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.
From "The various waves of feeling sent through me ..." to "... and were replaced by others."
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The narrator decides to make his move on Albertine, but as usual he keeps overthinking things, devising oblique strategies to win her over.
He joins the gang, plus some extras recruited for the game, to play ring-on-a-string. (A ring is threaded onto a long piece of string, which is then tied together to form a circle. The player who is "it" stands in the middle of the circle while the other players pass the ring along the string. "It" tries to find the ring, and if he or she succeeds, the one who was holding the ring becomes "it.") The narrator is ticked off because another boy is next to Albertine, which deprives him of the opportunity to touch her hand.
A squeeze from the hand of Albertine had a sensual softness which seemed at one with the slightly mauve pink of her skin: it made you feel as though you were penetrating her, entering the privacy of her senses, an impression one had too from her resounding laugh, which was as suggestive of indecency as any throaty murmur of invitation, or as certain cries.
He lets himself get caught with the ring and, when he takes his position in the center, succeeds in finding the ring as it passes into the hand of the boy next to Albertine, so he can take the boy's place. But he's so preoccupied with touching her hand, and so convinced that she is returning his ardor, that he's shocked when she whispers, "Take the thing, would you! I've been trying to pass it to you for about half an hour!"
Embarrassed, he leaves the game in the company of Andrée to walk to the cliffs at Les Creuniers, which Elstir had painted. Andrée is clearly flirting with the narrator, but he doesn't notice, trying to say nice things about Albertine that Andrée would repeat to her: "Andrée said she was also very fond of Albertine and thought she was a dear; but the complimentary things I said about her friend did not seem to please her very much."
Along the way he sees a hawthorn bush, which is associated with his first sighting of Gilberte -- "just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers." He falls into an imaginary conversation with the bush about its vanished blossoms, and when he returns to Andrée resumes his praises of Albertine, about which he naively reports, "Despite this, I was never to learn whether Albertine heard a word of what I said about her." He also maintains his ignorance of Andrée's jealousy of his infatuation with Albertine when he recalls, "If it was suggested that Albertine's marriage prospects might not be as bad as was supposed, Andrée scotched the notion and repeated in a furious tone, 'Of course the girl's unmarriageable! I don't ned to be told -- I think it's terrible!'"
And so he wanders into another set of self-made barriers that prevent him from achieving his ostensible goal with Albertine, which he might have accomplished with a more direct approach.
I knew now that I loved Albertine, but I was in no hurry, alas, to tell her: the fact was that, since the time when I had played at the Champs-Élysées, my notion of love had undergone a change, while those to whom my love was addressed, though they were consecutive, remained unchanged. For one thing, the confession of love, the declaration of my tenderness to her whom I loved, no longer seemed to be one of love's classic and indispensable scenes; and for another, love itself, instead of appearing to be a reality eternal to me, now seemed a subjective pleasure. I sensed that the less Albertine knew about this pleasure of mine, the more she would be likely to let me go on enjoying it.
The course of true love never did run smooth, but this is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, he goes on flirting with Rosemonde and poor Andrée. When he hears that Albertine's aunt, Mme. Bontemps, is arriving for a visit, he desperately wants an introduction to her. So of course he pretends he doesn't, repeatedly scorning Mme. Bontemps to Andrée, while in the meantime arranging an introduction through Elstir. When he tells Andrée that he is invited to meet Albertine's aunt, though he really doesn't want to, she reacts as one might expect her to: "'I knew it all along!' Andrée exclaimed bitterly, gazing away at some invisible point, her eyes enlarged and flawed by displeasure."
From "When my attacks of breathlessness went on..." to "...improved my standing with the Swanns."
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Concerned by his "attacks of breathlessness," the narrator's parents call in Dr. Cottard, who prescribes "Drastic, violent purgatives. Milk and nothing but milk for several days. No meat. No alcohol." Quite sensibly, they reject this seemingly absurd treatment, but when the narrator keeps getting worse, they give in and follow Cottard's advice. It's sheer quackery of course, but it works, perhaps psychologically. "So it was that we realized that Cottard the buffoon was a great doctor."
