The Proust Project, Day 18

Where this began
Day 17

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 239-250.

At last, Swann and Odette "make cattleya" -- a twee euphemism that I'm certain Proust invented to emphasize the unsuitability of the relationship between the sophisticated, intellectual Swann and the shallow, slightly vulgar Odette. The consummation of their relationship is characterized as "having ended by possessing her that night," although Proust shortly afterward observes that "the act of physical possession" is one "in which, in fact, one possesses nothing" -- hinting that in no real way does Swann possess Odette.

Swann's experience with Odette has not yet achieved the bitterness that Shakespeare ascribes to sated lust in Sonnet 129:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe;

Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

But at least Swann is beginning to have doubts. He "could not ask himself without anxiety what Odette would mean to him in years later." He continues to associate the phrase from Vinteuil's sonata with their love, even though Odette's tastes in music are trashy. Sometimes

he realized that Odette's qualities did not justify his attaching so much value to the time he spent with her. And often, when Swann's positive intelligence alone prevailed, he wanted to stop sacrificing so many intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But as soon as he heard it, the little phrase had the power to open up within him the space it needed, the proportions of Swann's soul were changed by it.

And so Swann is being brought down to Odette's level. Except for the piece of Vinteuil, he "did not try to make her play things he liked or, any more in music than in literature, to correct her bad taste. He fully realized that she was not intelligent."

What great repose, what mysterious renewal for Swann -- for him whose eyes, though refined lovers of painting, whose mind, though a shrewd observer of manners, bore forever the indelible trace of the aridity of his life -- to feel himself transformed into a creature strange to humanity, blind, without logical faculties, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimerical creature perceiving the world only through his hearing.

The awareness of Odette's past doesn't trouble him: "He merely smiled sometimes at the thought that a few years before, when he did not know her, someone had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been she, as a courtesan, a kept woman." Up to this point, Odette has scarcely existed to him except when they are together. But now a friend reports seeing her on the street, and "it suddenly made him see that Odette had a life which did not belong entirely to him."

The Proust Project, Day 17

Where this began
Day 16

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 220-239.

Swann's infatuation with Odette deepens, even though the conniving of the Verdurins to bring them together is sometimes clumsy. The theme from Vinteuil's sonata becomes "like the anthem of their love," which causes him some perturbation because "when Odette, capriciously, had begged him to, he had given up the idea of having some pianist play him the entire sonata.... 'Why would you need the rest?' she said to him. 'This is our piece.'" Proust, who has earlier given us an account of the complexity of musical composition, is obviously demonstrating Odette's shallowness here, as she reduces a sonata to background music.

But then Proust pulls out all stops to alert us to Odette's deficiencies. The neighborhood in which she lives is denoted by its "short streets," the "monotony" of the houses, the "sinister street stall, the historic sign and sordid vestige of a time when these districts were in bad repute." Even her handwriting gives her away:

an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution.

And Swann is forced to overlook the deficiencies in her beauty,

to limit what he imagined of her cheeks only to her fresh, pink cheekbones since the rest was so often yellow, languid, sometimes marked with little red specks, distressed him, as it seemed to prove that the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre.

So he lets himself fall into the fantasy that she resembles the figure of Zipporah (above) in the fresco by Botticelli in the Sistine Chapel. It is a way of bringing grace to "those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated." Once again, as with the theme from Vinteuil's sonata, he falls into the habit of reducing works of art to suit his personal circumstances: "The words 'Florentine painting' did Swann a great service. They allowed him, like a title, to bring the image of Odette into a world of dreams to which it had not had access until now and where it was steeped in nobility." And so he contemplates Odette "sometimes with the humility, spirituality, and disinterestedness of an artist, and sometimes with the pride, egotism, and sensuality of a collector."

We learn, perhaps with some surprise, that they have not yet slept together. Certainly the Verdurins are surprised: Mme. Verdurin tells her husband and others in the "little circle," "As she hasn't anyone just now, I told her she ought to sleep with him." M. Verdurin, to his credit, sees Odette clearly: "I don't know if you heard what he was declaiming to her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata; I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile."

Which is pretty much what Swann has become in his infatuation, as he pursues the trail of Odette through the clubs and restaurants of Paris:

Of all the modes by which love is brought into being, of all the agents which disseminate the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great gust of agitation which now and then sweeps over us. Then our fate is sealed, and the person whose company we enjoy at the time is the one we will love. It is not even necessary for us to have liked him better than anyone else up to then, or even as much. What is necessary is that our predilection for him should become exclusive.

