Day One Hundred Seventy-Five: Finding Time Again, pp. 171-191

From "The Duchesse de Létourville, who was not going to the Princesse de Guermantes's party ..." through "... than that sort of cinematographic approach."

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Jupien and the narrator leave the Baron sitting on a bench to rest while they go for a stroll and talk about Charlus and his state of health. Jupien confides that he can't leave the Baron alone for long because "he's still as randy as a young man" and he's so generous that he keeps giving away "everything he's got to other people." The Baron was temporarily blind, and during this period of sightlessness Jupien once left him alone in a room at "the Temple of Shamelessness," as he calls his brothel, and returned to find Charlus with "a child who wasn't even ten years old." Charlus also tends to cause trouble because of his pro-German sympathies, which he is not shy about voicing loudly:

Even though the war was long over, he would groan about the defeat of the Germans, among whom he counted himself, and say with pride: "And yet there is no doubt but that we shall have our revenge, for we have proved that it is we who are capable of the greater resistance and who have the better organisation." 

Considering the date of Finding Lost Time, Proust is being chillingly prophetic here.

Jupien parts with the narrator: "Look, he's already managed to get into conversation with a gardener's boy.... I can't leave my invalid alone for a second, he's nothing but a great baby." The narrator continues on his way, reflecting that the change from his usual routine is doing him some good, though "The pleasure today seemed to me to be a purely frivolous one, that of going out to an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes." He reflects once again on his lost vocation: "I now had proof that I was no longer good for anything, that literature could no longer bring me any joy, whether through my own fault, because I was not talented enough, or through the fault of literature, if it was indeed less pregnant with reality than I had thought."

And then, entering the courtyard to the Guermantes's house, he dodges an approaching car and steps on some uneven paving stones, triggering the first of a series of epiphanies:

But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive around Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my intellectual talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment.

He realizes that the paving stones had triggered a memory of similarly "uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St Mark's" in Venice, just as "the taste of the little madeleine had reminded me of Combray. But why had the images of Combray and Venice given me at these two separate moments a joy akin to certainty and sufficient, without any other proofs, to make death a matter of indifference to me?"

Then, while he is waiting in a sitting room for the conclusion of a piece of music that his hostess wishes not to be interrupted, it happens again: a servant knocks a spoon against a plate, which triggers his memory of a hammer striking the wheel of the train he had recently sat in, feeling indifferent to the beauty of the countryside. And again, a butler gives him a plate of petits fours and a glass of orangeade, and when he wipes his mouth with the napkin, the texture of it recalls a similar sensation while he was looking out to sea at Balbec. Each instant of involuntary memory -- connections between past and present triggered by the madeleine, the paving stones, the sound of the spoon, the texture of the napkin -- "suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."

The narrator perceives in these moments in which "the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in" something he calls "extra-temporal." When he tasted the madeleine, "at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being."

This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.

He believes he has experienced "a little bit of time in its pure state." This perception of "the essence of things"

languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. 

"I knew that places were not the same as the pictures conjured up by their names" -- an observation that takes us back to the concluding sections of Swann's Way ("Place-Names: The Name") and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower ("Place-Names: The Place"). He recalls the disillusionments at Balbec, the fact that he did not experience its beauty when he was there as much as he did in remembering it, and that he was unable to recapture that beauty when he went back for a second visit.

Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came in contact with a direct pleasure which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths.

This is a vindication of the narrative strategy of In Search of Lost Time, the endless analysis of relationships (Swann-Odette, narrator-Gilberte, narrator-Albertine), the attempt to understand the emotional intricacies of a life.

It is also an attempt to give coherence to one's own existence:

I remembered with pleasure, because it showed me that I was already the same then and gave me back something that was fundamental to my nature, but also with sadness when I thought that I had not progressed since then, that in Combray already I used attentively to fix before my mind's eye some image which had impelled me to look at it. 

He has been trying to decipher "impressions such as that made on my by the sight of the steeples of Martinville" and other epiphanic moments. And he concludes

I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art? 

