The Proust Project: Moving Day

When I started the Proust Project a little over two months ago, I was unaware how much it would come to dominate this blog. And I realize that some (most? all?) of you who visit here don't have quite as consuming an interest as I do in reading In Search of Lost Time. 

So with that in mind, I have created a separate blog for my Proust notes. I copied all of the entries on this blog over to the other one, which will be devoted entirely to matters Proustian. 

Henceforth, the Proust Project can be found there.

The Proust Project, Day 65

Where this began
Day 64

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 465-.

From "On arriving at Elstir's..." to "...conditional on differing circumstances.'"

_____

As the narrator becomes more involved with the gang of girls, the focus of his attention shifts from Albertine to first one and then another, from Gisèle to Rosemonde to Andrée. Gisèle, "the one who looked rather poor and tough," greets him with "a smile, open and affectionate and full of blue eyes." He is walking with Albertine and Andrée, who snub Gisèle, Andrée accusing her of "awful dishonesty" and Albertine referring to her as "a little pest." But on learning that Gisèle is leaving for Paris, the narrator decides to slip away and follow her: "Gisèle would not be surprised to to see me, and once we had changed trains at Doncières, we would have a corridor train to Paris; while the English governess dozed, I would have Gisèle all to myself.... I could have assured her with total veracity that I was no longer attracted to Albertine." 


But he misses the train, so he goes back to his pursuit of the other girls, "all of them having stayed on in Balbec." Gisèle "now could not have been further from my thoughts." He begins spending every day with them, making excuses not to go on a carriage ride with Mme. de Villeparisis, staying away from Elstir's studio unless the girls go there, breaking his promise to visit Saint-Loup. "The Andrée who had struck me to begin with as being the most unfriendly of them all was in fact much more sensitive, affectionate, and astute than Albertine." (Does it need to be pointed out that Andrée is the third girl he's fallen for who has the feminized version of a man's name?) He now finds in Albertine "something of the Gilberte I had known in the earliest days, the explanation of which is that there is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times." He also notes that "Andrée, who was extremely wealthy, showed great generosity in sharing her luxury with Albertine, who was poor and an orphan." 


In the company of the girls, he finally pays a visit to Elstir, where the talk turns to the artistic potential of "regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside racecourse," to women's fashion, and to yachting.

The Proust Project, Day 64

Where this began
Day 63

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 450-465.

From "On arriving at Elstir's..." to "...conditional on differing circumstances.'"

_____

The introduction to Albertine is treated to Proustian microanalysis. First, the narrator tells us that, "On going into a fashionable gathering as a young man, one takes leave of the person one was, one becomes a different man." And that the introduction itself was pleasurable only in retrospect: "Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present." 

And if he is a different person in the situation, so is Albertine, his perception of her and her charms constantly changing, "as each part of her made out of imagination and desire was replaced by a perception much less." Her speech is different from what he expected, suggesting "a level of cultivation far above what I wold have imagined to be that of the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf course." He finds himself focusing on "one of her temples, flushed and unpleasant to look at, instead of the singular expression in her eyes, which until then had been the thing about her that had always been in my thoughts." 

But then he discovers himself from her point of view, as she mentions things that she had noticed about him as he crossed the room, pretending not to  focus on the impending introduction to her: "everything that I believed, not to be of importance only to myself, but to have been noticed only by me, and yet here they were, transcribed in a version I had not suspected existed, in the mind of Albertine." 

Now, feeling "a moral obligation toward the real Albertine to keep the promises of love made to the imaginary one," he begins a process of reconciling "the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted" with "the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea" of his imagination. He has noticed a beauty mark on her face, but can't seem to decide where it is. Today it was "on her cheek, just below the eye." But when he had seen her before, "when she had greeted Elstir in passing, I had seen it on her chin. Each time I saw Albertine, I noticed she had a beauty mark, and my misguided memory moved it about her face, sometimes putting it in one place, at other times another." 

He also experiences the disappointment that he had felt on the first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes, on seeing the church at Balbec, on watching La Berma in Phèdre, and on meeting Bergotte for the first time: "Disappointed as I was with Mlle Simonet, a young girl not very different from others I knew, I consoled myself with the thought ... that even though she had not lived up to my expectations, at least through her I would be able to meet her friends in the little gang." 


But when he sees her again a few days later on the esplanade, she has changed again. He almost doesn't recognize her as "a young girl with a little flat hat and a muff" and, "remembering the good manners which had so struck me, I was now surprised by their opposite, her coarse tone and her 'little gang' manners." Even the peripatetic beauty mark has relocated: 

Just as a phrase of Vinteuil that had delighted me in the sonata, and which my memory kept moving from the andante to the finale, until the day when, with the score in hand, I was able to find it and localize it where it belonged, in the scherzo, so the beauty mark, which I had remembered on her cheek, then on her chin, came to rest forever on her upper lip, just under her nose.

