Day One Hundred Seventy-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 211-226

From "It was sad for me to think that my love ..." through "... of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love."

_____

The narrator comes to realize that the emotions we experience in our relations with others outlive the relationships themselves:

I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted.... So that I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like the models for a painter.

He aphoristically remarks that "happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind." This echoes Nietzsche's "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," except that Proust appends, "Sorrow kills in the end." It also results in a somewhat more sophisticated spin on the cliché that artists must suffer to produce art:

let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life.

Sexual passion, in the narrator's scheme of things, is primary: "A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us." But the interrelationship between pleasure and pain is also key: "If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappiness would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless." The greater the experience of unhappiness, the more likely the work is to succeed: "one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart." There is no substitute for the painful experience: "Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion."

The narrator makes one of his digressions on homosexuality in reflecting on how his "encounters with M. de Charlus" had revealed "how utterly neutral matter is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion."

A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.... if M. de Charlus had not given to the "faithless one" over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d'octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love.

Similarly, Proust gave his male lovers feminine faces (and names like Albertine and Gilberte and Andrée that betrayed their masculine origins), reinforcing the point here that the emotion -- passion, obsession, desire for possession -- is universal, whatever physical form may inspire it. "The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself." (On the other hand, Schopenhauer warned, "Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.")

Reflecting on his life, he reiterates his premise of the primacy of emotion, which exists in the observer, not in the thing observed: "it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind." He had lost the physical presence of his grandmother long before he experienced grief for her death. "I had seen love placing qualities in a person which are only in the person who loves."

Dreams were another, very striking, fact of my life, and had probably done more than anything else to convince me of the purely mental nature of reality, and I did not spurn their help in the composition of my work... this nocturnal muse ... sometimes compensated for the other one.

And he comes to realize the central role that Swann has played in his life:

the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte. It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes,where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann.

But he also realizes that "I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine." Existence itself is an arbitrary, accidental thing.

Similarly, Albertine played an important role in bringing him to this point of realizing his mission as an artist: "she was so different from me.... If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them." 

Day One Hundred Seventy-Six: Finding Time Again, pp. 191-211

From "On the subject of books, I had remembered ..." through "... and to have died for my benefit."

_____

A copy of George Sand's François le Champi in the Prince's library reminds the narrator of the night his mother spent in his room, reading the book to him, and "a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord."

[T]hings -- a book in its red binding, like the rest -- at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to "describe things," to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between or present self and the past, the essence of which is is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. 

This takes us back to the beginning of this volume and the Goncourt parody, when he berated himself for his inability to see and hear as the Goncourts did, to record the minute details of a scene. Now such minutiae are dismissed as "a miserable list of lines and surfaces."

He recalls the night his mother read François le Champi to him as "perhaps the loveliest and saddest night of my life, when I had alas! ... obtained from my parents their first surrendering of authority, from which I would later come to date the decline of my health and my will." On the other hand, he regards this one as a "most glorious day" on which the discovery of the book in the Guermantes' library "illuminated not only the old fumblings of my thoughts, but even the purpose of my life and perhaps of art."

What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously -- a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it -- a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. 

What the writer does is "the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality." The writer's task is to "translate" what "already exists within each of us."

How could a purely descriptive literature have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them?

We run the risk "of dying without having known" the reality "which is quite simply our life."  But more than that, art enables us to glimpse the reality that is other people's lives:

It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, ... we ... have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists. 

Art also undoes the work of the narrator's old nemesis, habit:

The work carried out by our vanity, our passions, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.

And he recognizes that this is the path he must follow if he still wants to be an artist: "I needed to restore to even the slightest of the signs which surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) the meaning which habit had made them lose for me." He realizes that "the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again." He resolves to find in his life the materials for his novel, not transcribing the events of his life, but searching through it for the pieces he can assemble into fiction:

The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder.... In every work of art one can recognize those the artist hated most and also, alas! those whom he loved best. All they have done is to pose for the artist at the moment when, against his will, they were causing him the most suffering.

To succeed as an artist he realizes that he needs to be willing to use what life has presented him, and to distance himself from those whom he has loved, including Albertine and his grandmother: "All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit."

Day One Hundred Thrty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 497-514

Part II, Chapter IV, from "I was only awaiting an opportunity..." to "...I absolutely must marry Albertine."

_____

And so the narrator makes a great about-face in the space of a single short chapter.

He announces to his mother, who is leaving Balbec for Combray to stay with her dying aunt, that he has decided not to marry Albertine and will stop seeing her. He plans to tell Albertine that he doesn't love her and to switch his attentions to Andrée. But ... best-laid plans. As they are returning from the evening at Mme. Verdurin's he tells her that he is "beginning to find this life rather stupid" and that he's going to ask the Patronne to have some music played by a musician Albertine probably doesn't know: Vinteuil.

Oops.

It turns out that Albertine has "a girlfriend, older than me, who was like both a mother and sister to me, whom I spent my best years with in Trieste," whom she's meeting in Cherbourg a few weeks from now, "and isn't this extraordinary, is in actual fact the best friend of this Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuil's daughter almost as well."

Cue the Proustian moment, "suddenly rising up out of the depths of that darkness where it had seemed to lie forever entombed and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new life, terrible and deserved, perhaps also to explode before my eyes the fateful consequences to which wicked actions give rise indefinitely." And so on.

Albertine the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of her friend, a practicing and professional sapphist, this, compared with what I had imagined at my most suspicious, was ... a terrible terra incognita on which I had just set foot, a new phase of unsuspected suffering that was opening.

