Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

 The remaining three chapters* of Albertine Gone deal with Marcel coming to terms with loss, finally visiting Venice, and revisiting Combray. Chapter II It is said that there are five (or seven) stages of grief, but for Marcel there are only three: anguish; suspicion; and oblivion. Chapter II finds him fluctuating between the latter two. By the beginning of this chapter, his love for Albertine has altered. On his way to forgetting and indifference, Marcel sees his feelings go on a reverse journey. He now finds himself back at the beginning of their affair and experiences again the sentiments through which he had passed before “arriving at my great love”. His memories of those sentiments “retained the terrible force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then yearning towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future” ( p.195 XI Scott Moncrieff, p.569 III Kilmartin ). He presently feels a charm in ...

  When Marcel is not attending society parties, a number of important events take place in his life. We have already dealt with the death of his grandmother, which occurs after Mme de Villeparisis's party, but other developments include the return of Albertine, a strange meeting with the Baron de Charlus, a possibly bogus invitation to the Princesse de Guermantes's ball, Swann's sad news and an insight into the Duc and Duchesse of Guermantes's real character. Albertine It is the period between the Marquise de Villeparisis's tea-party and the Duchesse de Guermantes's dinner-party. We find Marcel home alone on a Sunday afternoon in the autumn following the death of his grandmother. Robert Saint-Loup has written to him to say he had bumped into Mme de Stermaria (she was Mlle de Stermaria when we first met her at the Grand Hotel but has since married and divorced) and had asked her to meet Marcel. Robert's note suggests that he will be on to a sure thing ( pp....

  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...