ix- The captive, Part 1, (aka The prisoner) Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
Context: At the Book's opening, the Narrator is living with Albertine in the family apartment. At its close, she has left. Both appear to have tired of their relationship. The Narrator is both obsessed by the relationship and at the same time consumed with jealousy. In the end, she is, to use his own words,a captive, and familiarity prompts a loss of appeal. Gradually she had lost her beauty. "We love only that which we do not fully possess'. In the meantime, Bergotte is in his final illness, and Swann has passed away. Our focus is not on these events as such but as usual, on the Narrator's impressions on a variety of subjects-matters, which inevitably include the medical profession and the Dreyfus affair.
8 Snobbishness is a serious malady of the spirit, but one that is localised and does not taint it as a whole.
11-12 His mother writes to inform him that "Mme Sazerat gave us one of those little luncheons which, as your grandmother would have said, quoting Mme de Sévigné, deprive us of solitude without affording us company". 23 ... those tiny fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a magnet, an inkling of the unknown… Even if we live in a hermetically sealed compartment, associations of ideas, memories continue to act upon us. 25-6 Unconscious memory Françoise came in to light the fire, and to make it draw, threw upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, traced round the fireplace a magic circle within which, perceiving myself poring over a book, now at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris, as if I had been on the point of starting for a walk along the Méséglise way, or of going to join Saint-Loup and his friends on the training-ground. ... There had been not merely a change in the weather outside, or, inside the room, the introduction of a fresh scent, there had been in myself a difference of age, the substitution of another person. The scent, in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood, was like a fragment of the past, an invisible floe broken off from the ice of an old winter that stole into my room, often variegated moreover with this perfume or that light, as though with a sequence of different years, in which I found myself plunged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them. The sun’s rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me a sheet of scorching crystal. 29 Jealousy is one of those intermittent maladies, the cause of which is capricious, imperative, always identical in the same patient, sometimes entirely different in another. There are asthmatic persons who can soothe their crises only by opening windows, inhaling the full blast of the wind, the pure air of the mountains, others by taking refuge in the heart of the city, in a room heavy with smoke. Rare indeed is the jealous man whose jealousy does not allow certain concessions. 41-2 Memory It seems that among men and women of action (and people in society are men and women of action on a minute, a microscopic scale, but are nevertheless men and women of action), the mind, overcharged by the need of attending to what is to happen in an hour’s time, confides only a very few things to the memory… In saying that M de Norpois was not being untruthful (about his prophesies which had not been fulfilled)), he had simply forgotten. We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of our neighbours. These changes, and with them our memory, undergoes alteration. Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes (recantations) are due less to a surfeit of ambition than to a shortage of memory. As for people in society, there are very few things that they remember. |
43 Dreyfus Alluding to the campaign against the Duc de Guermantes in the Jockey club: it was urged against him that the Duchess was a Dreyfusard (the Dreyfus case had long been concluded, but twenty years later people were still talking about it, and so far only two years had elapsed).
