Swann’s Way, Part 1 Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1922
Combray
Context:
As a result of this chance encounter with the madeleine, further memories of Combray follow, often in “great blocks”: of his introduction to music via Vinteuil the musician and composer, art through the intercession of Bergotte (the writer introduced to him by his Jewish friend, Bloch), and the theatre, per medium of Berma the actress; the personalities permeating the Combray grand bourgeois social scene, such as the Legrandins, and the Guermantes family - the local nobility; and most of all of his childhood walks along the “two ways”, the Méséglise Way, also known as Swann’s Way, because it passed by the Swann estate, and the Guermantes Way, so named because that was the ultimate destination along that route. The “two ways” are in fact a literary allegory depicting the self we are born with and the self which we acquire along life’s way[1]. During his boyhood years, Marcel was never able to see the physical correlation between them. They never visited the Swann abode along the Méséglise Way, and the ultimate destination along the route, Guermantes, was never reached. But they were in fact linked, the one to the other, but it is not until towards the end of his lengthy narrative that the narrator is able to perceive the inter-relationship between them, and the significance of this inner shadowy and timeless world of early experience involuntarily summonsed into the present.
[1] George D Painter, Marcel Proust – A Biography, Chatto & Windus, Penguin Books, 1983, 681.
As a result of this chance encounter with the madeleine, further memories of Combray follow, often in “great blocks”: of his introduction to music via Vinteuil the musician and composer, art through the intercession of Bergotte (the writer introduced to him by his Jewish friend, Bloch), and the theatre, per medium of Berma the actress; the personalities permeating the Combray grand bourgeois social scene, such as the Legrandins, and the Guermantes family - the local nobility; and most of all of his childhood walks along the “two ways”, the Méséglise Way, also known as Swann’s Way, because it passed by the Swann estate, and the Guermantes Way, so named because that was the ultimate destination along that route. The “two ways” are in fact a literary allegory depicting the self we are born with and the self which we acquire along life’s way[1]. During his boyhood years, Marcel was never able to see the physical correlation between them. They never visited the Swann abode along the Méséglise Way, and the ultimate destination along the route, Guermantes, was never reached. But they were in fact linked, the one to the other, but it is not until towards the end of his lengthy narrative that the narrator is able to perceive the inter-relationship between them, and the significance of this inner shadowy and timeless world of early experience involuntarily summonsed into the present.
[1] George D Painter, Marcel Proust – A Biography, Chatto & Windus, Penguin Books, 1983, 681.
The novelist and the ‘real person’.
112-3 But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a ‘real’ person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of ‘real’ people would be a decided improvement. A ‘real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.
112-3 But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a ‘real’ person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of ‘real’ people would be a decided improvement. A ‘real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes.
161-181 The snobbish M. Legrandin (the Parian engineer) who avoids giving Marcel an introduction to his sister in Balbec:
161 Faint recognition As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church, … my father had saluted him in a manner at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk; M. Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and with that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable, and who from the suddenly receding depths of their eyes seem to have caught sight of you at the far end of an interminably straight road, and at so great a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, in proportion to your doll-like dimensions…
180 My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative--but an honourable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain--as, from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to have been certain--that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have dreamed of making use of it.
The peas and asparagus personified
163 .. The platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game. The asparagus, tinged with ultramine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. Françoise (the family servant)’s hard-heartedness to the rest of the world (qua Giotto’s Charity being unable to rise from her bed and the pain she was experiencing following her recent confinement) 165-6 Françoise, who, for her own daughter or for her nephews, would have given her life without a murmur, shewed a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest of the world… I began to realise that Françoise’s kindness, her compunction, the sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed. The “two ways” |
The setting sun
181-2 But in summer, when we came back to the house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to Aunt Leonie, its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and scattered and filtered; and then at last, would fall upon and inlay with tiny flakes of gold the lemon-wood of her chest-of-drawers, illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting, shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees. ..(on other occasions) the pond beneath the Calvary would have lost its fiery glow, sometimes had changed already to an opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken and broadened by every ripple upon the water’s surface, would be lying across it, from end to end. |
183 For there were, in the environs of Combray, two ' ways' which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Meseglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.' Of Meseglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth; I never knew anything more than the way there, and the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would ‘know at all,' and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must have come over from Meseglise'. As for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but that day had still to come; and, during, the whole of my boyhood, if Meseglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the folds of a country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the country round Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the ' Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator. And so to ‘take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Meseglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west. Since my father used always to speak of the Meseglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ' Guermantes way' as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind;….
