Within A Budding Grove: Place-Names: The Place (14th post)

 It is now two years after the Gilberte episode and Marcel, aged about 16 or 17, finally gets finally to go to Balbec, accompanied by his grandmother. In Place-Names: The Name, at the end of Swann's Way, Marcel has only the names of desired destinations with which to conjure. But now in the much longer Place-Names: The Place, he experiences one of the destinations of which he has long dreamed. In particular, he has been looking forward to seeing the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and, as ever, he is disappointed by the reality. He has alighted from the train at Balbec-le-Vieux rather than Balbec-Plage and discovers that the church is not next to the sea, which he had romantically imagined lapping at the foot of its walls, but twelve miles away in the inland town's mundane surroundings of a café, an omnibus office, a bank and a pâtisserie. Furthermore, the church's statue of the Virgin appears as a little, wrinkled, old lady (which is discussed in a 357-word sentence – incidentally, not even close to the novel's longest sentence of 958 words). For Marcel, the name “Balbec” has been “broken open” by  the place: its two syllables will now forever contain a tramway, café and provincial bank, as well as people crossing the town square (pp.330-334 III Scott Moncrieff, pp.708-710 Kilmartin).

The lift at the Grand Hotel, Cabourg

Marcel leaves Balbec-le-Vieux for Balbec-Plage. Arriving at the Grand Hotel, he takes the lift to his room. To the operator, he addresses a few words. “I apologised for taking up so much room, for giving him so much trouble, and asked whether I was not obstructing him in the practice of an art to which, so as to flatter the performer, I did more than display curiosity, I confessed my strong attachment. But he vouchsafed no answer, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what he was doing, regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for holy ground, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the manager's orders” (p.341 III SM, pp.715-716 TK). 

The hotel provides plenty of opportunity for character studies as the guests, a bourgeois and aristocratic mixture, include the stand-offish and contemptuous M de Stermaria and his pretty daughter whom Marcel would like to impress; the bohemian Marquise de Villeparisis with whose acquaintance he later hopes to impress Mlle de Stermaria; a snobbish group  consisting of a chief magistrate, a barrister, a solicitor and their wives who criticise and laugh at the other guests; and an exclusive group consisting of an actress and three men who have no interaction with anyone else (pp.336ff III SM, pp.712ff TK).

Mme de Villeparisis is the first of three characters in Within a Budding Grove whom Proust introduces anonymously (the others are Charlus and Albertine): when we and Marcel see them for the first time, although their names are known to him (and us), the persons themselves are unknown. Here Mme de Villeparisis is initially presented as an unidentified, eccentric old lady who is the unwitting cause of amusement to the lawyers' group (p.358 III SM, p.728 TK). It transpires that she is part of the Guermantes family and, of more tactical importance to Marcel, a childhood friend of his grandmother. The latter part of this important passage reveals his intention with regard to Mme de Villeparisis: “Aesthetically the number of types of humanity is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know, even without looking for them in the works of the old masters, like Swann. Thus it happened that in the first few days of our visit to Balbec I had succeeded in finding Legrandin, Swann's hall porter and Mme Swann herself, transformed into a waiter, a foreign visitor whom I never saw again and a bathing superintendent … Whereas this Mme de Villeparisis was her real self, she had not been the victim of an enchantment which had deprived her of her power, but was capable, on the contrary, of putting at the service of my power an enchantment which would multiply it an hundred fold, and thanks to which, as though I had been swept through the air on the wings of a fabulous bird, I was to cross in a few moments the infinitely wide (at least, at Balbec) social gulf which separated me from Mlle de Stermaria.” However, when Marcel's grandmother encounters Mme de Villeparisis, she pretends, out of tact or maybe principle, not to have seen her, thus dashing Marcel's hopes of Mlle de Stermaria observing them together and of thereby being elevated in her eyes (pp.368-371 III SM, pp.736-738 TK). 

I have previously remarked that Proust is a great miniaturist, which is perhaps a paradoxical statement about an author whose novel weighs in at 3,000 pages (depending on the edition) and whose sentences can approach 1,000 words in length. Nevertheless, with just a few strokes, he can depict a character's psyche. Consider how the following passage gives an initial impression of both the little old lady yet to be named as the marchioness and the lawyers group: “The barrister and his friends could not exhaust their flow of sarcasm on the subject of a wealthy old lady of title, because she never moved any where without taking her whole household with her. Whenever the wives of the solicitor and the magistrate saw her in the dining-room at meal-times they put up their glasses and gave her an insolent scrutiny, as minute and distrustful as if she had been some dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance which, after the negative result of a systematic study, must be sent away with a lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust. No doubt by this behaviour they meant only to shew that, if there were things in the world which they themselves lacked—in this instance, certain prerogatives which the old lady enjoyed, and the privilege of her acquaintance—it was not because they could not, but because they did not choose to acquire them. But they had succeeded in convincing themselves that this really was what they felt”  (p.358 III SM, pp.728-729 TK). Or this passage, developing his sketch of the little old lady: “Perhaps she felt that—were she to arrive incognito at the Grand Hotel, Balbec, she would, in her black stuff gown and old-fashioned bonnet, bring a smile to the lips of some old reprobate, who from the depths of his rocking chair would glance up and murmur, 'What a scarecrow!'" (p.359 III SM, p.729 TK). Her own servants (and even curtains, screens and photographs) travel with her and insulate her from the rest of the hotel. She is “indifferent whether or not she gave offence to people whom her friends would not have had in their houses, it was in her own world that she continued to live, by correspondence with her friends, by memories, by her intimate sense of and confidence in her own position, the quality of her manners, the competence of her politeness” (p.360 III SM, p.730 TK).

Meanwhile, we are given an insight into the personality of the barrister, who one day is avoiding his friends because he is to lunch with the Marquis de Cambremer and is ecstatic at the prospect. Afterwards, he pretends that it was nothing extraordinary and that he had hoped his friends would join them at the luncheon. And on learning that the barrister had entertained the marquess, M de Stermaria shows his true colours by dropping his habitual haughtiness and coming up to the barrister the next day to introduce himself (pp.371-373 III SM, pp.738-739 TK). This satirical treatment of snobbery and reflected glory has been intentionally juxtaposed with Marcel's similar behaviour.

That is where we must leave Marcel and his fellow hotel guests, whose places in the narrative will be taken by the more substantial characters of Saint-Loup and Charlus, and whose portraits will become much more complete than the amusing vignettes to which we have just been treated.