He's so jolted by the news that he asks Albertine to come stay the night at the hotel in Balbec, where, after she goes to her room on another floor, he is racked with sobs. "What I had dreaded, had long vaguely suspected in Albertine, what my instinct had isolated from her whole being, but what my arguments, guided by my desire, had slowly led me to deny, was true! ... For, pretty as Albertine was, how could Mlle Vinteuil, with her proclivities, not have asked her to satisfy them?"

He sends for Albertine and complicates matters more by making up a story about a woman he had left in Paris whom he had been planning to marry, and that he had been thinking of killing himself: "If I was going to die, I'd have liked to say goodbye to you." Albertine falls for this story: "I won't leave you again, I'm going to stay with you." He decides that he must take her to Paris, to prevent her from meeting her old girlfriend in Cherbourg. "True," he reflects, "I might have told myself that in Paris, if Albertine had these proclivities, she would find a great many other people with whom to gratify them." But he asks her anyway, realizing that with his mother in Combray and his father away on "a tour of inspection," they would be alone together in Paris.

He reverts to his old childishness, likening his current emotional torment to "that which used to rise up into my room of old in Combray from the dining room, where I could hear, laughing and talking with strangers, amid the sound of forks, Mamma, who would not be coming up to say good night; like that which, for Swann, had filled the houses where Odette had gone to a soirée in search of unimaginable delights."

Albertine replies that she can't go to Paris now, and urges him to marry the woman there. He replies that he "wouldn't have wanted to make a young woman live with someone so sickly and so tiresome." She protests, of course. But he has revealed a truth about himself: "I was too given to believing that the moment I was in love I could not be loved, and that self-interest alone could attach a woman to me."

After she leaves him, she sends word that "she could, if I wanted, come to Paris that same day." The news reaches the hotel manager, who tries to persuade him to stay. And he has second thoughts on looking around the room:

I two or three times had the idea, momentarily, that the world in which this room and these bookcases were, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my unhappiness something like that which we get from reading a novel, and which a madman alone could make into a lasting and permanent unhappiness, extending into his life. 

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the strength of will to stay in this reality. He has a vision of Albertine taking the place of Mlle. Vinteuil's friend in the room in Montjouvain where he had spied on on them. And when his mother comes to see him  he falls back into the old childishness, which she perhaps unwittingly encourages: "Remember that your mamma is leaving today and is going to be desolate at leaving her darling in this state. All the more, my poor child, because I hardly have time to console you." She has "the look she had worn in Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night beside me, that look which at this moment bore an extraordinary resemblance to that of my grandmother when she allowed me to drink cognac."

And so he tells her: "I absolutely must marry Albertine."

Day One Hundred Thirteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 180-192

Part II, Chapter II, from "In my fear that the pleasure found..." to "...at all events be with me before 1 a.m."

_____

The dazzling sight of the apple trees in blossom seems to mark a turning point for the narrator, who notes that "my grief at my grandmother's death was diminishing." There is a concomitant change: "Albertine was beginning, meanwhile, to fill me with something like a desire for happiness." The parallel he uses for this experience is, however, somewhat bathetic: "Are married couples not soon to be found once again intertwined, in the very bedroom where they have lost a child, in order to give the dead little one a brother?"

When he sets out by train to see Albertine, and to invite her on a visit to Mme. de Cambremer and Mme. Verdurin, he is suddenly visited by the specter of his grandmother.

what could I have done with Rosemonde when across the whole of my lips there was passing only a desperate desire to kiss a dead woman? What could I have said to the Cambremers and the Verdurins when my heart was pounding because the sorrow that my grandmother had endured was constantly re-forming there? I could not remain in that carriage.

(Sturrock's note informs us that "Rosemonde" in this passage is "a slip of the pen for Albertine." Knowing of Proust's admiration for George Eliot, I wonder if he may have had in mind Rosamond Vincy, who became the destructive obsession of Lydgate in Middlemarch.)

He gets off the train in Maineville-la-Teinturière, where he notes the presence there of "an establishment to which we shall be returning, ... the first brothel for the smart set that anyone had thought to build on the coasts of France." But he doesn't stop there now. Returning to the hotel, he sends Françoise to fetch Albertine for him. And once again he foreshadows for us: "I think I would be lying if I said that the painful and perpetual mistrust that Albertine was to inspire in me had already begun, let alone the particular, above all Gomorran, character which that mistrust was to assume." This time, however, Albertine's arrival "dispelled my happiness," although he is forced once again to suffer a warning from Françoise: "Monsieur shouldn't see that young lady. I can easily tell the sort of character she has; she'll cause you unhappiness." 

But foreshadowing is about all this section does. The remainder of it is taken up with observations about life in the hotel and the character of the "lift," the elevator operator who also figured in the previous visit to Balbec.

Day One Hundred Twelve: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 166-179

Part II, Chapter I, from "As for a grief as deep as that of my mother..." to "...falling: it was a day in spring." 

_____

The narrator informs us that it "will be seen in due course in this narrative" that he would suffer "a grief as deep as that of my mother." She has arrived in Balbec and, having borne her grief longer than her son, attempts to edge him out of it. But he is still resisting a re-entrance to the world: "I understood for the first time that the fixed, tearless gaze (which meant that Françoise felt little pity for her) that she had had since my grandmother's death had been dwelling on this incomprehensible contradiction between memory and nothingness." He also begins noticing the similarities between his mother and his grandmother. 

"Finally, my mother demanded that I go out," he reports, but although he still demonstrates an acute awareness of the details of hotel life, he can think of nothing but "the last days of my grandmother's illness," reliving them in his imagination while aware that "when we believe we are merely re-creating the pain of a beloved being, our compassion exaggerates it; yet perhaps it is the compassion that is right, rather than the awareness that those who are suffering have of their pain, from whom the sadness of their life is hidden, whereas compassion sees it and despairs." Once again, the narrator valorizes the imaginative experience (the witness's compassion) over the actual one (the sufferer's pain). He learns from the hotel manager that his grandmother had had several "suncopies" -- his malapropism for "syncopes" or fainting spells -- during their previous visit. And Françoise reveals that the photograph of the grandmother that Saint-Loup had made during their visit had been taken when she was ill. 