Saturday evening and the long walk around the Calvary
154-5 The viaduct, which began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of civilisation.. We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time.
200 The circular shadow of the apple-trees It was while going the ‘Méséglise way’ that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.
200 Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to ‘come on’ for a while, and so goes ‘in front’ in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a monument, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.
245 During my walks along the Guermantes way: Suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me..
92 The first appearance of Gilberte, Swann’s daughter with Mme Swann and the Baron de Charlus:
192-3 I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult. (Gilberte informed him later in life that it was not an insult; rather was it a suggestive gesture of flirtatious intent).
154-5 The viaduct, which began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of civilisation.. We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time.
200 The circular shadow of the apple-trees It was while going the ‘Méséglise way’ that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.
200 Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to ‘come on’ for a while, and so goes ‘in front’ in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a monument, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.
245 During my walks along the Guermantes way: Suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me..
92 The first appearance of Gilberte, Swann’s daughter with Mme Swann and the Baron de Charlus:
192-3 I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult. (Gilberte informed him later in life that it was not an insult; rather was it a suggestive gesture of flirtatious intent).
Old age and the renunciation it makes in preparation for death
196 My aunt: The process which had begun in her – and in her a little earlier only than it must come to all of us – was the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed whenever life has been unduly prolonged The ruins of the castle of Combray 230 The remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old counts of Combray. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones…; but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers’ school, who came there in their play-time, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth. 239ff Espies Mme de Guermantes in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad during the nuptial mass for Dr Percepied’s daughter’s wedding: a lady with fair hair and a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and brilliant, and a little spot at the corner of her nose. 247-250 Meditates upon the special pleasure he experienced in seeing the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was playing, while the movement of his carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing their position. |
The rain
206 But on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had due warning from the little barometer-figure which the spectacle-maker hung out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fyly off in a body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching order. They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in the rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw after it the drop which was following, and the sky would be as greatly disturbed as by the swallows flying south… A stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly they splashed plump upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree. 208 Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised, like a village in the Old Testament, by all the innumerable spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already received the forgiveness of the Almighty, Who had restored to it the light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of uneven length, like the rays of a monstrance upon an altar. Water lilies 232 Caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to accentuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante.. |
The narrator expresses the pleasure he derives from, and the difficulties he experiences in, reliving these moments of Time Regained ....
252 So the ‘Meseglise way’ and the ‘Guermantes way’ remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest episodes; I mean the life of the mind….; .which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.
255 No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Meseglise and Guermantes ways left me exposed, in later life. to much disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of affection. by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions, to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two ways give to those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the Meseglise way that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac-trees.
252 So the ‘Meseglise way’ and the ‘Guermantes way’ remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest episodes; I mean the life of the mind….; .which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent.
255 No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Meseglise and Guermantes ways left me exposed, in later life. to much disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of affection. by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions, to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two ways give to those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the Meseglise way that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac-trees.
... and, in that penumbra between sleep and waking, tries to rationalise his faint glimpses of this world within himself, "a world of shadowy outlines which disappears in the full light of consciousness"[1].
256-7 And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the taste — by what would have been called at Combray the ‘perfume’ — -of a cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories, following one after another, were condensed into a single substance, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a taste or ‘perfume,’ and those which were actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand — no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in the darkness, and — fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed the curtains and the window — would have reconstructed it complete and with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. But scarcely had daylight itself — and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for daylight — traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of day.
[1] Combray, Germain Brée, Carlos Lynes Jr (eds), George G Harrop, London, 1955, Introduction, 17
256-7 And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the taste — by what would have been called at Combray the ‘perfume’ — -of a cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories, following one after another, were condensed into a single substance, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a taste or ‘perfume,’ and those which were actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand — no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in the darkness, and — fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed the curtains and the window — would have reconstructed it complete and with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. But scarcely had daylight itself — and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for daylight — traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of day.
[1] Combray, Germain Brée, Carlos Lynes Jr (eds), George G Harrop, London, 1955, Introduction, 17