The "primary character" of these epiphanies, the thing that gives them their authenticity for the narrator (and hence for the reader), "was that I was not free to choose them." They are not subject to logical analysis. "The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary." Whereas the spontaneous impression contains its own truth, and demands an elucidation that "can bring the mind to a more perfected state, and give it pure happiness. An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards."

Art, then, is a process of discovery, not of will: "we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, ... we cannot shape it according to our wishes." And above all, it can't be dominated by rules or theories: "A work in which there are theories is like an object with its price-tag still attached." Proust/the narrator here strikes back at proclamations about the social or political role of the artist: "the sound of the spoon on a plat, or the starched stiffness of the napkin ... had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations." He admits that the war has brought out proponents of these roles, which remind him of "M. de Norpois's simple theories in opposition to 'flute-players'" when he criticized Bergotte to the young narrator. And he even takes a dig, I think, at stream-of-consciousness writers:

Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.  

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 Thirty-Nine: The Prisoner, pp. 102-117

From "The morning after the evening when Albertine..." to "...peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

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Proust returns to one of his favorite topics, the interface between sleeping and waking, as the narrator arises in the morning to the musical sounds of street-seller crying their wares. "I had never enjoyed them so much as I did now that Albertine was living with me. They seemed to me the joyous signal of her awakening and, by involving me in the life outside, made me more conscious of the calming power of a dear presence, now as constant as I could wish." It helps, of course, that "she had given up her idea of going to the Verdurins' and would be going instead, as I had suggested to the 'special' matinée at the Trocadéro." First, however, she is going riding with Andrée, and we have a bit of foreshadowing as he warns her "no gymnastics" and tells her how dreadful it would be if she had an accident. On the other hand, he also reflects "how wonderful if, once on horseback, she had ridden off into the blue yonder, liked it there, and never come home! How much simpler it would have been if she could have gone and been happy somewhere else."

As for his thoughts on the waking state, he comments that "the waking world still enjoys the superiority of being able to be continued every morning, unlike dreams which are different every night. But perhaps there are other worlds more real than the waking world. For have we not seen how the 'real world' is transformed by every revolution in the arts, and without waiting for that, by the degree of aptitude or cultivation which distinguishes and artist from an ignorant fool?" He subscribes to the notion of modernists that the dream state provides the artistically inclined with a privileged insight into reality. Before habit and memory set in, "One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack." But he recalls a failed effort to remain in a dream state and concludes that "We constantly have to choose between health and wisdom on the one hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always been too much of a coward to choose the second."

Albertine is delighted by the street-sellers, and wants to buy everything they offer, from winkles to carrots. She imagines the various foods, and her thoughts turn to the elaborate ice creations made in Paris at the time, until the narrator is put on edge by the sensuality of her descriptions, particularly of "the physical sensation of imagining something so delicious, so cool in her mouth, which gave her an almost sexual pleasure." He is further disturbed when her recollections turn to her stay "at Mlle Vinteuil's, at Montjouvain," where they would "sit in the garden and travel all round France by drinking a different sparkling mineral water every day." He tries to take her mind off of Mlle. Vinteuil -- or rather his mind off of what they might have done together, and thinks again of the choice between living with Albertine or separating from her: "which sort of peace should one put first (either by continuing one's daily, exhausting activity, or by resuming the pain of separation) -- peace of mind, or the peace of the heart?"

Day One Hundred Thirty-Four, The Prisoner, pp. 19-35

From "Françoise came in to light the fire and..." to "...a look this evening and let you know."

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The twigs that Françoise tosses on the fire to get it started spark another Proustian moment, a happy one this time. Their "smell, forgotten all through the summer, traced a magic circle around the fireplace in which, seeing myself reading at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as happy, staying in my room in Paris, as if I had been on the point of leaving for a walk toward Méséglise or meeting Saint-Loup and his friends on field exercises.... It was not just the weather outside that had changed, or the smells in my room, but inside me there was a change of age, the replacement of one person by another."

He is still convinced that he doesn't love Albertine, but as in the past, he is in the grip of his fantasy of possession. She "held nothing new for me. Every day I found her less pretty. Only the desire which she excited in others, when I learned of it and began to suffer again, in my desire to keep her from them, could put her back on her pedestal. Suffering alone gave life to my tedious attachment to her." And yet he persists in trying to make her happy by giving her presents, especially buying her expensive clothes. His chief consultant on matters of fashion is the Duchesse de Guermantes, to whom Albertine was indifferent at first, even hostile, out of her "hatred for upper-class people." But "my friend's republican disdain for a Duchess was replaced by an intense interest in a woman of fashion."

