Day One Hundred Seventy-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 226-249

From "At that moment the butler came to tell me ..." through "... now broadly spread beneath the snow."

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The narrator's reverie in the library comes to an end when the music in the drawing-rooms is over and he can join the guests there, but he is sure he can continue in the same meditative frame of mind. He's misaken because "a dramatic turn of events occurred which seemed to raise the gravest of objection to my undertaking."

He enters the drawing-room to discover what appears to him to be a masked ball taking place: "everybody seemed to have put on make-up, in most cases with powdered hair which changed them completely." In other words, time has changed them. The transformation is more than physical: M. d'Argencourt, who has long treated the narrator coldly, has become "another person altogether, as kindly, helpless and inoffensive as the usual Argencourt was contemptuous, hostile and dangerous."

the new, almost unrecognizable d'Argencourt stood there as the revelation of Time, which he rendered partially visible. In the new elements which made up the face and character of M. d'Argencourt one could read a certain tally of years, one could recognize the symbolic form of life not as it appears to us, that is as permanent, but in its reality, in such a shifting atmosphere that by evening the proud nobleman is depicted there in caricature.

The experience, the juxtaposition of the people he remembers with what time has made of them, "was like what we used to call an optical viewer, but giving an optical view of years, a view of not one moment, but of one person set in the distorting perspective of Time."

And then the table is turned on him: the Duchesse de Guermantes addresses him as "my oldest friend." A young man calls him "an old Parisian." Another young man, whom he had met when he arrived, leaves a note for him signed, "'your young friend, Létourville.' 'Young friend!' That was how I used to write to people who were thirty years older than myself, like Legrandin." Bloch arrives, and in his mannerisms "I would have recognized the learned weariness of an amiable old man if I had not at the same time recognized my friend standing before me ... and was astonished to notice on his face some of the signs generally thought to be more characteristic of men who are old. Then I understood that this was because he really was old, and that it is out of adolescents who last a sufficient number of years that life makes old men."

Most disturbing to him is the realization that he had "discovered this destructive action of Time at the very moment when I wanted to begin to clarify, to intellectualize within a work of art, realities whose nature was extra-temporal." He persists, however, in thinking of himself as young, and when Gilberte de Saint-Loup suggests that they go to dinner together, he agrees, "So long as you don't think it compromising to dine alone with a young man," which causes the people around him to laugh and him to correct himself, "or rather, with an old man." Still, he thinks to himself, "I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing."

And now it dawned upon me what old age was -- old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends' children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d'Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world. 

And he continues to survey the crowd of once-familiar faces -- Legrandin, Ski, etc. -- to note how "Time, the artist, had 'rendered' all these models in such a way that they were still recognizable but they were not likenesses, not because he had flattered them, but because he had aged them." He observes the influence of heredity:

I had seen the vices and the courage of the Guermantes recur in Saint-Loup, as also his own strange and short-lived character defects, and in Swann's case his Semitism. I could see it again in Bloch. He had lost his father some years ago and, when I had written to him then, had not at first been able to reply to me, because in addition to the powerful family feeling that often exists in Jewish families, the idea that his father was a man utterly superior to all others had turned his love for him into worship.

And he stumbles on the difficulty of reconciling his long-held image of people with the present reality, "to think of the two people under a single heading," to realize "that they are made of the same material, that the original stuff did not take refuge elsewhere, but through the cunning manipulation of time has become this, that it really is the same material, never having left the one body."

Day One Hundred Sixty-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 3-29

From "All day long, in that slightly too bucolic residence..." through "...the oblivion which piles up so relentlessly?)"

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The narrator is still where he was at the end of The Fugitive, staying at Tansonville with Gilberte. Saint-Loup shows up occasionally during his stay, but the narrator finds him changed, and in his description of him repeats verbatim one he had given of Legrandin in The Fugitive. He is "slenderer and swifter," with the "habit of conducting himself like a gust of wind."

