|
Part
One
Madame
Swann at Home
[2002.02.02]
The
second volume has no structure, containing only two parts. However, as
with the first volume, there are a few pages at the rear of the book,
called Synopsis. I have added numerical section numbers to aid in the
structure of the headings.
- 1
- A
new Swann: Odette's husband (1)
- A
new Cottard: Professor Cottard (3)
- 2
- Norpois
(5)
- the
"governmental mind" (8)
- an
ambassador's conversation (8)
- "
'Although' is always an unrecognized 'because' " (10)
- Norpois
advises my father to let me follow a literary career (13)
- 3
- My
first experience of Berma (15)
- My high expectations
of her - as of Balbec and Venice (17)
- A great disappointment
(20)
- Francoise and Michelangelo
(21)
- The auditorium and
the stage (24)
- 4
- Norpois dines at
our house (29)
- His notions about
literature (31)
- financial investments
(33)
- Berma (37)
- Francoise's spiced
beef (39)
- King Theodosius'
visit to Paris (41)
- Balbec church
(48)
- Mme Swann (49)
- Odette and the
Comte de Paris (58)
- Bergotte (60)
- my prose poem
(62)
- Gilberte (65)
- Gestures which we
believe have gone unnoticed (67)
- Why M. de Norpois
would not speak to Mme Swann about me (70)
- 5
- How I came to say
of Berma: "What a great artist!" (72)
- The laws of Time
(74)
- Effect produced by
Norpois
- on my parents
(75)
- on Francoise
(76)
- the latter's views
on Parisian restaurants (78).
- 6
- New Year's Day visits
(79)
- I propose to Gilberte
that we should rebuild our friendship on a new basis (80)
- but that same
evening I realize that New Year's Day is not the first day of
a new world (81)
- Berma and love (83)
- Gabriel's palaces
(84)
- I can no longer recall
Gilberte's face (84)
- She returns to the
Champs-Elysees (85)
- "They can't
stand you!" (86)
- I write to Swann
(86)
- Reawakening, thanks
to involuntary memory, in the little pavilion (89)
- Amorous wrestle with
Gilberte (89)
- I fall ill (91)
- Cottard's diagnosis
(96)
- 7
- A letter from Gilberte
(98)
- Love's miracles,
happy and unhappy (99)
- Change of attitude
towards me of Gilberte's parents (102)
- The Swann apartment;
the concierge; the windows (103)
- Gilberte's writing-paper
(104)
- The Henri II staricase
(106)
- The chocolate cake
(107)
- Mme Swann's praise
of Francoise: "your old nurse" (110)
- The heart of the
Sanctuary: Swann's library (111)
- Odette's "at
home" (114)
- The "famous
Albertine", neice of Mme Bontemps (116)
- The evolution of
society (117)
- Swann's "amusing
sociological experiments" (128)
- Swann's old jealousy
(131)
- 8
- Outings with the
Swann's (134)
- Lunch with them (135)
- Odette plays Vinteuil's
sonata to me (140)
- A work of genius
creates its own posterity (143)
- What the little phrase
now means to Swann (145)
- "Me nigger,
you old cow!" (149)
- Consistent charm
of Mme. Swann's heterogeneous drawing-room (153)
- Princess Mathilde
(157)
- Gilberte's unexpected
behavior (161)
- 9
- Lunch at the Swanns'
with Bergotte (164)
- The gentle white-haired
bard and the man with the snail-shell nose and black goatee (165)
- A writer's voice
and his style (168)
- Bergotte and his
imitators (169)
- Unforeseeable beauty
of the sentences of a great writer (170)
- Reflecting power
of genius (174)
- Vices of the man
and morality of the writer (181)
- Bergotte and Berma
(183)
- "A powerful
idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it"
(186)
- A remark of Swann's,
prelude to the theme of The Captive (188)
- Gilberte's characteristics
inherited from both parents (190)
- Swann's confidence
in his daughter (193)
- Are my pleasures