The citation of a phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, the leitmotif for Swann's infatuation with Odette, is a pretty obvious signal that the narrator will undergo a similarly dramatic relationship with Albertine. 


He begins an integration with Albertine's world when they meet Octave, "[a] young man with regular features and tennis racquets" who is "the son of a very wealthy industrialist." He and Albertine chat about golf while the narrator seethes with jealousy, noting that Octave "had no idea of how to use certain words, or even of the most elementary rules of good grammar." But he's gratified when Albertine dismisses him as "a lounge lizard ... incapable of conversing with you. He's good at golf and that's all he's good at." 


And then Bloch turns up, informing the narrator that he's going to Doncières to see Saint-Loup. When he leaves them, Albertine informs the narrator, "'I don't like him at all!'" When he tells her Bloch's name, "she exclaimed, 'I wouldn't have minded betting he was a Jew boy! They always know how to get your back up!'" 


They agree to go out together sometime, and the narrator parts from her in some perplexity, finding her "upbringing ... inconceivable," her "inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, a mystery.... Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses." (If that last phrase seems enigmatic, it's because, as Grieve notes, scholars can't decipher Proust's handwriting and tell whether he wrote reposant -- "restful" -- or passionnant -- "exciting." Though either way it remains enigmatic.)


They do go out again, and this time they meet Andrée, the tall girl in the "little gang," who joins them but remains silent. They briefly encounter Octave again, who when the narrator alludes to Octave's family connection to the Verdurins, "disparaged the celebrated Wednesdays, and added that M. Verdurin was ignorant of the proper wearing of the dinner jacket." They pass the d'Ambresac sisters, and when both he and Albertine exchange greetings with them, she comments on the shared acquaintance, giving him some hope "that my situation with Albertine might improve." 

Albertine also surprises him with the information that the older d'Ambresac sister is betrothed to Saint-Loup, with whom the younger was also in love. "I felt very sad to realize that Saint-Loup had concealed his engagement from me and that he should be contemplating such an immoral thing as to marry without first giving up his mistress." 


But Albertine is not inclined to introduce him to the rest of the gang of girls: "It's very sweet of you to bother about them. But they're nobody, just pay attention to them. I mean, a fellow as clever as you should have nothing to do with a group of silly girls like that. Actually, Andrée's very clever, and she's a very nice girl, although perfectly skittish. But honestly, the others are just silly." And when he tries to set up a meeting with Andrée a few days later, she fibs by saying her mother is ill, when in fact, as he learns from Elstir, she had another engagement.

The Proust Project, Day 63

Where this began
Day 62

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 439-450.

From "I had to rejoin Elstir...." to "...would have been in a state of panic.'"

_____

Catching up with Elstir after avoiding an introduction to the girls, the narrator tells the artist that he would have been "so happy to meet them," to which Elstir replies quite sensibly, "Well, in that case, what did you stand miles away for?"  The narrator takes umbrage at the reply, retreating into self-consciousness: "I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them."  

When Elstir offers to give him a sketch "as a memento of our friendship," the narrator tells him what he really wants is a photo of the portrait of "Miss Sacripant," the sexually ambiguous watercolor he had examined earlier. Suddenly the narrator realizes the truth: The woman in the picture is Odette. (The note of sexual ambiguity is not new with Odette: She has admitted to relations with members of her own sex.) And then he's struck by another realization: 

the identity of Elstir himself. He had painted a portrait of Odette de Crécy -- could such a brilliant man, a solitary, a philosopher, who had accumulated wisdom, who stood above all things, whose conversation was so enthralling, possibly be the painter, vacuous and devious, adopted long ago by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether they had not nicknamed him "M. Biche." He answered, in a very simple manner, that this was indeed the case, as though speaking of a part of his life that was rather remote, as though not realizing his answer caused me an acute disappointment.

(A question: How does the narrator know so much about the Verdurins' "little set" at this point? Has Swann already unburdened himself of the full story that the narrator recounts in "Swann in Love"? Or have Swann and Odette simply gossiped to him about the old days of the little set? In Swann's Way the painter is seldom mentioned, at least in comparison to the pianist, who plays for Swann the theme from Vinteuil's sonata that figures so much in his wooing of Odette. Or is this just one of Proust's narrative inconsistencies?) 

Elstir then goes on to defend himself, claiming that there has never been a man who "has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory.... Wisdom cannot be inherited -- one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things." Sensible enough, but he goes on for too long about it, leading Grieve to append a footnote in which he comments that Proust himself wrote a marginal note, "This is all badly written." So it is. 

The narrator leaves, heartened by the knowledge that he will get his introduction to the girls one day. In the meantime he's engaged in preparations for Saint-Loup's return to the garrison where he is stationed. Things are muddled a bit when Bloch shows up, "to Saint-Loup's great displeasure," and manages to get himself invited to visit him at Doncières, despite Saint-Loup's efforts to discourage the visit. 