And so the narrator visits the Duchesse often, and devotes several pages to further analysis of her character, including her country roots, which reveal themselves in her vocabulary and pronunciation, which he finds not unusual, likening them to those of Françoise. On his latest visit to the Duchesse, he finds the Duc and M. de Bréauté present also. The Duc is still obsessed by the Dreyfus affair, even though it has been over for two years -- "twenty years later people would still be talking about it," the narrator comments. The narrator's comments on a dress the Duchesse once wore, "by an obscure association of ideas" provokes M. de Bréauté to mention the Dreyfus case and the Duc to an anti-Semitic tirade:

"If a Frenchman commits theft or murder, I don't feel I have to say he's innocent, just because he's a Frenchman like me. But the Jews will never admit that one of them could be a traitor, even though they know it's true, and they don't care in the least about the terrible repercussions ... that can result from their friend's crime." 

The Duchesse quite sensibly replies, "Certainly if Dreyfus had been a Christian the Jews wouldn't have taken such an interest in the case, but they did, because they realize that if he hadn't been  Jew, people wouldn't have been so ready to believe him a traitor." The Duc can only bluster that "Women don't understand anything about politics" and "France should expel all the Jews."

The narrator "saw danger ahead and hurriedly began to talk frocks again."

Day One Hundred Twenty-Three: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 369-382

Part II, Chapter III, from  "I could not keep awake. I was taken up..." to "...difference in status between M. de Charlus and Aimé." 

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Chapter III begins with an extended passage on some familiar themes in the novel: sleep, memory, and time. Exhausted from his visit to the Verdurins, the narrator can hardly stay awake as he's taken up to his room by an elevator operator who chatters on about his sister, who is the mistress of a rich man and who "never leaves a hotel without relieving herself in a wardrobe or a chest of drawers, so as to leave a small memento for the chambermaid who'll have to clean it up." He seems inordinately proud of this.

The narrator observes that in dreams there are two kinds of time, but then narrows it to "only one, not because that of the waking man holds good for the sleeper, but perhaps because the other life, that in which we sleep is not -- in its profound part -- subject to the category of time.... On these mornings (which is what makes me say that sleep perhaps knows nothing of the law of time), my attempt to wake up consisted above all in an attempt to introduce the obscure, undefined block of sleep that I had just been living into the framework of time." 

As for memory, the narrator comments on "the great Norwegian philosopher" he had met at the Verdurins and his endorsement of Bergson's theory that "We possess all our memories, if not the faculty of recalling them." The narrator (or the Norwegian philosopher -- Proust doesn't quite make it clear) objects, 

But what is a memory that we cannot recall? Or let us go further. We do not recall our memories of the last thirty years, but we are totally steeped in them; why, then, stop at thirty years, why not continue this previous existence back before our birth?... If I can have, in me and around me, so many memories that I do not remember, this oblivion (a de facto oblivion at least, since I do not hae the faculty of seeing anything) may apply to a life that I have lied in the body of another man, or even on another planet.... The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man that I have been since my birth than this latter remembers what I was before it.

The arrival of the valet de chambre interrupts these metaphysical speculations, and the narrator's thoughts turn to Charlus, about whom he had dreamed that he "was 110 years old and had just twice slapped him mother, Mme Verdurin, in the face for spending five billion on a bunch of violets." Charlus had recently dined in a private room at the hotel with "none other than the footman of a cousin of the Cambremers." All of the servants at the hotel, even Françoise, had recognized the footman, but his "playacting" had fooled the guests. The occasion allowed the narrator to identify Charlus to Aimé, who was surprised to learn his identity. The narrator learns that Charlus had been smitten with Aimé and had written him a long letter commenting, among  other things, on his resemblance to a dead friend of Charlus's. The narrator speculates that Charlus's relationship with Morel is "perhaps Platonic," leading the Baron to "now and again seek out company for an evening such as that in which I had just met him in the hall."  