On Zola absconding 46 "Cartier appears to have said that if M Zola had gone out of his way to stand his trial and to be convicted, it was in order to enjoy the only sensation he had never yet tried, that of being in prison" "And so he ran away before they could arrest him", Oriane broke in..... 46-7 Dreyfus still guilty because of his Jewishness The Duc de Guermantes: "If a Frenchman robs or murders somebody, I do not consider myself bound, because he is a Frenchman like myself, to find him innocent. But the Jews will never admit that one of their fellow-countryman is a traitor, although they know it perfectly well, and never think of the terrible repercussions.. which the crime of one of one of their people can bring”. Oriane: “Perhaps it is just because they are Jews and know their own race that they realise that a person can be a Jew and not necessarily a traitor and anti-French…” Duc: "That shocking crime is not simply a Jewish cause, but out and out an affair of vast national importance which may lead to the most appalling consequences for France, which ought to have driven out all the Jews”. 49 The regularity of a habit is in proportion to its absurdity. The sensational thing we do as a rule only by fits and starts. But the senseless life, in which the maniac deprives himself of all pleasures and inflicts the greatest discomforts upon himself, is the type that alters least. Aristocratic traits 53 On the one hand (and this is the less important aspect of the matter), it may be felt that the aristocracy is, in these pages, disproportionately accused of degeneracy in comparison with the other classes of society. Were this true, it would be in no way surprising. The oldest families end by displaying, in a red and bulbous nose, or a deformed chin, characteristic signs in which everyone admires "blood". But among these persistent and perpetually developing features, there are others that are not visible, to wit tendencies and tastes. 55-6 Social mobility "A young seamstress received in society?" the reader will exclaim, "how improbable!"... The day will come when dressmakers - nor should I find it at all. shocking - will move in society. 59 For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often those people who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence. |
Speeches steeped in sentimentality
61 The girl's passion for the violinist (Morel) streamed round about her, like her hair when she let it down, like the joy in her beaming eyes… It was therefore sincerely ... that he addressed Jupien's niece in speeches that are steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are speeches that so many young noblemen who look forward to a life of complete idleness address to some charming daughter of a middle-class millionaire) as had been steeped in unredeemed vileness the speech he had made to M de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of a virgin.
Reincarnations of childhood memories
66-7.. during the hour that preceded the return of my mistress, I would take up an album of Elstir's work, one of Bergotte’s books, Vinteuil’s sonata. Then, just as those works of art which seem to address themselves to the eye or ear alone require that, if we are to enjoy them, our awakened intelligence shall collaborate closely with these organs, I would unconsciously evoke from myself the dreams that Albertine had inspired in me long ago, before I knew her, dreams that had been stifled by the routine of everyday life. I cast them into the composer’s phrase or the painter’s image as into a crucible, or used them to enrich the book that I was reading. And no doubt the book appeared all the more vivid in consequence… But Albertine profited also ... by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter to play freely in the fluid space of mind…She had at that moment the appearance of a work by Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary enthusiasm for her, seeing her in the perspective of imagination and art.
Unconscious memory
69-70 The pleasure, a blend of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt, fugitive and fragmentary, at Balbec on the night she had come to sleep at the hotel, was completed, stabilised, filled my dwelling, hitherto void, with a permanent store of domestic, albeit conjugal bliss… Our house house was indeed icy, a cave of the winds…The cold weather released in me a joy accompanied by an unconscious memory of the first evenings of winter when, in past years, returning from the country, in order to re-establish contact with the forgotten delights of Paris, I used to go to a café-concert.
Love and jealousy
72-73 Love.. is what we feel for a person whose actions seem rather to arouse our jealousy… However skillfully jealousy is concealed by him who suffers from it, it is at once detected by her who has inspired it, and who when the time comes is no less skilful. . . .. As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by her who is its object as a challenge which authorizes deception.
81-2 Was she not after all... the girl whom I had seen the first time at Balbec, in her flat polo-cap, with her insistent laughing eyes, a stranger still, exiguous as a silhouette projected against the waves? These effigies preserved intact in our memory, when we recapture them, we are astonished at their unlikeness to the person we know, and we begin to realise what a task of remodelling is performed every day by habit.
61 The girl's passion for the violinist (Morel) streamed round about her, like her hair when she let it down, like the joy in her beaming eyes… It was therefore sincerely ... that he addressed Jupien's niece in speeches that are steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are speeches that so many young noblemen who look forward to a life of complete idleness address to some charming daughter of a middle-class millionaire) as had been steeped in unredeemed vileness the speech he had made to M de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of a virgin.
Reincarnations of childhood memories
66-7.. during the hour that preceded the return of my mistress, I would take up an album of Elstir's work, one of Bergotte’s books, Vinteuil’s sonata. Then, just as those works of art which seem to address themselves to the eye or ear alone require that, if we are to enjoy them, our awakened intelligence shall collaborate closely with these organs, I would unconsciously evoke from myself the dreams that Albertine had inspired in me long ago, before I knew her, dreams that had been stifled by the routine of everyday life. I cast them into the composer’s phrase or the painter’s image as into a crucible, or used them to enrich the book that I was reading. And no doubt the book appeared all the more vivid in consequence… But Albertine profited also ... by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter to play freely in the fluid space of mind…She had at that moment the appearance of a work by Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary enthusiasm for her, seeing her in the perspective of imagination and art.