After a lovely passage in which the narrator describes commonplace things -- "knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet" and so on -- to show how Elstir's art has attuned him to "beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things," he receives an invitation to a reception where he can meet Albertine. And now the trinity of forces determining his personality -- will, sensibility and mind, which are rough analogues of Freud's triad of id, ego, and superego -- take hold again in the anticipation of "the pleasure of making her acquaintance."

My mind saw this pleasure, now that it was assured, as being worth not very much. But the will in me did not share that illusion for an instant, being the persevering and unwavering servant of our personalities, hidden in the shadows, disdained, forever faithful, working unceasingly, and without heeding the variability of our self, making sure it shall never lack what it needs. ... So my mind and sensibility set up a debate on how much pleasure there might be in making the acquaintance of Albertine, while in front of the mirror I considered the vain and fragile charms that they would have preferred to preserve unused for some better occasion. But my will did not lose sight of the time at which I had to leave; and it was Elstir's address that it gave to the coachman. My mind and sensibility, now that the die was cast, indulged in the luxury of thinking it was a pity. If my will had given a different address, they would have been in a state of panic.

One note: in the previous account of this battle between the will and the other two elements of personality, Grieve's translation was "sensitivity" rather than "sensibility." Again, it would be worth knowing what the French original was.

The Proust Project, Day 62

Where this began
Day 61

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 427-439.

From "I walked up and down, impatient..." to "...I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'"

_____

As the narrator waits for Elstir to finish the painting he's working on, worrying that he might miss seeing the "gang of girls," he examines a watercolor of a young woman. "The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait I was looking at came from the fact, which I did not understand, that it was a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed." The sexual ambiguity of the portrait intrigues him. At times the figure looks like "a rather boyish girl" and then again "an effeminate young man, perverted and pensive." The face's "wistful or forlorn" look, "in the contrast it made with the accessories from the world of theater and debauchery, gave a strange thrill." But it's also an expression that might have been assumed by the actress for the portrait. 


When Elstir sees what he's looking at, he dismisses it as worthless, something he'd done when much younger. But he also hides it away quickly when he hears his wife coming, even though "I can assure you the young creature in the bowler hat had no part to play in my life." Mme. Elstir, whom the artist addresses as "My beautiful Gabrielle!," makes little impression on the narrator at first. He notices that she has black hair that's turning white and was "common  but not simple in her manner," as if she's affecting a pose "required by her mode of statuesque beauty, which had lost, in aging, all its attractiveness." But he comes to realize that her husband had found in her an ideal of beauty that he had previously located only in his imagination -- that she is herself "a portrait by Elstir."  


But he remains impatient to leave in time to catch another glimpse of his girls. Finally, Elstir is ready to take a walk with him.

I was walking back toward the villa with Elstir when, with the suddenness of Mephistopheles materializing before Faust, there appeared at the far end of the avenue -- seemingly the simple objectification, unreal and diabolical, of the temperament opposite to my own, of the almost barbaric and cruel vitality which, in my feebleness, my excess of painful sensitivity and intellectuality, I lacked -- a few spots of the essence it was impossible to mistake for any other, a few of the stars from the zoophytic cluster of young girls, who, although they looked as though they had not seen me, were without a doubt at that very moment making sarcastic remarks about me. 

Self-consciously, he pretends to look at porcelain in a shop window while Elstir walks ahead to meet the girls. "The certainty of being introduced to the girls had made me not only feign indifference to them, but feel it." But to his surprise, "Elstir parted from the girls without calling me over. They turned up a side street and he came toward me. It was a fiasco." The sudden reversal of expectations, that he was going to meet Albertine at last, "made her almost insignificant to me, then infinitely precious; and some years later, the belief that she was faithful to me, followed by disbelief, would have analogous results." (Proust is not averse to giving the plot away.) 


The experience inspires the narrator to some thoughts about self-deception:

what is known to the will remains inefficacious if it is unknown to the mind and the sensitivity: they can believe in good faith that we wish to leave a woman, when only the will is privy to our attachment to her. They are fooled by the belief that we will see her again in a moment. But let that belief vanish, in the realization that she has just gone and will never come back, and the mind and sensitivity, having lost their bearings, are afflicted with a fit of madness, and the paltry pleasure of being with her expands to fill everything in life.

He follows this insight with an anecdote: His grandmother and some other ladies in Combray once set up a fund to provide an annuity for a girl they believe to be the daughter of their drawing teacher, who is dying shortly after the death of the woman they assume to be his mistress. When they compliment the child's beautiful hair, the grandmother asks, "'Did her mother have such lovely hair?' To which the father gave the guileless reply: 'I don't know -- I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'" I confess that I don't quite get this: Is the point that they were wrong, and the woman was not his mistress? Or is it that he is unwilling to admit it? Or maybe she followed Joe Cocker's advice and left her hat on? It seems to me something has been lost either in the telling or the translating.

