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.

The Proust Project, Day 46

Where this began
Day 45

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 217- 234.

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

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

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

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

Habit may weaken all things, but it also stabilizes them; it brings about a dislocation, but then makes it last indefinitely. For years past, I had been roughly modeling my state of mind each day on my state of mind the day before. At Balbec, breakfast in bed -- a different breakfast -- was to be incapable of nourishing the ideas on which my love for Gilberte had fed in Paris.

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

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

The trip itself puts him once again in the hands of the women who have coddled him, not only his mother but also his grandmother and Françoise. And this man whom we have seen holding his own with Bergotte, listening to the grownup conversations in Mme. Swann's salon, selling his Aunt Léonie's bequest to woo Gilberte, and spending his time with prostitutes, is once again reduced to the emotional state of a little boy fearing separation from his mother.

The Proust Project, Day 45

Where this began
Day 44

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 198-217.

The narrator finally makes the break with Gilberte -- after selling his Aunt Léonie's Chinese vase for ten thousand francs so he can send Gilberte flowers every day -- when he sees her walking down the street "with a young man in the twilight." (Actually, he says he "thought" he saw her -- few things happen definitively to our narrator.) He is "now determined never to see her again," and he spends the money so he can "lie weeping in the arms of other women, whom I did not love."

And then there's a bit of foreshadowing:

On one occasion there was an unpleasant scene at home because I declined to accompany my father to an official function, at which M. and Mme Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, who was then little more than a child. The different periods of our life overlap. Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others).

He also tells us that "all the diverse modes of sorrow will be described in connection with a later love affair." The reader is left to decide whether to take that as a threat or a promise.

But for now he is beginning to experience "the peace of mind of lasting sadness." His imagination dwells on things that might have been, "sweet and constantly regenerated images" that "came to occupy more space in my mind than the glimpse of her with the young man, which weakened for lack of nourishment." He stops visiting Mme. Swann's because "the memory of Gilberte was inseparable from such visits," though he and Gilberte continue to write letters to each other. Hers "were fully as considerate as any I wrote to people who meant nothing to me."

As they slowly grow apart, he begins to regret having decided against a diplomatic career -- a choice he made "so as not to absent myself from a girl whom I would not now be seeing again, whom I had already more or less forgotten." He resumes his visits to Mme. Swann's, which "now caused me no grief at all," but to avoid seeing Gilberte, he more often meets Odette (and her entourage that includes Swann and other men) on her Sunday morning walk. His fascination with Odette is such that he continues to notice the minutest hidden details of her dress, "like the fine Gothic stonework hidden eighty feet up a cathedral, on the corner face of a balustrade, just as perfectly executed as the bas-relief statues in the main doorway, but which no one had ever set eyes on until an artist on a chance visit to the city asked to be allowed to climb up there."

He pinpoints the Swanns' niche in society: "though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic idea and purposes -- in was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile." And he witnesses the Prince de Sagan's attention to Odette as "homage to Woman, even though she was embodied in a woman whom his mother or sister would never stoop to frequent."

And so, at the end of the section "At Mme Swann's," the narrator reports that "the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria."

The Proust Project, Day 44

Where this began
Day 43

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 183-198.

There are times when Proust reminds me of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, that infamously interminable eighteenth-century epistolary novel that Henry Fielding parodied in Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Not, of course, that I've actually read Pamela, but I've read in it and about it -- including Fielding -- enough to know that it requires a certain patience and persistence to get through a thousand-plus pages about a woman defending her virtue. (Apologies and kudos to those who have read it.) Today is one of those times, with the narrator wallowing in self-inflicted misery about Gilberte's not making the next move to restore their relationship.

He begins by waiting for the New Year's Day letter he expects her to write. And waiting and waiting, having decided it must have been held up in the mail.

Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die. This is the amulet that protects individuals, and sometimes nations, not from danger, but from the fear of danger, or, rather, from belief in danger, which can lead to the braving of real dangers by those who are not brave.

There's enough wisdom and psychological insight in passages like that one to win us over, to keep us going through what might otherwise be sheer ennui -- a trait that, again reportedly, Proust shares with Richardson (despite Fielding's mockery). Proust also makes us realize that what the narrator is going through is a kind of addiction: "I was as distressed as an invalid who has finished his vial of morphine without having another one available." And indeed, the narrator has his own physiological addiction: "My heart palpitations had become so violent that I was ordered to reduce my consumption of caffeine. This having put a stop to them, I began to wonder whether the caffeine might not be partly responsible for the anguish I had felt when I more or less chose to fall out with Gilberte."

Well, yes, but he might as well face it, he's addicted to love. (Catchy line, that.) "I detested the thought that one day I might have these same feelings for someone else, as this deprived me not only of Gilberte, but also of my love and my pain, the very love and pain through which, as I wept, I tried to grasp the real Gilberte, though I was obliged to admit they did not belong to her in particular, but would sooner or later devolve to another woman." He fancies going to Gilberte to tell her that one day he would love another, but decides that this would only show her how great his love for her is now, "and she would have been more irked than every by the sight of me." You're caught in a trap, you can't get out, because you love her too much, baby.

Sorry for the pop song references, but they make a point: What the narrator is going through here is familiarly adolescent posturing, of a different order from the fevered obsession of Swann for Odette. "So, with tears, courage, and consolation, I sacrificed the happiness of being with her to the possibility of one day seeming lovable in her eyes, though knowing it would be a day when the prospect of seeming lovable in her eyes would leave me cold."

We know that the narrator's infatuation is a shallow one because he's so easily distracted from self-pity by the goings-on at the Swanns', particularly by Odette herself, who is constantly upgrading her style:

She was in the habit of maintaining that she would go without bread sooner than be deprived of art and cleanliness, and that she would have be more upset by the burning of the Mona Lisa than by the annihilation of "swarms" of her acquaintance. These conceptions appeared paradoxical to her lady friends, giving her among them the renown of a high-minded woman, and brought the Belgian ambassador to visit her once a week; and in the little world that revolved about her sun, everybody would have been astounded that elsewhere -- at the Verdurins', for example -- she was seen as stupid.

The narrator's observations of the way Odette has changed, even in the eyes of Swann, are another of Proust's violations of point of view -- it's unlikely that the still-naive narrator would have seen so clearly that Swann "could still see her as a Botticelli" while Odette "had no time for Botticelli."

In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel's inkwell, before writing in the holy book where the word Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, "Be sure not to mention it to her! One word -- and she'd make sure it wouldn't happen again!"

Similarly, the nuanced analysis of of Odette's clothing -- "One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization" -- is a bit beyond the young narrator's sensibility. But why quibble, when it gets us away, if only temporarily, from his musings about Gilberte?