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 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."

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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." 

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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 Seventy-Four: The Guermantes Way, pp. 75-85

From "But as it happened, I was wrong...." to "...These thoughts carried me far." 

_____

Instead of pining away in his hotel room, the narrator explores the hotel, which takes up only a portion of a former palace, with "passages winding back on themselves" and "lobbies as long as corridors." There's an Alice in Wonderland quality to the narrator's explorations, in which the rooms themselves take on human traits and personalities: "behind a hanging curtain I discovered nothing more than a small closet whose escape had been blocked by the outer wall, hiding there rather sheepishly, staring at me in fright from its little round window, turned blue by the moonlight." 

There follows an extended reverie on the nature of sleep and dreams, as an escape from habit: 

The same is true of sleep as of our perception of the external world. It needs only some modification in our habits to make it poetic; we need only to have dozed off involuntarily on top of the bed while undressing for the dimensions of sleep to be altered and its beauty felt. 

He makes clear the point of these passages -- "to describe human life" -- by noting that it's impossible to do so "without bathing it in the sleep into which it plunges, and which, night after night, encircles it like the sea around a promontory.... In the end, the world in which we live when we are asleep is so different that the foremost concern of people who have difficult in going to sleep is to escape from the waking world." 

And so he analyzes the different kinds of sleep and dreams, including the deepest, "leaden sleep" -- the kind of sleep, when we wake from it, "Identity has vanished," and we have trouble placing not only where we are, but even who we are:

So how, then, searching for our thoughts, our identities, as we search for lost objects, do we eventually recover our own self rather than any other? Why, when we regain consciousness, is it not an identity other than the one we had previously that is embodied in us? ... The resurrection that takes place when we wake up -- after the beneficent attack of mental derangement we call sleep -- must in the end be similar to what happens when we recall a name, a line of poetry, or a refrain we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be thought of as a phenomenon of memory.

He is now afflicted by an anxiety attack, uncontrollable worries about his grandmother and various unnamed "business" in Paris, which spur him to send for the ever-patient Saint-Loup. 

He would listen to my explanation and respond pertinently; but before he had uttered a world he had transformed me into his own likeness; compared with the important duties that had kept him so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries that a moment ago I had been unable to endure a second longer seemed to me as negligible as they did to him. 

Who needs Paxil when you've got Saint-Loup? 

He begins to venture out to see Saint-Loup's regiment performing its maneuvers and to revert "to the healthy exhaustion of my childhood in Combray."  

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 Forty-Six: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 217-234

From "By the time my grandmother and I..." to "...for once as a single lasting picture." 
_____
Proust begins the section called "Place-Names: The Place" with a recapitulation of what might be called the "madeleine theory" of memory, or as the narrator puts it, "the general laws of remembering," which are predicated on the fact that memories are often spontaneously generated by similar sensory events that, when we experienced them in other contexts, we thought too trivial to notice: sights, sounds, scents, tastes -- like that of the tea-soaked crumbs of a madeleine.

Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Having finally made the journey to Balbec, and convincing himself that he "had reached a state of almost complete indifference toward Gilberte," he still finds that life is "unchronological" and "anachronistic in its disordering of our days." He sometimes finds himself "living farther back in time than I had been on the day or two before, back in the much earlier time when I had been in love with Gilberte." Overhearing some words spoken by a passing stranger recalls a similar phrase from a conversation Gilberte had once had with her father.

The temporal disorientation lasts only briefly, however, because "his life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it prevail."

Habit may weaken all things, but it also stabilizes them; it brings about a dislocation, but then makes it last indefinitely. For years past, I had been roughly modeling my state of mind each day on my state of mind the day before. At Balbec, breakfast in bed -- a different breakfast -- was to be incapable of nourishing the ideas on which my love for Gilberte had fed in Paris.The trip itself puts him once again in the hands of the women who have coddled him, not only his mother but also his grandmother and Françoise. And this man whom we have seen holding his own with Bergotte, listening to the grownup conversations in Mme. Swann's salon, selling his Aunt Léonie's bequest to woo Gilberte, and spending his time with prostitutes, is once again reduced to the emotional state of a little boy fearing separation from his mother.

