Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

  As previously mentioned, almost half of The Guermantes Way is taken up with accounts of two parties held respectively by the Marquise de Villeparisis and by her niece, the Duchesse de Guermantes. I would like to have ignored these events as we learn almost nothing of interest, but they have some importance for Marcel's social development, so I intend to cover them both in one post. There is another long section devoted to a dinner-party, that of the Princesse de Guermantes, but that is in Part I of Cities of the Plain, and it will have to wait until a later post. Chapter One: the Marquise de Villeparisis's party Marcel's entrance to aristocratic society begins with an invitation to an event one afternoon at Mme de Villeparisis', who has known his grandmother since they were girls and is the great aunt of his friend Robert de Saint-Loup.  La Comtesse de Boigne (a model for the  Marquise de Villeparisis Before the description of her tea-party we are given a discussion o...

  Out of concern for his grandmother's health, Marcel has left Doncières and returned to the family home in Paris. The scene that immediately greets him there is a still life that is both sad and alarming, and the analysis of that fleeting instant is worth quoting in full.  Painting by M Knoop “Entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,—there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to...

I suspect that the vast majority of those readers who give up on Proust do so at some stage of The Guermantes Way. While it contains much of interest, half of its pages are devoted to two society parties at the respective homes of Mme de Villeparisis and Mme de Guermantes, and during those 400 pages of inconsequential chatter, genealogy and snobbery, it can be difficult not to start thinking of more profitable ways of spending one's time. I intend to focus rather on the other half and make only a few comments about Marcel's attendance at those two events. Since we were last in Marcel's company at Balbec, he and his family have moved into a flat in the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes' Parisian hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The building also houses little shops and workrooms of shoe-makers and tailors, along with the apartment of Mme de Villeparisis, who will be company for Marcel's grandmother as she has started suffering from an undiagnosed illness...