Day Ninety-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 430-450

Part II, Chapter II, from "No sooner had the order to serve dinner..." to "...and make her decline further invitations."

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They go in to dinner with the Duchesse on the narrator's arm, a process like "an artfully contrived puppet theater" or a "vast, ingenious, obedient, and sumptuous human clockwork." And for all the formality and grandeur of the scene, the narrator joins in "the more readily because the Guermantes attached no more importance to it than a truly learned man does to his learning, with the result that one is less intimidated in his company than in that of an ignoramus." 

And so the narrator launches into an analysis of the Guermantes way of thinking and behaving. It is a portrait of an aristocracy long after its day had passed, of manners and comportment that were nearly wiped out a century earlier by the revolution. The Duc's "grandeur" consists in an "indifference to the splendor of his surroundings, his consideration for a guest, however insignificant, who he wished to honor." And the Duchesse "would not have admitted Mme. de Cambremer or M. de Forcheville to her society. But the moment anyone appeared eligible for admission to the Guermantes circle (as was the case with me), this courtesy disclosed a wealth of hospitable simplicity even more splendid, if such a thing is possible, than those historic rooms and their marvelous furniture." 

There is, however, a certain duality about the Guermantes, an inconsistency between the surface grace and the inner life. The Duc is "a man of touching kindness and unspeakable inflexibility, a slave to the most petty obligations yet  not to the most sacred commitments," exhibiting "the same aberration that typified court life under Louis XIV, which removes scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality and transforms them into questions of pure form." 

As usual, the narrator has to overcome an initial disillusionment: "But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after initially disappointing the imagination by having more in common with the rest of humanity than with their name, were subsequently capable, though to a lesser degree, of presenting various distinctive characteristics as food for thought." To wit, such physical traits as the men's hair, "massed in soft, golden tufts, halfway between wall lichen and cat fur." And he eventually perceives a weakness underlying their superior manner: 

Later on, I realized that the Guermantes did indeed think of me as belonging to a different breed, but one that aroused their envy, because I possessed merits of which I was unaware, and which they professed to regard as the only things that mattered. Later still, I came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere, and that in their responses to things admiration and envy went hand in hand with scorn and astonishment.

There is, he learns a rival branch of the family, the Courvoisiers. 

For a Guermantes (even a stupid one), to be intelligent meant to have a scathing tongue, to be capable of making tart comments, of not taking no for an answer; it also meant the ability to hold one's own in painting, music, and architecture alike, and to speak English. The Courvoisiers had a less exalted notion of intelligence, and unless one belonged to their world, being intelligent came close to meaning "having probably murdered one's parents."

Meeting a Guermantes could be a bit of an ordeal:

when the Guermantes in question, after a lightning tour of the last hiding places of your soul and your integrity, had deemed you worthy to consort with him in future, his hand, directed toward you at the end of an arm stretched out to its full length, seemed to be presenting a rapier for single combat, and the hand was in fact placed so far in front of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand he was acknowledging.

Even their movements are idiosyncratic. "But, given the sheer size of the corps de ballet involved, it is not possible to describe here the richness of this Guermantes choreography."

We are reminded in the midst of all this deftly satirical analysis of some facts we may have forgotten. For example, that the Duchesse de Guermantes is someone we met way back in Swann's Way as the Princesse des Laumes, and that she and her husband inherited the title of Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes on the death of her father-in-law. And that although the Princess of Parma outranks her socially, the Duchesse is more exclusive in her invitations than the Princess, refusing to allow entree of some people she has met at the Princess's home: "the same rule applied to a drawing room in a social as in a physical sense: it would take only a few pieces of furniture that were not particularly pleasing but had been put there to fill the room, and as a sign of the owner's wealth, to turn it into something dreadful.... Like a book, like a house, the quality of a salon, Mme de Guermantes quite rightly thought, depended essentially on what you excluded."

Day Thirty-Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 30-44

From "The cold beef with carrots..." to "...foreshadow what was to happen after his death?"

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Proust pulls several narrative tricks in this section.

First, he wears us down with several pages of the ineffably boring M. de Norpois, about whom the narrator comments, "The only deduction I could draw was that, in politics, it was a mark of superiority rather than inferiority to repeat what everybody else thought." And then, just as we are tempted to begin to skim, he allows M. de Norpois to deliver a small bombshell at the dinner table:

"I dined [last night] at the house of a lady of whom you may have heard -- the beautiful Mme Swann."

My mother all but trembled. ... However, she was curious to know what sort of people went to the Swanns', and inquired of M. de Norpois about his fellow guests.

"Well, now .... to tell you the truth ... I must say it's a house at which most of the guests appear to be ... gentlemen. There were certainly several married men present -- but their wives were all indisposed yesterday evening, and had been unable to go," the ambassador replied, with a crafty glance masked by joviality, his eyes full of a demure discretion that pretended to moderate their mischievousness while making it more obvious.

And he goes on in this vein, remarking on Swann's fallen state in society, until he finally delivers the second narrative coup, answering the question that has lurked in the reader's mind about why Swann has married Odette when the last time we saw him, he was convinced he no longer loved or was obsessed by her:

"And yet, you know, I don't think the man's unhappy. It's true that the woman stooped to some pretty nasty things in the years before the marriage, some quite unsavory blackmail -- if he ever declined to satisfy her something or other, she just forbade him access to the child."

