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...

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...

Interwoven in the telling of Swann and Odette's romantic entanglement are three important factors in its development: the Verdurins' group which starts by bringing them together and ends by coming between them; Swann's consequent exile from high society; and the importance of music, in particular Vinteuil's sonata, in their relationship. In relation to the first two of those themes, Proust's skills as a portraitist and as an observer of subtle class distinctions are illustrated in his sketches of the attendees of both the Verdurins' bourgeois and the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's upper-class salons; while, in relation to the third theme, his profound appreciation of music is demonstrated by his thoughts on the sonata which is heard in both salons. The Verdurins' circle Proust commences Swann in Love with a description of the “little clan” who attend the Verdurins' salon. Immediately, with just one quote, he renders the personality of the group...

  Finally in the Combray section (which consists almost entirely of the remembrance of his youth in that Norman village by an older Marcel while lying in bed somewhere else unspecified), we come to the Guermantes way. This is a longer walk than Swann's way (aka the M éséglise way) and so the family only embark on it when the weather is fine ( p.227 Scott Moncrieff, p.180 Kilmartin ). The route runs alongside the Vivonne river where, on each stroll, Marcel observes a single lily “which the current, across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey.” The lily's plight is first compared to that of neurasthenics such as his Aunt L é onie and then to the never-ending repetitions of the inhabitants of the Inferno, to whom Dante would like to have talked for longer had he not been whisked away by h...