Combray

Swann in Love

Place-Names

I

Awakenings

Bedtime at Combray

Resurrection of Combray through involuntary memory

II

Combray

Swann’s Way

The Guermantes Way

Awakenings

• River landscape: the Vivonne (235)
• the water-lilies (238)
• The Guermantes; Genevieve de Brabant “the ancestress of the Guermantes family” (242)
• Daydreams and discouragement of a future writer (243)
• The Duchesse de Guermantes in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad (246)
• The secrets hidden behind the shapes, scents, and colours (252)
• The steeples of Martinville; first joyful experience of literary creation (254)
• Transition from joy to sadness (257)
• Does reality take shape in the memory alone? (260)

Summary

This section describes the views and memories as one walks along a path known as Guermantes Way.

Quotations

“... a lily ... which the current ... would never leave at rest for a moment, so that ... it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey.” [238]

“... who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they constantly imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, inelctable and baneful dietetics. Such as these was the water-lily, and reminiscent also of those wretches whose paculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired about them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents. [238]

“How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!” [240]

“... on the grass over which came to us, faint, horizontal, but dense and metallic still, echoes of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had not melted into the air they had traversed for so long, and, ribbed by the successive palpitation of all their sound-waves, throbbed as they grazed the flowers at our feet.” [240]

“... because reality takes shape in the memory alone...” [260]

Comment

We have in this section the first glimpses of his emotions as an author.