Things Are Really Foxed Up

Andrew Sullivan views Palin's Fox News contract with great alarm:

This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.
...
Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Ailes' New Political-Media Party: The FNC-RNC Hostile Take-Over - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

How Do You Say...?

So it seems that we're pronouncing "Haiti" wrong. Or are we?

Language Log » Hatey?

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.