The Proust Project, Day 61

Where this began
Day 60

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 416-427.

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on. 


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

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

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


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

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

The Proust Project, Day 60

Where this began
Day 59

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 404-416.

From "It was the day after I had seen ..." to "... whatever does not correspond to that view."

_____

Sober again, the narrator resumes his obsession with his "group of girls," but also finds time to make more trips with Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, where they notice "a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray." The owner informs them that this is "the famous painter Elstir," whom the narrator remembers as having been mentioned by Swann. The narrator and Saint-Loup send a note to Elstir's table. The artist comes and sits with them, "but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him." He invites the narrator to visit his studio in Balbec.

But the narrator's obsession with the group of girls is such that he puts the visit off after, out for a walk with his grandmother, he sees one of the group "hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable," with "an authoritative-looking personage," perhaps her governess. "From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me." He takes every opportunity he can to be on the esplanade or wherever he might catch sight of the girls. 

Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again -- for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. ... Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days.

His grandmother is irritated at his failure to visit Elstir, and eventually he gives in and makes the visit. His mood changes when he sees the works in the artist's studio, "for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling thoughts for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality's composite spectacle."

The Proust Project, Day 59

Where this began
Day 58

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 391-404.

The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."


Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 


When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."

The Proust Project, Day 58

Where this began
Day 57

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 380-391.

Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.

The Proust Project, Day 57

Where this began
Day 56

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 369-380.

A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation. 

The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them. 

He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique. 

[F]or love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passerby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary to leave the house.

Is Proust talking about himself here? 

Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece." 

Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet. 

I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore.

We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting." 

No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder in a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life's potential for bringing unexpected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience ... the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces ... by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired ... with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment.

He knows that "having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rare varieties than these buds."

The Proust Project, Day 56

Where this began
Day 55

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 359-369.

Bloch mystifies the narrator by his effect on Françoise, who seems to have expected some "prodigy of nature" and is disappointed when she meets him: "She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance." She's also disappointed when she finds out that Saint-Loup, "whom she adored, ... was a Republican." But Françoise, who is a royalist, gets over it, "and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, 'He's just a hypocrite,' her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought a well of him as before and that she had forgiven him."

We learn more about Saint-Loup and his mistress, whom the narrator credits with a positive effect on him. His family "did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake." (Imagine an English or American writer contemporaneous with Proust making such an assertion.)

An actress of sorts, the mistress made Saint-Loup "see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable." She thereby "saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity." But things do not go well between them. Her friends, writers and actors, make fun of him, and she asserts that "their worlds were too dissimilar." There's also an implication that she is gold-digging, and that "she would wait quietly until she had 'made her pile,' which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as thought it might take a very short time." His ill-advised suggestion that she perform a scene from an avant-garde symbolist play for guests of his aunt is also a disaster.

And then the narrator goes into a fit of jealous pique because Saint-Loup asks his grandmother if he can photograph her before he leaves Balbec. His grandmother and Françoise make so much fuss over the request that the narrator gets huffy and the grandmother takes offense at his attitude. He retreats into childishness again.

The Proust Project, Day 55

Where this began
Day 54

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 340-359.

The narrator goes to two very different social events.

In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."

We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."

I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.

And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which

like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.

When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."

And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?

Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."

The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.

So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.

The elder Bloch is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet Bloch senior is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mentión of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."

As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double satus of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.

Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."

The Proust Project, Day 54

Where this began
Day 53

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 325-339.

Bloch badmouths the narrator to Saint-Loup, and Saint-Loup to the narrator, and when each shows no sign of having told the other about his slanders, confesses to them that he did it to get each of them on his side. The narrator's reaction to this perverse little trick is curious:

I bore him no ill will, as my mother and grandmother had handed down to me not only their inability to bear a grudge, even against those who deserved it more than he did, but their reluctance to condemn anybody.

This is ironic (and may be meant ironically), because the narrator is gifted at condemnation by satire. He goes on further to observe that these days -- as contrasted with the idealized image he retains from his childhood -- "one's choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures ... and, on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you.... I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company."

Bloch's father invites the narrator and Saint-Loup to dine with him, but the invitation is delayed because of the anticipated arrival of Saint-Loup's Uncle Palamède. In talking about his uncle, Saint-Loup naively describes him as a man who in his youth, when someone made homosexual advances toward him, had his friends beat the man to a bloody pulp. But these days, Saint-Loup insists, his uncle would never do anything so brutal. Why, he even takes an interest in men of the working classes: "A footman who attends him in a hotel somewhere and whom he'll set up in Paris; a peasant lad whom he gets apprenticed to a trade -- that sort of thing. It's just this rather nice side of his nature, as opposed to his society side."