He has not yet seen Albertine, about whom his mother and Françoise have very different opinions, and keeps postponing their meeting. Finally, he arranges to meet her, having "longed to hear Albertine's laugh once more, to see her friends again, the young girl, outlined against the waves, who had remained in my memory as the inseparable charm, the characteristic flora of Balbec." But the weather turns bad on the day of their meeting, and Albertine is "in a very bad mood." Leaving her, he sets out for a walk to the apple orchards that, when he saw them on a ride with Mme. Villeparisis, had lost their blossoms.

But the moment I reached the road, what dazzlement. There, where in Augsut, with my grandmother, I had seen only the leaves and as it were the emplacement of the apple trees, they were in full flower for as far as the eye could see, unimaginably luxuriant, their feet in the mud but wearing their ballgowns.

The narrator has just recalled that his grandmother, who loved nature, "could not go two steps without getting mud on her. The beauty of the scene, as the "sky that was changing from minute to minute" clears for a while, overwhelms him: 

Beneath this azure, a slight but fresh breeze was causing the reddening bouquets to shiver slightly. Blue tits were coming to settle on the branches and were leaping about among the indulgent flowers, as if it were some lover of exoticism and of colors who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one almost to tears, because, however excessive these effects of a fined artifice, you felt that it was natural, that these apple trees were there, in the heart of the countryside, like peasants, on one of the highways of France. Then to the rays of sunlight there suddenly succeeded those of he rain; they striped the entire horizon, drawing their gray mesh tight around the line of apple trees. But these continued to raise aloft their pink, flowering beauty, in a wind now become icy beneath the shower of rain that was falling: it was a day in spring.

Day One Hundred Eleven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 150-166

Part II, Chapter I, from "My second arrival in Balbec was very different..." to "...differed only in its modality, of involuntary memory."

_____

The section is headed by the subtitle, "The Intermittences of the Heart," which Sturrock's note informs us was a title that Proust considered for the entire novel. 


The narrator returns to Balbec and is treated like royalty by the hotel manager, whose malapropisms may lose something in translation but I suspect were rather tiresomely overdone even in the original. 

He is immediately flooded with memories, but the initial ones are of the superficial sort: "The images chosen by memory are as arbitrary, as confined, and as elusive as those that imagination had formed and that reality has destroyed." But he has come to Balbec partly because of the future as well as because of the past: He has learned that Mme. Verdurin has rented one of the Cambremer châteaux, and that Mme. Putbus, whose maid Saint-Loup has inspired him to pursue, will be one of her guests. Saint-Loup has written a letter of introduction to the Cambremers. But the narrator informs us that the "principal object of my journey was neither attained nor even pursued." 

Moreover, on his arrival in his hotel room, he is assaulted by "A convulsion of my entire being." He is "suffering from an attack of cardiac fatigue," and when he bends to remove his boots he is flooded by repressed grief: 

I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother, not that of the one whom I had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Élysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had recovered in a complete and involuntary memory.

In short, he is having another "Proustian moment," one that he explicates in a lengthy discourse that explains the subtitle: 

For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the hart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them. 

Involuntary memory, then, is generated by a "framework of sensations" -- the taste of a madeleine, the bending over to remove a boot -- that can't be voluntarily induced. 

The experience also causes the narrator to reflect on the nature of his grief, which consists in large part of guilt: "for, since the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike unrelentingly when we persist in remembering the blows we have dealt them." He is subsequently troubled by a bad dream in which his father talks to him about her grandmother in her final illness, frustrating his wish to see her, and ending in a string of nonsense: "stags, stags, Francis Jammes, fork," a "sequence of words" that "no longer held the limpid, logical meaning they had expressed so naturally for me only a moment before and which I could no longer recall." 

He is so distressed by the experience that he stays in his room and sees no one, even when Albertine, who has just arrived in Balbec, comes to call on him. He also sends word that he is "indisposed" when Mme. de Cambremer leaves her calling card.

With his mother due to arrive the following day, he realizes that her grief for her own mother had been "genuine," the kind of grief that "literally takes away your life for long periods, sometimes forever." His own grief he recognizes as "ephemeral," the kind that "we experience only long after the event because in order to feel it we needed to 'understand' that event."  

Day Ninety-Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 342-366

Part II, Chapter II, from "Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn..." to "...the songs of a Gothic jongleur." 

_____

The second chapter, like the first, begins with a summary, but since the chapter constitutes the remaining 250 pages of the book, it's a rather scanty summary. 

It begins with a bit of a surprise, in the narrator's statement, "I had just been reborn." Given his earlier description of his deep attachment to his grandmother, that seems almost callous coming immediately after the account of her death. His mother, he notes, is still in mourning, but she is in Combray with his father, and is not around to disapprove of his plans to visit Mme. Villeparisis's house to see a play that's being performed there. 

So he is left alone in Paris, remembering his stay in Doncières with Saint-Loup, and listening to the hiccuping sound of the new furnace boiler, which "was in no way connected to my memories of Doncières, but its prolonged encounter with them inside me that afternoon was to force it into such an affinity with them that, after I thought I had more or less forgotten it, whenever I heard the central heating it would bring them back to me." Another instance of "involuntary memory," or "Proustian moment." 