Unconscious memory
69-70 The pleasure, a blend of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt, fugitive and fragmentary, at Balbec on the night she had come to sleep at the hotel, was completed, stabilised, filled my dwelling, hitherto void, with a permanent store of domestic, albeit conjugal bliss… Our house house was indeed icy, a cave of the winds…The cold weather released in me a joy accompanied by an unconscious memory of the first evenings of winter when, in past years, returning from the country, in order to re-establish contact with the forgotten delights of Paris, I used to go to a café-concert.
Love and jealousy
72-73 Love.. is what we feel for a person whose actions seem rather to arouse our jealousy… However skillfully jealousy is concealed by him who suffers from it, it is at once detected by her who has inspired it, and who when the time comes is no less skilful. . . .. As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by her who is its object as a challenge which authorizes deception.
81-2 Was she not after all... the girl whom I had seen the first time at Balbec, in her flat polo-cap, with her insistent laughing eyes, a stranger still, exiguous as a silhouette projected against the waves? These effigies preserved intact in our memory, when we recapture them, we are astonished at their unlikeness to the person we know, and we begin to realise what a task of remodelling is performed every day by habit.
Watching Albertine sleeping
85 Sleep By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human characters with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of vegetation 88 ... feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not ground upon reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of profound slumber. . . Albertine's kiss a gift of the Holy Spirit 96 ... her hair caressed me like a wing of softly bristling feathers. Incomparable as were those two kisses of peace, Albertine slipped into my mouth, making me a gift of her tongue, like a gift of the Holy Spirit, conveyed to me in a viaticum, left me with a provision of tranquillity almost as precious as when my mother in the evening as Combray used to lay her lips upon my brow. We have to extend hospitality to those of our relatives who have preceded us 97-8... Here I was talking now to Albertine, at one moment as the child I had been at Combray used to talk to my mother, at another as my grandmother used to talk to me. When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and bestow upon us in handfuls their treasures and calamities, asking to be allowed to cooperate in the new sentiments which we are feeling and in which, obliterating their former image, we cast them in an original creation. Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and earlier still the past of my parents and relatives, blended with my impure love for Albertine the charm of an affection at once filial and maternal. We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our life, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered around us. 98. .. and her belly (concealing the place where a man's is marred as though by an iron clamp left sticking in a statue that has been taken down from its niche0 was closed, at the junction of her thighs, by two valves of a curve as hushed, as reposeful, as cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. 102 Everyday was for me a different country.. 108-9 How many persons, cities, roads does not jealousy make us eager to know? It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which, with regard to various isolated points, we end by acquiring every possible notion in turn except those that we require… There is the jealousy that is endless, for even if the beloved object , by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions, it so happens that posthumous memories, of later origin than any event, take shape suddenly in our minds as though they were events also, memories which hitherto we have never properly explored, which had seemed to us unimportant, and to which our own meditation upon them has been sufficient, without any external action, to give a new and terrible meaning. 115 Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical applied to matters of love. I had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire to threaten the people whom I loved best in the hopes with which they were lulling themselves with a security that I determined to expose to them as false. 119 How suddenly do the things that are probably the most insignificant assume an extraordinary value when a person whom we love (or who has lacked only this duplicity to make us love her) conceals them from us! 133 Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy. Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but always returns to assume a fresh incarnation. 137-8 Love, in the painful anxiety as in the blissful desire, is the insistence upon a whole. It is born, it survives only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess. 139 These words - a great part of what we say being no more than a citation from memory … (upon reciting to Albertine a collection of words, ostensibly his own, but previously being used by his mother)... It was natural that I should become in my turn what my parents had been to me. 142..there is no better informer than a reformed thief, or a subject of a nation that we are fighting. Prostitutes attract us so little because they are available 186 ..if prostitutes themselves (provided that we know them to be prostitutes) attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, it is because they are ready and waiting; the very object that we are seeking to obtain they offer us already; it is because they are not conquests… We are sculptors. We are anxious to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from that which she has presented to us. |