Uh-huh.

The next day, the narrator is returning to the hotel when he feels himself being watched, and finds that he is being stared at, "with eyes dilated by the strain of attention," by "a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a black mustache." When he returns the gaze, the man pretends to look at other things and makes "the gesture of irritation that is meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting" and breathes "out noisily, as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot."

Later, when he and his grandmother have gone for a walk, they meet the man in the company of Saint-Loup and Mme. de Villeparisis, who introduces him as the Baron de Guermantes, her nephew, then corrects herself: "What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus!" The baron shakes hands -- proffering two fingers -- with the narrator in a chilly fashion. And so the narrator learns that his uncle is Palamède de Guermantes, the brother of the owner of the château at Combray.

The narrator now realizes "that the fierce stare that had attracted my attention ... was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte." He asks Saint-Loup if Mme. Swann had been one of Charlus's mistresses, and Saint-Loup denies it emphatically: "'You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.' I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it."

The narrator's grandmother is quite taken with Charlus, who doesn't seem to fit under the rubric of "naturalness." "But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, distinguishing him from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things that made my grandmother so indulgent toward his aristocratic bias." That bias extends to women:

In the view of M. de Charlus, a pretty woman of the middle classes, in relation to any of these women [whose ancestry traced to the ancien régime], was like a contemporary painting of a road or a wedding party in relation to an old master, the history of which we know, from the pope or the king who commissioned it. ... M. de Charlus drew comfort too from the fact that a similar bias to his own prevented these few great ladies from frequenting other women of lesser breeding, thus enabling him to worship them in their unimpaired nobility.

The narrator's grandmother responds to this attitude because "she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon."

Then Charlus surprises the narrator, to whom he has "not spoken a syllable" after that chilly handshake, by inviting him and his grandmother to tea.

The Proust Project, Day 53

Where this began
Day 52

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 314-325.

The narrator gives us a portrait of two of his friends, Robert de Saint-Loup and Bloch, who could hardly be more different from each other, and in the middle of it extended thoughts on conventional manners and snobbery.

Saint-Loup becomes a favorite of the narrator's grandmother because of his "naturalness," which we remember from long ago, when the narrator commented on her distaste for the gardener's too-symmetrical flowerbeds. "But in nothing was the naturalness of Saint-Loup so endearing to my grandmother as in the open way he expressed his liking for me," declaring it "apart from his love for his mistress, ... the greatest joy in his life." But the narrator is not so generous in returning his friendship: "I felt none of the happiness I was capable of deriving from being without company" or from "the pleasure that could come from finding something deep within myself, from bringing it out of its inner darkness and into the light of day."

This solitary self-absorption is what allows the narrator time to reflect on Saint-Loup's character as an aristocrat who rejects the attitudes of his class. "It was because he was a noble that his passion for ideas and his attraction to socialism, which made him seek the company of young, pretentious, and badly dressed students, attested to something genuinely pure and disinterested in him, though the same could not be said about them."

Or about Bloch, who turns up at Balbec, whom they first overhear railing about the "glut" of Jews there. "Eventually, the man who found Jews so distasteful stepped out of the tent, and we glanced up to look at the anti-Semite: it was my old school friend Bloch." Saint-Loup's attitude toward Bloch is more tolerant than that of the narrator, who comments on Bloch's "more picturesque than pleasant" retinue of sisters, relatives, and friends:

It is quite likely that this Jewish community, like any other, perhaps more than any other, could boast of many charms, qualities, and virtues. The enjoyment of these, however, was restricted to its members. The fact was they were disliked; and this, once they became aware of it, became a proof in their eyes of anti-Semitism, against which they ranged themselves in a dense phalanx, closing ranks in the face of a world that was, in any case, of no mind to join their group.

The narrator notices that Bloch refers to the lift as "lyfte" and to "The Stones of Venyce by Lord John Ruskin," apparently under the impression that "in England not only all individuals of the masculine gender were lords, but that the letter i was always pronounced like y." Saint-Loup worries that Bloch will be embarrassed when he learns the truth and will think him inconsiderate for not setting him straight -- which good manners forbid him from doing. But when the narrator pronounces "lift" correctly, Bloch notices the correct pronunciation: "'I see -- so it's "lift,"' To which, in a sharp and supercilious tone, he added, Ányway -- doesn't matter.'" Which reveals "how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker."

Bloch then accuses the narrator of "snobbery" in his association with Saint-Loup, launching the narrator into reflections about how the thing of which we accuse others is often the thing of which we are most guilty ourselves. This long, essay-like paragraph includes such aphoristic observations as, "we should make a rule of never speaking of ourselves, given that it is a subject on which we may be sure our own view and that of others will never coincide."