And having let us know that Odette had conceived a child -- Gilberte, the reader assumes at this point -- who was used to bind Swann to her permanently, Proust does something that would be considered a flaw in most contemporary fiction writing: He superimposes the mature narrator on the point of view of the young narrator. It's as if this section of the novel is being narrated by two voices. It's the mature narrator who takes over to tell us how Odette manipulated Swann into a marriage which "came as a surprise to almost everybody, which is a surprise." It is the mature narrator, after all who is privy to the information that "when it occurred to [Swann] that he might one day marry Odette, there was only one person in society whose opinion he would have cared for, the Duchesse de Guermantes." And that the Duchesse, whom we saw through the young narrator's eyes earlier in the novel , is someone we have also seen in the "Swann in Love" section, when she was the Princesse des Laumes.

And here we get another narrative trick: imparting information to us about what is to come in the novel, a kind of "spoiler" that might even be considered a narrative flaw in the hands of a lesser writer.

[I]t can be said that the purpose of Swann's marrying Odette was to introduce her and Gilberte, even though no one else might be present, even though no one else might ever know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. As will be seen, the fulfillment of this social ambition, the only one he had ever harbored for his wife and child, was the very one that was to be denied him; and the veto preventing it was to be so absolute that Swann was to die without imagining that the Duchesse would ever meet them. It will be seen too that the Duchesse de Guermantes did come, after Swann's death, to be acquainted with Odette and Gilberte.

So why does Proust drop these as-will-be-seens on us, including the death of a major character, thereby eliminating at least one element of narrative suspense from his novel? We can only assume that Proust has bigger things in mind than mere plot.

Day Twenty-Five: Swann's Way, pp. 340-356

From "Swann had walked on into the room ..." to "... so small a creature as the comma bacillus."

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Proust remains in satiric mode, giving us a portrait of those gathered at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's soiree, including the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, and the various layers of snobbery on display. We also learn that Swann is the object of some anti-Semitism:

"It's funny that he should go to old Saint-Euverte's," said Mme de Gallardon. "Oh, I know he's intelligent," she added, meaning he was a schemer, "but still and all, a Jew in the home of the sister and sister-in-law of two archbishops!"


"I confess to my shame that I'm not shocked," said the Princesse des Laumes.


"I know he's a convert, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say converts remain more attached to their religion than anyone else, that it's all just a pretense."

(One thinks of the insistence that Obama is still a Muslim.)

The Princesse des Laumes reveals why Swann is so attached to her when Mme. de Gallardon persists in observing that "people claim that M. Swann is someone whom one can't have in one's house, is that true?" The Princesse replies, "Why ... you ought to know, ... since you've invited him fifty times and he hasn't come once."

The Princesse is herself no stranger to the sexual vagaries of high society, "because everyone knew that the very day after the Prince des Laumes married his ravishing cousin, he had deceived her, and he had not stopped deceiving her since." No wonder then that

Swann liked the Princesse des Laumes very much, and the sight of her also reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, the whole countryside which he loved so much and had ceased to visit so as not to be away from Odette.

He can talk to the Princesse in ways that he is unable to do with others: "Swann, who was accustomed, when he was in the company of a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in gallant language, to say things so delicately nuanced that many society people could not understand them.... Swann and the Princesse had the same way of looking at the small things of life, the effect of which -- unless it was the cause -- was a great similarity in their ways of expressing things and even in their pronunciation." So he fully understands and agrees that "life is a dreadful thing." When he hears her say this, "he felt as comforted as if she had been talking about Odette."

The Princesse, who senses Swann's unhappiness and its cause, says later to her husband,

"I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn't even interesting -- because they say she's an idiot," she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

Day Twenty: Swann's Way, pp. 276-287

From "Most of the time, at least, he met Odette ..." to "'... does a man no harm at any age.'"

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Swann has gone nuts. Even if we hadn't been alerted to the unfortunate outcome of his relationship with Odette earlier in the novel, it would be quite apparent by now that it can't end well. But there's no talking him out of it, even with warnings that she's more interested in his social status or his money. As he sees it, those things will only bind her to him the more: "self-interest ... would prevent the day ever coming when she would be tempted to stop seeing him." A "dilettante of immaterial sensations," he regards Odette as worth the price:

as we observe that people who are uncertain whether the sight of the sea and the sound of the waves are delightful convince themselves of it and also of the exceptional quality and disinterest of their own taste, by paying a hundred francs a day for a hotel room that allows them to experience that sight and that sound.

His "mental laziness" deters him from investigating her reputation as a "kept woman," and his behavior begins to attract comment like that of the Princesse des Laumes, whose dinner party he leaves early so as to meet Odette: "Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, one would excuse him for running off like that. But the fact is he doesn't care what people think." Indeed, he's pleased when Odette reveals to the Verdurins and the "little set" that Swann will be seeing her at home later.

Moreover, the depth of his obsession is revealed when, after Odette pleads a headache, meaning "no cattleyas tonight," he sneaks back to her house later and, seeing a light at what he thinks is her window, he fancies that she is entertaining a lover there. In fact, it fills him with a perverse, almost masochistic, joy.

And yet he was glad he had come: the torment that had forced him to leave his house had become less acute as it became less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, back then, a sudden helpless suspicion, was now in his grasp.... And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress; it was a pleasure in knowledge.

Characteristically, Swann intellectualizes his obsession:

[T]he curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

Of course, this "scientific investigation" ends in farce, when he knocks on the window and discovers that what he thought was her room is actually in the house next door.

At this point, Swann's love has turned to neurosis, and however he might try to shut out the embarrassment of this misstep, "To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it." And "every pleasure he enjoyed with her, ... he knew that a moment later, ... would supply new instruments for torturing him."

This section ends with a further unmasking of the "real" Odette, the woman who takes pleasure in Forcheville's cruelty to his brother-in-law, Saniette, and casts "him a glance of complicity in evil." It's an expression that tortures Swann.