An orchestral wakening of the day
151 Outside, popular themes skilfully transposed for various instruments, from the horn of the mender of porcelain, or the trumpet of the chair weaver to the flute of the goat driver who seemed, on a fine morning, to be a Sicilian goatherd, were lightly orchestrating the matutinal air an ”Overture for a Public Holiday”. Our hearing, that delicious sense, brings us the company of the street, every line of which it traces for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, shewing us their colours. The iron shutters of the baker’s shop, of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of feminine bliss, were rising now like the canvas of a ship which is setting sail and about to proceed, crossing the transparent sea, over a vision of young female assistants. This sound of the iron curtain being raised would perhaps have been my sole pleasure in a different part of the town. In this quarter a hundred other sounds contributed to my joy, of which I would not have lost a single one by remaining too long asleep. It is the magical charm of the old aristocratic quarters that they are at the same time plebeian. Just as, sometimes, cathedrals used to have them within a stone's throw of their porches (which have even preserved the name, like the porch of Rouen styled the Booksellers', because these latter used to expose their merchandise in the open air against its walls), so various minor trades, but peripatetic, used to pass in front of the noble Hotel de Guermantes, and made one think at times of the ecclesiastical France of long ago. 158-9 Upon awakening; Comparison of dream world and waking world And yet to say that these words, instead of those that continued to run in the mind of the half-awakened sleeper that I was, demanded the same effort of equilibrium that a man requires when he jumps out of a moving train and runs for some yards along the platform, if he is to avoid falling. He runs for a moment because the environment that he has just left was one animated by great velocity, and utterly unlike the inert soil upon which his feet find it difficult to keep their balance. Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow that the waking world is less genuine, far from it. In the world of sleep, our perceptions are so overcharged, each of them increased by a counterpart which doubles its bulk and blinds it to no purpose, that we are not able even to distinguish what is happening in the bewilderment of awakening. . .. Silence at that moment was the only way not to reveal anything, as at the moment when we are brought before a magistrate cognisant of all the charges against us, when we have not been informed of them ourself. . ... Besides, in the limpid state of unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if fragments of wisdom float there luminously, ... the waking life does still retain the superiority, inasmuch as it is possible to continue it every morning, whereas it is not possible to continue the dream life every night. .. And often an extra hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must recover the use of our limbs, learn to speak. 179 The cries of the street vendors And I felt that, should I ever have to leave this "aristocratic quarter - unless it were to move to one that was entirely plebeian - the streets and boulevards of centra1 Paris (where the fruit, fish and other trades, stabilised in huge stores, rendered superfluous the cries of the street hawkers, who for that matter would not have been able to make themselves heard) would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained of all these litanies of the small trades and peripatetic victuals, deprived of the orchestra that returned every morning to charm me. On the pavement a woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of goatskin; but no, it not a woman, it was a chauffeur who enveloped in his ponyskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage. Escaped from the big hotels, their winged messengers, of variegated hue, were speeding towards the termini, bent over their handlebars, to meet the arrivals by the morning trains. The throb of a violin was due at one time to the passing of a motor-car, at another to my not having put enough water in my electric kettle. In the middle of the symphony, there rang out an old-fashioned “air”, replacing the sweet seller, who generally accompanied her song with a rattle, the toy seller, to whose pipe was attached a jumping jack which he sent flying in all directions, paraded similar puppets for sale, and without heeding the ritual declamation of Gregory the Great,... Art and life 209 ..was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life? Every great artist seems indeed so different from all the rest, and gives us so strongly that sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our every day existence… A passage in the sonata, a passage with which we are quite familiar, but sometimes our attention throws a different light upon things which we have long known, and we remark in them what we have never seen before… And genetic traits: I could not help murmuring "Tristan", with the smile of an old friend of the family discovering a trace of the grandfather in an intonation, a gesture of the grandson who never set eyes on him. |
Genes, heredity and allergies
206 Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity, cross-breeding have given us an irresistible force to habits, to vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in an eruption at the smell of wet paint, has frequent attacks of colic if he has to start on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves millionaires and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of 50 francs.