Is it worth pointing out that although this passage is a comment on Swann's passion for Odette, the generalizing pronouns that Proust uses are "him" and not "her"?

The Proust Project, Day 16

Where this began
Day 15

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 206-220.

The social satire continues with a delicious analysis of the manners and mannerisms of the Verdurins and their circle, including Dr. Cottard, whose social insecurity is such that he tries to greet every statement or question with an "ironic smile that removed all impropriety from his attitude in advance, since he was proving that if the attitude was not a fashionable one he was well aware of it and that if he had adopted it, it was as a joke." Even when invited to a performance by Sarah Bernhardt, Cottard is so unwilling to express an unfashionable opinion that "he entered the box with a smile that was waiting to become more pronounced or to disappear as soon as some authoritative person informed him as to the quality of the entertainment."

Cottard is the perfect foil for Swann, who is at ease in any social situation, "so that toward people of a social circle inferior to his, like the Verdurins and their friends, he instinctively displayed a marked attention, permitted himself to make advances." He asks to be introduced to everyone, including those to whom the Verdurins condescend, sometimes unwarrantedly, such as "Saniette, whose shyness, simplicity, and good nature had lost him all the esteem he had won by his skill as an archivist, his substantial fortune, and the distinguished family he came from."

But Proust also allows us to see what Swann has in common with Cottard, namely a sense that he has been hollowed out by his attempts to adapt to society's expectations. In Swann's case,

He had for so long given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that ... since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether.

As a result, "in his conversation he endeavored never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about things." Or else, very much like Cottard, "give[s] his remarks an ironic tone, as if he did not entirely subscribe to what he was saying."

But there is one thing that opened "in Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation": the "delicious sensation" provoked in him by a piece of music he hears at a soiree. It rouses in him "the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life."

He has been unable to find out what the piece of music is or who composed it until he hears it again at the Verdurins': "it was the andante from the Sonata for Piano and Violin by Vinteuil."

The Proust Project, Day 15

Where this began
Day 14

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 195-206.

At the end of the "Combray" section, the narrator says that his mind returned

by an association of memories, to what, many years after leaving that little town, I had learned, about a love affair Swann had had before I was born, with that precision of detail which is sometimes easier to obtain for the lives of people who died centuries ago than for the lives of our best friends.

And so Proust excuses the fictional device of recounting "memories belonging to another person from whom I had learned them." Yes, it's a cheat, but all fiction is a cheat.

"Swann in Love" begins as a comedy of manners, with the introduction of the Verdurins and their "little set" or "little circle" or "little clan," which consists largely of "a person almost of the demimonde, Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her first name, Odette" and a "former concierge" who is the aunt of a pianist under the Verdurins's patronage. The Verdurins's "little set" is just that: a microcosmic society mimicking the larger social set from which they were excluded.

So Swann, who moves in the highest circles, is something of a catch for the Verdurins. He is a dilettante who "had wasted his intellectual gifts in frivolous pleasures and allowed his erudition in matters of art to be used to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses." His Achilles heel is his susceptibility to women. "And though Swann was unaffected and casual with a duchess, he trembled at being scorned by a chambermaid, and posed in front of her." So even though Odette de Crécy was not his type, he falls for her.

Her profile was too pronounced for his taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too pinched. Her eyes were lovely, but so large they bent under their own mass, exhausted the rest of her face, and always gave her a look of being in ill health or ill humor.

Moreover, she knows nothing about the art he so admires, including his "unfinished" (i.e., abandoned) work on Vermeer, that he keeps using as an excuse for not visiting her: "'You're going to make fun of me, but that painter who keeps you from seeing me--' (she meant Vermeer) 'I've never heard of him; is he still alive?'" The way Swann is drawn into the trap reminds me of Lydgate being snared by Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch.

The Proust Project, Day 14

Where this began
Day 13

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 169-191.

I went a little farther than my allotted ten pages today because there was really no place to stop before the ending of the "Combray" section.

The descriptions of the walks along the Vivonne on "the Guermantes way" are some of the most gorgeous writing so far in the novel, and could be celebrated for that alone. But one senses that Proust writes nothing without intent. One intent is to establish the centrality of the Guermantes, who have only been alluded to so far, to the history of Combray. And another is to comment on the importance of the place the narrator loves so well in his development as an artist. The two fuse together in this passage:

I dreamed that Mme. de Guermantes had summoned me there, smitten with a sudden fancy for me; all day long she would fish for trout with me. And in the evening, holding me by the hand as we walked past the little gardens of her vassals, she would show me the flowers that leaned their violet and red stems along the low walls, and would teach me their names. She would make me tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write.

