encounter.

I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: "I think you're ugly, I think you're grotesque, I loathe you!" But I went away, carrying with me forever, as the first example of a type of happiness inaccessible to children of my kind because of certain laws of nature impossible to transgress, the image of a little girl with red hair, her skin scattered with pink freckles, holding a spade and smiling as she cast at me long, cunning, and inexpressive glances.

Note that Gilberte's hair, previously described as "blonde" or "reddish-blonde," has here become simply red, and that the pinkness of her freckles is emphasized.

Day Eight: Swann's Way, pp. 90-102

From "Sometimes I would be drawn ..." to "... perhaps be indispensable to a stockbroker."

_____

The narrator is introduced to the works of a writer named Bergotte "by a friend of mine older than I whom I greatly admired, Bloch." Unfortunately, the rather pretentious and affected Bloch is not admired by the rest of the family. The narrator's grandfather is concerned that Bloch is "a Jew, which would not have displeased him in principle -- even his friend Swann was of Jewish extraction -- had he not felt that it was not from among the best that I had chosen him." His barometer-watching father is perturbed by Bloch's indifference to the weather. His grandmother suspects Bloch of insincerity when he wipes away tears after hearing that she was "a little indisposed." And when he arrives for lunch "an hour and a half late covered with mud," Bloch, instead of apologizing, proclaims that he knows "nothing about the use of those ... pernicious and insipidly bourgeois implements, the watch and the umbrella." But the final straw is Bloch's telling the narrator "that he had heard most positively that my great-aunt had had a wild youth and had been known to be a kept woman." The narrator, incapable of keeping secrets, tells his parents with the result that Bloch is banished. 

But the narrator's obsession with Bergotte continues. He becomes so taken with the writer's observations and opinions "that, when by chance I happened to encounter in one of his books a thought that I had already had myself, my heart would swell as though a god in his goodness had given it back to me, had declared it legitimate and beautiful." So he's overcome when Swann informs him that he knows Bergotte quite well and would even ask him to inscribe the narrator's book. The narrator learns that La Berma is Bergotte's favorite actress and that Swann's daughter is great friends with Bergotte, which puts the narrator "on the point of falling in love with" Mlle. Swann.

Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest. Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face.

In these pages we also learn a little more about Swann's mannerisms, including his adoption of an ironic tone of voice, "as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it," when expressing an opinion.

Until then his horror of ever expressing a serious opinion had seemed to me a thing that must be elegant and Parisian and that was the opposite of the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I also suspected that it was a form of wit in the social circles in which Swann moved, where, reacting against the lyricism of earlier generations, they went to an extreme in rehabilitating those small, precise facts formerly reputed to be vulgar, and proscribed "fine phrases." But now I found something shocking in this attitude of Swann's toward things. It appeared that he dared not have an opinion and was at his ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information.

Day Three: Swann's Way, pp. 23-37

From "But the only one of us for whom ..." to "... in the silence of the evening."

_____

Swann comes to dinner, with the result that the narrator is sent to bed early without a goodnight kiss from his mother. He persuades Françoise, the cook who is tasked with looking after him, to take a letter to his mother asking her to come see him, but his mother declines the request. Unable to sleep, he waits until she comes upstairs, even though he fears that he'll be punished by being sent away to school. To his surprise, his father tolerates his misbehavior, and even suggests that his mother spend the night in the narrator's room.

But first, we see the grandmother's spinster sisters again, and learn their names -- though Proust makes a mistake when he reveals them. One sister addresses the other as Céline, but when she replies, Proust writes, "answered her sister Flora." He has no particular interest in distinguishing Flora from Céline; they are there only for sake of the joke, which in this case involves their making "such a fine art of concealing a personal allusion beneath ingenious circumlocutions that it often went unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed." And so their thanks to Swann for the case of wine he has sent them goes so veiled in indirect references that grandfather is indignant at the end of the evening when he learns that their coy allusions to "good neighbors" were their expressions of gratitude.

We learn one more bit of information about Swann's unhappy marriage, which has been alluded to earlier, when the narrator hears his great-aunt say, "I think he has no end of worries with that wretched wife of his who is living with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all of Combray knows. It's the talk of the town."