Reality in Wagner's work
210 I began to perceive how much reality there is in the work of Wagner, when I saw in my mind’s eye those insistent, fleeting themes which visit an act, withdraw only to return, and, sometimes distant, drowsy, almost detached, are at other moments, while remaining vague, so pressing and so near, so internal, so organic, so visceral, that one would call them the resumption not so much of a musical motive as of an act of neuralgia… As the spectrum makes visible to us the composition of light, so the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir enables us to know that essential quality of another person’s sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.
210-211 Analysis of Wagner's music Where a minor composer would pretend that he was portraying a squire, or a knight, whereas he would make them both sing the same music, Wagner on the contrary allots to each denomination, a different reality, and whereas a squire appears, it is an individual figure, at once complicated and simplified, that, with a joyous, feudal clash of warring sounds, inscribes itself in the vast, sonorous mass. Whence the completeness of a music that is indeed filled with so many different musics, each of which is a person. A person or the impression that is given by a momentary aspect of nature. It is true that Wagner had still to bring these together, to make use of them, to introduce them into an orchestral whole, to make them subservient to the highest musical ideals, but always respecting their original nature, as a carpenter respects the grain, the peculiar essence of the wood that he is carving.
221 And when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose as Venus or Ceres young women of humble birth, who follow the most sordid callings, so far from committing sacrilege, they have merely added, restored to them the quality, the various attributes which they had forfeited.
228 Familiarity But this very parallel between desire and travel made me vow to myself that one day I would grasp a little more closely the nature of this force, invisible but as powerful as any faith, or as, in the world of physics, atmospheric pressure, which exalted to such a height cities and women so long as I did not know them and slipped away from beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once collapse and fall flat upon the dead level of the most commonplace reality.
229 As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured step along the front, surrounded by the congregation of the other girls like seagulls alighted from who knows whence, Albertine had lost her colours, with all the chances that other people had of securing for her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty.
233.. I perceived, over Paris, the moon prematurely full, like the face of a clock that has stopped and made us think that we are later for an engagement
206 Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity, cross-breeding have given us an irresistible force to habits, to vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in an eruption at the smell of wet paint, has frequent attacks of colic if he has to start on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves millionaires and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of 50 francs.
Reality in Wagner's work
210 I began to perceive how much reality there is in the work of Wagner, when I saw in my mind’s eye those insistent, fleeting themes which visit an act, withdraw only to return, and, sometimes distant, drowsy, almost detached, are at other moments, while remaining vague, so pressing and so near, so internal, so organic, so visceral, that one would call them the resumption not so much of a musical motive as of an act of neuralgia… As the spectrum makes visible to us the composition of light, so the harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir enables us to know that essential quality of another person’s sensations into which love for another person does not allow us to penetrate.
210-211 Analysis of Wagner's music Where a minor composer would pretend that he was portraying a squire, or a knight, whereas he would make them both sing the same music, Wagner on the contrary allots to each denomination, a different reality, and whereas a squire appears, it is an individual figure, at once complicated and simplified, that, with a joyous, feudal clash of warring sounds, inscribes itself in the vast, sonorous mass. Whence the completeness of a music that is indeed filled with so many different musics, each of which is a person. A person or the impression that is given by a momentary aspect of nature. It is true that Wagner had still to bring these together, to make use of them, to introduce them into an orchestral whole, to make them subservient to the highest musical ideals, but always respecting their original nature, as a carpenter respects the grain, the peculiar essence of the wood that he is carving.