But immediately the narrator is stricken with a kind of artistic impotence, an inability to "find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning."

And then Mme. de Guermantes herself attends church in Combray, and the narrator gets his first, somewhat disillusioning glimpse of her: "a blond lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a full tie of smooth, shiny new mauve silk, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose." But he overcomes the ordinariness of her appearance and imbues her with the cultural and historical significance that had informed his earlier imaginings.

And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

In the meantime, his frustration at his inability to convert his sensations into something of literary import continues, to the point that he is ready to give up his vocation as a writer.

But the moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance, or color was so arduous -- to try to perceive what was concealed behind them -- that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.

Fortunately, he has an epiphany on a ride back from their walk along the Guermantes way. He sees three church steeples that change position as the carriage moves along and which change colors as the sun sets. And his pleasure in the sight of them manifests itself "in the form of words that gave me pleasure." So he asks the doctor in whose carriage he is riding for a piece of paper and a pencil and writes the words down. "I felt that it had ... perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them."

And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, on returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other.

And so the Méségliese way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life.

That, in a nutshell, is why the narrator goes in search of lost time. (And, incidentally, why Scott Moncrieff's Shakespeare allusion, "Remembrance of Things Past," is so misleading a title, turning the narrator's quest into a passive and nostalgic exercise.)

When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méségliese way that I am the only one in ecsasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

This is the quest for the incidents in the "intellectual life" that are bound up in the particularities of sensory experience.

The Proust Project, Day 13

Where this began
Day 12

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 158-169.

This section sent me back to Wordsworth, to "The Prelude" and the "Intimations of Immortality" ode, those poems that trace the process from boyish exhilaration to the disillusionment of maturity in which

nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

On his solitary walks in the autumn of his aunt's death the narrator begins to discover the disjunction between himself and the world, to be "struck for the first time by this discord between our impressions and their habitual expression."

And seeing on the water and on the face of the wall a pale smile answering the smile of the sky, I cried out to myself in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn." But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at those opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.

But from the grumpy way with which his enthusiasm is received by a passerby, he "learned that the same emotions do not arise simultaneously, in a preestablished order, in all men."

And mostly what he discovers in himself is the limits of his adolescent erotic longings, which merge with the landscape.

For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they would have appeared to a grown man. And I made no distinction between earth and people. I desired a peasant girl from Méségliese or Rossainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méségliese and Balbec.

The narrator assumes an availability of women from the "lower" classes, keeping his imagination distant from women of his own class. And he "has not yet abstracted [sexual] pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, [or] reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." Even in the sly passage in which he masturbates "at the top of our house in Combray in the little room smelling of orris root," he's at one with nature "until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail added itself to the leaves of the wild black currant that leaned in toward me."

And then adolescent eroticism gives way to detachment, disillusionment, depression:

I no longer believed that the desires which I formed during my walks, and which were not fulfilled, were shared by other people, that they had any reality outside of me. They now seemed to me no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament. They no longer had any attachment to nature, to reality, which from then on lost all its charm and significance and was no more than a conventional framework for my life, as is, for the fiction of a novel, the railway carriage on the seat of which a traveler reads it in order to kill time.

This is followed by the scene, which takes place a few years later, in which the narrator spies on Mlle. Vinteuil and her lover as they mock the portrait of the late M. Vinteuil. It is a moment "that remained obscure to me at the time" but will eventually form in him the idea of sadism. Throughout the scene, the narrator's sympathetic understanding remains with Mlle. Vinteuil, in whom he "recognized her father's obsequious and reticent gestures, his sudden qualms.... And time and again, deep inside her, a timid and supplicant virgin entreated and forced back a touch and swaggering brawler."

Proust is, I think, rather self-conscious in his somewhat overheated treatment of this incident: He tries to downplay its melodramatic theatricality by drawing attention to it.

It was true that in Mlle. Vinteuil's habits, the appearance of evil was so complete that it would have been hard to find it so perfectly represented in anyone other than a sadist; it is behind the footlights of a popular theater rather than in the lamplight of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging her friend to spit on the portrait of a father who lived only for her; and almost nothing else but sadism provides a basis in real life for the aesthetics of melodrama.