Or as he puts it another way: "the best way to gain time is to change place."

On the other hand, the process of changing place seems to cast him back into a second childhood, in which all his childish attachment to his mother is restored. And his enthusiasm for seeing this place he has dreamed of is tempered by his awareness that he will probably be in some way disappointed or disillusioned: "Long before going to see La Berma, ... I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit; and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."

Day Forty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 150-161

From "It was about this time that Bloch..." to "...personal freedom, has not yet acquired."

_____

Bloch turns up again, this time to take the narrator to his first brothel, and to give him "the truly divine gift ... which can be acquired only from reality: the charm of the individual." One individual that a madam thrusts upon him is "a Jewess" whom she calls Rachel, and whom the narrator nicknames "Rachel, when of the Lord," a rather arch allusion to an aria in Halévy's opera La Juive: "Rachel, quand du seigneur."

The madam doesn't get the joke. And the narrator doesn't get the girl -- she is "busy" on later visits, and he stops visiting the brothel, though not before giving the madam several pieces of furniture, including "a large couch," that he has inherited from his Aunt Léonie. "But as soon as I set eyes on them again in that brothel, put to use by those women, I was assailed by all the virtues that had perfumed the air in my aunt's bedroom at Combray, now defiled by the brutal dealings to which I had condemned the dear, defenseless things. I could not have suffered more if it had been the dead woman herself being violated." And here Proust plays an ironic memory trick -- ironic, given that it was the madeleine soaked in tea that caused the memory of Aunt Léonie and of Combray to surface so dramatically earlier in the novel -- by noting that "memory does not usually produce recollections in chronological order, but acts more like a reflection inverting the sequence of parts," so that "it was not until much later that I remembered this was the couch on which, many years before, I had been initiated into the pleasures of love by one of my cousins."

Meanwhile, he is also selling off his aunt's silverware so he can buy flowers for Mme. Swann. However, things are not going so well with Gilberte. He notes that he gave up the idea of becoming a diplomat because the career might have separated him from Gilberte, but his obsession with her and the Swanns has also distracted him from his writing -- to the dismay of his parents and his grandmother. He details the long chain of excuses and rationalizations -- familiar to any procrastinator -- that keep him from sitting down to write.

Moreover, he begins to sense that Gilberte is not quite so enamored of him as he is of her.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity that in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual, and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since if one had not obtained what one desired.

The Swanns, "who were more and more convinced I was an improving influence on" Gilberte, don't help when they stop her from going to a dancing class and instead make her stay to entertain the narrator. "Gilberte's face was devoid of all joy, laid waste, a blank, melancholy mask, which for the rest of the afternoon seemed to grieve privately for those foursome reels being danced without her, because of my presence here." And so he finds himself "on the threshold of one of those difficult junctures which most of us encounter several times in our lives," when pride and self-indulgence cause an avoidable pain.

Day Thirty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 93-107

From "In any case, Swann was blind..." to "...foreseen by someone much less gifted."

_____

Swann's marriage to Odette is built on denial -- on both sides. He "was blind not only to the gaps in Odette's education, but also to her poverty of mind." For her part, her "inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say." It's a marriage of "subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar."

Except that Swann has indulged his own vulgar streak, setting up "experiments in the sociology of entertainment" in which he brings together "people from very different backgrounds." When he announces that he's going to have the Cottards come to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme, he looked "like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves." But by doing so he annoys Mme. Bontemps, who has recently been introduced to the Duchesse and is upset that someone else of her acquaintance also has that privilege.

(Here there seems to be a typographical error: "Would she even have the heart to tell her husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure that she had assured him was unique to themselves?" The not [my italics] in that sentence contracts its apparent meaning -- that the Cottards were going to partake of the same pleasure. I think the intended word must be now. Unfortunately, I don't have another text handy to cross-check.)

We also learn that Swann is no longer jealous of Odette, that he was "now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere." He realizes that when he was jealous in the past, he fell into another kind of denial, determined to believe "that Odette's daily doings were quite innocent." Now he realizes that "she had ... been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe." And now he is carrying on an affair of his own, with

a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette.... And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.