We learn that Saint-Loup and Rachel have broken up, and that Saint-Loup had been angry with him for a while because Rachel, to provoke Saint-Loup's jealousy, had claimed that the narrator tried to have sex with her. But now Saint-Loup has written to say that he had met Mlle. de Stermaria, with whom the narrator was smitten at Balbec, and "had asked for an assignation with the young woman on my behalf." He is now awaiting a response to the letter he has written to Mlle. de Stermaria (now "Mme de Stermaria, given that she had divorced her husband after three months of marriage").

But then Albertine pays him a surprise visit. She has matured so much that "she was hardly recognizable ... she had a real face at last; her body had developed." 

I am not quite sure whether it was the desire for Balbec or for her that took hold of me then; perhaps my desire for her was itself a lazy, cowardly, incomplete way of possessing Balbec, as if to possess a thing materially, to take up residence in a town, were equivalent to possessing it spiritually. 

As before, the narrator thinks of sexual attraction as a matter of possession. And while he claims that he was "not in the least in love with Albertine," he dreams "both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body" the way Eve is attached to Adam's body in the medieval sculptures at Balbec. 

In their conversation, we learn the intriguing fact that the narrator has fought a duel, but no further details. The narrator focuses instead on her manner of speech, which strikes him as more "grown-up" than it had in Balbec, and suspects that she has learned these expressions "from Mme Bontemps, along with a hatred of Jews and a respect for the color black because it is always suitable and never out of place." 

And reiterating that he was no longer in love with her, so that he "no longer ran the risk, as I might have done in Balbec, of wrecking her affection for me, since it no longer existed," he begins to seduce her -- at least into letting him kiss her cheek. He is in bed already, so he teases her into lying down next to him by saying "I'm not in the least ticklish. You could tickle me for a whole hour and I wouldn't feel a thing." She responds to this come-on by getting in bed with him, only to be interrupted by the entrance of Françoise with a lamp: "Albertine had just time to regain her chair." 

Their game resumes when Françoise leaves (although the narrator suspects her of listening outside the door). He reflects that 

women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman's body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

His teasing pursuit of Albertine results in a kind of consummation -- on his part at least: "her caresses had satisfied me in a way that she could not have failed to notice, and which I had even feared might provoke her to the slight gesture of revulsion and offended modesty Gilberte had made in similar circumstances behind the laurel bushes in the Champs-Élysées." Albertine does seem "embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going after what had just happened." As for the narrator, he is more concerned about getting her to leave so he can get to the play at Mme. Villeparisis's on time. And he maintains a kind of cold distance from her: 

Albertine -- and this was perhaps, with another, which will be clear in due course, one of the reasons that had made me unconsciously desire her -- was one of the incarnations of the charming little French country girl typified in stone in Saint-André-des-Champs. I recognized in her, as I did in Françoise, who was soon nevertheless to become her deadly enemy, a courtesy toward host and stranger, a sense of propriety, a respectful bedside manner.

Even without the heavy-handed foreshadowing, it's clear this is not going to work out well.                        

Day Ninety-Two: The Guermantes Way, pp. 321-341

Part II, Chapter I, from "He had always liked to come regularly and spend..." to "...laid her to rest with the face of a young girl."

_____

If I were asked to pick a section from In Search of Lost Time for an anthology that would represent Proust at his best, I think it might be this chapter, for its miraculous blend of genuine feeling and wry humor. I would call it "Dickensian" except that I fear Dickens would have treated the grandmother's death far more lugubriously, and thus less touchingly, than Proust does. 

We begin with a visit from Bergotte, who is ill and aging, and with the revelation that the author has lost some favor with the narrator. He has always admired Bergotte's clarity, but he has lately become fascinated by a new writer in whose work "the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming." It's a pretty apt description of the reaction of some early readers to Moderns like Joyce and Kafka and, of course, Proust. He elaborates on the transformative power of new visions in art with a reference to painting: "Women pass us in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women." Or as Oscar Wilde put it, Nature imitates Art. But Bergotte manages to undercut the narrator's interest in the new writer "not so much by assuring me that his art was unpolished, facile, and hollow, as by telling me that he had seen him and very nearly mistaken him for Bloch. The image of Bloch then started to loom over the pages I read, and I no longer felt any compulsion to take the trouble to understand them." 

The grandmother's condition worsens, and Cottard decides to treat her with leeches.

I knew the disgust my grandmother felt at the sight of certain creatures, not to mention being touched by them. I knew it was out of respect for the advantageous relief they would bring that she endured the leeches. And so it infuriated me to hear Françoise chuckling at her as to a child who has to be humored, and repeating, 'Oh, look at the little beasties crawling all over Madame!' Furthermore, this was to treat our invalid with a lack of respect, as though she had in fact slipped into her second childhood. But my grandmother, whose face now wore the calm forbearance of a stoic, did not even seem to hear.

When the final stage arrives, the narrator's parents wake him in the middle of the night, and his mother says, "Poor boy, you have only your papa and mama to rely on now." Word spreads that the grandmother is on her deathbed, and the Duc de Guermantes pays a call, demonstrating his customary noblesse oblige: "M. de Guermantes was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to go off somewhere. But he was so conscious of the importance of the courtesy he was showing us that it blinded him to everything else, and he insisted on being shown into the drawing room." And when Saint-Loup arrives, the Duc shows a wholly inappropriate delight: "'Well, what a pleasant surprise!' cried the Duc joyfully, ... heedless of the presence of my mother." 

It was not that the Duc de Guermantes was bad-mannered. Far from it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves in the place of others, similar in this respect to undertakers and the majority of doctors, who, after composing their faces and saying, 'This is a very painful time for you,' perhaps even embracing you and recommending rest, then revert to treating a deathbed or a funeral just like some social gathering of a more or less restricted kind, at which, with the joviality they have just momentarily repressed, they scan the room for someone they can talk to about their humdrum affairs or ask to introduce them to someone else or offer a lift home in their carriage.