When he gets better, however, they are convinced that the air of the Champs-Élysées is "unhealthy," endangering his meetings with Gilberte. But to his surprise, even disbelief, Gilberte invites him to tea at her house.
In love, it is not only the causes of catastrophe that may lie forever beyond our grasp: just as often we remain in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of sudden outcomes that are happier -- such as the one that Gilberte's letter brought to me -- or, rather, outcomes which appear to be happy, as there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling, which can generally look for no better reard than a shift in the side of the pain it entails.
The invitation is an accident: The narrator's friend Bloch is present one time when Cottard is making a call and comments that Mme. Swann is very fond of the narrator -- which is, as far as either of them knows -- untrue. But Cottard, always on the lookout to ingratiate himself, apparently speaks favorably of him to Odette, and the narrator becomes a regular visitor, welcomed cordially by the Swanns -- who have apparently forgotten their previous animus toward him (if it ever existed).
Such is the narrator's adulation of the Swanns that, when he reports to his parents that the staircase in the Swanns' home is a Renaissance antique and his father replies that it's a copy in a commonplace building where he once considered renting an apartment, the narrator clings to his faith: "I exercised the authority of my inner self and, despite what I had just heard, put behind me once and for all, as a true Catholic might shun Renan's Life of Jesus, the corrosive notion that the Swanns' apartment was a perfectly ordinary apartment, an apartment that we ourselves might have lived in."
And so the narrator is swept up in his adulation of the Swanns and his passion for Gilberte.
From "He responded politely to..." to "...as fleeting, alas, as the years."
_____
The narrator develops an obsession with Gilberte's parents. He knows that Swann has "quarreled" with his family and that they don't accept Mme. Swann into their circle of friends, but this hardly matters to him: "for me Swann was preeminently her father, and no longer Swann of Combray." But now he must prepare for a separation from Gilberte, who prattles on about the various things that will be occupying her in the coming days, including the fact that they may be leaving Paris for the holidays. He is devastated by the way "in which Gilberte had exploded with joy at the prospect of not coming back to the Champs-Élysées for such a long time."
Like Swann suffering Odette's absence, he relishes his sorrow, clinging to the gifts she has given him: a book by Bergotte and an agate marble. He wallows in "the perpetual concern I felt to show myself to advantage in her eyes, because of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue ostrich feather" like Gilberte's governess. And although he realizes "that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved," he is determined to "ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one."
His parents, by not indulging his infatuation with the Swanns -- he pulls at his nose and rubs his eyes in an effort to make himself look like Swann, causing his father to say, "The child has no sense, he'll make himself quite hideous" -- are a source of constant frustration, and sometimes of disillusionment, as when his mother identifies the old lady who is always in the park as Mme. Blatin, and as "horrible," "rather mad," "frightfully vulgar, and a troublemaker into the bargain." On the other hand, when his mother reports that she ran into Swann at the umbrella counter in Trois Quartiers and that he mentioned that the narrator played with his daughter, he is stunned "with the prodigious fact that I existed in Swann's mind."
Of the household, only Françoise is a source of any consolation, as when she reports what the governess has told her about Mme. Swann, that "she puts a good deal of trust in her medals. You won't find her going off on a trip if she's heard an owl hooting, or something ticking like a clock inside the wall, or if she's seen a cat at midnight, or if the wood furnniture creaks. Oh, yes! She's a person of great faith!" And so he's able to persuade Françoise to take him on walks in the Swanns' neighborhood and in the Bois de Boulogne.
It's in the Bois that he sees Mme. Swann in her element, among the "famous Beauties" who rode and strolled there. And here the narrator begins his shift from the boy's point of view to his current one, reconstructing the conversations that might have been had by on-lookers, which the boy simply perceived as "the indistinct murmur of celebrity":
"Do you know who that is? Mme. Swann! That means nothing to you? Odette de Crécy?"