A full description of him would also have to take account of his desire, the older he grew, to appear young, as well as of the impatience characteristic of men who are always bored and blasé, being too intelligent for the relatively idle life they lead, in which their faculties are never fully stretched.

Toward Gilberte, Saint-Loup affects "a sentimentality ... that bordered on the theatrical.... Robert loved her. But he lied to her all the time." He remarks to the narrator on her resemblance to Rachel, which "one could, at a stretch, now see between them," and the narrator speculates that this caused Saint-Loup to pick her over "other women of comparable fortune" when his family put pressure on him to marry. The narrator also observes in Saint-Loup a "regression to the birdlike elegance of the Guermantes" which brings out in him the effeminate "manners of M. de Charlus," although "Robert never permitted his type of love to come up in conversation," dodging the topic of homosexuality as if he were indifferent to it.

As for the narrator, he has "lost all recollection of the love of Albertine," but he discovers that "there is also an involuntary memory of the limbs" when he wakes up in the night and calls out "Albertine!" It seems that "a recollection suddenly burgeoning within my arm had made me reach behind my back for the bell, as if I had been in my bedroom in Paris." This physical memory causes him to call out for her help in locating the pull.

Morel, he sees, is "treated as the son of the house." Françoise naively regards this as characteristic of the generosity of the Guermantes, having observed that Legrandin similarly served as patron to Théodore, the one-time grocerer's assistant in Combray. The narrator meets Théodore's sister and learns that his surname is Sautton, and that he "must be the person who wrote to me about my Figaro article!"

In conversation with Gilberte, the narrator says, "I once knew a woman who ended up completely shut away by the man who loved her; she was never allowed to see anyone, and could only go out accompanied by trusty servants." Gilberte replies that "someone as good as you must have been horrified by that," and adds that he ought to get married: "A wife would make you healthy again, and you world make her very happy." He claims that he was once engaged but "couldn't make up my mind to marry her" and that she broke it off "because of my fussiness and indecision." This is as close as he can get to confession: "It was, indeed, in this over-simplified form that I regarded my adventure with Albertine, now that I could see it only from the outside."

From his window, he can see the spire of the church at Combray, but he postpones visiting it:

"Never mind, it'll have to wait for another year, if I don't die in the meantime," seeing no obstacle to this other than my death, never envisaging that of the church, which seemed bound to endure long after my death, as it had endured for so long before my birth.

More than Albertine, the thing that haunts him now is his "lack of an aptitude for literature." And it is brought home to him when Gilberte gives him a copy of "a recently published volume of the Goncourts' journal," which he reads in bed that night. In this parody "excerpt" Goncourt visits the salon of Mme. Verdurin: "Cottard, the doctor, is there with his wife, and the Polish sculptor Viradobetski, Swann the collector, an aristocratic Russian lady, a princess with a name ending in "-ov" which I don't quite catch." "Brichot, from the University" is there, too, and the talk turns to Elstir, whom, he is told, they called "Monsieur Tiche." The extract is filled with elaborate and minute descriptions of the room and even the china from which they eat, and reports of the conversation. The narrator is stung by "The magic of literature!" and reflects,

Certainly, I had never concealed from myself the fact that I did not know how to listen, nor, as soon as I was not alone, how to observe. My eyes would not notice what kind of pearl necklace an old woman might be wearing, and anything that might be said about it would not penetrate my ears.

He rebukes himself for making judgments about people, for later discovering that someone he thought "a society bore, a stuffed shirt, ... was a major figure!" He concludes that "Goncourt knew how to listen, as he knew how to see: I did not." And he regrets that he is "unable to go back and see all the people whom I had failed to appreciate" and that "the progress my illness was making" is forcing him "to break with society, give up travelling and visiting museums, in order to enter a sanatorium and undergo treatment."

