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."

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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."

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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 Ninety: The Guermantes Way, pp. 290-306

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

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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.