In the library
Years later, the narrator voyages by train from his sanatorium where he has passed the last several years back to Paris. Upon his arrival home, an invitation to an afternoon reception from the Prince de Guermantes awaits him and he decides to attend. The Guermantes name “laid hold of a fraction of the past buried in the depths of (his) memory”. (197)
The Prince no longer lived in his former mansion, but in a magnificent new one he had built in the Avenue du Bois. Not wanting to get to the party too early, the narrator decides to alight at the Champs Elysées and walk awhile and has only walked a few steps when he notices another carriage containing a stooped figure about to stop. “An untouched forest of snow-white hair escaped from under his straw hat while a white beard like those snow attaches to statues in public gardens depended (sic) from his chin”.(200) It was none other than the Baron de Charlus faithfully attended by Jupien, looking after him like a child in fact. The Baron was convalescing from an attack of apoplexy and the temporary loss of his eyesight. “He seemed … to have been subjected to some sort of chemical precipitation which had the effect of making his hair shine with such a brilliant and metallic lustre that the locks of his hair and beard spouted like so many geysers of pure silver and clad the aged and fallen prince with the Shakespearean majesty of a King Lear. The eyes had not remained unaffected by this total convulsion, this metallurgical alteration of the head; but by an inverse phenomenon they had lost all their lustre”. (201) By his demeanour, the narrator perceived therein “a sort of quasi-physical gentleness, a detachment from the realities of life which strikes one in those about to enter the shadows of death”. Arriving at the Guermantes’ courtyard, the narrator accidentally stumbles against some unevenly placed paving stones, thereupon bringing back literally a whole flood of memories accompanited by a feeling of intense well-being: the trees during the drive round Balbec; the view of the belfries of Martinville; the savour of the madeleine dipped in his tea. |
He determines to find out the meaning of all this, repeating his tripping movement of a moment ago, and is immediately transported back to Venice when he once experienced the same sensation on two uneven slabs in the Baptistry of St. Mark. A whole host of recollections which had lingered expectant in their place among the series of forgotten years ushered forth. So too the taste of the little madeleine which recalled Combray.
He enters the Guermantes’ mansion, and sits in the library. A servant knocks a spoon against a plate. This brings back another forgotten impression of yore accompanied also by that same felicitous feeling as before: a sensation of great heat accompanied by the smell of smoke tempered by the fresh air of a surrounding forest. It then damns on him that the sound of the spoon against the plate was strikingly similar to that of the hammer of a railway employee who was doing something to the wheel of the carriage while his train was at a standstill facing the group of trees he alluded to earlier on his drive around Balbec. While he waits, a servant brings him a glass of orangeade and some cakes. He wipes his mouth on the napkin supplied and is transported back to the first day of his arrival at Balbec, and now within the folds of that napkin in the Guermantes mansion appeared a green-blue ocean spreading its plumage like the tail of a peacock, the servant having then opened the window upon the shore. He realises that the sensation of the uneven paving-stones and the taste the madeleine, had aroused in him, bore no relation to those conscious memories which he had so often attempted to reconstruct of Venice, of Balbec and of Combray. This was because those recently revisited sensations had the common quality of being felt simultaneously at the actual moment and at a distance in time - the noise of the spoon upon the plate, the unevenness of the paving-stones, the taste of the madeleine – thereby imposing the past upon the present, making him hesitate as to which time I was living in. These experiences existed, as it were, outside time, and he was an extra-temporal being indifferent to the vicissitudes of the future, endowing him with the power to recapture former days: Lost Time. |