Day One Hundred Sixty-Six: The Fugitive, pp. 609-658*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter III: Staying in Venice, concluded, from "After lunch, whenever I did not set out to wander around Venice...."
Chapter IV: A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup

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Okay, first off: I think the telegram announcing Albertine's resurrection is a mistake that Proust would have corrected in revising The Fugitive. The reaction to the telegram is not at all what we expect from the intensely obsessive narrator, who more characteristically would have endlessly pondered Albertine's motives in both faking her death and then announcing that she had done so. And he is also paranoid enough to wonder if the telegram is a hoax, and if so, who is playing the trick on him and to what end. But instead he stuffs it in his pocket and goes off to prowl the back alleys of Venice. It can be argued that it has thematic significance, in fusing Albertine with Gilberte, but that has already occurred in his imaginings. And the explanation that the errors in the telegram are the result of Gilberte's faulty penmanship is awkward at best. The telegram is a melodramatic gimmick that the novel would have been better off without.

But accepting what the novel gives us, we set out on a bit of a travelogue, ostensibly so the narrator can take notes for a "study of Ruskin." (Proust, of course, translated Ruskin, as the note reminds us.) It's striking in this chapter how often Venice is likened to, or contrasted with, Combray, and not, as one might expect, Paris. The reason, I think, is that Proust wants to bring us back to the beginning of the novel as he nears its conclusion -- and at this point, the end of The Fugitive looks like a conclusion, with its assemblage of revelations about many of the principal characters.

Albertine still hovers in his mind, of course, despite his assertions that he has forgotten her. A painting by Carpaccio "almost revived my love for" her because one of the costumes worn by a figure in it resembles the Fortuny coat she wore on their trip to Versailles on the eve of her departure. And he even wonders if a young Austrian woman he meets also "loved women" the way Albertine did.

A figure from the past -- the Baroness Putbus -- almost makes him stay in Venice after his mother leaves because of the promiscuous lady's maid that Saint-Loup once told him about. But he makes a mad dash for the train and joins her, carrying three letters -- two for her, one for him -- that had been handed him at the last moment. The letters announce two marriages: Gilberte's to Saint-Loup and Mme. de Cambremer's son to Jupien's niece. Of the latter marriage, the narrator reflects:

It allows the Cambremers to drop anchor at the Guermantes', where they never dared hope pitch their tent; what is more, the child, since she was adopted by M. de Charlus, will have plenty of money, which was indispensable for the Cambremers since they had lost their own; and finally she is the adopted and, according to the Cambremers, probably the real -- that is, the natural -- daughter of someone whom they consider to be a prince of the blood.

The narrator of course knows the truth of the relationship between Charlus and Jupien, and between Charlus and Morel, who once was going to marry Jupien's niece. Moreover, he recognizes that both marriages signal the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain's definition of society, with Saint-Loup, a Guermantes, marrying "the daughter of Odette and a Jew." Money, which Jupien's daughter will inherit from Charlus and which Gilberte already possesses, is the key, and it has been, as the narrator tells us, the cause of much behind-the-scenes intrigue among the various families involved. The narrator's mother has heard "that it was the Princess of Parma who arranged the marriage of the young Cambremer." Meanwhile, the rumors have started that both grooms are gay. Charlus, on learning from the Princess that Cambremer is the nephew of Legrandin, is pleased: "If he took after his uncle, after all, that shouldn't put me off, I have always said that they make the best husbands."

The effect on society of the marriages is colossal: "the magical charm that Mme de Cambremer had imagined the Duchesse de Guermantes to possess evaporated as soon as she found herself solicited by the latter." And "Gilberte started to show her contempt for what she had so desired, to declare that the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Germain were fools unfit for company, and, matching words with deeds, did indeed cease to seek their company." And when Jupien's niece dies of typhoid soon after the wedding, because she is thought to be related to Charlus the effect is extraordinary: "the death of a petty commoner throws all of the princely families into mourning." Meanwhile, Legrandin has begun styling himself Comte de Méséglise. And Charlus  discovers that his widowed son-in-law shares his sexual orientation.