But the narrator discerns in Mlle. Vinteuil something of the prudishness of her father. "It was not evil which gave her the idea of pleasure, which seemed agreeable to her; it was pleasure that seemed to her malign." And he ends by (somewhat heavy-handedly, I think, drawing a moral from the incident:

Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, and to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty.

A Different Perspective

I have mixed feelings about this, a three-dimensional exploration of Picasso's "Guernica." On the one hand, it draws attention to details in the painting I had never observed so closely before. But on the other, I think it oddly diminishes the work, reducing it to a collection of shapes. The impact of the painting is sufficiently strong without camera tricks and mood music. But as an "interpretation," I suppose it's as valid as any other form of criticism.

The Proust Project, Day 12

Where this began
Day 11

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 146-158.

After the encounter with Gilberte, there are no more visits to Tansonville, but the family's walks continue. Along them, they sometimes encounter Mlle. Vinteuil -- Montjouvain, Vinteuil's home, lies along their route -- "driving a cabriolet at top speed." And then one year, "she was always accompanied by an older friend, a woman who had a bad reputation in the area and who one day moved permanently into Montjouvain." As the local gossips put it, Vinteuil "can be sure she's not dabbling in music when she's with his daughter."

Though "prudish," as the narrator has called him, Vinteuil is "incapable of any effort whose direct goal was not his daughter's happiness." The narrator comments that

it is remarkable how a person always inspires admiration for her moral qualities in the family of the person with whom she is having carnal relations. Physical love, so unfairly disparaged, compels people to manifest the very smallest particles they possess of goodness, of self-abnegation, so much that these particles glow even in the eyes of those immediately surrounding them.

Nevertheless, Vinteuil "saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and because of this his manner had recently acquired that humility, that respect for those who were above him and whom he saw from below (even if they had been well below him until then)." When Vinteuil encounters Swann, whose "inappropriate marriage" has also put him in disgrace in the eyes of Combray, Swann invites him to "send his daughter to play at Tansonville." The invitation was one "which two years before would have incensed M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with such feelings of gratitude that he believed he was obliged by them not to have the indiscretion of accepting it."

We jump ahead to

the autumn in which we had to come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate, because she had at last died, proving correct both those who had claimed that her enfeebling regimen would end by killing her, and those who had always maintained that she suffered from an illness that was not imaginary but organic, to the evidence of which the skeptics would certainly be obliged to yield when she succumbed to it.

Françoise's grief is "savage," and "some demon" leads the narrator to tease her with his lack of sentiment over his aunt's death. She is especially provoked because the plaid wrap that the narrator puts on for his solitary walks in the direction of Tansonville, where he still hopes for a glimpse of Gilberte, is so out of keeping with the mourning for his aunt that she feels has been sadly deficient.

The Proust Project, Day 11

Where this began
Day 10

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 129-146.

The narrator goes to dinner at M. Legrandin's but finds him no less enigmatic. When the narrator tries to inquire into Legrandin's acquaintance with "the ladies of Guermantes," Legrandin retreats into florid evasions: "Deep down, I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books, scarcely more paintings, and the light of the moon when the breeze of your youth brings me the fragrance of the flower beds that my old eyes can no longer distinguish." He claims that he is still a radical, "a Jacobin in my thinking." But the narrator senses that

another Legrandin whom he kept carefully concealed deep inside himself, whom he did not exhibit because that Legrandin knew some compromising stories about our own, about his snobbishness, had already answered by the wound in his eyes, by the rictus of his mouth, by the excessive gravity in the tone of his answer, by the thousand arrows with which our own Legrandin had been instantly larded, languishing like a Saint Sebastian of snobbishness.

The narrator takes this knowledge of the second Legrandin home with him, and his parents take delight in what they have learned about their friend. "My mother was infinitely amused each time she caught Legrandin in flagrante delicto in the sin that he would not confess, that he continued to call the sin without forgiveness, snobbishness." And the father, who knows that Legrandin's sister, Mme. de Cambremer, lives near Balbec, where the grandmother plans to spend a summer vacation, delights in trying to make Legrandin confess that he knows someone in the area. But he evades the question with extravagant circumlocutions, and they conclude that

M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would have ended by constructing a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that his own sister lived a mile from Balbec and be obliged to offer us a letter of introduction.

This glimpse of the social mores of Combray yields to another when the family goes out on one of its walks and decides to go "Swann's way" rather than "the Guermantes way." The narrator informs us that his parents "had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's marriage," but believing that Swann's wife and daughter were in Paris, they decide to take a shortcut through the park. They're mistaken, however, and the narrator gets his first glimpse of Swann's daughter, Gilberte.

Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough "power of observation," as they say, to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterward, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes -- which struck one so the first time one saw her -- I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.

The setup for this encounter is telling: The narrator has just been admiring a pink hawthorn.

Inserted into the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in a party dress among people in everyday clothes who are staying at home, the shrub was all ready for Mary's month, and seemed to form a part of it already, shining there, smiling in its fresh pink outfit, catholic and delicious.

Only about twenty pages earlier, the narrator has described for us the hawthorns adorning the altar at Saint-Hilaire for the celebration of "Mary's month." Mary is, of course, the emblem of virginity -- like the "young girl in a party dress." But the narrator dwells on the pinkness of the flower, on the buds "which revealed, when they began to open, as though at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, reds of a bloody tinge." The language here is sensual, hinting at pubescence and menstruation. And Gilberte's behavior toward the narrator is hardly virginal:

she allowed her glances to stream out at full length in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but with a concentration and a secret smile that I could only interpret, according to the notions of good breeding instilled in me, as a sign of insulting contempt; and at the same time her hand sketched an indecent gesture for which, when it was directed in public at a person one did not know, the little dictionary of manners I carried inside me supplied only one meaning, that of intentional insolence.

(I'm trying not to venture too far into Proust commentary and criticism at this point, but I couldn't resist Googling "Proust Gilberte 'indecent gesture'," and sure enough there's plenty of discussion of this passage.)

And then Gilberte is called away by her mother, who is accompanied by Charlus. And the narrator is left to reflect on the encounter.

I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: "I think you're ugly, I think you're grotesque, I loathe you!" But I went away, carrying with me forever, as the first example of a type of happiness inaccessible to children of my kind because of certain laws of nature impossible to transgress, the image of a little girl with red hair, her skin scattered with pink freckles, holding a spade and smiling as she cast at me long, cunning, and inexpressive glances.

Note that Gilberte's hair, previously described as "blonde" or "reddish-blonde," has here become simply red, and that the pinkness of her freckles is emphasized.

The Proust Project, Day 10

Where this began
Day 9

Swann's Way (translated by Lydia Davis), pp. 118-129.

Thus far, Aunt Léonie and Françoise have been rather narrowly defined comic figures, so set in their routines as to be almost mechanical. But now Proust delves into their psychology, adding perverse and contradictory qualities to their characters. For Proust, as for Austen, George Eliot, Flaubert, Faulkner and any number of other novelists, provincial life, with its limited and circumscribed relationships, provides a laboratory for character analysis and moral commentary.

Léonie's utter self-absorption leads to the narrator's conclusion that "she would have taken pleasure in mourning us," that if the rest of the family were wiped out in one fell swoop, it would have allowed "her to savor all her tenderness for us in an extended grief and to be the cause of stupefaction in the village as she led the funeral procession, courageous and stricken, dying on her feet." He asserts that "she would from time to time resort to introducing into her life, to make it more interesting, imaginary incidents which she would follow with passion," Françoise being a prime player in these fantasies, which Léonie would act out over the board on which she played solitaire, speaking the roles aloud.

"Sometimes, even this 'theater in bed' was not enough for my aunt, she wanted to have her plays performed." So she would set Françoise and Eulalie against one another to watch the consequences. She demonstrates the paranoia of the idle imagination, or as the narrator calls her, "an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness."

Françoise, the dutiful servant, is similarly perverse. She "would for her daugher, for her nephews, have given her life without a murmur, [but] was singularly hard-hearted toward other people." So when the kitchen maid who has given birth is seized by postpartum pains, Françoise is sent for the medical book to find a treatment and is discovered weeping over the "hypothetical" patient in the book, but she treats the maid herself with harshness and indifference. And she drives away another kitchen maid who is allergic to asparagus by repeatedly forcing the girl to clean them.

This section ends with the family's puzzlement over the behavior of M. Legrandin, who had "barely responded" to the father's greeting him after church, "walking by the side of a lady from a neighboring château whom we knew only by sight." Then the next evening, Legrandin greets them in a friendly manner, paying especial attention to the narrator. But several Sundays later, they have an encounter with Legrandin similar to the one that puzzled them earlier, in which he is walking with the same lady, and exhibits "a love-smitten eye in a face of ice," as he pretends not to see them. Despite the family's doubts, they allow the narrator to accept an invitation to dinner that Legrandin has extended to him, and him alone, the day before.