Bloch was a bad-mannered, neurotic snob; and since he belonged to a family of no note, he suffered, as though at the bottom of the ocean, from the incalculable pressures bearing upon him from not just the Gentiles on the surface, but the superimposed layers of Jewish society, all more estimable than the one he belonged to, and each of them pouring scorn on the one immediately below itself.... When Bloch spoke of the fit of snobbery I must be having and invited me to own up to being a snob, I could have answered, "If I were a snob, I wouldn't be mixing with you."

The Proust Project, Day 52

Where this began
Day 51

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 299-314.

The ride draws to an end, and the narrator jumps ahead in time to note how these rides arose in future "Proustian moments":

How often the mere breath of trees in full leaf has made me see the act of sitting on a folding seat opposite Mme de Villeparisis, as she acknowledges the greeting of the Princess of Luxembourg passing by in her carriage, then driving home to dinner at the Grand-Hôtel, as among those inexpressible joys of life which neither the present nor the future can ever bring back, which can be tasted only once!

As the moon appears, he teases Mme. de Villeparisis by quoting lines about it by Chateaubriand, Vigny, and Hugo, and gets her usual scorn for these poets. His grandmother concurs when they discuss the marquise later, and he attributes her literary conservatism to her desire to turn him away from the "cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me." There follows an emotional moment in which he almost blurts out his fear of what his life would be like when she died. And the next day, he tries to cover up the embarrassing moment by observing that "the latest advances in science seemed to have made materialism untenable, and that the most likely outcome was still the eternal life of the soul and reunion beyond the grave."

The key moment in this section, however, is the arrival of Mme. de Villeparisis's grandnephew, Robert de Saint-Loup, who is introduced as "a tall, slim young man with piercing eyes, a proud head held high on a fine uncovered neck, and with hair so golden and skin so fair that they seemed to have soaked up the bright sunshine of the day.... His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the color of the sea." The narrator comments that "some thought there was something effeminate about him, though no one ever said such a thing against him, as his virility and passionate liking for women were well known." He was also "not much older than I was" -- a point underscoring the narrator's earlier comment that he was at "an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich.... One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind."

Robert certainly disturbs his peace of mind when, on their first meeting, he extends his arm stiffly for a cold and distant handshake. "When he sent up his card the following day, I thought it must be at least a challenge to a duel." But they have in common a "keen preference for intellectual things" and "I saw the man of disdain trun into the most likable and considerate fellow I had ever met."

Mme. de Villeparisis, however, is disturbed by her grandnephew, in part because "he was imbued with what she called the 'ravings of the socialists,' spoke of his own class with heartfelt contempt, and spent hours deep in Nietzsche and Proudhon." He is also at odds with his father, the Comte de Marsantes, in part because he "yawned through Wagner and delighted in Offenbach." His seriousness even puts a small impediment between him and the narrator:

Though I thought Saint-Loup was rather serious, he found it strange that I was not serious enough. Judging all things by their intellectual content, and being unaware of the delights that my imagination took in in what he dismissed as frivolous, he was amazed that I, whom he thought of as far superior to himself, could take any interest in such things.

The Proust Project, Day 51

Where this began
Day 50

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 285-299.

We begin today "within a budding grove," as it were. Or rather, riding through orchards that have recently lost their blossoms. The narrator's reflections on remembering these orchards when he bought apple branches in Paris the following spring and gazed on the pink buds amid the white blossoms may have given Scott Moncrieff the inspiration for his title for this volume, which Grieve translates more literally.

We learn more about Mme. de Villeparisis, whose familiarity with the arts makes it seem "that she looked upon painting, music, literature, and philosophy as merely the unavoidable accomplishments of any young girl given an aristocratic upbringing and happening to live in a building famous enough to figure on the list of national monuments. She gave the impression of believing that the only paintings worth anything are the ones you inherit." Despite this aristocratic attitude, she is something of a radical. "She was in favor of the Republic; and her only objection against its anticlericalism she expressed as follows: 'I should be as much against being prevented from going to Mass if I wanted to go as I should be against being made to go to Mass if I didn't want to go!'"

On the other hand, she and the narrator have a bit of a falling out over literature. She dismisses his enthusiasm for Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Victor Hugo -- "all of whom had been guests in her parents' house, and whom she herself had even glimpsed" -- in favor of some now-forgotten figures whom she regarded as having "qualities of measured judgment and simplicity in which she had been taught to see the mark of genuine worth." And she quotes Sainte-Beuve to the effect that "one should take the word of people who knew them at first hand and could size them up properly." As Grieve tells us in his note, this is the opposite of Proust's insistence that one should judge the work and not the creator.