Gilberte and Saint-Loup decide to live at Tansonville, but the neighbors at Combray are not impressed with the fact that Odette's daughter lives there now. The narrator goes to visit them, leaving his current girlfriend in the apartment he now rents and under the supervision of a friend "who was not attracted to women." His visit is particularly to try to cheer up Gilberte, "since Robert was deceiving her, but not in the manner which everyone believed and which perhaps even she still believed, or at any rate declared. For "Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, showed himself off in public with women whom he compromised and whom everyone, no doubt even Gilberte, believed to be his mistresses." In fact Saint-Loup is having an affair with Charles Morel.

Reviewing the past, the narrator comes to realize that Saint-Loup had been giving signals of his homosexuality for a long time. He had once told the narrator:

"It's a shame that your girlfriend from Balbec does not have the fortune required by my mother, I think that the two of us would have got on well together." He had meant to imply that she was from Gomorrah as he was from Sodom.... In the end it was the same factor that had inspired both in Robert and in me the desire to marry Albertine (that is, her love for women). But the causes of our desire, like its ends, were opposite. I had been driven to it by the despair I had felt at the discovery, Robert by his satisfaction; I in order to prevent her through constant surveillance from yielding to her inclination; Robert in order to cultivate it and to enjoy the freedom that he would allow her to offer him her girl-friends.

Saint-Loup "ceaselessly" impregnates Gilberte, but he flirts with waiters in restaurants. And the narrator learns from Aimé that Saint-Loup had put the moves on "the lift" during the narrator's first visit to Balbec, causing a scene that had to be hushed up. The narrator thinks Aimé may be lying, but he can't be sure. He also remembers that Saint-Loup had looked "rather lingeringly" at Morel one time at the Verdurins, and remarked "It's strange how this lad remind me of Rachel." But Saint-Loup's acceptance of his homosexuality also affects his friendship with the narrator: "It was only as long as he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterwards, at least for a period of time, the men who did not interest him directly were subject to a display of indifference."

Odette now finds herself in the role of being protected by Saint-Loup: "The fact that she was no longer in her prime was of little importance in the eyes of a son-in-law who did not love women."

Thus, thanks to Robert, she was able, on the threshold of her fiftieth (some said her sixtieth) year to dazzle with extraordinary luxury at any dinner-table and very soirée to which she was invited. Without needing as she had done before to have a "friend," who now would no longer have forked out, or even acted his part. Thus she embarked on a final period of chastity, which seemed definitive, and she had never been more elegant.

The narrator's views on homosexuality also seem to have mellowed: "I found that it made no difference from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human to take it wherever one could find it." But Saint-Loup's "liaison" with Morel offends him because Saint-Loup is married, and to Gilberte, and he feels the pain of losing his friendship.

He feels another pain when he visits Combray and no longer experiences the love he had once felt for the place. "I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte." Moreover, Gilberte reveals that she had fallen in love with him the first time they saw each other, and she explains the "indecent gesture" she made at the time: "I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I'm ashamed of it now." For his part, he now realizes that his life might have been different "if I had not met two shadowy figures coming towards me side by side in the twilight" and decided to break with Gilberte. But he also observes that the torment of that love and separation has vanished:

For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collapses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.

In Search of Lost Time might well have ended right there.

Day One Hundred Nineteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 273-288

Part II, Chapter II, from "Cottard was far more inclined to say, 'I'll see..." to "...there got the doctor, Saniette, and Ski."

