Mademoiselle de Forcheville
Reminder: Have you read the preceding page Albertine Gone?
Synopsis Marcel goes for a walk in the Bois and comes across three girls whose fashionable, energetic style reminds him of Albertine and her friends. He follows them but loses contact when they get into a carriage. A few days later, he sees them again. One of them, the fair one, catches his eye as they pass. The porter at the house gives him her name but it is mis-spelt Déporcheville. It is more or less the same name as a prostitute whom Saint-Loup says he encountered in a disorderly house and Marcel assumes that it must be she, A few days later he pays a visit to Mme de Guermantes house. He again speaks to the porter and learns that the young lady in question will again be visiting in a few days’ time.
He makes inquiries of Saint-Loup who confirms by telegram that the name of the lady he was familiar with is de l’Orgeville, that she is not fair but small, dark and plump and in any event is presently in Switzerland. At the same time as Marcel receives Saint-Loup’s telegram, his mother brings him the morning newspapers and he finds that an article he has written is published in that day’s Le Figaro. He sends Françoise to purchase a few more copies which he can then disseminate among those he knows. He visits Mme de Guermantes to see what she thought of his article. The fair girl, now “stripped of the better part of her personality” since Saint-Loup’s revelations was there and Marcel seeks an introduction. It turns out to be none other than his old childhood friend Gilberte whom he failed to recognise. However, she recognised him when they saw each other in the street, hence her “come hither” look which Marcel misinterpreted.
Gilberte is now a rich heiress. Not only had a rich uncle, now deceased, bestowed his fortune on her, her mother Odettte, Swann’s widow be it remembered, had since married a nobleman by the name of Forcheville (compare and contrast with the two earlier renditions) who in turn has adopted Gilberte endowing her with the same name, thereby performing two acts of charity in one: marrying the widow of a Jew, and improving Gilberte’s prospects of marriage immensely in getting rid of that “absurd name” Swann, and substituting therefore his own which, petty nobleman that he was, considered to be of a lineage more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld. Along with her mother, Gilberte was now welcomed into the circles of high society, the portals of which had been declared closed to her father, she now concealing her true origins and becoming a great snob in the process.
Synopsis Marcel goes for a walk in the Bois and comes across three girls whose fashionable, energetic style reminds him of Albertine and her friends. He follows them but loses contact when they get into a carriage. A few days later, he sees them again. One of them, the fair one, catches his eye as they pass. The porter at the house gives him her name but it is mis-spelt Déporcheville. It is more or less the same name as a prostitute whom Saint-Loup says he encountered in a disorderly house and Marcel assumes that it must be she, A few days later he pays a visit to Mme de Guermantes house. He again speaks to the porter and learns that the young lady in question will again be visiting in a few days’ time.
He makes inquiries of Saint-Loup who confirms by telegram that the name of the lady he was familiar with is de l’Orgeville, that she is not fair but small, dark and plump and in any event is presently in Switzerland. At the same time as Marcel receives Saint-Loup’s telegram, his mother brings him the morning newspapers and he finds that an article he has written is published in that day’s Le Figaro. He sends Françoise to purchase a few more copies which he can then disseminate among those he knows. He visits Mme de Guermantes to see what she thought of his article. The fair girl, now “stripped of the better part of her personality” since Saint-Loup’s revelations was there and Marcel seeks an introduction. It turns out to be none other than his old childhood friend Gilberte whom he failed to recognise. However, she recognised him when they saw each other in the street, hence her “come hither” look which Marcel misinterpreted.
Gilberte is now a rich heiress. Not only had a rich uncle, now deceased, bestowed his fortune on her, her mother Odettte, Swann’s widow be it remembered, had since married a nobleman by the name of Forcheville (compare and contrast with the two earlier renditions) who in turn has adopted Gilberte endowing her with the same name, thereby performing two acts of charity in one: marrying the widow of a Jew, and improving Gilberte’s prospects of marriage immensely in getting rid of that “absurd name” Swann, and substituting therefore his own which, petty nobleman that he was, considered to be of a lineage more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld. Along with her mother, Gilberte was now welcomed into the circles of high society, the portals of which had been declared closed to her father, she now concealing her true origins and becoming a great snob in the process.
As it turned out, no one in the household had seen or read Marcel's article but M de Guermantes reads it while he was there, complimenting Marcel but qualifying his approval in the process. On the following day, he receives two complimentary letters, but not one from Bloch which disappoints him.