"Odette de Crécy? Why in fact I was just wondering. ... Those sad eyes. ... But you know she can't be as young as she once was! I remember I slept with her the day MacMahon resigned."
"You'd better not remind her of it. She's now Mme. Swann, wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club who's a friend of the Prince of Wales. But she's still superb."
"Yes, but if only you'd known her then -- how pretty she was. She lived in a very strange little house filled with Chinese bric-a-brac. I remember we were bothered by the newsboys shouting outside, in the end she made me get up."
And so the identity of Mme. Swann, which the reader has probably already surmised, is confirmed, along with the knowledge that Gilberte is the daughter of a "woman whose reputation for beauty, improper behavior, and elegance was universal." (The narrator has already hinted that, "as will be seen," his parents "did not like my playing with her.")
In the final section of the novel, the narrator shifts into his present-day voice, an extended and nostalgic reverie on the beauty -- and the Beauties -- of the Bois de Boulogne: "My consolation is to think about the women I once knew, now that there is no more elegance." The motorcar has replaced the carriages, and the women who stroll there are "ordinary women, in whose elegance I had no faith and whose dress seemed to me unimportant.... Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women had vanished."
And so the novel concludes with a kind of realization about the search for lost time:
what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.... The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions whch formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.
From "One day, because I was bored..." to "...incognito in which he was wrapped."
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What's in a name? Quite a lot if that name is Gilberte, which the narrator hears in the park on the Champs-Élysées. He has not seen Mlle. Swann since the day of the "indecent gesture," yet his infatuation with her has simmered and now comes to a furious boil. Even the fact that her governess wears "a blue ostrich feather" becomes part of his obsession, to the detriment of his own governess, Françoise, whom he now "noticed for the first time with irritation that she had a vulgar way of speaking, and alas, no blue feather in her hat." He is jealous of those who keep her company, including "a lady of a certain age" who is always in the park, whom Gilberte greeted every day and who "asked Gilberte for news of 'her love of a mother.'"
But he is invited to play with Gilberte and her friends, and soon becomes a regular part of their group. One day a snowfall delays the arrival of her friends, leaving the narrator alone for a while with Gilberte. This "caused my love to progress, for it was like a first sorrow that she had shared with me." And when the friends arrive, "That day which I had so dreaded was in fact, one of the only ones on which I was not too unhappy."
We're beginning to see the parallels between the narrator/Gilberte and Swann/Odette. (I keep leaving the final e off of "Gilberte," and if I fail to correct it, don't assume that I'm one of those who insist that Gilberte really is a Gilbert, or Albertine an Albert.) But Swann and Odette, we are reminded, were adults. What we have here is a case of puppy love (between some rather precocious puppies, to be sure). As the narrator says,
I still believed that Love really existed outside of us; that, allowing us at the very most to remove obstacles in our way, it offered its joys in an order which we were not free to alter; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of confession the simulation of indifference, I would not only have deprived myself of one of the joys of which I had dreamed most often but that I would have fabricated for myself in my own way a love that was artificial and without value, without any connection to the real one, whose mysterious and preexisting paths I would have had to forgo following.
Or as Lorenz Hart put it: "Falling in love with Love is falling for make-believe."
When Gilberte finally speaks the narrator's given name (which he coyly keeps from us), the effect is startlingly sensual. He had "the impression that I had been held for a moment in her mouth, I myself, naked, ... her lips ... seemed to strip me, undress me." What's in a name, indeed.
The friendship with Gilberte also gives the narrator a new perspective on Swann, hitherto not much more to him than the man who came to dinner.
For he and Mme. Swann -- because their daughter lived in their home, because her studies, her games, her friendships depended on them -- contained for me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as was proper for gods all-powerful with respect to her, in whom it must have had its source, an inaccessible strangeness, a painful charm.
