III - Within a budding grove, Part 1, Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
(also known as: In the shadow of young girls in flower)
Context: The narrator has moved from childhood to adolescence, and participates in gatherings of society both at his parent's home and at the Swann's. Swann has by now married his former sweetheart Odette, but is no longer in love with her. He is however interested in their daughter Gilberte, his former childhood acquaintance, and imagines himself in love with her, but he gradually loses interest after she distances herself from him. However, he still maintains contact with Mme Swann, and frequently attends her mid-day "at homes", where he comes into contact with society figures such such as Norpois, a diplomat, Bergotte, an author he greatly admires, Cottard, a doctor and Mme Bontemps, Albertine's aunt. His friend, Bloch, introduces him to a disorderly house, which he would come to frequent in future years. Two years later, now indifferent to Gilberte and also in indifferent health, the narrator travels with his grandmother and Françoise to the seaside town of Balbec in Normandy, which a plethora of local characters "scattered like snipers in a battle or draughtsmen on a board", also frequents for their summer holidays. His grandmother meets an old friend, Mme de Villeparisis.
Consanguinity of
spirit
8 What attracts men to one another is not a common point of view but a consanguinity of spirit. The diplomat's economy with words 8 Miserly in the use of words, not only from a professional scruple 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 … Superannuated forms of speech 9-10 His conversation furnished so exhaustive a glossary of the superannuated forms of speech peculiar to a certain profession, class and period Attributes of conversation 11 His conversation. So elaborately circumspect, in which he referred as seldom as possible to himself and always considered what might interest the person to whom he was speaking. One feels oneself the centre of the theatre 24 I now registered the fact that.. thanks to an arrangement which is, so to speak, symbolical of all spectatorship, everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre. Love 55-56 No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived, from ourself, the lover. Fresh visions for the old 58 Now fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, protracted relations with a woman will substitute fresh visions for the old. The non-perception of the earth's movement - and time 76 In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seem not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. Uniform perceptions of Architecture 86 It would be untrue to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty, or even of another epoch than the adjoining houses. I found more style, and should have supposed more antiquity if not in the Palais de l'Industrie at any rate in the Trocadero. Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embodied in one uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it might be strolling, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been astonished to learn that the Porte-Saint-Martin and the Porte-Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid regions that bore their names. Involuntary memory 93 On my way home I perceived, I suddenly recollected the impression, concealed from me until then, towards which, without letting me distinguish or recognise it, the cold, almost sooty smell of the trellised pavilion that bore me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe's little sitting-room at Combray, which had indeed exhaled the same odour of humidity. But I could not understand, and I postponed the attempt to discover why the recollection of so trivial an impression had given me so keen a happiness. It struck me, however, that I did indeed deserve the contempt of M. de Norpois; I had preferred, hitherto, to all other writers, one whom he styled a mere "flute-player" and a positive rapture had been conveyed to me, not by any important idea, but by a mouldy smell. The changing nature of society 125 Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively on different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable and composes a fresh pattern... These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call 'a change of criterion'. The Dreyfus case brought about another.. and the kaleidoscope scattered once again its little scraps of colour. Everything Jewish, even the smart lady herself, fell out of the pattern, and various obscure nationalities appeared in its place. The artist not appreciated in own life time 146-7 The time that a person requires 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. .. The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few others resemble him. It was Beethoven's Quartets themselves (the 12th, 13th; 14th, and 15th) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven's Quartets, making it in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work ..shall create its own posterity. The limitations of genius 148 The power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen. Failure to understand a joke 213 Failure to understand a joke has never yet made anyone find it less amusing. No peace of mind in love 219 There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires. Love and fortune 281 Labruyere: "It is a mistake to be in love without an ample fortune”. |
The genetic similarities of a child to its parents
