Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

 The third and final chapter of The Captive marks a dramatic change in Marcel and Albertine's relationship. After returning from the Verdurins' soir é e (see my 26 th post), which he had dissuaded Albertine from attending and to which he had then secretly gone himself, Marcel finds her waiting up for him in her room. She is annoyed by his revelation that he has been to the Verdurins'. She asks whether Mlle Vinteuil had attended, which for him confirms his suspicion that she had intended to meet the composer's daughter there (see my 25 th and 26 th posts) ( pp.175-176 X Scott Moncrieff, p.338 III Kilmartin ). Albertine confesses to Marcel that when she had told him that she had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend (see my 24 th post), she had been lying to make herself more interesting to him by pretending she was connected with the great composer. Marcel feels sorry that Albertine thinks the Verdurin circle look down on her and he offers to pay several hund...

 The Verdurins, who figured largely in Swann in Love and then reappeared at la Raspeli è re near Balbec in Cities of the Plain (see my 23 rd post), are once more central to the narrative in this chapter. Marcel is visiting their Parisian salon in the Quai Conti and is longing to see the room where Swann used to meet Odette. His wish is disappointed when, on the way there, he learns from Brichot that the couple had frequented the salon when it was at the Verdurins' former home in the rue Montalivet, before it was partially destroyed by fire. Marcel now reveals that Swann's death, which had been briefly mentioned in passing in Cities of the Plain, had been a “crushing blow” to him and he quotes a newspaper obituary before reflecting that, as a result of his “remarkable personality in both the intellectual and the artistic worlds”, his name could survive for a while after his death. Le Cercle de la rue Royale by James Tissot. Charles Haas is furthest right. There follows a stran...

 When Descartes sought to discover what he could know for certain, he discarded everything he could doubt, and by this method found that the only thing he knew for sure was that in doubting, he was thinking . Hence, the famous “cogito, ergo sum”. However, Descartes' certainty is solipsistic and this creates other philosophical problems, in particular what philosophers call the “problem of other minds”. Any Proust reader who has studied philosophy will have noticed passages over which the ghost of Descartes (and sometimes Plato) seems to hover. For instance, in the first chapter of The Captive, taking the Cartesian method one step further, Marcel tells us that the real life of another person is unknowable to us ( p.74 IX Scott Moncrieff, p.56 III Kilmartin ). This could be taken as the theme of this section of the novel: the impossibility of Marcel knowing what is going on in Albertine's mind. All he has to go one are suspicions, confessions and the reports of others: each of w...