Andrée pays him a visit coinciding with one of his mother’s “at-homes” which he describes as the second stage of oblivion as regards Albertine. This occurred about six months after their earlier conversation. By this stage, his memory of Albertine was so fragmentary that it “no longer caused him any sorrow and was no more than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announced a change of key”. Caressing her arm, Marcel says that he wouldn’t mind being on the recipient of whatever it is women do to each other. Andrée confesses that she and Albertine had indeed been intimate, and that Morel – “a nice boy at Mme Verdurin’s” – used to procure “little girls” for her, such as the young laundresses, after he had tried them out himself. Albertine loved doing it is the country, she says, notably at Buttes-Chaumont and the Petit Trianon.
Andrée pays him a visit coinciding with one of his mother’s “at-homes” which he describes as the second stage of oblivion as regards Albertine. This occurred about six months after their earlier conversation. By this stage, his memory of Albertine was so fragmentary that it “no longer caused him any sorrow and was no more than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announced a change of key”. Caressing her arm, Marcel says that he wouldn’t mind being on the recipient of whatever it is women do to each other. Andrée confesses that she and Albertine had indeed been intimate, and that Morel – “a nice boy at Mme Verdurin’s” – used to procure “little girls” for her, such as the young laundresses, after he had tried them out himself. Albertine loved doing it is the country, she says, notably at Buttes-Chaumont and the Petit Trianon.
She said that one of the chief reasons Albertine left was that her circle - the “little band” - might hold her in disrespect when they saw she was living with a man to whom she was not married. Notwithstanding his fading interest in Albertine with the passage of time, he cross-examines Andrée about this aspect of her life, particularly whether anything transpired between her and Mlle Vinteuil.
The third occasion he was conscious of approaching an absolute indifference as regards Albertine was a day in Venice a long time after Andrée’s last visit.
195-6 The cruelty of memory And indeed I was quite well aware now that before I forgot her altogether, before I reached the initial stage of indifference, I should have, like a traveller who returns by the same route to his starting-point, to traverse in the return direction all the sentiments through which I had passed before arriving at my great love. But these fragments, these moments of the past are not immobile, they have retained the terrible force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then yearning towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future... In these return journeys along the same line from a place to which we shall never return, when we recall the names, the appearance of all the places which we have passed on the outward journey, it happens that, while our train is halting at one of the stations, we feel for an instant the illusion that we are setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which we have come, as on the former journey. Soon the illusion vanishes, but for an instant we felt ourself carried away once again: such is the cruelty of memory.
196 Good novels triumph (temporarily) over habit - certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, they abolish our habits, bring us into contact once more with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, like a nightmare, since the force of habit, the oblivion that it creates, prevails to an infinite extent over the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all suggestions, has but a transient effect. 207 Love and reality Certain philosophers assert that the outer world does not exist, and that it is in ourself that we develop life. However, that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us. 209-10 Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still hot and damp from the press in the murky air of the morning in which it is distributed, at break of day, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once…. What I am holding in my hand is not a particular copy of the newspaper, it is anyone of the ten thousand, it is not merely what has been written for me, it is what has been written for me and everyone... For what I held in my hand was not merely what I had written, it was the symbol of its incantation in countless minds. 211 I may full well know that many people who read this article will find it detestable; at the moment of reading it, the meaning that each word conveys to me seems to me to be printed on the paper, I cannot believe that each other reader as he opens his eyes will not see directly the images that I see, believing the author's idea to be directly perceived by the reader, whereas it is a different idea that takes shape in his mind, with the simplicity of people who believe that it is the actual word which they have uttered that proceeds along the wires of the telephone. 219 Societal antisemitism But this was the moment when from the effects of the Dreyfus case there had arisen an anti-semitic movement parallel to a more abundant movement towards the penetration for society by Israelites. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would deal a fatal blow to anti-semitism. But provisionally, at least, a social anti-semitism was on the contrary, enhanced and exacerbated by it. Forcheville considered that, in marrying the widow, a Jew, he had performed the same act of charity as a millionaire who picks up a prostitute in the street and rescues her from poverty and mire. 235 Egoisms and genetic defects multiply but are brought under control But with a certain quantity of egoism which exists in the mother, a different egoism, inherent in the father's family, is combined which does not invariably mean that it is added, nor even precisely that it serves as a multiple, but rather that it creates a fresh egoism infinitely stronger and more redoubtable. And, in the period that has elapsed since the world began, during which families in which some defect exists in one form have been intermarrying with families in which the same defect exists in another, thereby creating a peculiarly complex and detestable variety of that defect in the offspring, the accumulated egoisms (to confine ourselves, for the moment, to this defect) would have acquired such force that the whole human race would have been destroyed, did not the malady itself bring forth, with the power to reduce it to its true dimensions, natural restrictions analogous to those which prevent the infinite proliferation of the infusoria from destroying our planet, the unisexual fertilization of plants from bringing about the extinction, of the vegetable kingdom, and so forth. From time to time a virtue combines with this egoism to produce a new and disinterested force. The combinations by which, in the course of generations, moral chemistry thus stabilises and renders inoffensive the elements that were becoming too formidable, are infinite and would give an exciting variety to family history. 272 Surrounded by the walls of time, man floats within them For man is that creature without any fixed age, who has the faculty of becoming, in a few seconds, many years younger, and who, surrounded by the walls of time through which he has lived, floats within them, but
as though in a basin the surface-level of which is constantly changing,
so as to bring him into the range now of one epoch, now of another.