Proust also slips one of his foreshadowings in here, telling us that "the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counterdemonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death."

At the Swanns' the narrator gets -- though he's unaware of it at this time -- another link to the couple's past, when he hears Odette play the theme from the Vinteuil sonata that used to be their theme song. The music allows the narrator to reflect on the interlocked nature of time, memory, and music:

Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. ... What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory.... This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.... Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible toward the unknown depths of the distant future.

This is the shrewd comment of the mature narrator, of course, and not of the young narrator who is willing to capitulate to received opinion rather than to trust his own disappointment at the performance of La Berma. Of course, he also adds, "It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or airplanes had a future, and it is possible to be an acute psychologist yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted."

Is the narrator, who has already demonstrated himself to be "an acute psychologist," talking about himself here?

Day Seven: Swann's Way, pp. 73-89

From "At last my mother would say to me ..." to "... sonorous, redolent, and limpid hours."

_____

The narrator is sent out to "get a little fresh air first so that you don't start reading right after leaving the table" -- a caution familiar to every bookworm child. We are on the brink here of a dense philosophical excursus on the externality of nature and the internality of literature, the kind of passage that stymies some would-be readers of Proust, and may have been the one that stymied me in my earlier attempts to read him. Some of it remains opaque to me, but I think I glimpse where he's going.

But first, we meet Uncle Adolphe, the brother of the narrator's grandfather, "who no longer came to Combray because of a quarrel that had occurred between him and my family, through my fault." The narrator "loved the theater, with a platonic passion since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter the theater." And he is drawn to his uncle because Adolphe was friends with actresses -- "and also some courtesans whom I did not distinguish clearly from the actresses. He would entertain them at home. And if we went to see him only on certain days, this was because on the other days women came whom his family could not have met." But the narrator, slipping away from home to see his uncle on one of the "other days," does meet one, a woman in a pink dress, who demonstrates to him "one of the touching aspects of the role of these idle and studious women that they devote their generosity, their talent, a free-floating dream of beauty in love ... to enrich with a precious and refined setting the rough and ill-polished lives of men." Infatuated with her, he blurts out to his parents the full story of his encounter, with the result that his uncle "died many years later without any of us ever seeing him again."

We also meet the pregnant kitchen maid who reminds Swann of the image of Charity in Giotto's Padua frescoes of the Virtues and Vices, who "holds her flaming heart out to God, or, to put it more exactly, "hands" it to him, as a cook hands a corkscrew through the vent of her cellar to someone who is asking her for it at the ground-floor window." Swann has given the narrator photographs of the frescoes which hang in the schoolroom. "There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical." This correlation between art and life leads us into the reflections on the external world and the world of the imagination.

When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

The natural world remains at a distance, because it is apprehended only by the senses. So too do human beings: "A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift."

Fictional characters, on the other hand, occur "within us." The novelist "provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them."

Similarly, the landscapes of the imagination have for the narrator an immediacy that observed nature lacks. But then memory transforms the external world into a world that can be apprehended by the imagination. So these reflections on the relationship between life and art, between nature and the imagination, between experience and memory, end with a lyrical valorizing of the Sunday afternoons in Combray:

Lovely Sunday afternoons under the chestnut tree in the garden at Combray, carefully emptied by me of the ordinary incidents of my own existence, which I had replaced by a life of foreign adventures and foreign aspirations in the heart of a country washed by running waters, you still evoke that life for me when I think of you and you contain it in fact from having gradually encircled and enclosed it -- while I went on with my reading in the falling heat of the day -- in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and spanned by leafy branches, of your silent, sonorous, redolent, and limpid hours.

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

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

_____

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.

Day Four: Swann's Way, pp. 37-48

From "Mama spent that night in my room" to "... from my cup of tea." 

_____

And so we come to the scene everyone knows (or knows about), the "Proustian moment," the epiphany in a teaspoon. I admit that from my previous forays into Proust, I had thought it came at the very beginning of the novel, not 40-some pages in. (Although in a novel the size of In Search of Lost Time, 40-some pages in does rather qualify as "the very beginning.")