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Cottard is so devoted to the Verdurins and their "Wednesdays" that nothing, not even an emergency demanding his professional attention, can deter him: 

For Cottard, kindly man though he was, would renounce the comforts of a Wednesday not for a workman who had had a stroke but for the headcold of a minister. Even in this last instance he would say to his wife: "Make my sincere apologies to Mme Verdurin. Warn her I'll be late getting there. His Excellency might well have picked another day to catch cold." One Wednesday, their elderly cook having cut the vein in her arm, Cottard, already in a dinner jacket in order to go to the Verdurins', had given a shrug when his wife timidly asked him whether he could not dress the wound. "But I can't, Léontine," he had exclaimed with a groan, "you can see I've got my white waistcoat on."

Cottard is convinced that the Verdurins, because Mme. Verdurin inherited "thirty-five million," are the cream of society, and that in comparison to the Duchesse de Guermantes, "Mme Verdurin is a great lady, the Duchesse de Guermantes is probably on her uppers." 

At a station, a beautiful girl gets on the train and attracts the narrator's eye. "I have never again met, nor identified, the beautiful girl with the cigarette.... But I have never forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing." And the experience induces a meditation on time and memory, for he realizes that the beautiful girl would, ten years later, have "faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time." This experience with an anonymous girl precedes the mention of the fact that the Verdurins are upset because their favorite violinist has disappeared. We are told here only that he has been "doing his military service near Doncières" and that he had not met them at the station the last time they expected him. The attentive reader will remember another musical soldier recently spotted at a train station. 

It will be especially unfortunate if the violinist doesn't show up tonight, Brichot observes, because Mme. Verdurin has invited the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer, from whom they are leasing La Raspelière. Cottard is delighted, and says to the narrator, "What did I tell you? The Princesse Sherbatoff, the Marquis and Marquise de Cambremer." The Verdurins have had some concern about whether the anti-Dreyfusism of the Cambremers will put them at odds with the overwhelmingly Dreyfusard view of their little set, but they resolve to seat them next to Brichot, "the only one of the faithful who had taken the side of the General Staff, which had lowered him greatly in Mme Verdurin's esteem."

Ski launches into praise of Mme. de Cambremer's intelligence and prettiness. "Since I thought the complete opposite of what Ski had expressed..., I contented myself with saying that she was the sister of a very distinguished engineer, M. Legrandin," the narrator comments, and he admits to the others that he has already met her. He adds that he is looking forward to seeing her so that he can remind her he wants to borrow a book they had talked about: the former curé of Combray's volume on the etymology of local place-names. Brichot immediately launches into an extended monologue about the errors in the curé's book that takes up almost four pages in the novel. 

We are rescued from Brichot's philology by his realization that they have passed the stop where they were to meet the Princesse Sherbatoff. The group launches a search for the Princesse and finds her in an empty carriage reading the Revue des deux mondes: It is "the lady who, in this same train, two days earlier, I had thought might be the madam of a brothel." (Again, never ignore even the anonymous walk-on characters in Proust.) The Princesse has some good news for the group: The missing violinist has been found. "He had kept to his bed the previous day on account of a migraine, but would be coming this evening and bringing an old friend of his father's whom he had met again in Doncières." Now who could that be? 

The affair of the violinist reminds Brichot of something: "our poor friend Dechambre, formerly Mme Verdurin's favorite pianist, has just died." And Brichot and Cottard argue about whether Dechambre had played the Vinteuil sonata at Mme. Verdurin's when Swann was there. (He did.)

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."

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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 Eighty-Three: The Guermantes Way, pp. 193-209

From "'Oh, good evening,' said Mme de Villeparisis..." to "...'The water didn't touch me.'" 

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And so the narrator is introduced to Mme. de Guermantes, who barely acknowledges him. Then the company is joined by someone who has made previous attempts to visit Mme. de Villeparisis and is now grudgingly admitted: Legrandin. "I had wanted to go and greet Legrandin at once," the narrator tells us, "but he kept himself as far away from me as he could, no doubt in the hope that I might not hear the highly refined flatteries he kept lavishing on Mme de Villeparisis." Instead, he talks with Bloch, who talks mostly about himself: "'Yes, I do live a charmed life,' Bloch responded smugly, 'I've three really good friends -- quite enough for me -- and an adorable mistress.'" 