Similarly, a priest who is a brother-in-law of the grandmother is so self-conscious about showing proper grief that, when he covers his face with his hands, the narrator catches him peering between his fingers "to observe whether my sympathy was sincere.... Priests, like specialists in mental disorders, always have something of the examining magistrate about them." Another relative "was so assiduous in his solicitude for the dying that the families concerned, on the pretext that he was delicate, ... invariably begged him, with customary evasiveness of expression, not to come to the cemetery" and others had given him "the nickname, 'No Flowers by Request.'" 

And then there's Dr. Dieulafoy, who had been urged upon them by the Duc de Guermantes. By this point, the narrator has begun to see the scene surrounding his grandmother's death as taking on the character of a play, so that "when the maid announced 'M. Dieulafoy,' it was like something out of a play by Molière." The doctor is a paragon of dignity and tact -- and unnecessary, since all he can do is confirm what the other doctors have already established, that the grandmother is dying -- and when he takes his leave he makes "a perfect exit, simply accepting the sealed envelope that was slipped into his hand. He did not seem to have seen it, and even we were left wondering for a moment whether we had really given it to him, so dexterously had he made it disappear, like a conjurer, yet without losing a single trace of the gravity -- if anything, it was accentuated -- of the eminent consultant in his long frock coat with its silk lapels, his handsome face weighed down with the most dignified commiseration."

These bits of amused observation are so deftly handled that they only heighten the sense of genuine emotion when the end finally comes and Françoise combs the grandmother's hair and the narrator recognizes that "death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl."             

Day Ninety-One: The Guermantes Way, pp. 309-321

Part II, Chapter I, from "We made our way back along the Avenue Gabriel..." to "... Bergotte came every day and spent several hours with me."

_____

Suddenly, in the middle of the third volume, Proust has decided to break the narrative into chapters and provide a synopsis at the start of each chapter: "My grandmother's illness -- Bergotte's illness -- The Duc and the doctor -- My grandmother's decline -- Her death." Well, it's not like In Search of Lost Time is one of those books for which you want to avoid "spoilers." 

Grandmother's fatal illness, which we learn is uremia, brings the narrator's thoughts on illness and death to the forefront. 

We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might mean that death -- or the first signs of its partial possession of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again -- will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon, with its hourly activities prescribed in advance.

Nevertheless, the account of the grandmother's last days is leavened with humor, some of it embodied in "the famous Professor E---," a physician whom the narrator encounters on the street and whom he asks to help his grandmother. He tells the narrator, "that is unthinkable. I'm dining with the minister of commerce." And he's far more concerned that the tailcoat he has to wear "has no buttonhole for my decorations," than with the state of the narrator's grandmother. Nevertheless, he does see her, and delivers the bad news that "this seems a hopeless case to me." 

The narrator sees his grandmother slumped in the carriage as they ride home, "slithering into the abyss," but he's nevertheless aware of other things, such as the fact that they pass Legrandin on the street, who "doffed his hat to us, and stopped with a surprised look on his face." Aware "how touchy he was," the narrator is concerned that his grandmother failed to acknowledge his greeting, but she "raised her hand in a gesture that seemed to convey, 'What does it matter? It's of no importance whatsoever.'" 

His mother is "stricken with a paroxysm of despair" when they arrive home, but she can't bear to look at her mother's face, contorted by the stroke. "All this time, there was one person who could not avert hers from what could be glimpsed of my grandmother's altered features, at which her daughter dared not look, someone whose eyes were fixed on them dumbfoundedly, indiscreetly, and with an ominous stare: this was Françoise." And Françoise, as usual, becomes the mainstay of the family through this ordeal. 

Cottard is called in, and prescribes morphine for her pain, but it raises her albumin count, so he is forced to stop it. The narrator comments that "this unprepossessing, commonplace man assumed something of the impressiveness of a general who, though unexceptional in all other respects, is a gifted strategist." 

The effect of the disease on his grandmother shocks the narrator, who nevertheless has the strength to observe it:

her face, eroded, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rough, purplish, ruddy, desperate face of some fierce guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture. But the work was not yet completed. Later, the sculpture would have to be smashed, then lowered into the tomb that had been so painfully guarded by those harshly contracted features.

And still the element of humor rises through the narrative, as when the family summons a specialist because the grandmother seems to have contracted an upper respiratory problem: "a relative ... assured us that if we brought in the specialist X the trouble would be over in a matter of days. This is the sort of thing society people say about their doctors, and we believe them, just as Françoise believed newspaper advertisements." But the grandmother refuses treatment so "we, in our embarrassment at having called out this doctor for nothing, deferred to his desire to examine our respective noses, although there was nothing wrong with them." And as a result, everyone in the family comes down with "catarrh."           

Day Ninety: The Guermantes Way, pp. 290-306

From "I, for my part, returned home..." to "...that she had had a slight stroke." 

_____

The Dreyfus affair is inescapable: When he gets home the narrator finds his family's butler and the Guermantes's butler in a heated argument about the case, and in just as complicated a manner as the conversation between Bloch and de Norpois or the one between Bloch's father and Mme. Sazerat. Their butler, a Dreyfusard, is arguing that Dreyfus was guilty, while the Guermantes butler, an anti-Dreyfusard, is arguing for his innocence.

They behaved in this manner not to hide their convictions, but out of shrewd, hardheaded competition. Our butler, who was not sure there would be a retrial, wanted to compensate in advance for not winning the argument by denying the Guermantes' butler the satisfaction of seeing a just cause crushed. The Guermantes' butler thought that if a retrial was refused ours would be more incensed by the continued detention of an innocent man on Devil's Island.