As they ride through the countryside, the narrator indulges once again his fantasies about the women he sees there, and reveals that "Bloch had ... opened a whole new era for me by informing me that ... every single one of these girls, from the village girl to the smart lady, was ready and willing to oblige me." But he also reveals that he has learned that inaccessibility is a great sauce to desire, that "beauty is a succession of hypotheses" and that "I have never met in real life any girls as desirable as the ones I saw when in the company of some important personage who baffled all my ingenious attempts to get rid of him." And he recalls once leaping from a carriage in which he was riding with a friend of his father's to chase after a woman he saw in the street, only to find, when he caught up with her, that he was "face-to-face with the aging Mme Verdurin, whom I usually avoided like the plague."

While sightseeing an old church in Carqueville, he spots a village girl who is fishing from a bridge. "It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can be only one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind." And so he contrives a way to mention that he is traveling with "the Marquise de Villeparisis. "I was simultaneously aware that I had lost not only my anxiety at perhaps not being able to see her again, but with it part of my desire to do so.... As happens with physical possession, this forcible insertion of myself into her mind, this disembodied possession of her, had taken away some of her mystery."

But not all of his experiences on these rides are erotic. One is an account of a failed epiphany -- "a feeling of profound bliss, rather like the feeling I had once had from things such as the steeples of Martinville." He has a sensation of déjà vu on seeing three trees "making a pattern that I knew I had seen somewhere before."

I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, "Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self that we brought for you will return forever to nothing."... I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey to me, or where it was that I had seen them.... I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god.

It's an enigmatic passage at best, especially puzzling because he has already flagged for us the earlier experience with the three steeples that seemed to him truly epiphanic.

The Proust Project, Day 50

Where this began
Day 49

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 271-285.

Today's dissection of snobbery begins with Françoise, whose confidence in her own status in the world is unassailable, which is why she's one of the book's most endearing and memorable characters. Even the people she works for have to know their place, and after she befriends the staff of the hotel, Françoise has no qualms about letting the narrator and his grandmother know where they stand in the scheme of things. "The long and the short of it was that we had to make do without proper hot water because Françoise was a friend of the man whose job it was to heat it."

The peculiar and sometimes artificial relationships of resort life extend to the grandmother as well. After she pretends not to see Mme. de Villeparisis in the dining room, which the marquise returns in kind, they meet by accident in a doorway and go through a stagy scene of surprised recognition, "like a air of actors in a scene by Molière who have been standing apart from one anther, each delivering a soliloquy and supposedly not seeing the other, though there is no more than a few feet between them." Mme. de Villeparisis then begins to join them at table, raising their status in the eyes of the headwaiter.

To bring this look of happiness to Aimé's face, one needed only to speak the name of a titled person; and in this he was the opposite of Françoise, in whose hearing one could not mention "Count This" or "Viscount That" without her expression's turning dark and her voice's sounding curt and sour, which actually meant she cherished the nobility not less than Aimé but more.... But once she had unmistakably registered Mme de Villeparisis's countless little acts of considerateness toward us, and even toward herself, Françoise forgave her for being a marquise; and since she had never ceased being grateful to her for being a marquise, Mme de Villeparisis was her favorite of all the people we knew.

And then a more elevated member of the aristocracy enters their lives, the Princess of Luxembourg, to whom they are introduced by Mme. de Villeparisis. But this doesn't at all raise their status in the eyes of the local gentry, used to being the most kowtowed-to of the visitors to the hotel. These include the First President from Caen, the bâtonnier from Cherbourg, and an eminent notary from Le Mans, and especially their wives: "Each time Mme de Villeparisis walked through the vestibule, the wife of the First President, always on the lookout for loose women, set aside her embroidery and inspected her in a way that moved her two friends to irresistible laughter." She vows to make inquiries about Mme. de Villeparisis, unwilling to believe she's a genuine marquise. And the same holds true for the Princess of Luxembourg, who, she reports to the other women, is "a female with dyed hair, if you don't mind, made up to the eyeballs, and with a carriage that smacked of 'immoral earnings' a mile away, the kind that sort of woman always has, and who turned up a while ago asking to see our alleged marquise!"

This is great stuff, but there's one flaw in it for those who insist that authors stick to the conventions of fiction: How could the narrator have been present at the table of these gossips? Proust is not one, however, for sticking to a limited point of view for very long. And the material is so good that he (almost) gets away with it.

The Proust Project, Day 49

Where this began
Day 48

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 259-271.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Proust Project, Day 48

Where this began
Day 47

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 246-259.

If the infantilizing of the narrator wasn't already clear enough, his account of his attachment to his grandmother raises some curious psychosexual questions:

Whenever my mouth was on her cheeks or her forehead, I drew from them something so nourishing, so beneficent, that I had all the immobility, gravity, and placid gluttony of an infant on the breast.

Of course, not all the questions raised are about the narrator. The grandmother comes in for her share of them, too:

She took such pleasure in any trouble that spared me trouble, such delight in a moment of rest and peace for my weary limbs, that when I tried to prevent her helping me untie my laces and get ready for bed, making as though to undress myself, her pleading glance halted my hands, which were already on my boots and the first buttons of my jacket.

