Day One Hundred Seventy-Nine: Finding Time Again, pp. 249-271

From "And as with snow, too, ..." through "... It's just like a novel.'"

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The narrator's heightened consciousness of the effect of time also causes him to turn his attention to the younger people at the party: "now it was not only what had become of the young people of the past, but what would become of the young people of today, that was giving me such a strong sensation of time." A few guests, however, seem to have withstood the ravaging effects of time and "at the age of fifty they began a new kind of beauty." But women "who were too beautiful or too ugly" couldn't benefit from this kind of transformation: The former "crumble away like a statue," and the latter "did not really look as if they had aged," but haven't improved either. In a few, the process has either "accelerated or slowed down." One former beauty has been ravaged by her addiction to "cocaine and other drugs." But one man, who "must have been over fifty, and looked younger than he had when he was thirty ... had found an intelligent doctor and cut out alcohol and salt."

And then there's Odette: "'You think I'm my mother,' Gilberte had said to me. It was true." Expecting to see a great change in Odette, he doesn't recognize her at first. Having calculated how old she must be, "it seemed to me [she] could not possibly be the one I was looking at, precisely because she was so like her old self." And because Odette "had not changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She was like a sterilized rose.... The voice had stayed the same, needlessly warm, captivating.... And yet, just as her eyes seemed to be looking at me from a distant shore, her voice was sad, almost pleading, like that of the dead in the Odyssey. Odette was still capable of acting." Three years later, he will see her again at Gilberte's and find that her mind is going, though when a guest says, "She's a bit gaga, you know," Odette will visibly take offense. "[S]he who had betrayed Swann and everybody else was not being betrayed by the entire universe; and she had become so weak that she no longer even dared, now the roles were reversed, to defend herself against men. And soon she would not defend herself against death."

And thus the Princesse de Guermantes's drawing-room was illuminated, forgetful, and flowery, like a peaceful cemetery. There, time had not only brought about the ruin of the creatures of a former epoch, it had made possible, had indeed created, new associations. 

Bloch has "permanently adopted his pseudonym of Jacques du Rozier as his own name" and has become a famous and successful writer. He has shaved his moustache and wears a monocle, and "his Jewish nose had disappeared, in the way that a hunchback, if she presents herself well, can seem to stand almost straight." He comments to the narrator that the Princesse de Guermantes is hardly the "marvellous beauty" that he had once raved about, and the narrator has to explain that this isn't the same person: "The Princesse de Guermantes had died and it was the former Mme Verdurin whom the Prince, ruined by the defeat of Germany, had married." Bloch protests that he must be wrong, because he had looked up the Prince in the Almanac de Gotha, and found that he was "married to somebody terribly grand, ... Sidonie, Duchesse de Duras, née des Baux." But the narrator explains that this is still the former Mme. Verdurin, who, "shortly after the death of her husband, had married the penniless old Duc de Duras, who had made her a cousin of the Prince de Guermantes, and had died after two years of marriage." So Mme. Verdurin, who scorned the aristocracy, is now in the thick of it.

So "the outward changes in the faces that I had known were no more than the symbols of an interior change which had been going on from day to day." Case in point: Charles Morel, whose arrival is greeted with "a stir of deferential curiosity" because he's now "a man of some distinction" and commended for "his high moral standards." "I was perhaps the only person there who knew that he had been kept simultaneously both by Saint-Loup and by a friend of Saint-Loup's."

Society itself has loosened up: "The Faubourg Saint-Germain, like a senile dowager, made no response beyond a timid smile to the insolent servants who invaded her drawing-rooms, drank her orangeade and introduced her to their mistresses." The younger members of society assume "that Mme Swann and the Princesse de Guermantes and Bloch had always been in the most elevated social position."

Someone having asked a young man from one of the best families if there was not some story about Gilberte's mother, the young nobleman replied that it was true that in the first part of her life she had been married to an adventurer named Swann, but that she had subsequently married one of the most prominent men in society, the Comte de Forcheville.

