Combray

Swann in Love

Place-Names

The Verdurins and their “Little Clan”

An evening at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s

The whole past shattered stone by stone

• Bellini’s Mahomet II (505)
• An anonymous letter (506)
• Les Filles de Marbre (512)
• Beuzeville-Breaute (513)
• Odette and women (513)
• Impossibility of ever possessing another person (517)
• On the Ile du Bois, by moonlight (519)
• A new circle of hell (522)
• The terrible re-creative power of memory (523)
• Odette and procuresses (525)
• Had she been lunching with Forcheville at the Maison Doree on the day of the Paris-Murcie festival? (526)
• She was with Forcheville, and not at the Maison-Doree, on the night when Swann had searached for her in Prevost’s (527)
• Odette’s suspect effusions (529)
• “Charming convesation” in a brothel (530)
• Odette goes on a cruise with the “faithful” (531)
• Mme Cottard assures Swann that Odette adores him (534)
• Swann’s love fades; he no longer suffers on learning tht Forcheville has been Odette’s lover (538)
• Return of his jealousy in a nightmare (539)
• 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 (541)
• The first image of Odette seen again in his dream: he had wanted to die for a woman “who wasn’t his type” (543)

Summary

Another short section, describing the final stages of Swann’s disengagement from Odette.

Quotations

“But he was so imbued with the habit of finding life interesting - of marvelling at the strange discoveries that there are to be made in it - that even whhile he was suffering so acutely that he did not believe he could bear souch agony much longer, he was saying to himself: “Life is really astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears tht vice is far more common than one has been led to believe ... But he could not confine himself to these detached observations. He sought to form an exact estimate of the significance of what she had just told him, in order to decide whether she had done these things often and was likely to do them again. He repeated her words to himself ... But they did not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them still held its knife, with which it stabbed him anew.” [521-522]

“When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one should say to oneself, ‘Who are the people around her? What kind of life has she led?’ All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.” [522]

“... after several months this old story would still shatter him like a sudden revelation. He marvelled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age, that he could hope for a relaxation of his torments.” [523]

“For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.” [529]

“Who indeed can say whether, in the event of his having gone elsewhere that evening, other happinesses, other griefs might not have come to him, which later would have appeared to him to have been inevitable? But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place... his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shows, and incapable of fcing a difficult problem for any length of time, ... came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and the plesures, as yet unsuspected, which were already germinating there - the exact balance between which it was too difficult to establish - were linked by a sor tof concatenation of necessity.” [542-543]

Comment

Presumably this marks the end of this little aside (over half of the first volume) into the background of one of the author’s neighbours. Perhaps it will provide a valuable comparison with some other affair that is to come later, either with Swann, or more likely, with the author. We shall see.