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

• View over the plain (189)
• The lilacs of Tansonville (190)
• The hawthorn lane (193)
• Apparition of Gilberte (197)
• 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 (204)
• Mlle Vinteuil’s friend comes to Montjouvain (206)
• M. Vinteuil’s sorrow (208)
• The rain (211)
• The porch of Saint-Andres-des-Champs, Francoise and Theodore (211)
• Death of Aunt Leonie; Francoise’s wild grief (215)
• Exultation in the solitude of autumn (218)
• Disharmony between our feelings and their habitual expression (218)
• “The same emotions do not spring up simultaneously in everyone” (219)
• Stirrings of desire (219)
• The little closet smelling of orris-root (222)
• Scene of sadism at Montjouvain (224).

Summary

This section describes the views and memories as one walks along a path known as Swann’s Way, since it bordered Swann’s property.

Quotations

“My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used to take them after long hours spent over a book.” [217]

“... my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation ... most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us identify them. ... this discordance between our impressions and their habitual expression.” [218]

“... I learned that identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order.” [219]

“Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added an alternative feeling which I was unable to distinquish clearly from it, a feeling stimulated by the desire to see appear before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my arms.” [219]

“... had she been able to discern in herself ... that indifference to the sufferings one causes which ... is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty.” [233]

Comment

There is a slight sense of a passing of time as Aunt Leonie dies. The author doesn’t seem to feel any sense of sorrow himself, but only comments on how it affected the maid, Francoise.