Bloch, who had once "cut such a sorry figure" in his former attempts to get into society, "had not left off publishing those books of his, the absurd sophistry of which I was today doing my best to demolish so as not to be bogged down by it, works without originality but which provided young people, and a large number of fashionable women, with the impression of an unusually rarefied intellect, a sort of genius." But his final arrival in society has been eased by "the few names he had retained from his acquaintance with Saint-Loup enabled him to give his current prestige the illusion of infinite regress." Bloch introduces the narrator to a young woman who is also a friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes, "and who was one of the smartest women of the day." But even she is completely confused by the lineages of the various friends of the narrator, having been led to believe that the Forchevilles are socially superior to the Guermantes.  

Day Seventy: The Guermantes Way, pp. 21-38

From "Despite the apparent haughtiness of their butler..." to "...immense bird of paradise, soft, glittering, and velvety." 

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Françoise is the narrator's principal source of information about their new home. She tells him 

that the Guermantes did not occupy their hôtel because of some immemorial right, but were fairly recent tenants, and that the garden they overlooked on the side that was unknown to me was quite small and no different from all the other neighboring gardens; so I discovered at last that it contained no feudal gallows or fortified mill, no fishpond or pillared dovecote, no communal bakehouse, tithe barn, or fortress, no fixed bridges or drawbridges, not even flying bridges or toll bridges, no pointed towers, wall charters, or commemorative mounds. 

Nevertheless, he persists in his fascination with the name "Guermantes," and the images it rouses in his imagination, and is further intrigued when a friend of his father's says of the Duchesse: "She has the highest status in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Hers is the leading house in the Faubourg." He recalls how his glimpse of her in the church at Combray had been disillusioning at first, "like a god or a nymph changed into a swan or a willow and henceforth subjected to natural laws." His frequent sightings of her now as she comes and goes from the hôtel could also be disillusioning: 

she played out the role, so unworthy of her, of a fashionable woman; and in this mythological obliviousness of her native grandeur, she checked the position of her veil, smoothed her cuffs, arranged her cape, as the divine swan goes through all the movements of his animal species, keeps his painted eyes on either side of his beak without any sign of movement in them, and then darts suddenly after a button or an umbrella, behaving like a swan and forgetting that he is a god.

But he persists in wanting to "know what was really enclosed within the brilliant orange-colored envelope of her name." He is amazed "that this leading salon of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was situated on the Right Bank and the fact that, every morning, from my bedroom, I could hear its carpets being beaten." Nor is he fazed by the arrogance of the Duc de Guermantes, "who stood there on the pavement, a giant, enormous in his light-colored clothes, a cigar between his teeth, his head in the air, his monocle alert," waiting for the horse that would take him to "his mistress in the Champs-Élysées." 

Françoise continues to be a conduit for information about the family that she gleans from the servants, including the Duchesse's plans to visit the Duchesse de Guise at Cannes and her attending the Opéra in the box of the Princess of Parma. (Françoise also reports that "there had been a good deal of talk in society about the marriage of the Marquis de Saint-Loup to Mlle d'Ambresac, and that it was virtually settled.") 


And then the narrator comes in possession of a ticket to a gala at the Opéra, where La Berma will be doing an act from Phèdre. His disappointment at his first experience of La Berma's performance makes that part of the gala of less interest to him than the opportunity to glimpse society in its element. And as he waits for the gala to begin, he, like others in the orchestra, gawks at the "white deities" in the boxes, imagining them as "water goddesses," as "radiant daughters of the sea ... constantly turning round to smile at the bearded tritons who hung from the anfractuous rocks of the ocean depths, or at some aquatic demigod, whose skull was a polished stone, around which the tide had washed up a smooth deposit of seaweed, and whose gaze was a disc of rock crystal." (In other words, a balding man with a monocle.) 


The Princesse de Guermantes, in her parterre box, particularly draws his attention. 

The imagination being like a barrel organ that does not work properly and always plays a different tune from the one it should, every time I had heard anyone mention the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection of certain sixteenth-century masterpieces began to sing in my head. I was forced to rid myself of the association now that I saw her there before me, offering crystallized fruit to a stout gentleman in tails.

And then the performance of the act from Phèdre begins.