The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (69 page)

1
Bressant: a well-known actor (1815–1886) who introduced a new hair-style which involved wearing the hair short in front and fairly long behind.

2
O ciel, que de vertus vous nous faites haïr
. From Corneille’s
Mort de Pompée
.

3
à contre-coeur
: reluctantly.

4
Le Miracle de Théophile:
verse play by the thirteenth-century troubadour, Rutebeuf.
Les quatres fils Aymon or Renaud de Montauban
: twelfth-century
chanson de geste
.

5
bleu:
express letter transmitted by pneumatic tube (in Paris).

6
The first edition of
Du côté de chez Swann
had
“pour Chartres”
instead of “
pour Reims.”
Proust moved Combray (which as we know was modelled on Illiers, near Chartres) to the fighting zone between Laon and Rheims when he decided to incorporate the 1914–1918 war into his book.

7
Indirect quotation from Racine’s
Phèdre
, Act I, Scene 3:
Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent!
Quelle importune main en formant tous ces noeuds
A pris soin sur mon front d’assembler mes cheveux?

8
In English in the original. Odette’s speech is peppered with English expressions.

9
“Home” is in English in the original, as is “smart” on
this page.

10
La Reine Topaze:
a light opera by Victor Massé presented at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1856.

11
Serge Panine:
play by Georges Ohnet (1848–1918), adapted from a novel of the same name, which had a great success in 1881 in spite of its mediocre literary qualities.
Olivier Métra: composer of such popular works as
La Valse des Roses
and a famous lancers quadrille, and conductor at the Opéra-Comique.

12
Serpent à sonnettes
means rattlesnake.

13
Pays du Tendre
(or, more correctly,
Pays de Tendre
): the country of the sentiments, the tender emotions, mapped (the
carte de Tendre
) by Mlle de Scudéry in her novel,
Clélie
(1654–1670).

14
The rather forced joke on the name Cambremer conceives of it as being made up of abbreviations of
Cambronne
and
merde
(shit).
Le mot de Cambronne
(said to have been flung defiantly at the enemy by a general at Waterloo) is the traditional euphemism for
merde
.

15
Pneumatique
or
petit bleu:
see
note
above.

Awakenings
. Bedrooms of the past, at Combray, at Tansonville, at Balbec. Habit.

Bedtime at Combray
. The magic lantern; Geneviève de Brabant. Family evenings. The little closet smelling of orris-root. The good-night kiss. Visits from Swann; his father; his unsuspected social life. “Our social personality is a creation of other people’s thoughts”. Mme de Villeparisis’s house in Paris; “the tailor and his daughter”. Aunts Céline and Flora. Françoise’s code. Swann and I. My upbringing: “principles” of my grandmother and my mother; arbitrary behaviour of my father. My grandmother’s presents; her ideas about books. A reading of George Sand.

Resurrection of Combray through involuntary memory
. The
madeleine
dipped in a cup of tea.

Combray
. Aunt Léonie’s two rooms; her lime-tea. Françoise. The church. M. Legrandin. Eulalie. Sunday lunches. Uncle Adolphe’s sanctum. Love of the theatre: titles on posters. Meeting with “the lady in pink”. My family quarrel with Uncle Adolphe. The kitchen-maid: Giotto’s “Charity”. Reading in the garden. The gardener’s daughter and the passing cavalry. Bloch and Bergotte. Bloch and my family. Reading Bergotte. Swann’s friendship with Bergotte. Berma. Swann’s mannerisms of speech and attitudes of mind. Prestige of Mlle Swann as a friend of Bergotte’s. The Curé’s visits to Aunt Léonie. Eulalie and Françoise. The kitchen-maid’s confinement. Aunt Léonie’s nightmare. Saturday lunches. The hawthorns on the altar in Combray church. M. Vinteuil. His “boyish”-looking daughter. Walks round Combray by moonlight. Aunt Léonie and Louis XIV.
Strange behaviour of M. Legrandin. Plan for a holiday at Balbec. Swann’s (or the Méséglise) way and the Guermantes way.

Swann’s Way
. View over the plain. The lilacs of Tansonville. The hawthorn lane. Apparition of Gilberte. The lady in white and the man in white “ducks” (Mme Swann and M. de Charlus). Dawn of love for Gilberte: glamour of the name “Swann”. Farewell to the hawthorns. Mlle Vinteuil’s friend comes to Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil’s sorrow. The rain. The porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, Françoise and Théodore. Death of Aunt Léonie; Françoise’s wild grief. Exultation in the solitude of autumn. Disharmony between our feelings and their habitual expression. “The same emotions do not spring up simultaneously in everyone”. Stirrings of desire. The little closet smelling of orris-root. Scene of sadism at Montjouvain.

The Guermantes Way
. River landscape: the Vivonne; the water-lilies. The Guermantes; Geneviève de Brabant “the ancestress of the Guermantes family”. Daydreams and discouragement of a future writer. The Duchesse de Guermantes in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad. The secrets hidden behind shapes, scents and colours. The steeples of Martinville; first joyful experience of literary creation. Transition from joy to sadness. Does reality take shape in the memory alone?.

