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Swann's Way
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Combray
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Bedtime at Combray
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Combray |
Bedtime at Combray Resurrection of Combray through involuntary memory
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Summary These pages provide a range of memories about the author’s immediate family and acquaintances when he was a boy in Combray. In addition to his parents and grandparents, we meet his great-aunt, the maid Francoise, and a neighbor, M. Swann. Quotations “... my memory had been set in motion; ... remembering again all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.” [9] “ ... my melancholy and anxious thoughts ... on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched” [9] “ ... he [father] would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. ‘That is not the way to make him strong and active ... especially this little man, who needs all the strength and will-power that he can get’ [12] “ ... [mother] not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind” [12] “At last one can breathe! [grandmother]” [12] “ ... in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them” [14] “... my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future.” [14] “I [grandfather] very often think of my poor wife [recently dead], but I cannot think of her for long at a time.” [18] “... the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from the Swann created by my great-aunt ... even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone ...our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people ... ‘seeing someone we know’ is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him ... each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen”. [23-24] “Our friend’s coporeal envelope had been so well lined with this residuum, as well as various earlier memories of his parents...” [24] “This view of Swann’s social position which prevailed in my family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst type, almost a prostitute, whom, to do him justice, he never attemped to introduce to us ...” [26] “The fault I [Swann] find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything of real importance.” [33] “That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crytallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.” [36] “This code [of Francoise’s] ... seemed to have provided for social complexities and refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise’s background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood ...” [37] “... like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, from signs imperceptible to the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything we might wish to conceal from her.” [38] “As for the agony through which I had just passed, ..., as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his [Swann] life for many years, ..., to him, the anguish that comes from knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow - to him that anguish came through love, ..., but when, as had befallen me, it possesses one’s soul before love has yet entered into one’s life, then it must drift, awaiting love’s coming, vague and free, without precise attachment.” [39-40] “I fancy he [Swann] has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who lives with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It is the talk of the town. [45] “My father used constantly to refuse to let me do things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters granted me by my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to ‘principles’, and because for him there was no such thing as the ‘rule of law’. ... ‘But my dear,’ my mother answered timidly, ‘whether or not I feel sleepy is not the point; we mustn’t let the child get into the habit...’ “ [48] “... it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me ... [the author, in the present]” [49] “... for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value, she [grandmother] would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography. [53] “... the pastoral novels of George Sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque, and are now only to be found in country dialects.” [55] Comment Daily life follows a tight regimen and there is a strict social code that determines whom one may talk with. This provides a window into French upper class society around 1900. It parallels many English novels of about the same period. Who are the key authors for different countries at about this time?
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