Time Regained (30th post)

The death in 1930 of Scott Moncrieff prevented him completing Remembrance of Things Past and it was left to Sydney Schiff, under the pseudonym of Stephen Hudson, to translate the final volume, Time Regained. I find his version awkward to read and will therefore quote instead the translation by Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, as revised by DJ Enright. For the sake of completeness, I will continue to use page references of both the 12-part Chatto & Windus edition (Scott Moncrieff and Hudson) and the three-part Kilmartin version. For this final volume I will additionally give the page references of the Enright version. 

I intend to divide the volume into three sections: Marcel's return to Paris during World War I; his attendance at the new Princess de Guermantes' party; and his resolution to become a writer. That resolution occurs before he enters the party but I am going to deal with it last as it draws together a number of threads in a conclusive way. 

* * * * * 

It is 1916 and Marcel is once more in Paris after “long years” of treatment at a sanatorium. Now the salons of Mme Verdurin and Mme Bontemps are pre-eminent and it is there that people go to discuss the war, with which Marcel is preoccupied (Hudson XII pp.34-35, Kilmartin III pp.743, Enright VI pp.39-40). 

 Meanwhile, Gilberte, who has gone back to live at Tansonville, writes to tell him that the countryside where they had walked when he had visited her*, is now ravaged by war. The battle of Méséglise lasted more than eight months, and for eighteen months the Germans had held half of Combray and the French the other half (SH XII pp.68-70, TK III pp.777-778, DE VI pp.79-81). 

On his way to Mme Verdurin's, Marcel spots Charlus, so greatly changed as to be unrecognisable at first: “I noticed a tall, stout man in a soft felt hat and a long heavy overcoat, to whose purplish face I hesitated whether I should give the name of an actor or a painter, both equally notorious for innumerable sodomist scandals” (SH XII pp.79-80, TK III pp.786-787, DE VI p.90). Marcel reflects that while Mme Verdurin and Charlus were still estranged from each other, the war had not had a great effect on the activities of either although the presence in Paris of fewer men had reduced the number at her parties and had led to his acquiring, out of necessity, “first the habit of and then the taste for little boys”. For the Verdurins and Charlus “life continued almost unchanged” because “there is a law of inverse proportion which multiplies to such an extent anything that concerns our own welfare and divides by such a formidable figure anything that does not concern it, that the death of unknown millions is felt by us as the most insignificant of sensations, hardly even as disagreeable as a draught” (SH XII pp.87-92, TK III pp.793-797, DE VI pp.97-102). 

In addition to Gilberte's news from Tansonville, Marcel is informed by Charlus that the French and English have destroyed the church at Combray because the Germans were using it as an observation post. He also says he would like to be reconciled with Morel. However, Morel later tells Marcel that he is too afraid to see Charlus, although he refuses to reveal why. Marcel discovers many years afterwards that Morel had reason to fear Charlus: following the Baron's death, Marcel is given some of his effects, including a letter which Charlus had written to Marcel ten years before he died in which he says he would have killed Morel if he had come to see him (SH XII pp.118, 129-132, TK III pp.822, 830-833, DE VI pp.130, 140-142). 

Marcel leaves Charlus and finds himself in a remote part of Paris, where nearly every hotel and most shops are closed as a result of the war. There is, however, one hotel which is busy. Suspecting it might be a meeting places for spies, Marcel enters. In one of the rooms he sees Charlus, chained to a bed, being whipped and verbally abused. The whip is reinforced with nails. The hotel is run by Jupien and Marcel hears Charlus complaining to Jupien that the boy whipping him is not brutal enough. Subsequently, Marcel speaks to Jupien and compares what he has just witnessed to a tale from the Arabian Nights. The reader has previously been told that Jupien possesses a natural wit and we see it at play here when he replies: “'There is another [Arabian Nights tale] I know of, not unrelated to the title of a book which I think I have seen at the Baron's” (SH XII pp.137-166, TK III pp.837-862, DE VI pp.147-175). Jupien's allusion is to the “open sesame” of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and also to a translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies which Marcel had sent to Charlus. I think that Proust is here referring to his own translation of Sesame and Lilies, and in doing so creates the subtlest of blink-and-you-miss-it Hitchcock-style silent auteur cameos. (You would think this would be a common trope in modern literature - it is seen in paintings with van Eyck hidden here and Raphael there, etc - but I can think of only two examples where we are left wondering if an unnamed background character is the author: the man in the macintosh who appears several times in Joyce's Ulysses and the young humorous writer with thinning hair who is seen briefly in Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning.) In this more oblique case, it is not even the author appearing but one of his works, as in Don Quixote when Cervantes references his earlier novel La Galatea. 

German planes over Paris
during WWI

Making his way home, Marcel contemplates what he has just witnessed: “I reflected upon the speed with which conscience ceases to be a partner in our habits, which she allows to develop freely without bothering herself about them, and upon the astonishing picture which may consequently present itself to us if we observe from without, and in the belief that they engage the whole of the individual, the actions of men whose moral and intellectual virtues may at the same time be developing independently in an entirely different direction.” This reflection applies both to Jupien providing such services despite his natural intelligence and good taste, and to Charlus receiving them despite his personal dignity and self-respect. But in the latter's case, Marcel perceives an irreversible decline: “A new stage had been reached in the malady of M de Charlus, which since I had first observed it had … pursued its development with ever-increasing speed”. And he speculates that Charlus' masochism is a consequence of his machismo: “There persisted in M de Charlus his dream of virility, to be attested if need be by acts of brutality” (SH XII p.175, TK III p.870, DE VI p.184). Charlus has more than once suggested that wartime Paris might share the same fate as Pompeii and, in that context, that the inscription “Sodom and Gomorrah” had been found on the wall of a house in Pompeii (SH XII pp.133-134, TK III pp.834-835, DE VI pp.143-144). He now links Sodom more directly with Paris under attack from German planes as he says to Jupien that he can imagine himself being “consumed by this fire from heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom” (SH XII p.175, TK III pp.870, DE VI p.184).

This section of Time Regained ends on a sad note with the news of the death of Robert de Saint-Loup, two days after his return to the front (SH XII pp.183-193, TK III pp.877-885, DE VI pp.192-201).

* At the end of Albertine Gone or the beginning of Time Regained, depending on the edition - see the footnote to my 29^th post