But the rest of the section is concentrated on the grandmother's illness, about which the narrator makes this aphoristic comment:

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us, and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

The account of her illness gives us some more glimpses into the medical practices at the turn of the century, including the use of the still fairly novel medical thermometer and the fact that aspirin had "not yet come into use at the time" as a febrifuge. Cottard prescribes his milk diet, which doesn't work, though the narrator blames it on his grandmother's putting too much salt in it. The narrator remembers Bergotte's recommendation of a doctor who would not "bore" him, and calls in Dr. du Boulbon, a "specialist in nervous diseases" who studied with Charcot, the teacher of Freud. 

Du Boulbon does in fact treat the grandmother's illness as at least partly psychosomatic, and recommends that she get out of bed and take walks in the Champs-Élysées, despite her fatigue. He also tries to reassure her that there should be no stigma to being called neurotic: "Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. They and they alone are the ones who have founded religions and created great works of art." And noting a book by Bergotte on her table, he says, "Cured of your nervous complaint, you would no longer have any taste for it. Now, what right have I to supplant the pleasure it gives you with a nervous stability that would be quite incapable of giving you such pleasure. The pleasure itself is a powerful remedy, the most powerful of all perhaps."


And so the narrator takes his grandmother out for a walk on the Champs-Élysées, where they go to "the little old-fashioned pavilion with the green metal trellis-work" that had figured earlier in one of his more memorable encounters with Gilberte. But there his grandmother becomes more ill, and he recognizes that she has suffered a stroke.        

Day Seventy-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 126-137

From "One morning, Saint-Loup confessed that he had..." to "...retained all that brightness for themselves."

_____

At Saint-Loup's suggestion, the narrator's grandmother telephones him, a "time-consuming and inconvenient" process that involves going to the post office and waiting for her call. It also produces a characteristically Proustian account of the then unfamiliar business of talking on the phone, including some rather twee personifications of telephone operators as "the Vigilant Virgins ... the All-Powerful Ones who conjure absent beings to our presence ... the Danaids of the unseen ... the ironic Furies ... the forever fractious servants of the Mysteries ... the shadowy priestesses of the Invisible ... the Young Ladies of the Telephone!" And when his grandmother does come on the line, "the isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isoation, that of my grandmother, separated from me for the first time." 

The result is that homesickness wells up in him and he decides to return to Paris. Circumstances prevent him from saying good-bye to Saint-Loup before his departure, but he leaves nevertheless: "I had to free myself as quickly as possible, in her arms, from the ghostly image, unsuspected until now but suddenly evoked by her voice, of a grandmother who was really separated from me." It's an oddly powerful suggestion of the impact that the telephone might have had, at least on someone as sensitive as the narrator, in its early days. 

And he has another shock coming when he sees his grandmother, unaware of his arrival, after what has been apparently only a couple of weeks' absence.

We never see those who are dear to us except in the animated workings, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images their faces represent to reach us, draws them into its vortex, flings them back onto the idea we have always had, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.

Habit has made him "neglect what had become dulled and change about her," so that "for the first time and for a mere second, since she vanished almost immediately, I saw, sitting there on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy, and vulgar, ill, her mind in a daze, the slightly crazed eyes wandering over a book, a crushed old woman whom I did not know." Has separation from home made the narrator grow up a little?

On the other hand, his obsession with Mme. de Guermantes has not faded, and he is disappointed that Saint-Loup has evidently forgotten to write to her about giving him permission to see her paintings by Elstir, for he receives no invitation to do so.     

Day Sixty-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 3-21

From "The early-morning twitter..." to "...deal hurriedly with his private correspondence." 

_____

The Guermantes Way begins charmingly because it begins, for the most part, with Françoise. The family has moved because grandmother is ill and needs cleaner air. This has taken its toll on Françoise, that arch-conservative, and the narrator hasn't made things easier by mocking her tears at leaving the old apartment. But the narrator has "found it as difficult to assimilate new surroundings as [he] found it easy to abandon old ones," and he gets no sympathy from Françoise: 

The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear it when other people flaunt the suffering with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves. Françoise, who would not allow the least of her own troubles to pass unobserved, would turn her head away if I was suffering, so that I should not have the satisfaction of seeing my suffering pitied, let alone noticed.

They have moved into an apartment next to that of Mme. de Villeparisis in the Hôtel de Guermantes, and the narrator finds his imagination running wild at the magic name of Guermantes. He is also having "Proustian moments":

[S]hould a sensation from the distant past ... enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint -- forgotten, mysterious, and fresh -- of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory.

That distinction between "voluntary memory" and the spontaneous memories evoked by an unsolicited external sensation (like, say, the taste of a madeleine) is central to Proust. And so the narrator goes into a reverie of Combray and the romantic vision of the "proud race of the Guermantes," dating from "a time when the sky was still empty in those places where Notre-Dame de Paris and Notre-Dame de Chartres were later to rise" that filled his childhood. But Saint-Loup, who belongs to the Guermantes lineage, points out that "the house [near Combray] had borne the name only since the seventeenth century" and that the "famous Guermantes tapestries ... were by Boucher, acquired in the nineteenth century by a Guermantes with artistic tastes and hung, along with mediocre hunting scenes that he had painted himself, in a particularly ugly drawing room." Still, to be living now in the Hôtel de Guermantes, where an actual Duchesse de Guermantes also resides, awakens his romanticism. 

Françoise, too, makes the adjustment to the new residence. "Françoise, like those plants that are completely attached to a particular animal and nourished by that animal with food it catches, eats, and digests for them, offering it to them in its final and easily assimilable residue, lived with us symbiotically." She makes the rules for the household, and no one, not even the narrator's father, dares to break them. We also meet M. Jupien, the former waistcoat maker whose niece runs a dressmaking shop that he owns, adjacent to the hôtel, and whom Françoise, "always ready to assimilate new names into the ones she already knew," calls "Julien." The section concludes with Françoise in her element belowstairs. 