194 Meanwhile Gilberte, who had been told to go and get ready for our drive, stayed to listen to the conversation, and hovered between her mother and her father, leaning affectionately against his shoulder. Nothing, at first sight, could be in greater contrast to Mme. Swann, who was dark, than this child with her red hair and golden skin. But after looking at them both for a moment one saw in Gilberte many of the features—for instance, the nose cut short with a sharp, unfaltering decision by the unseen sculptor whose chisel repeats its work upon successive generations—the expression, the movements of her mother; to take an illustration from another form of art, she made one think of a portrait that was not a good likeness of Mme. Swann, whom the painter, to carry out some whim of colouring, had posed in a partial disguise, dressed to go out to a party in Venetian 'character.' And as not merely was she wearing a fair wig, but every atom of a swarthier complexion had been discharged from her flesh which, stripped of its veil of brownness, seemed more naked, covered simply in rays of light shed by an internal sun, this 'make-up' was not just superficial but was incarnate in her; Gilberte had the appearance of embodying some fabulous animal or of having assumed a mythological disguise. This reddish skin was so exactly that of her father that nature seemed to have had, when Gilberte was being created, to solve the problem of how to reconstruct Mme. Swann piecemeal, without any material at her disposal save the skin of M. Swann. And nature had utilised this to perfection, like a master carver who makes a point of leaving the grain, the knots of his wood in evidence. On Gilberte's face, at the corner of a perfect reproduction of Odette's nose, the skin was raised so as to preserve intact the two beauty spots of M. Swann. It was a new variety of Mme. Swann that was thus obtained, growing there by her side like a white lilac-tree beside a purple. At the same time it did not do to imagine the boundary line between these two likenesses as definitely fixed. Now and then, when Gilberte smiled, one could distinguish the oval of her father's cheek upon her mother's face, as though some one had mixed them together to see what would result from the blend; this oval grew distinct, as an embryo grows into a living shape, it lengthened obliquely, expanded, and a moment later had disappeared. In Gilberte's eyes there was the frank and honest gaze of her father; this was how she had looked at me when she gave me the agate marble and said, "Keep it, to remind yourself of our friendship." 196 It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and mother. And yet the distribution of the merits and defects which it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents you will find but one In the child, and allied to that very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it.. Indeed, the incarnation of a good moral quality . in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of the laws of physical resemblance. 198 Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the prosperity that they themselves brought to numberless women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but in their child they believe that they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to remain in the world after their death. When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle. Swann, or a Mme. something-else, _née_ Swann, who would continue to love the vanished father. Intelligence 200 For my intelligence must be a uniform thing, perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage. The attributes of a good doctor 203-4 Bergotte to the narrator , concerning Cottard who was treating him: "The man's an imbecile. Even supposing that that doesn't prevent his being a good doctor, which I hesitate to believe, it does prevent his being a good doctor for artists, for men of intelligence. People like you must have suitable doctors, I would almost go so far as to say treatment and medicines specially adapted to themselves. Cottard will bore you, and that alone will prevent his treatment from having any effect. Besides, the proper course of treatment cannot possibly be the same for you as for any Tom, Dick or Harry. Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands their disease. How do you expect that Cottard should be able to treat you, he has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare. So that his calculations are inaccurate in your case, the balance is upset; you see, always the little bottle-imp bobbing up again. He will find that you have a dilated stomach; he has no need to examine you for it, since he has it already in his eye. You can see it there, reflected in his glasses." This manner of speaking tired me greatly ... I was in no way disturbed by finding my doctor a bore; I expected of him that, thanks to an art the laws of which were beyond me, he should pronounce on the subject of my health an infallible oracle, after consultation of my entrails. Overcoming prejudice 209 Just as a poisoned dog, in a field, rushes, without knowing why, straight to the grass which is the precise antidote to the toxin that he has swallowed, so I, without in the least suspecting it, had said the one thing in the world that was capable of overcoming in my parents this prejudice with respect to Bergotte, a prejudice which all the best reasons that I could have urged, all the tributes that I could have paid him, must have proved powerless to defeat. Instantly the situation changed. What women (and men) want 211 It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, for that matter, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, in contradiction of all that I had believed at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love. He added to this service a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later; it was he who took me for the first time into a disorderly house. (Acknowledges that he was indebted to Bloch for his 'good tidings' that beauty and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things). Language
221 In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds, the perspicuity of ideas. But a language we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is free to play us false, while we, standing alone, desperately alert in our impotence, can see, can prevent, nothing. New-fangled inventions 256 Have you heard the news that the new house Mme Verdurin has just bought is to be lighted by electricity? A charming luxury for those who can afford it. Just fancy, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine has just had the telephone installed in her house! She can order things from her tradesmen without having to go out of doors! |
Involuntary memory
308-9 (A trivial off-hand remark overheard whilst walking along the sea-front at Balbec about the Secretary to the Ministry of Ports and his family ) ought to have passed unheeded; instead it gave me at once an acute twinge, which a self that had for the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at being parted from Gilberte. because I had never given another thought to a conversation which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in which allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Ports and his family.
Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourself, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourself, did I say; rather within ourself, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourself face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourself but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we (309) should never find them again had not a few words (such as this 'Secretary to the Ministry of Posts') been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.
The essence of the journey
310 The special attraction of the journey lies not in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in our mind when we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to see, .. and this difference is accentuated.. by the mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name. But I this respect as in every other, our age is infected with a mania for shewing things only in the environment that properly belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind which isolated them from that environment.
308-9 (A trivial off-hand remark overheard whilst walking along the sea-front at Balbec about the Secretary to the Ministry of Ports and his family ) ought to have passed unheeded; instead it gave me at once an acute twinge, which a self that had for the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at being parted from Gilberte. because I had never given another thought to a conversation which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in which allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Ports and his family.
Now our love memories present no exception to the general rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general rules of Habit. And as habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls to us most is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourself, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourself, did I say; rather within ourself, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature that we were, range ourself face to face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer ourself but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or rather we (309) should never find them again had not a few words (such as this 'Secretary to the Ministry of Posts') been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.
The essence of the journey
310 The special attraction of the journey lies not in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in our mind when we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to see, .. and this difference is accentuated.. by the mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name. But I this respect as in every other, our age is infected with a mania for shewing things only in the environment that properly belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind which isolated them from that environment.
318 To know nothing: to understand nothing
Of thought, in relation to Francoise, one could hardly speak. She knew nothing, in that absolute sense in which to know nothing means to understand nothing, save the rare truths to which the heart is capable of directly attaining. The vast world of ideas existed not for her. . . . Sunrise 325 Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. In the pale square of the window over a small dark wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed dead pink. not liable to change.. The unanswered apology 341 I apologised (to the lift-driver) for taking up so much room, for giving him so much trouble, and asked whether I was not obstructing him in the practice of an art to which, so as to flatter the performer, I did more than display curiosity, I confessed my strong attachment. But he vouchsafed no answer, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what he was doing, regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for holy ground, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the manager's orders.
The morning sun 346 She pushed open the shutters; where a wing of the hotel jutted out at right angles to my window, the sun was already installed upon the roof, like a slater who is up betimes, and starts early and works quietly so as not to rouse the sleeping town, whose stillness seems to enhance its activity. Respectability 365 .. the stranger, who exhaled all the starched vulgarity of the really respectable.. |
The sun personified
352 When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be shewing me another side of the picture, and to be engaging me on the pursuit, along the winding path of its rays, of a journey motionless but ever varied amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning the sun pointed out to me far off with a jovial finger those blue peaks of the sea, which bear no name upon any geographer's chart, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came back to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, swaggering across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand, and into my open trunk:, where by its very splendour and ill-matched luxury it added still further to the general effect of disorder. The wind, the sky, parted by the window 353 It seemed to my grandmother a cruel deprivation not to be able to feel its life-giving breath on her cheek, on account of the window, transparent but closed, which like the front of a glass case in a museum divided us from the beach while allowing us to look out upon its whole extent, and into which the sky entered so completely that its azure had the effect of being the colour of its windows and its white clouds only so many flaws in the glass. Like snipers in a battle, draughtsmen on a board 355 They were composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that region of France, a chief magistrate from Caen, a leader of the Cherbourg bar, a big solicitor from Le Mans, who annually, when the holidays came around, starting from the various points over which, throughout the working year, they were scattered like snipers in a battle or draughtsmen upon a board, concentrated their forces upon this hotel. Wives with pretensions to aristocracy. |