those of the intelligence? (195)
- Why Swann, according
to Bergotte, needs a good doctor (199)
- Combray society and
the social world (199)
- My parent's change
of mind about Bergotte and Gilberte; a problem of etiquette (203)
- 10
- Revelations about
love (205)
- Bloch takes me to
a second-ratae house of assignation (205)
- "Rachel when
from the Lord" (207)
- Aunt Leonie's furniture
in the brothel (208)
- Amatory initiation
at Combray on Aunt Leonie's sofa (208)
- Work projects constantly
postponed (210)
- Impossibility of
happiness in love (214)
- My last visit to
Gilberte (214)
- I decide not to see
her again (217)
- Unjust fury with
the Swann's butler (222)
- Waiting for a letter
(222)
- I renounce Gilberte
forever (224)
- but the hope of a
reconciliation is superimposed on my resolve (226)
- Intermittency, law
of the human soul. (227)
- 11
- Odette's "winter-garden"
(228)
- splendour of
the chrysanthemums and poverty of conversation
- Mme. Cottard
(234)
- Mme Bontemps
(234)
- effontery
of her neice Albertine (237)
- the Prince
d'Agrigente (239)
- Mme Verdurin
- Painful New Year's
Day (251)
- "Suicide of
that self which loved Gilberte" (255)
- Clumsy interventions
(256)
- Letters to Gilberte:
"one speaks for oneself alone" (259)
- Odette's drawing-room:
retreat of the Far East and invasion of the eighteenth century (261)
- New hair styles and
silhouettes. (265)
- 12
- A sudden impulse
interrupts the cure of detachment (271)
- Aunt Leonie's Chinese
vase (272)
- Two walkers in the
Elysian twilight (273)
- Impossibility of
happiness (274)
- The opposing forces
of memory and imagination (276)
- Because of Gilberte,
I decline an invitation to a dinner-party where I would have met
Albertine (277)
- Cruel memories (278)
- Gilberte's strange
laugh, evoked in a dream (281)
- Fewer visits to Mme
Swann (283)
- Exchange of tender
letters and progress of indifference (286)
- Approach of spring:
Mme Swann's ermine and the guelder-roses in her drawing room; nostalgia
for Combray (288)
- Odette and the "Down-and-outs
Club" (290)
- An intermediate social
class (295).
Summary
for 1
The book
begins with a short explanation of why Swann was now viewed as a 'pestilent'
fellow (he had totally changed his personality after marrying Odette)
and why Cottard was now viewed with approval (he had become a famous
medical doctor).
Summary
for 2
We are introduced to a new
character, Norpois, who is a senior, conservative, bureaucrat.
Summary
for 3
The narrator's anticipation
of a play, with the resulting disappointment.
Summary
for 4
A lengthy
description of the evening meal with Norpois.
Summary
for 5
A brief review
of evening meal with Norpois, with a few of the narrator's reflections
on memory and the passage of Time.
Summary
for 6
The narrator
renews his friendship with Swann's daughter, Gilberte.
Summary
for 7
This section
of 35 pages describes some of the memories the narrator has of his times
with Gilberte in the Swann apartment in Paris.
Summary
for 8
A continuation of the previous
section - more descriptions of visits to the Swann's apartment to play
with Gilberte.
Summary
for 9
A decription of a lunch at
the Swann's with the writer Bergotte.
Summary
for 10
The narrator
finally realizes that Gilberte doesn't care for him and he decides to
no longer see her.
Summary
for 11
However he
continues to visit Mme Swann.
Summary
for 12
The final
break with the Swann family and he begins to get on with his life.
Quotations
for 1
I plan to
identify the quotations that appeal to me, and which will usually be
related to psychology/memory and to the passage of time.