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239-240 Snobbishness is, with certain people, analogous to those pleasant beverages with which they mix nutritious substances. Guermantes took an interest in some lady of fashion because she possessed priceless books and portraits by Nattier which my former frend would probably not have taken the trouble to inspect m the National Library or at the Louvre.
245 The perpetual renewal of our cells is retarded by our attention to a moment bound to change The vanishing of my suffering and of all that it carried away with it, left me diminished as does the healing of a malady which occupied a large place in our life. No doubt it is because memories are not always genuine that love is not eternal, and because life is made up of a perpetual renewal of our cells. But this renewal, in the case of memories, is nevertheless retarded by the attention which arrests and fixes a moment that is bound to change. 246 Optical errors in time and in space If the fact remains that it is time that gradually brings oblivion, oblivion does not fail to alter profoundly our notion of time. There are optical errors in time as there are in space. The persistence in myself of an old tendency to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to begin to live me the illusion that I was still as young as in the past; and yet in the memory of all the events that had followed one another in my life (and also of those that had followed one another in my heart, for when we have greatly changed, we are led to suppose that our life has been longer) in the course of those last months of Albertine's existence, had made them seem to me much longer than a year, and now this oblivion of so many things, separating me by gulfs of empty space from quite recent events which they made me think remote because I had what is called “the time” to forget them, by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory - like a thick fog at sea which obliterates all the landmarks - confused, destroyed my sense of distances in time contracted in one place, extended in another, and made me suppose myself now farther away from things, now far closer to them than I really was. And as in the fresh spaces, as yet unexplored, which extend before me, there would be no more trace of my love for Albertine than there had been, in the past time which I had just traversed, of my love for my grandmother, my life appeared to me – offering a succession of periods in which, after a certain interval, nothing of what had sustained the previous period survived in that which followed – (247) as something so devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self, something so useless in the future and so .protracted in the past, that death might just as well put an end to its course here or there, without in the least concluding it, as with those courses of French history which, in the Rhetoric class, stop short indifferently, according to the whim of the curriculum or the professor, at the Revolution of 1830, of that of 1848, or at the end of the Second Empire. 248 Self-renewal Ruminates upon a character in one of Bergotte’s novels, who, separated by the events of life from a woman whom he had adored when he was young, as an old man meets her without pleasure, without any desire to see her again). It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourself are dying... We may be faithful to what we remember, we remember only what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the information that it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her attractive, it was in love with her, but this was merely an affection at second hand 256 The habit of thinking prevents us at times from feeling reality, makes us immune to it, makes it seem no more than another thought. 257.. for other people's reality survives their death for only a short time in our minds, and after a few years they are like those gods of obsolete religions whom we insult without fear, because people have ceased to believe in their existence. 259 … those people, who, being in a certain state of life, desire a better state, but knowing it only by desire, do not realise that the first condition is to break away from the former state - like the neurasthenics or morphinomaniacs who are anxious to be cured, but at the same tune do not wish to be deprived of their manias or their morphine… 266 Desire engenders belief It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end .. only with our own life,... Why had I believed them? Falsehood is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part as the quest of pleasure and is moreover commanded by that quest. We lie in order to protect our pleasure or our honour if the disclosure of our pleasure runs counter to our honour. We lie all our life long, especially, indeed perhaps only, to those people who love us. Such people in fact alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem. 273 I was beginning to realise that the system of multiple causes for a single action, of which Albertine shewed her mastery in her relations with her girl friends when she allowed each of them to suppose that it was for her sake that she had come, was only a sort of artificial, deliberate symbol of the different aspects that an action assumes according to the point of view that we adopt. |