Meanwhile, Mme. de Villeparisis's rival, Alix, indulges in some name-dropping with Mme. de Villeparisis and is coolly one-upped by her. Mme. de Villeparisis informs Mme. de Guermantes that Legrandin's sister is Mme. de Cambremer, whom the Duchesse describes as a "vile woman," a "monster," and "an impossible woman," and observes of Legrandin that he and his sister "both have that doormat humility and the mental resources of a circulating library. She's just as sycophantic and just as annoying as he is. I think I begin to see the family likeness."

The narrator offends Legrandin with a joke that he takes the wrong way: "'Well, monsieur, I feel almost excused from being in a salon, now that I find you in one, too.' Legrandin drew the conclusion from this (at least this is what he accused me of a few days later) that I was a thoroughly spiteful young person who delighted only in being nasty." 

But the salon chiefly gives the narrator an opportunity to see and reflect upon Mme. de Guermantes: 

Later, when I had become indifferent to her, I was to know many of the Duchesse's distinctive features, notably (to keep for this moment to what  already charmed me at the time without my being able to recognize it) her eyes, which captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there is no sun; and a voice that one would have thought, from its first hoarse sounds, to be almost common, in which there lingered, as on the steps of the Combray church or the pâtisserie on the square there, the lazy, rich gold of provincial sunlight.

He still has difficulty disassociating the person from the aura her family name casts upon her: "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window" and finds it hard to believe that she doesn't "reflect the amaranth color of the last syllable of her name." In fact the Duchesse merely participates in the spiteful snark of salon conversation, taking the opportunity to make a barbed joke about the weight that Mme. Leroi has gained. But the narrator's attention perks up when she mentions Bergotte and praises his wit. 

The scene is a comedy of manners, largely composed of name-dropping and incidental details of the current social conventions, such as the "fashionable quirk of the time" in which gentlemen "set their top hats on the floor beside them." The group gathers around to admire the flower-painting that Mme. de Villeparisis is engaged in, which leads Bloch to a "clumsy gaffe": "Bloch was anxious to express his admiration with some suitable gesture, but managed only to knock over the vase containing the spray of blossom with his elbow, and all the water was spilled on the carpet." When he overhears the historian say that the Marquise has "a magic touch," Bloch takes the remark as a sarcastic reference to his accident and replies "insolently, 'There's not the least cause for alarm. The water didn't touch me.'" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Sixty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 416-427

From "At the hotel in Balbec ..." to "... it might lend some of itself to me, in their eyes."

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Viewing Elstir's work inspires the narrator to musings on Impressionism. (Commenters on Proust often identify Elstir with -- among others -- Monet.)

Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of. One of the metaphors that recurred most often in the sea pictures surrounding him then was one that compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them....

On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear fontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean....

Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest....

Elstir's intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to discover them....

The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant in order to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity (since the things one knows are not one's own), was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated.

And so on. 

Elstir also takes it upon himself to correct the narrator's first disappointed experience of the church of Balbec. And he disagrees with Legrandin's comment to the narrator that Brittany was "bad for someone inclined to wistfulness."

"Not at all," he replied. "When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn't be kept away from it, he mustn't have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what's in it. And you'll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you'll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it's more of it, it's all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them."

"Wistfulness" is not a word we use much anymore, and in this context I'd like to know what the original word in French was. The dictionary gives, as translations for "wistfulness," nostalgie, mélancolie and tristesse. But "nostalgia" and "melancholy," though the narrator is certainly given to both, seem to narrow the focus to, on the one hand, a longing for the past, and on the other, a generalized feeling of the blues. "Wistfulness" suggests dreaminess and longing, and I think Grieve must have hit on the right word to characterize the narrator. Certainly no one ever put more effort into getting to know his dreams, his longings, his nostalgia and his melancholy than the narrator does. 