"Adapting
to the humble ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry
which he had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself,
a long way beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion
who was to share it with him." [p. 1]
"...
our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which
we retain a permanent control and power of disposal..." [p. 2]
Comment
for 1
There appears
to be a (natural) inability on the part of the narrator to realize that
the shortcomings he attibutes to others might also apply to himself,
or his immediate family. There is a sense of protocol and proper background
among the French upper class that is positively disgusting by today's
standards. Thus he sees the situation as Swann and Cottard having changed,
rather than that his family have changed their ideas of who was proper
and then finding examples to justify their changed attitude.
Summary
for 2
We are introduced to a new
character, Norpois, who is a senior, conservative, bureaucrat.
Quotations
for 2
"...
in the course of a long career in diplomacy, he had become imbued with
that negative, methodical, conservative spirit, a 'governmental mind,'
which is common to all governments and, under every government, particularly
inspires its foreign service." [p. 7]
"Sparing
of his words, not only from a professional habit of prudence and reserve,
but because words themselves have more value, present more subtleties
of definition to men whose efforts, protracted over a decade, to bring
two countries to an understanding are condensed, translated - in a speech
or in a protocol - into a single adjective , colourless in all appearance,
but to them pregnant with a world of meaning." [p. 8]
"The
evening on which M. de Norpois first appeared at our table ... has remained
fixed in my memory because the afternoon of the same day was that upon
which I at last went to a matinee to see Berma in Phedre, ..."
[p.11]
Comment
for 2
The family
immediately changes its position on two family matters as soon as they
here that Norpois has a different view: namely that the narrator should
see a particular play, and that his idea of pursuing a literary career
might be a good one.
Summary
for 3
The narrator's anticipation
of a play, with the resulting disappointment.
Quotations for 3
"Finally, if I went
to see Berma in a new play, it would not be easy for me to assess her
art and her diction, since I should be unable to discriminate between
a text which was not already familiar to me and what she added to it
by her vocal inflexiions and gestures..." [p. 15]
"But what I demanded
from this performance - as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to
Venice for which I had so intensely longed - was something quite different
from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in
which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me again
by any trivial incident..." [p. 17]
Comment for 3
The narrator appears to only
be confident of interpreting a play that he has been 'prepared' for,
and has no confidence in his own judgement to asses a novel situation.
This seems to pervade the novel. His opinions are those that he has
picked up from listening and watching others, rather than from some
form of personal integrity. What I am seeing is a man who is a consequence
of his environment, and so deeply so that he is unaware of it himself.
While at the same time possessing the most amazing sense of language
and sentence structure that I have ever seen. He also lives in a fantasy
world of unrealistic expectations. Comparing Francoise preparing a meal
to Michelangelo making a statue seems to exemplify his fantastic and
unrealistic interpretations of daily occurrences. So far, he seems just
as childish as in the first volume - I don't see the growth to adolescence,
yet.
Summary
for 4
A lengthy
description of the evening meal with Norpois.
Quotations for 4
"My Aunt Leonie had
bequeathed to me, together with a multiplicity of objects and furniture
which were something of an embarrassment, almost all her liquid assets
..." [p. 33]
- Thus the narrator will
be secure without having to think of employment!
"The contempt which
my father had for my kind of intelligence was so far tempered by affection
that, in practice, his attitude towards everything I did was one of
blind indulgence." [p. 35]
"In the words of a fine
Arab proverb, 'The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on!' " [p.
