Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

  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...

 Following his failure, due to feigned indifference, to be introduced by Elstir to the girls of the “little band”, Marcel finds pleasure afterwards in the realisation that he will nevertheless soon meet them. As he observes, many hours might pass between the event that gave us pleasure and the moment at which we are free to enjoy it ( p.229 IV Scott Moncrieff, p.925 Kilmartin ). When, having persuaded Elstir to give a small tea-party so that he can meet Albertine Simonet, his favourite of the girls, Marcel again experiences this deferred pleasure after he is introduced to her: “This is not to say that the introduction ... did not give me any pleasure, nor assume a definite importance in my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was not conscious* of it, naturally, until some time later, when, once more in the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely...

 Seascape, with Frieze of Girls is the title that Scott Moncrieff gave to the third and final part of Within a Budding Grove. For Proust, and later translators, there were only two parts: Madame Swann at Home and Place-Names: The Place. The latter is itself in two parts, and it is this second part of Place-Names: The Place that Scott Moncrieff has chosen to entitle. His sectioning off is understandable because while the whole of Place-Names: The Place is set in Balbec during Marcel's stay at the Grand Hotel, its first half concerns his meeting Mme de Villeparisis, Robert de Saint-Loup and Baron de Charlus, while its second half concerns his meeting the painter Elstir and, through him, Albertine Simonet and her “little band” of girl friends. Artist: Frank Weston Benson Robert, who is a sergeant in a cavalry regiment, has had to depart Balbec for his barracks at Doncières. Left by himself, Marcel is hanging about outside the hotel when he sees in the distance, walking towards him “fi...

How to introduce characters in a novel? Here is some actual advice given to novice writers: “provide a brief description or summary of the character's physical appearance (age, height, hair colour and clothing style), personality (shy and reserved or outgoing and charismatic) and background (occupation, family and past experiences)”.  Yet this is not how the great writers go about it. There are two ways of introducing characters: by having them appear or by referring to them before they appear (Godot being the exception). At one extreme, where introduction and appearance coincide, we can think of literary characters who suddenly and dramatically appear on the scene. In Great Expectations, for example, the young narrator, Pip, has just introduced himself to the reader and is in the churchyard where his father, mother and five brothers are buried. Without any warning, Dickens then introduces the startling character of Abel Magwitch:  “‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, a...

 It is now two years after the Gilberte episode and Marcel, aged about 16 or 17, finally gets finally to go to Balbec, accompanied by his grandmother. In Place-Names: The Name, at the end of Swann's Way, Marcel has only the names of desired destinations with which to conjure. But now in the much longer Place-Names: The Place, he experiences one of the destinations of which he has long dreamed. In particular, he has been looking forward to seeing the Persian-influenced church at Balbec and, as ever, he is disappointed by the reality. He has alighted from the train at Balbec-le-Vieux rather than Balbec-Plage and discovers that the church is not next to the sea, which he had romantically imagined lapping at the foot of its walls, but twelve miles away in the inland town's mundane surroundings of a café, an omnibus office, a bank and a pâtisserie. Furthermore, the church's statue of the Virgin appears as a little, wrinkled, old lady (which is discussed in a 357-word sentence – ...