Day Sixty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 507-533

From "About a month after ..." to end. 

____

Albertine, preparing to visit her aunt, Mme. Bontemps, for a few days, arranges to spend the night at the hotel because it's close to the train station. And she tells the narrator he "can come up and sit by my bedside while I'm having my dinner." As you can imagine, he's thrilled: "Her words carried me back further than the time when I had been in love with Gilberte, to the days when love had seemed to be a thing that was not only external to myself, but achievable." So he goes to the room in an exhilarated state, finding her in bed and wearing her nightgown. He's "intoxicated" by "her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks," and the moonlight, the sea, and "the swelling breasts of the closest of the Mainville cliffs":

I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or, rather, it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me.

Bad move. 


Recovering from her startled and angry rejection, which ends with her pulling the bell to call for a servant, he gives her up. When she returns from her visit to her aunt and forgives him, warning him not to try anything like that again, he turns his attentions to Andrée. 


He reflects on Albertine's popularity and the advantages that her beauty has given her, which overcome her status as the dowryless ward of the stingy M. Bontemps. She tells no one else about "our bedside scene, which a plainer girl might have wanted to share with the world." And he "even began to wonder whether her violent reaction might not have been prompted by some other reason, such as squeamishness (if she had suddenly noticed a bad smell about her person, and thought it might offend me), or timidity (if she believed, in her ignorance of the realities of lovemaking, that my state of nervous debility might somehow be contagious, contractable from a kiss)." 


For her part, she wonders, "What sort of girls must you be familiar with to be surprised at what I did?" (He has already reflected that her behavior was different from what he expected after "Bloch first informed me that women were there for the having.") And she concludes with "I'm sure you're just teasing me! Andrée's the one you really like -- admit it! And I'm sure you're right -- she's much nicer than me, and she's beautiful! Oh, you men!" 


But he has already realized that he doesn't love Andrée: "she was too intellectual, too high-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself." She was "never happier than when translating into French a novel by George Eliot." His obsession with Albertine only increases: 

It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman, these characters coming over me not just in response to the random recurrence of memories, but also under the variable influence of some intervening belief which afected this or that memory by making me see it differently. 

It's clear that instead of him possessing her, she has possessed him. 


And so the summer ends: "the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad, and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week." He and his grandmother and Françoise linger at the hotel, where only a few guests remain, including some wealthy and aristocratic young men, one of whom is the Marquis de Vaudémont. They invite him to join them at a restaurant, but he declines. (But since the name has been introduced, we can bet we'll encounter the marquis again.) The hotel grows emptier and colder, but it has become to feel like home for him, and he is "all the more determined to come back one day."


Finally he and his grandmother and Françoise leave, and we set out on The Guermantes Way.

Day Sixty-Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 427-439

From "I walked up and down, impatient..." to "...I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'"

_____

As the narrator waits for Elstir to finish the painting he's working on, worrying that he might miss seeing the "gang of girls," he examines a watercolor of a young woman. "The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait I was looking at came from the fact, which I did not understand, that it was a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed." The sexual ambiguity of the portrait intrigues him. At times the figure looks like "a rather boyish girl" and then again "an effeminate young man, perverted and pensive." The face's "wistful or forlorn" look, "in the contrast it made with the accessories from the world of theater and debauchery, gave a strange thrill." But it's also an expression that might have been assumed by the actress for the portrait. 

When Elstir sees what he's looking at, he dismisses it as worthless, something he'd done when much younger. But he also hides it away quickly when he hears his wife coming, even though "I can assure you the young creature in the bowler hat had no part to play in my life." Mme. Elstir, whom the artist addresses as "My beautiful Gabrielle!," makes little impression on the narrator at first. He notices that she has black hair that's turning white and was "common  but not simple in her manner," as if she's affecting a pose "required by her mode of statuesque beauty, which had lost, in aging, all its attractiveness." But he comes to realize that her husband had found in her an ideal of beauty that he had previously located only in his imagination -- that she is herself "a portrait by Elstir."  

But he remains impatient to leave in time to catch another glimpse of his girls. Finally, Elstir is ready to take a walk with him.

I was walking back toward the villa with Elstir when, with the suddenness of Mephistopheles materializing before Faust, there appeared at the far end of the avenue -- seemingly the simple objectification, unreal and diabolical, of the temperament opposite to my own, of the almost barbaric and cruel vitality which, in my feebleness, my excess of painful sensitivity and intellectuality, I lacked -- a few spots of the essence it was impossible to mistake for any other, a few of the stars from the zoophytic cluster of young girls, who, although they looked as though they had not seen me, were without a doubt at that very moment making sarcastic remarks about me. 

Self-consciously, he pretends to look at porcelain in a shop window while Elstir walks ahead to meet the girls. "The certainty of being introduced to the girls had made me not only feign indifference to them, but feel it." But to his surprise, "Elstir parted from the girls without calling me over. They turned up a side street and he came toward me. It was a fiasco." The sudden reversal of expectations, that he was going to meet Albertine at last, "made her almost insignificant to me, then infinitely precious; and some years later, the belief that she was faithful to me, followed by disbelief, would have analogous results." (Proust is not averse to giving the plot away.) 

The experience inspires the narrator to some thoughts about self-deception:

what is known to the will remains inefficacious if it is unknown to the mind and the sensitivity: they can believe in good faith that we wish to leave a woman, when only the will is privy to our attachment to her. They are fooled by the belief that we will see her again in a moment. But let that belief vanish, in the realization that she has just gone and will never come back, and the mind and sensitivity, having lost their bearings, are afflicted with a fit of madness, and the paltry pleasure of being with her expands to fill everything in life.