44]
"Your most ardent longing
is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear
of him any more, having removed to some other place, your enemy will
come to have no longer the slightest importance to you." [p. 56]
"The laborious process
of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect,
including, consequently, those which one believed to be least possible,
naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which
in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence,
and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes
ceased to live." [p. 58]
"... but at this period
of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words
in a harmonious manner." [p. 61]
"But already there is
the same fault, that nonsense of stringing together fine-sounding words
and only afterwards troubling about what they mean." [p. 62]
"I felt dismayed, diminished;
and my mind, like a fluid which is without dimensions save those of
the vessel that is provided for it, just as it had expanded in the past
to fill the vast capacity of genius, contracted now, was entirely contained
within the straitened mediocrity in M. de Norpois had of a sudden enclosed
and sealed it." [pp. 63-64]
"For it is difficult
for any of us to calculate exactly the extent to which our words or
gestures are apparent to others." [p 67]
"This piece of gossip
enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence
of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness, of which the human maind
is composed ... " [p. 68]
Comment for 4
This is typical Proust, 40
pages to describe in detail the conversations that took place during
an evening meal. Norpois expresses his admiration for Mme. Swann, and
comments that Swann had an aunt who conducted a campaign to force friends
and acquaintances to refuse to meet his new wife (just as the narrator's
parents have refuse to meet her). There are a couple of occasions where
the narrator is critical of people who write cumbersome sentences!
Summary
for 5
A brief review
of evening meal with Norpois, with a few of the narrator's reflections
on memory and the passage of Time.
Quotations for 5
"As soon as my mind
had conceived this new idea of 'the purest and most exalted manifestation
of dramatic art,' the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which
I had felt in the theatre, adding to it a little of what it lacked,
and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to
myself: 'What a great artist!' " [pp. 71-72]
"... let us bear in
mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the over-all splendour
of a journey from which day by day they experienced nothing but tedium..."
[pp. 72-73]
"... and let us then
declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the
enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us
most happy which has not first sought, like a real parasite, and won
from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength
that it originally lacked." [p. 73]
"Two very painful suspicions...
that my existence had already
begun, and that, furthermore, what was yet to follow would not differ
to any extent from what had gone before.
that I was not situated
somewhere outside of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like
those characters in novels... [p. 74]
Comment for 5
This is the first real occurence
of some reflections on both memory and Time.
Summary
for 6
The narrator
renews his friendship with Swann's daughter, Gilberte.
Quotations for 6
"A moist and gentle
breeze was blowing. It was weather with which I was familiar; I suddenly
had a feeling and a pesentiment that New Year's Day was not a day of
a new world in which I might, by a chance that was still intact, ...
as though the past did not yet exist ... For all that I might dedicate
this new year to Gilberte, and as one superimposes a religion on the
blind laws of nature, ... it was in vain. ... in the gentle breeze that
blew ... I had recognized , had sensed the reappearance of, the eternal
common substance, the familar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the
old days and years." [p.82]
"The sadness of men
who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing
such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown."
[p. 82]
" 'They can't stand
you!' and, slipping from me like the watersprite that she was, burst
out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed,
as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane."
[p. 86]
"Whereupon Gilberte
said good-naturedly: 'You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling
a bit longer.' " [p. 90]
"... I suddenly recalled
the impression, concealed from me until then, of which, without letting
me distinguish or recognize it, the cold and almost sooty smell of the
trellised pavilion had reminded me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe's
little sitting room at Combray, which had inded exhaled the same odour
of humidity." [p. 91]
Comment for 6
The dual themes of time and
memory both appear in this section. The recognition of New Year's Day
as just another day, as well as the involuntary memory triggered by
an odor (much like the triggering of a memory in volume 1 over the odor
of a medeleine dipped in tea).
Summary
for 7
This section
of 35 pages describes some of the memories the narrator has of his times
with Gilberte in the Swann apartment in Paris.
Quotations for 7
"I saw everything reel,
as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether
there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew,
in direct contradiction to it, but itself the real one..." [p.