The narrator's account of the scenes of his childhood rising before him, awakened by the taste of crumbs from a madeleine steeped in tea, comes after his account of the rare, privileged night his mother spent in his room, reading to him from books that were supposed to be a gift from his grandmother. It is "a sort of puberty of grief, of emancipation from tears," "the beginning of a new era" that "would remain as a sad date."

It also reinforces the grandmother's role in forming the narrator's character as an aesthete, a man of discerning tastes. She "could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive a intellectual profit." And even when forced to select a gift that was utilitarian, preferred to give antique things in which "long desuetude had effaced their character of usefulness."

We could no longer keep count, at home, when my great-aunt wnted to draw up an indictment against my grandmother, of the armchairs she had presented to young couples engaged to be married or old married couples which, at the first attempt to make use of them, had immediately collapsed under the weight of one of the recipients.

Of course, the narrator comes to rebel against the imbuing of art with "that moral distinction which Mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books."

But for years afterward, his childhood in Combray remained limited to what it has been in the first 40-some pages of the novel: "the theater and drama of my bedtime" -- "as though Combray had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it had always been seven o'clock in the evening there." The rest of it comes to life when he pursues something ineffable awakened by the taste of the madeleine in tea. At first, he doesn't know what he has glimpsed: "Undoubtedly what is palpitating thus, deep inside me, must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me." Note here that he ascribes the volition to the memory, that he must meet the memory -- "struggling too far away" -- halfway.

Ten times I must begin again, lean down toward it. And each time, the laziness that deters us from every difficult task, every work of importance, has counseled me to leave it, to drink my tea and think only about my worries of today, my desires for tomorrow, upon which I may ruminate effortlessly.

For Proust this is, I think, the distinction between the artist and the layman, the willingness to struggle against the "laziness" that traps most of us in the quotidian.

And then he meets the memory, of aunt Léonie giving him a taste of madeleine soaked in lime-blossom tea. It's the fortuitous combination of tea and madeleine that does it -- the intimate power of taste that proves more effective than sight alone in raising the past. He had seen madeleines in shops without awakening any distinct sensations. He even finds a way of moralizing the image of the little shell-shaped cake, "so fatly sensual within its severe and pious pleating."

But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

And so rooms, roads, people and the town join themselves in his imagination. The stage is set.

Day Three: Swann's Way, pp. 23-37

From "But the only one of us for whom ..." to "... in the silence of the evening."

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Swann comes to dinner, with the result that the narrator is sent to bed early without a goodnight kiss from his mother. He persuades Françoise, the cook who is tasked with looking after him, to take a letter to his mother asking her to come see him, but his mother declines the request. Unable to sleep, he waits until she comes upstairs, even though he fears that he'll be punished by being sent away to school. To his surprise, his father tolerates his misbehavior, and even suggests that his mother spend the night in the narrator's room.

But first, we see the grandmother's spinster sisters again, and learn their names -- though Proust makes a mistake when he reveals them. One sister addresses the other as Céline, but when she replies, Proust writes, "answered her sister Flora." He has no particular interest in distinguishing Flora from Céline; they are there only for sake of the joke, which in this case involves their making "such a fine art of concealing a personal allusion beneath ingenious circumlocutions that it often went unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed." And so their thanks to Swann for the case of wine he has sent them goes so veiled in indirect references that grandfather is indignant at the end of the evening when he learns that their coy allusions to "good neighbors" were their expressions of gratitude.

We learn one more bit of information about Swann's unhappy marriage, which has been alluded to earlier, when the narrator hears his great-aunt say, "I think he has no end of worries with that wretched wife of his who is living with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all of Combray knows. It's the talk of the town."

But the bulk of these pages deals with the narrator's long evening of waiting for his mother's arrival. They include some of Proust's famous long, curlicue sentences, exploring every nuance of the boy's anxiety but also anticipating some of the obsessiveness that will fill his later life. Proust's psychological insight radiates through these pages, as when he remarks of the "precious and fragile kiss" that on dinner-party evenings he had to "snatch ... brusquely, publicly, without even having the time and the freedom of mind necessary to bring to what I was doing the attention of those individuals controlled by some mania, who do their utmost not to think of anything else while they are shutting a door, so as to be able, when the morbid uncertainty returns to them, to confront it victoriously with the memory of the moment when they did shut the door." That's about as good a description of obsessive-compulsive disorder as you can find.