He follows this insight with an anecdote: His grandmother and some other ladies in Combray once set up a fund to provide an annuity for a girl they believed to be the daughter of their drawing teacher, who was dying shortly after the death of the woman they assumed to be his mistress. When they complimented the child's beautiful hair, the grandmother asked, "'Did her mother have such lovely hair?' To which the father gave the guileless reply: 'I don't know -- I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'" I confess that I don't quite get this: Is the point that they were wrong, and the woman was not his mistress? Or is it that he is unwilling to admit it? Or maybe she followed Joe Cocker's advice and left her hat on? It seems to me something has been lost either in the telling or the translating.

Day Sixty: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 404-416

From "It was the day after I had seen ..." to "... whatever does not correspond to that view."

_____

Sober again, the narrator resumes his obsession with his "group of girls," but also finds time to make more trips with Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, where they notice "a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray." The owner informs them that this is "the famous painter Elstir," whom the narrator remembers as having been mentioned by Swann. The narrator and Saint-Loup send a note to Elstir's table. The artist comes and sits with them, "but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him." He invites the narrator to visit his studio in Balbec.

But the narrator's obsession with the group of girls is such that he puts the visit off after, out for a walk with his grandmother, he sees one of the group "hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable," with "an authoritative-looking personage," perhaps her governess. "From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me." He takes every opportunity he can to be on the esplanade or wherever he might catch sight of the girls. 

Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again -- for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. ... Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days.

His grandmother is irritated at his failure to visit Elstir, and eventually he gives in and makes the visit. His mood changes when he sees the works in the artist's studio, "for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling thoughts for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality's composite spectacle."

Day Fifty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 380-391

From "I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert..." to "...the waiters who were about to serve us."

_____

Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.

Day Fifty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 369-380

From "This day, as on the preceding days, Saint-Loup..." to "...nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue."

_____

A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation. 

The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them. 

He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique. 

[F]or love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passerby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary to leave the house.

Is Proust talking about himself here? 

Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece." 

Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet. 

I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore.

We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting." 

No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder in a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life's potential for bringing unexpected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience ... the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces ... by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired ... with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment.

He knows, "having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds."

Day Fifty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 359-369

From "I went to see Bloch shortly after..." to "...until sleep came to dry my tears."

_____

Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."

We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)

An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.

And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.

Day Fifty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 340-359

From "Though it was a Sunday..." to "...'her again, one of these evenings.'" 

_____

The narrator goes to two very different social events.

In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."

We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."

I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.

And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which

like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.

When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."

And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?

Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."

The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.

So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.

Bloch père is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet the elder Bloch is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mention of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."

As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double status of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.

Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."

Day Fifty-Four: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 325-339

From "There was one thing about Bloch..." to "...He then rejoined the Marquise."

_____

Bloch badmouths the narrator to Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup to the narrator, and when each shows no sign of having told the other about his slanders, confesses to them that he did it to get each of them on his side. The narrator's reaction to this perverse little trick is curious:

I bore him no ill will, as my mother and grandmother had handed down to me not only their inability to bear a grudge, even against those who deserved it more than he did, but their reluctance to condemn anybody.

This is ironic (and may be meant ironically), because the narrator is gifted at condemnation by satire. He goes on further to observe that these days -- as contrasted with the idealized image he retains from his childhood -- "one's choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures ... and, on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you.... I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company."

Bloch's father invites the narrator and Saint-Loup to dine with him, but the invitation is delayed because of the anticipated arrival of Saint-Loup's Uncle Palamède. In talking about his uncle, Saint-Loup naively describes him as a man who in his youth, when someone made homosexual advances toward him, had his friends beat the man to a bloody pulp. But these days, Saint-Loup insists, his uncle would never do anything so brutal. Why, he even takes an interest in men of the working classes: "A footman who attends him in a hotel somewhere and whom he'll set up in Paris; a peasant lad whom he gets apprenticed to a trade -- that sort of thing. It's just this rather nice side of his nature, as opposed to his society side."

Uh-huh.

The next day, the narrator is returning to the hotel when he feels himself being watched, and finds that he is being stared at, "with eyes dilated by the strain of attention," by "a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a black mustache." When he returns the gaze, the man pretends to look at other things and makes "the gesture of irritation that is meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting" and breathes "out noisily, as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot."

Later, when he and his grandmother have gone for a walk, they meet the man in the company of Saint-Loup and Mme. de Villeparisis, who introduces him as the Baron de Guermantes, her nephew, then corrects herself: "What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus!" The baron shakes hands -- proffering two fingers -- with the narrator in a chilly fashion. And so the narrator learns that his uncle is Palamède de Guermantes, the brother of the owner of the château at Combray.

The narrator now realizes "that the fierce stare that had attracted my attention ... was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte." He asks Saint-Loup if Mme. Swann had been one of Charlus's mistresses, and Saint-Loup denies it emphatically: "'You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.' I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it."

The narrator's grandmother is quite taken with Charlus, who doesn't seem to fit under the rubric of "naturalness." "But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, distinguishing him from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things that made my grandmother so indulgent toward his aristocratic bias." That bias extends to women:

In the view of M. de Charlus, a pretty woman of the middle classes, in relation to any of these women [whose ancestry traced to the ancien régime], was like a contemporary painting of a road or a wedding party in relation to an old master, the history of which we know, from the pope or the king who commissioned it. ... M. de Charlus drew comfort too from the fact that a similar bias to his own prevented these few great ladies from frequenting other women of lesser breeding, thus enabling him to worship them in their unimpaired nobility.

The narrator's grandmother responds to this attitude because "she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon."

Then Charlus surprises the narrator, to whom he has "not spoken a syllable" after that chilly handshake, by inviting him and his grandmother to tea.