Awakenings
.

The Verdurins and their “little clan
.” The “faithful”. Odette mentions Swann to the Verdurins. Swann and women. Swann’s first meeting with Odette: she is “not his type”. How he comes to fall in love with her. Dr Cottard. The sonata in F sharp. The Beauvais settee. The little phrase. The Vinteuil of the sonata and the Vinteuil of Combray. Mme Verdurin finds Swann charming at first. But his “powerful friendships” make a
bad impression on her. The little seamstress; Swann agrees to meet Odette only after dinner. Vinteuil’s little phrase, “the national anthem of their love”. Tea with Odette; her chrysanthemums. Faces of today and portraits of the past: Odette and Botticelli’s Zipporah. Odette, a Florentine painting. Love letter from Odette written from the Maison Dorée. Swann’s arrival at the Verdurins’ one evening after Odette’s departure; anguished search in the night. The cattleyas; she becomes his mistress. Odette’s vulgarity; her idea of “chic”. Swann begins to adopt her tastes and considers the Verdurins “magnanimous people”. Why, nevertheless, he is not a true member of the “faithful,” unlike Forcheville. A dinner at the Verdurins’: Brichot, Cottard, the painter, Saniette. The little phrase. Swann’s jealousy: one night, dismissed by Odette at midnight, he returns to her house and knocks at the wrong window. Forcheville’s cowardly attack on Saniette, and Odette’s smile of complicity. Odette’s door remains closed to Swann one afternoon; her lying explanation. Signs of distress that accompany Odette’s lying. Swann deciphers a letter from her to Forcheville through the envelope. The Verdurins organise an excursion to Chatou without Swann. His indignation with them. Swann’s exclusion. Should he go to Dreux or Pierrefonds to find Odette?. Waiting through the night. Peaceful evenings at Odette’s with Forcheville. Recrudescence of anguish. The Bayreuth project. Love and death and the mystery of personality. Charles Swann and “young Swann”. Swann, Odette, Charlus and Uncle Adolphe. Longing for death.

An evening at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s
. Detached from social life by his love and his jealousy, Swann can observe it as it is in itself: the footmen; the monocles; the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot listening to Liszt’s “St Francis”; Mme de Gallardon, a despised cousin of the Guermantes. Arrival of the Princesse des Laumes; her conversation with Swann. Swann introduces the young Mme de Cambremer (Mlle Legrandin) to
General de Froberville. Vinteuil’s little phrase poignantly reminds Swann of the days when Odette loved him. The language of music. Swann realises that Odette’s love for him will never revive.

The whole past shattered stone by stone
. Bellini’s Mahomet II. An anonymous letter.
Les Filles de Marbre
. Beuzeville-Bréauté. Odette and women. Impossibility of ever possessing another person. On the Ile du Bois, by moonlight. A new circle of hell. The terrible re-creative power of memory. Odette and procuresses. Had she been lunching with Forcheville at the Maison Dorée on the day of the Paris-Murcie festival?. She was with Forcheville, and not at the Maison Dorée, on the night when Swann had searched for her in Prévost’s. Odette’s suspect effusions. “Charming conversation” in a brothel. Odette goes on a cruise with the “faithful”. Mme Cottard assures Swann that Odette adores him. Swann’s love fades; he no longer suffers on learning that Forcheville has been Odette’s lover. Return of his jealousy in a nightmare. Departure for Combray, where he will see the young face of Mme de Cambremer whose charm had struck him at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s. The first image of Odette seen again in his dream: he had wanted to die for a woman “who wasn’t his type”.

Dreams of place-names
. Rooms at Combray. Room in the Grand Hotel at Balbec. The real Balbec and the Balbec of dream. The 1.22 train. Dreams of spring in Florence. Words and names. Names of Norman towns. Abortive plan to visit Florence and Venice. The doctor forbids me to travel or to go to the theatre to see Berma; he advises walks in the Champs-Elysées under Françoise’s surveillance.

In the Champs-Elysées
. A little girl with red hair; the name Gilberte. Games of prisoner’s base. What will the weather be like?. Snow in the Champs-Elysées. The
reader of the
Débats
(Mme Blatin). Marks of friendship: the agate marble, the Bergotte booklet, “You may call me Gilberte”; why they fail to bring me the expected happiness. A spring day in winter: joy and disappointment. The Swann of Combray has become a different person: Gilberte’s father. Gilberte tells me with cruel delight that she will not be returning to the Champs-Elysées before the New Year. “In my friendship with Gilberte, it was I alone who loved”. The name Swann. Swann meets my mother in the Trois Quartiers. Pilgrimage with Françoise to the Swanns’ house near the Bois.

The Bois, Garden of Woman
. Mme Swann in the Bois. A walk through the Bois one late autumn morning in 1913. Memory and reality.