Within A Budding Grove: Madame Swann at Home (13th post)

 Having examined Marcel's relationship with Gilberte, I would now like to explore the Swanns' home and social life, which is the other main theme in this section.

Before doing that, however, it is necessary to consider the beginning of the section, which opens with Marcel's parents having to dinner an old ambassador, the Marquis de Norpois, who is working with Marcel's father. Prior to the visit, his parents had been pondering the question of whom else to invite and had decided against Swann, who Marcel's father thought had, since his marriage to Odette, become a vulgarian who was forever name-dropping. Meanwhile, on M de Norpois' previous recommendation, Marcel had been earlier that day to see the great actress Berma but when faced with the reality, as we should expect by now, had been disappointed. He remains, however, a devotee of the great author Bergotte.

It is an iconoclastic evening for Marcel, for M de Norpois speaks highly of Mme Swann, disparages Bergotte, maintains his praise of Berma, damns with faint praise the Balbec church which Marcel hopes to see soon, and lets Marcel know he has no literary talent (pp.1-70 III Scott Moncrieff, pp.465-515 Kilmartin). M de Norpois arrives at this latter opinion after he peruses the “prose poem” which Marcel had written a few years earlier, and which we can assume is the composition inspired by the twin steeples of Martinville and the third steeple of Vieuxvicq (see my 7th post here). Shortly afterwards, Marcel finds himself concurring after experiencing another “moment”. A pavilion in the park “emitted a chill and fusty smell which … pervaded me with a … consistent pleasure on which I could lean for support, delicious, soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and certain. I should have liked, as long ago in my walks along the Guermantes way, to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to interrogate this antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it was offering me only as an 'extra', but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to me” (p.90 III SM, p.530 TK). On his way home, Marcel realises the pavilion's smell had reminded him of his uncle Adolphe's room at Combray but does not understand why it had filled him with such happiness. It is then that he thinks he deserved the contempt of  M de Norpois: “a positive rapture had been conveyed to me, not by any important idea, but by a mouldy smell” (p.93 III SM, p.533 TK)

M de Norpois does not subscribe to the popular view of the Swanns' marriage and Odette's character. He says she was desperate to marry him and considers Swann to be happy. I have already referred to the lacuna that exists between the state of their relationship at the end of Swann in Love and their subsequent marriage (see my 9th post here). Their relationship had seemed at an end: he annoyed her all the time, while she avoided him and spent as much time away as possible. What caused them to marry? Something that  M de Norpois says might provide the reader with a clue. He recalls: “It is true that for some years before the marriage she was always trying to blackmail him in a rather disgraceful way; she would take the child away whenever Swann refused her anything” (p.53 III SM, p.503 TK). In other words, Gilberte was born out of wedlock and perhaps that was the reason they married. Some extra weight is given to this theory when we are later told: “But when Swann in his daydreams saw Odette as already his wife he invariably formed a picture of the moment in which he would take her—her, and above all her daughter—to call upon the Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her father-in-law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes)” (p.59 III SM, p.507 TK).

It is when Marcel is invited to the Swanns' house that we gain an insight into their social world. One thing that is odd about Marcel's perception of the Swanns is that it is inconsistent: his tone alternates between veneration and criticism. For instance, Marcel finds Swann very different from how he used to be when he was part of the aristocratic world. Echoing his parents' disapproval, Marcel observes that Swann is no longer discreet and likes to publicise his acquaintances (p.120 III SM, p.553 TK). Later, he finds Swann “a trifle ridiculous” (p.141 III SM, p.568 TK). This is not long after Marcel was idolising him as an extraordinary creature whom he would like to be as bald as (p.270 II SM, p.448 TK). And he finds “charm” in Swann's clothes and the contents of his house, and feels “privilege” in the Swanns' allowing him to become acquainted with them (pp.157-159 III SM, pp.580-581 TK).

Even more contradictory are his descriptions of Mme Swann. When, with “the thrilling prospect of sitting down to luncheon with Mme Swann”, he enters her house, he is as much in awe as he had been when observing her in the Bois de Boulogne (see my 11th post here). His deferential tone is the same as that of Place-Names: The Name. He is shown into a waiting room “its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon; I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people who are kept waiting in a room beside you but do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more impressive, and received coldly the warmth of a glowing fire of coals, preciously displayed behind a screen of crystal, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled, now and again, its perilous rubies” (pp.139-140 III SM, pp.566-567 TK). But whenever a past incident is recalled, she becomes once more Odette and the narrator's tone changes back to that of Swann in Love, pointing out her lack of intelligence and culture, eg. she “had seen nothing – nor would she, had she been a thousand times as comprehending” (p.150 III SM, p.574 TK), and she was regarded “as the illiterate courtesan” who was comically ignorant of the upper echelons of the social hierarchy (pp.128-129 III SM, pp.558-559TK). 

It is, of course, part of Proust's method of characterisation, that he presents different, even contradictory, views of a person at different times, but what is odd here is that he is giving the viewpoint of just one person: the narrator. The answer might perhaps lie in Proust's method of textual revision: inserting new passages here and there could result in an uneven tone. 

When Marcel's period in the Swanns' waiting room eventually ends, he is disappointed as usual and for the usual reason: “Mme Swann, creeping furtively in … did not fulfil the promises lavished, while I had been waiting, upon my imagination” (p.142 III SM, p.568 TK).

Anatole France (one of

the models for Bergotte)

It is at their house that he is introduced to Bergotte. Marcel's initial reaction? Having imagined the author to be a frail elderly gentleman with white locks, the reality is yet again disappointing. “The name Bergotte made me jump like the sound of a revolver fired at me point blank, but instinctively, for appearance's sake, I bowed; there, straight in front of me, as by one of those conjurers whom we see standing whole and unharmed, in their frock coats, in the smoke of a pistol-shot out of which a pigeon has just fluttered, my salute was returned by a young common little thick-set peering person, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a black tuft on his chin. I was cruelly disappointed, for what had just vanished in the dust of the explosion was not only the feeble old man, of whom no vestige now remained; there was also the beauty of an immense work which I had contrived to enshrine in the frail and hallowed organism that I had constructed, like a temple, expressly for itself, but for which no room was to be found in the squat figure, packed tight with blood-vessels, bones, muscles, sinews, of the little man with the snub nose and black beard who stood before me.”  To that body of work, which Marcel has so greatly enjoyed, he is now “obliged to attach, as to the cord of a balloon, the man with the little beard, without knowing whether it would still have the strength to raise him from the ground” (pp.169-171 III SM, pp.589-590 TK). 

Marcel is also not pleased by Bergotte's manner of speech, in the discussion of which a necessary quality of great writers is revealed: “the beauty of their language is as incalculable as that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object of which, and not of their language or its beauty, they are thinking, to which they have not yet given expression” and their work contains “an abundance of real and unexpected elements”. But the process which led to the literary beauty of Bergotte's work did not produce such a pleasing verbal effect: he “appeared almost to be talking nonsense”. There is an explanation for this: “the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be quite wrong about it, to be speaking in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be in confusion, for each of us finds lucidity only in those ideas which are in the same state of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the elimination, first, of the stereotyped attitude to which we have grown accustomed, and which has seemed to us to be reality itself, every new conversation, as well as all original painting and music, must always appear laboured and tedious.” (pp.173-176 III SM, pp.592-594 TK).76 III SM, pp.592-594 TK).