221 And when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose as Venus or Ceres young women of humble birth, who follow the most sordid callings, so far from committing sacrilege, they have merely added, restored to them the quality, the various attributes which they had forfeited.
228 Familiarity But this very parallel between desire and travel made me vow to myself that one day I would grasp a little more closely the nature of this force, invisible but as powerful as any faith, or as, in the world of physics, atmospheric pressure, which exalted to such a height cities and women so long as I did not know them and slipped away from beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once collapse and fall flat upon the dead level of the most commonplace reality.
229 As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured step along the front, surrounded by the congregation of the other girls like seagulls alighted from who knows whence, Albertine had lost her colours, with all the chances that other people had of securing for her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty.
233.. I perceived, over Paris, the moon prematurely full, like the face of a clock that has stopped and made us think that we are later for an engagement
Medicine creates its own illnesses
243 Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, compose a sham illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by making it permanent, just as children continue to give way to fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to that lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great miracle that medicine can almost equal nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue on pain of death the use of some drug. From that moment the illness artificially grafted has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only that natural illnesses are cured but never those which medicine creates, for it knows not the secret of their cure. 246-7 He consulted doctors who, flattered at being called in by him, saw in his virtue as an incessant worker (it was twenty years since he had written anything), in his overstrain, the cause of his ailments. They advised him not to read thrilling stories (he never read anything), to benefit more by the sunshine, which was "indispensable to life" (he had owed a few years of comparative health only to his rigorous seclusion indoors), to take nourishment (which made him thinner, and nourished nothing but his nightmares). One of his doctors was blessed with the spirit of contradiction, and whenever Bergotte consulted him in the absence of the others, and, in order not to offend him, suggested to him as his own ideas what the others had advised, this doctor, thinking that Bergotte was seeking to have prescribed for him something that he himself liked, at once forbade it, and often for reasons invented so hurriedly to meet the case that in face of the material objections which Bergotte raised, this argumentative doctor was obliged in the same sentence to contradict himself, but, for fresh reasons, repeated the original prohibition. 254 Error is more obstinate then faith and does not examine the grounds of its belief. 265-6 ... because in each of them – like a fragment of a Greek carving – an aspect of Morel’s face, hard as marble and beautiful as an antique sculpture, was embedded in her brain… |
267 Thick glasses
For some time past, his sight having grown steadily weaker, he had been endowed - as richly as an observatory - with new spectacles of a powerful and complicated kind, which, like astronomical instruments, seemed to be screwed into his eyes; he focussed their exaggerated blaze upon myself and recognised me.. They - the spectacles - were in marvellous condition. But behind them I could see, minute, pallid, convulsive, expiring, a remote gaze placed under this powerful apparatus, as , in a laboratory equipped out of all proportions to the work that is done in it, you may watch the last throes of some insignificant animalcule through the latest and most perfect type of microscope. 270 The unreality of reading an obituary: the death of Swann It was the same death whole striking and specific strangeness had recurred to me one evening when, as I ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in mysterious lines there out of place. They had sufficed to make of a living man someone who can never again respond to what you say to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written name, that has passed in a moment from the real world to the realm of silence. 274 M de Charlus and his blackmailers Just as we were coming to Mme. Verdurin's doorstep, I caught sight of M. de Charlus, steering towards us the bulk of his huge body, drawing unwillingly in his wake one of those blackmailers or mendicants who nowadays, whenever he appeared, sprang up without fail even in what were to all appearance the most deserted corners, by whom this powerful monster was, evidently against his will, invariably escorted, although at a certain distance, as is the shark by its pilot, in short contrasting so markedly with the haughty stranger of my first visit to Balbec, with his stern aspect, his affectation of virility, that I seemed to be discovering, accompanied by its satellite, a planet at a wholly different period of its revolution, when one begins to see it full, or a sick man now devoured by the malady which a few years ago was but a tiny spot which was easily concealed and the gravity of which was never suspected. 275 Of the Baron de Charlus No doubt to every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths which he does not suspect. Falsehood, so often treacherous, upon which all conversation is based …. |