In the end, the father is kind, Abraham spares Isaac, and we have a happy ending. Or as happy an ending as you're likely to find in a writer like Proust, who can turn any triumph into melancholy:

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. It was a long time ago, too, that my father ceased to be able to say to Mama: "Go with the boy." The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. But for a little while now, I have begun to hear again very clearly, if I take time to listen, the sobs that I was strong enough to contain in front of my father and that broke out only when I found myself alone again with Mama. They have never really stopped; and it is only because life is now becoming quieter around me that I can hear them again, like those convent bells covered so well by the clamor of the town during the day that one would think they had ceased altogether but which begin sounding again in the silence of the evening.

Day Two: Swann's Way, pp. 11-23

From "Certainly I found some charm ..." to "'It would be ridiculous.'" 

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We meet Swann, but first we witness some of the family dynamic. The grandmother's love for being outdoors, even in a rainstorm, puts her at odds with the rest of the family, and even with the gardener whose paths are "too symmetrically aligned for her liking" and the maid who finds her muddied skirts "a source of despair and a problem." She is also perturbed by the failure of the narrator's father to "make him strong and active" and "build up his endurance and willpower." The narrator's mother submits to the father, unwilling to "try to penetrate the mystery of his superior qualities." The great-aunt's teasing of his grandmother provokes the narrator, who, "already a man in my cowardice, ... did what we all do, once we are grown up, when confronted with sufferings and injustices: I did not want to see them."

The boy's love of his mother is so intense that he can't enjoy it. When he hears her coming to his room to kiss him goodnight, the moment is marred because of his awareness that it will end. He comes to prefer anticipation to fulfillment:

It heralded the moment that was to follow it, when she had left me, when she had gone down again. So that I came to wish that this goodnight I loved so much would take place as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite in which Mama had not yet come.

And then Swann appears, to set the household dynamic into a new alignment. He has, we are told, an "aquiline nose" and "green eyes under a high forehead framed by blond, almost red hair, cut Bressant-style." A footnote to Lydia Davis's translation tells us that the actor Jean-Baptiste Prosper Bressant "introduced a new hairstyle, which consisted of wearing the hair in a crew cut in front and longer in the back." In other words, Swann had a mullet. But the chief thing that we learn is that, unknown to his neighbors in Combray, Swann, the stockbroker's son, moves in the highest social circles when he is in Paris.

Our ignorance of this brilliant social life that Swann led was obviously due in part to the reserve and discretion of his character, but also to the fact that bourgeois people in those days formed for themselves a rather Hindu notion of society and considered it to be made up of closed castes, in which each person, from birth, found himself placed in the station which his family occupied and from which nothing, except the accidents of an exceptional career or an unhoped-for marriage could withdraw him in order to move him into a higher caste.

This sets in motion some Jane Austen-style comedy, centered on the great-aunt who has pigeonholed Swann because his town house is in "a part of town where my great-aunt felt it was ignominious to live." She handles Swann, "who was elsewhere so sought after, with the naive roughness of a child who plays with a collector's curio no more carefully than with some object of little value."

Proust typically uses Swann's unsuspected double life as a means to reflect on the nature of personality -- we are what we are seen to be:

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

And since this is a novel about recovering time, the narrator observes that the varied encounters we have with one person over time are freighted with revelations not such much about them as about who we were when we previously encountered them:

I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann -- to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one's life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality -- to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

Finally, we meet grandmother Bathilde's spinster sisters, with whom Jane Austen would have had almost as much fun as Proust does:

They were women of lofty aspirations, who for that very reason were incapable of taking an interest in what is known as tittle-tattle, ... and more generally in anything that was not directly connected to an aesthetic or moral subject. The disinterestedness of their minds was such, with respect to all that, closely or distantly, seemed connected with worldly matters, that their sense of hearing -- having finally understood its temporary uselessness when the conversation at dinner assumed a tone that was frivolous or merely pedestrian ... -- would suspend the functioning of its receptive organs and allow them to begin to atrophy.