98]
"However, with every
occurence in life and its contrasting situations that relates to love,
it is best to make no attempt to understand, since in so far as these
are as inexorable as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed
by magic rather than by rational laws." [p. 100]
"Thus it is superfluous
to make a study of social mores, since we can deduce them from psychological
laws." [pp. 116-7]
"One and the same man,
taken at successive points in his life, will be found to breathe, on
different rungs of the social ladder, in atmospheres that do not of
necessity become more and more refined; whenever, in any period of our
existence, we form or re-form associations with a certain circle, and
feel cherished and at ease in it, we begin quite naturally to cling
to it by putting down human roots." [p. 119]
"But, like a kaleidoscope
which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively
in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable,
and composes a new pattern." [p. 122]
"None of this alters
the fact, however, that whenever society is momentarily stationary,
the people who live in it imagine that no further change will occur,
just as, in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone, they
decline to believe in the aeroplane." [p. 123]
"And we may conclude
that this subservience of refinement to vulgarity is the rule in many
households when we think, conversely, of all the superior women who
yield to the blandishments of a boor, merciless in his censure of their
most delicate utterances, while they themselves, with the infinite indulgence
of love, are enraptured by the feeblest of his witticisms." [p
126]
Comment for 7
What continues to impress,
and amaze, me is the level of detail of the narrator's memory of "lost
time". The phrase "rich description" comes to mind, in
part because there is no plot nor building of suspense. We are simply
being provided with the narrator's memory of events when he was a young
adolescent. As such, this represents a particularly novel novel. It
is the richness of the language that keeps me interested in the story.
Summary
for 8
A continuation of the previous
section - more descriptions of visits to the Swann's apartment to play
with Gilberte.
Quotations for 8
"But often one hears
nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that
is at all complicated. ... Probably what is wanting, the first time,
is not comprehension but memory. ... our memory, relative to the complexity
of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal
... Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing
us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape
in memory..." [p. 140]
"The time, moreover,
that a person requires - as I required in the case of this sonata -
to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one
might say, of the years, the centuries even, that must elapse before
the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new."
[p. 142]
Comment for 8
While this is really a continuation
of the previous section, it ends with a vignette that shows that Gilberte
has characteristics of being both stubborn and spoiled.
Summary
for 9
A decription of a lunch at
the Swann's with the writer Bergotte.
Quotations for 9
"The whole of the Bergotte
whom I had slowly and delicately elaborated for myself, drop by drop,
like a stalactite, out of the transparent beauty of his books, ceased
(I could see at once) to be of any possible use, the moment I was obliged
to include in him the snail-shell nose and to utilise the goatee beard..."
[p. 165]
"... we often experience
a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined,
the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our
senses being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of
portraiture...." [p. 166]
Comment for 9
35 pages to describe a brief
evening with an author. There is no mention of what they ate, but just
a typical series of recollections by the narrator and their consequences.
There are portions of the dialogue.
Summary
for 10
The narrator
finally realizes that Gilberte doesn't care for him and he decides to
no longer see her.
Quotations for 10
"... as our memory does
not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence but
as it were by a reflection in which the order of the parts is reversed."
[p. 208]
"It is always thus,
impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make
our irrevocable decisions." [p. 209]
"And yet the assumption
that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself,
from within himself, and can acquire it from someone else, is as erroneous
as to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health (in spite of
neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses)
merely by dining out often in the company of a physician." [p.
212]
"There can be no piece
of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a
new starting-point for further desires." [p. 213]
Comment for 10
This is a very moving 20
pages that shows the anguish and despair of a young adolescent who realizes
that the one he loves does not share his feelings and who must find
a way to preserve his self respect.
Summary
for 11
However he
continues to visit Mme Swann.
Quotations for 11
"But certain favourite
roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully
when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious
testimony than to that of reality which we had almost entirely forgotten."
[p. 232]
"The time which we have
at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand
it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains."
[p. 257]
Comment for 11
I find this a strange section.
The narrator, a youn adolescent, continues to visit Mme Swann, even
though he no longer is friends with Gilberte.
Summary
for 12
The final
break with the Swann family and he begins to get on with his life.
Quotations for 12
"But happiness can never
be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances,
nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves,
and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something
other than what they are about to possess." [p. 274]
"One becomes moral as
soon as one is unhappy." [p. 282]
Comment for 12
It appears that the break
with the Swann family is finally complete, and the narrator is about
to travel to Balbec.
|