The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (234 page)
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Authors: Marcel Proust
Françoise holds court at lunch-time below stairs. Jupien; his niece.
The name Guermantes, having shed its feudal connotations, now offers my imagination a new mystery, that of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Guermantes’ doormat: threshold of the Faubourg.
A gala evening at the Opéra
. Berma in
Phèdre
once more. The Prince of Saxony?. The Faubourg Saint-Germain in their boxes. The Princesse de Guermantes’s
baignoire
: the water-goddesses and the bearded tritons. Berma in a modern piece. Berma and Elstir. The Princesse and the Duchesse de Guermantes. Mme de Cambremer.
My stratagems for seeing the Duchesse de Guermantes out walking; her different faces. Françoise’s impenetrable feelings. I decide to visit Saint-Loup in his garrison, hoping to approach the Duchess through him.
Doncières
. The cavalry barracks. The Captain, the Prince de Borodino. Saint-Loup’s room. Noises and silence. My Doncières hotel. The world of sleep. Field manoeuvres. Saint-Loup’s popularity. The streets of Doncières in the evening. Dinner at Saint-Loup’s
pension
. I ask him to speak to his aunt about me. He wants me to shine in front of his friends. He denies the rumour of his engagement to Mlle d’Ambresac. Major Duroc. The Army and the Dreyfus case. Aesthetics of the military art. Saint-Loup and his mistress. Captain deBorodino and his barber. My grandmother’s voice on the telephone. Saint-Loup’s strange salute.
Return to Paris
. I discover how much my grandmother has changed as a result of her illness. End of winter. Mme de Guermantes in lighter dresses. Work-plans, constantly postponed. Mme Sazerat a Dreyfusard. Legrandin’s professed hatred of society. Visit to the suburbs to meet Saint-Loup’s mistress. I recognise her as “Rachel when from the Lord”. Pear-trees in blossom. Jealous scenes in the restaurant. In the theatre after lunch. Rachel’s cruelty. Her transformation on stage. Rachel and the dancer. Saint-Loup and the journalist. Saint-Loup and the passionate stranger.
An afternoon party at Mme de Villeparisis’s
. Her social decline; her literary qualities. The social kaleidoscope and the Dreyfus case. Mme de Villeparisis’s
Memoirs
. The three Parcae. The portrait of the Duchesse de Montmorency. Legrandin in society. Mme de Guermantes’s face and her conversation lack the mysterious glamour of her name. Mme de Guermantes’s luncheons; the Mérimée and Meilhac and Halévy type of mind. Bloch’s bad manners. Entry of M. de Norpois. Entry of the Duc de Guermantes. Norpois and my father’s candidature for the Academy. Generality of psychological laws. Various opinions on Rachel, on Odette, on Mme de Cambremer. Norpois and the Dreyfus case. The laws of the imagination and of language. Mme de Villeparisis’s by-play with Bloch. The Comtesse de Marsantes. Entry of Robert de Saint-Loup. Mme de Guermantes’s amiability towards me. Norpois and Prince von Faffenheim. Oriane refuses to meet Mme Swann. Charles Morel pays me a visit; Mme Swann and the “Lady in pink”. Charlus and Odette. Charlus’s strange behaviour to his aunt. Mme de Marsantes and her son. I learn that Charlus is the Duc de Guermantes’s brother. The affair of the necklace. Mme de Villeparisis tries to prevent me from going home with M. de Charlus. Charlus offers to guide my life. “Terrible, almost insane” remarks about the Bloch family. M. d’Argencourt’s coldness towards me. Strange choice of a cab.
The Dreyfus case below-stairs. My grandmother’s illness. The thermometer. Dr du Boulbon’s diagnosis. Expedition to the Champs-Elysées with my grandmother. The “Marquise”. My grandmother has a slight stroke.
PART TWO
Chapter One
My grandmother’s illness and death
. Professor E——. “Your grandmother is doomed”. Cottard. The specialist X——. My grandmother’s sisters remain at Combray. Visits from Bergotte, himself ill. Time and the work of art. The Grand Duke of Luxembourg. The leeches. The Duc de Guermantes. My grandmother’s brother-in-law the monk. Professor Dieulafoy. My grandmother’s death.
Chapter Two
Morning visits. The water-heater. Saint-Loup breaks with Rachel. Mme de Stermaria’s divorce. Visit from Albertine. New words in her vocabulary. Françoise. Successive images of Albertine. Her kiss. My mother cures me of my infatuation with Mme de Guermantes. Indiscreet behaviour of a “tall woman” whom I shall later discover to be the Princesse d’Orvillers. Reception at Mme de Villeparisis’s: conversation with Mme de Guermantes; she invites me to dinner, speaks to me about her brother-in-law. Charlus’s strange attitude towards Bloch. Albertine accompanies me to the Bois, where I am to dine next day with Mme de Stermaria. Mme de Stermaria cancels our appointment. Visit from Saint-Loup. Reflections on friendship. Memory of Doncières. Night and fog. The Prince de Foix and his coterie: the hunt for “money-bags”. The Jews. A pure Frenchman. Saint-Loup’s acrobatics. An invitation from M. de Charlus.
Dinner with the Guermantes
. The Elstirs. The flowermaidens. The Princesse de Parme. The family genie. The Courvoisiers. The Duke a bad husband but a social ally to Mme de Guermantes. The Princesse de Parme’s receptions. The Guermantes salon. The Duchess’s mimicry. “Teaser Augustus”. Oriane’s “latest”. The handsome supernumeries. Disillusionment with the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The charm of the historic name of Guermantes detectable only in the Duchess’s vocal mannerisms: traces of her country childhood. Misunderstanding between a young dreamer and a society woman. Why Saint-Loup will return to a dangerous post in Morocco. The ritual orangeade. The Duchess praises the Empire style. The Guermantes divorced from the name Guermantes. Norpois at once malicious and obliging. The Turkish Ambassadress. The poetry of genealogy. Exaltation in the carriage on the way to M. de Charlus.