And then a surprise: "the young cyclist from the little group of girls came tripping along the lane, with her black hair, and her toque pulled down, her plump cheeks, and her cheerful, rather insistent eyes." She greets Elstir, and he tells the narrator that her name is Albertine Simonet. 

"There's hardly a day," Elstir said, "when one or another of [the gang of girls] doesn't come down the lane and drop in to pay me a little visit," a statement that reduced me to despair -- if I had gone to see him as soon as my grandmother had suggested it, I might well have made the acquaintance of Albertine long since!

Day Forty-Nine: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 259-271

From "There were other people (a certain actress..." to "...'to Biarritz, and over to Cannes.'" 

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The narrator continues with his sociological examination of the people in the hotel dining room, with a remarkable observation about the room at night as "an immense and wonderful aquarium" looked in upon by

the working classes of Balbec, the fishermen, and even middle-class families pressed against the windows, in an attempt to see the luxurious life of these denizens, glowing amid the golden sway of the eddies, all of it as weird and fascinating for the poor as the existence of strange fish and mollusks (but whether the glass barrier will go on protecting forever the feeding of marvelous creatures, or whether the obscure onlookers gloating toward them from the outer dark will break into their aquarium and hook them for the pot, therein lies a great social question).

It's a reminder that the France in which Proust lived, a society so layered and stratified that the author can spend page after page analyzing those layers and strata, was born of a bloody revolution. Proust is often thought of as an aesthete, shut off from the world in a cork-lined room, but here he betrays an acute and urgent awareness of the volatility of his society.

Among the visitors to the dining room, he sees "a man with a low forehead and a pair of shifty eyes flitting between the blinkers of his prejudices and breeding, who was the first gentleman of these parts, none other than Legrandin's brother-in-law," the one to whom Legrandin evaded providing the narrator's grandmother with a letter of introduction.

Of course, being "the first gentleman of these parts" means nothing. As the narrator observes, "their proper rank, the one they would have had in Paris, say, ... would have been a very lowly one." But he wants to be admired by them nonetheless, and no one more than the daughter of the arrogant M. de Stermaria, "of an obscure but very old Breton family," who had taken offense when he found the narrator and his grandmother occupying his usual table and had made a little scene over "his table being taken by 'persons unknown to him.'" Mlle. de Stermaria becomes the object of one of the narrator's romantic fantasies.

So when Mme. de Villeparisis appears in the dining room and gives "a start of joy and surprise" at seeing the narrator's grandmother there, the narrator is distressed that his grandmother ignores her. He hopes to use an acquaintance with Mme. de Villeparisis to impress Mlle. de Stermaria, but instead his grandmother considers it "a matter of principle that when you go on vacation, you sever relations with people; you do not go to the seaside to meet people, there is plenty of time for that in Paris; they just make you squander in trite civilities the invaluable time you should be spending exclusively in the open air, communing with the waves."

He continues with his fantasies of spending time with Mlle. de Stermaria "in her romantic Breton château." And here we get one of Proust's more convoluted sentences:

It felt as though I could never properly possess her anywhere else, as though I would have to trespass on the places that surrounded her with so many memories, as though these memories were a veil that my desire for her would have to strip away, one of those that are drawn between a woman and certain men by Nature (with the same purpose that makes it interpose the act of reproduction between all its creatures and their keenest pleasure, setting between the insect and the nectar it desires the pollen it must carry away) so that, misled by the illusion of possessing her more completely in that way, they feel compelled first to take possession of the landscapes among which she lives and which, though much more fruitful for the imagination than the sensual pleasure, would not have sufficed without it to attract them.

I confess that even though I've parsed that sentence several times, dodging around the parenthesis and various subordinate clauses to try to hook pronouns to antecedents, I'm still not sure I understand what it means. Other than, of course, that in matters of the heart the narrator tends to overanalyze things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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