We realize here that we're dealing with a late 19th-century, pre-Freudian attitude toward sexuality -- one that Proust's novel would do much to demolish. The narrator reveals here the extent to which he -- an only child, a gifted and sickly one -- has been spoiled. The question is how much of his sickliness (and perhaps his giftedness) arose from this upbringing.

His word for being spoiled, for his fear of being torn from all that makes him feel secure, is "habit." But he also projects his fear on external objects, on "the loweliest, most obscure, organic, and all-but-unconscious refusal, by the things that make up the best of our present life, to countenance even our theoretical acceptance of a possible future without them: a refusal which was the core of the horror I had so often felt at the thought that my parents would one day be dead, that the requirements of life might force me to live apart from Gilberte or just make me settle for good in a country where I would never see my friends again."

Habit resists change, but paradoxically can also promote change: It can "endear to us people whom we disliked." It "alters the shape of their faces, improves their tone of voice, makes hearts grow fonder." This is "the analgesia of habit." But until it sets in, we fear change -- the loss of family, friends, places we are used to -- because if we accept it, "that would mean our actual self had changed, ... it would amount to a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self." So that even becoming used to sleeping in a different bedroom becomes a kind of death of the self: "the anguish and alarm I felt when lying beneath a ceiling that was unknown and too high was nothing but the protest of my surviving attachment to a ceiling that was known and lower. No doubt that attachment would end and be replaced by another: first death, then a new life would have done their dual work at the behest of Habit."

But these are night thoughts. When the morning comes, and the effect of the sea and the sun upon it takes hold, his curiosity about the place revives. And we have some wonderful portraits of the types of people who visit this Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, snobs of various orders, including the woman who arrives with her staff and even her own draperies and furnishings, so that "instead of adapting to the outside world, she could erect between it and herself a bulkhead of habit so deftly constructed that it was her own home, with her inside it, that had done the traveling, and not her."

The Proust Project, Day 47

Where this began
Day 46

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 234-246.

The landscape as the train moves through Normandy gives the narrator opportunity to muse, and Proust an opportunity to segue from the mature narrator's voice to that of the young man he once was, who, as he once did on his walks in Combray, sinks into a sentimental fantasy about the happiness he might experience in love with a peasant girl -- an obvious antithesis to the sophisticated Gilberte. He sees a tall girl with a crock of milk, who comes from the farmland to serve coffee to the passengers on the train, and she gives him a "fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness." But not Beauty and Happiness, those abstract essences:

Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness.

Like all philosophers, he is adding his footnote to Plato, arguing that we can only perceive the abstract, the ideal, the Platonic form, in the particular, that "a particular form of happiness ... is the only form in which we can have the taste of happiness."

But he is also once again the sentimental naïf, the boy who imagines a life with this tall girl, as he once imagined bliss with a peasant girl he would meet along the Méséglise way: "She would have initiated me into the charms of rural life and the pleasures of early rising." As the train leaves, he fantasizes about various ways of returning to find her, which the more realistic voice of the narrator describes as "the mind's selfish, active, practical, mechanical, lazy, and centrifugal predisposition to shirk the effort required to analyze in an abstract and disinterested way any pleasant impression we have received."

There is something remarkable, perhaps unique about the way Proust blends and shifts his narrator's points of view -- young and old -- allowing the severe critical voice to intrude upon the naive younger voice without being brutally didactic.

And then reality intrudes, as it usually does when he encounters something he has experienced only in his imagination: a sighting of the Duchesse de Guermantes, a performance by La Berma, a meeting with Bergotte. The initial experience cannot possibly live up to expectations. And so it is with the church at Balbec, which is not in fact perched on a lonely cliff over the sea, "soaked by the spindrift blown from the tumultuous deep," but is miles from the sea, "in a town square at the junction of two trolley lines, opposite a café with the word Billiards aove it in gilt lettering."

He tries to pump himself up with the recognition that this is the real thing -- "And the real things are unique -- this is much more!" But he finds the church and its statue of the Virgin have fallen to "the tyranny of the Particular." The statue, "like the church itself, I now found transformed from the immortal work of art that I had longed to see into a little old woman in stone, whose height I could measure, and whose wrinkles I could count." He recalls "everything I had ever read about Balbec and the words Swann had spoken: 'It's a delight -- every bit as fine as Siena.'" And he remembers his musings on the magic of place-names. "But with Balbec it felt as though, by going there, I had broken open a name which should have been hermetically sealed."

His grandmother makes it worse by greeting him with, "'So? How was Balbec?,' with a smile of such radiant expectation, full of the great pleasure I must have had, that I could not bear to blurt out my disappointment." He decides to tell her that he feels ill "and that I thought we might find ourselves obliged to go back to Paris." He retreats again into juvenility, to the desire to be nursed, to homesickness.