Waiting in M. de Charlus’s drawing-room. His strange welcome. Gentleness succeeding rage. He accompanies me home in his carriage.
Letter from the young footman to his cousin. Invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes. Diversity of society people in spite of their apparently monotonous insignificance. Visit to the Duke and Duchess: view of the neighbouring houses. Remarkable discovery which will be described later. The Duc de Bouillon. The coins of the Order of Malta. The Duc de Guermantes’s “Philippe de Champaigne”. Swann greatly “changed”. His Dreyfusism. The Duke’s ball and Amanien’s illness. Swann’s illness. The Duchess’s red shoes.
Notes
1
The French is
s’ennuyer de
, which can mean to miss, to suffer from the absence of.
2
Françoise says
avoir d’argent
instead of
avoir de l’argent
.
3
Ce n’est pas mon père
: celebrated remark by the
môme
Crevette in Feydeau’s
La Dame de chez Maxim’s
. It became a popular all-purpose catch-phrase. John Mortimer translated it as “How’s your father?” in his adaptation of the Feydeau play for the National Theatre.
4
The French is
plaindre
, to pity, which used also to mean to deplore or regret. The sense here is that Mme Octave did not regret her expenditure on rich fare.
5
A somewhat inaccurate quotation from Pascal’s famous “memorial.”
6
The allusion is to the Romanian-born Comtesse Anna de Noailles (
née
Brancovan), friend and correspondent of Proust, who was an extravagant admirer of her verse.
7
Popular abbreviation of the newspaper
l’Intransigeant
.
8
The Academy in question is
l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques
, one of the five (including the
Académie Française
) which comprise the
Institut de France
.
9
Jules Méline, Prime Minister for two years during the Dreyfus Case.
10
Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1777), the best-known member of an illustrious family of botanists.
11
La barbe
has the colloquial meaning “tedious” or “boring.”
12
Duc Decazes: minister and favourite of Louis XVIII.
13
Carmen Sylva was the pen-name of Elizabeth, Queen of Romania (1843-1916).
14
“
Qu’importe le flacon pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse!
”—the line is in fact by Alfred de Musset.
15
Le Syndicat
was the term used by anti-semites to describe the secret power of the Jews.
16
Prince Henri d’Orléans, son of the Duc de Chartres, publicly embraced the notorious Esterhazy after he had given evidence at the Zola trial.
17
“Quand on parle du Saint-Loup!” is what the Duchess says. The French for “Talk of the devil” is “Quand on parle du loup.” The pun doesn’t work in English.
18
Paraphrase of a famous line from Molière’s
Le Misanthrope: “Ah, qu’en termes galants ces choses-là sont mises!”
19
A word introduced by Pierre Loti from the Japanese
musume
, meaning girl or young woman.
20
There is a complicated pun here, impossible to convey in English. Françoise says: “Faut-il que j’éteinde?” instead of “éteigne.” Albertine’s “Teigne?” is not only a tentative correction of Françoise’s faulty subjunctive; it also suggests that she is an old shrew (a secondary meaning of
teigne
= tinea, moth).
21
i.e., Venice. For an elucidation of this passage, see “Place-names: the Name”:
Swann’s Way
pp. 554-59.
22
A Proustian joke here: Edouard Detaille was a mediocre academic painter known especially for his paintings of military life. Alexandre Ribot was a familiar middle-of-the-road political figure, twice Prime Minister under the Third Republic. Suzanne Reichenberg was for thirty years the principal
ingénue
at the Comédie-Française.
23
Ventre affamé
—from the expression “Ventre affamé n’a pas d’oreilles,” meaning “Words are wasted on a starving man.”
24
A riverside restaurant/cabaret with “tree-houses” where, the notion was, patrons could imagine themselves the
Swiss Family Robinson
. It gave its name to the spot where it was situated, now incorporated in the Paris suburb of Le Plessis-Robinson.
25
La Fille de Roland
was a popular verse drama by Henri de Bornier. The Duchess’s joke refers to Princess Marie, daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte, who married Prince George, second son of King George I of Greece.
26
An aria from Hérold’s
Le Pré-aux-Clercs
.
27
A seventeenth-century poetess noted for rather mawkish verses.
28
A reference to the playwright Edouard Pailleron, noted for his quick, sharp-witted, rather shallow comedies.
29
Euphemism for
merde
(shit), hence the joke about capital C or M.
30
A reference to La Fontaine’s fable
The Miller and His Son
, in which the third party is an ass.
31
A well-known French opera singer, who had little connexion with Wagner.
I
N
S
EARCH OF
L
OST
T
IME
VOLUME IV
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
T
RANSLATED BY
C.K. S
COTT
M
ONCRIEFF AND
T
ERENCE
K
ILMARTIN
R
EVISED BY
D. J. E
NRIGHT
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
1993 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York,
This edition was originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, London, in 1992.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of
Cities of the Plain
by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
Sodom and Gomorrah
first appeared in The Modern Library as
Cities of the Plain
in 1938.
Jacket portrait courtesy of Culver Pictures
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922.
[Sodome et Gomorrhe. English]
Sodom and Gomorrah/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p. cm.—(In search of lost time; 4)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Title. II. Series: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du
temps perdu. English;
PQ2631.R63S6313 1993
843'.912—dc20 92-27272
eISBN: 978-0-679-64181-0
v3.0r1jc
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