But the bulk of these pages deals with the narrator's long evening of waiting for his mother's arrival. They include some of Proust's famous long, curlicue sentences, exploring every nuance of the boy's anxiety but also anticipating some of the obsessiveness that will fill his later life. Proust's psychological insight radiates through these pages, as when he remarks of the "precious and fragile kiss" that on dinner-party evenings he had to "snatch ... brusquely, publicly, without even having the time and the freedom of mind necessary to bring to what I was doing the attention of those individuals controlled by some mania, who do their utmost not to think of anything else while they are shutting a door, so as to be able, when the morbid uncertainty returns to them, to confront it victoriously with the memory of the moment when they did shut the door." That's about as good a description of obsessive-compulsive disorder as you can find.

In the end, the father is kind, Abraham spares Isaac, and we have a happy ending. Or as happy an ending as you're likely to find in a writer like Proust, who can turn any triumph into melancholy:

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. It was a long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: "Go with the boy." The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take time to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

Day Two: Swann's Way, pp. 11-23

From "Certainly I found some charm ..." to "'It would be ridiculous.'" 

_____

We meet Swann, but first we witness some of the family dynamic. The grandmother's love for being outdoors, even in a rainstorm, puts her at odds with the rest of the family, and even with the gardener whose paths are "too symmetrically aligned for her liking" and the maid who finds her muddied skirts "a source of despair and a problem." She is also perturbed by the failure of the narrator's father to "make him strong and active" and "build up his endurance and willpower." The narrator's mother submits to the father, unwilling to "try to penetrate the mystery of his superior qualities." The great-aunt's teasing of his grandmother provokes the narrator, who, "already a man in my cowardice, ... did what we all do, once we are grown up, when confronted with sufferings and injustices: I did not want to see them."

The boy's love of his mother is so intense that he can't enjoy it. When he hears her coming to his room to kiss him goodnight, the moment is marred because of his awareness that it will end. He comes to prefer anticipation to fulfillment:

It heralded the moment that was to follow it, when she had left me, when she had gone down again. So that I came to wish that this goodnight I loved so much would take place as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite in which Mama had not yet come.

And then Swann appears, to set the household dynamic into a new alignment. He has, we are told, an "aquiline nose" and "green eyes under a high forehead framed by blond, almost red hair, cut Bressant-style." A footnote to Lydia Davis's translation tells us that the actor Jean-Baptiste Prosper Bressant "introduced a new hairstyle, which consisted of wearing the hair in a crew cut in front and longer in the back." In other words, Swann had a mullet. But the chief thing that we learn is that, unknown to his neighbors in Combray, Swann, the stockbroker's son, moves in the highest social circles when he is in Paris.

Our ignorance of this brilliant social life that Swann led was obviously due in part to the reserve and discretion of his character, but also to the fact that bourgeois people in those days formed for themselves a rather Hindu notion of society and considered it to be made up of closed castes, in which each person, from birth, found himself placed in the station which his family occupied and from which nothing, except the accidents of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage could withdraw him in order to move him into a higher caste.

This sets in motion some Jane Austen-style comedy, centered on the great-aunt who has pigeonholed Swann because his town house is in "a part of town where my great-aunt felt it was ignominious to live." She handles Swann, "who was elsewhere so sought after, with the naive roughness of a child who plays with a collector's curio no more carefully than with some object of little value."

Proust typically uses Swann's unsuspected double life as a means to reflect on the nature of personality -- we are what we are seen to be:

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

And since this is a novel about recovering time, the narrator observes that the varied encounters we have with one person over time are freighted with revelations not such much about them as about who we were when we previously encountered them:

I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann -- to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one's life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality -- to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

Finally, we meet grandmother Bathilde's spinster sisters, with whom Jane Austen would have had almost as much fun as Proust does:

They were women of lofty aspirations, who for that very reason were incapable of taking an interest in what is known as tittle-tattle, ... and more generally in anything that was not directly connected to an aesthetic or moral subject. The disinterestedness of their minds was such, with respect to all that, closely or distantly, seemed connected with worldly matters, that their sense of hearing -- having finally understood its temporary uselessness when the conversation at dinner assumed a tone that was frivolous or merely pedestrian ... -- would suspend the functioning of its receptive organs and allow them to begin to atrophy.