ViiI- The cities of the Plain (aka Sodom and Gomorrah), Part 2, Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
Context: Having returned to Balbec, the Narrator spends time with Albertine. He visits the Verdurins, who host their famous “Wednesdays” at la Raspelière. Albertine and the Narrator also attend evening dinners there, taking the train with the other guests. A number of notables travel with him on the train, including Brichot, and Cottard, now a famous doctor, who wouldn't miss the occasion even if his patient was a workman who had suffered a stroke, though he might if a Minister had a cold. The contentious subject of Dreyfus inevitably comes to the fore. The Narrator and Albertine hire a motor vehicle and take drives into the countryside. The Narrator marvels at the sight of an airplane flying overhead, and bursts into tears. Although their relationship is somewhat ambivalent, and he exhibits a preference for others, the Narrator decides to return to Paris with Albertine, telling his mother he must marry her. Meanwhile, the text is replete with reminiscences and musings on subjects such as sleep, dreams, memory, death, immortality and the medical profession.
1 Twins This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head. A tomato exactly similar served as head to his twin brother. To the observer there is this attraction about these perfect resemblances between pairs of twins, that nature, becoming for the moment industrialised, seems to be offering a pattern for sale.
5 Mme Verdurin’s dinner parties - "Wednesdays" at la Raspelière. 7 the Narrator and Albertine catch the train there from Balbec-plage which stops at Epreveille, Montmartin-sur- Mer, Parvville-la-Bingard, Incarville, Saint-Frichoux, and finally Doncieres, (307 Grattevast, Mainville) along the way. 8 Death, immortality and Paradise We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of a lifetime, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourself as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream of Paradise, or rather of a number of successive Paradises, but each of them is before we die, a Paradise Lost, in which we should feel ourself lost also. 18 Death; promotion Diversity of the forms of death reflected in the obituary columns of newspapers.. With the passage of time, not only do the real talents that may co-exist with the most commonplace conversation reveal and impose themselves, but furthermore that mediocre persons arrive at those exalted positions, attached in the imagination of our childhood to certain famous elders, when it never occurred to us that, after a certain number of years, their disciples, become masters, would be famous also, and would inspire the respect and awe that once they felt. 22 Dreyfus All in smoking dress. I had forgotten that the Verdurins were beginning a timid evolution towards fashionable ways, retarded by the Dreyfus case, accelerated by the "new music", an evolution which for that matter they denied, and continued to deny it until it was complete, like those military objectives which a general does not announce until he has reached them, so as not to appear defeated if he fails. 36 Medical profession For Dr Cottard, excellent fellow as he was, would forego the delights of a Wednesday not for a workman who had had a stroke, but for a Minister's cold. Could Dr Cottard bandage the cook's cut. "Of course I can't, Leontine", he had groaned; "can't you see I've got my white waistcoat on?" 40 Chales Maurice, Abbé de Perigord. He began by promising to be an excellent journalist. But he made a bad end, by which I mean that he became a Minister! Life has these tragedies. |
43-4 Dreyfusism, political and social.. replied Mme Verdurin, who, a sincere Dreyfusard, would nevertheless have been glad to discover a social counterpoise to the preponderant Dreyfusism of her salon. For, Dreyfusism was triumphant politically, but not socially. Labori, Reinach, Picquart, Zola were still, to people in society, more or less traitors, who could only keep them aloof from the little nucleus. And so, after this incursion into politics, Mme Verdurin was determined to return to the world of art. Besides were not Indy, Debussy, on the “wrong" side in the Case? "So far as the Case goes, we need only remember Brichot", she said (the Don being the only one of the faithful who had sided with the General Staff, which had greatly lowered him in the esteem of Mme Verdurin).
53 Princess Sherbatoff (the lady reading the Revue des Deux Mondes on the train) 70 A great publisher from Paris. He was a tall, stout man, very dark, with a studious and somewhat cutting air. He reminded one of an ebony paperknife. 70 The sunsets. .. so fine when seen from that cliff, and finer still from the terrace of la Raspelière, and which I would have travelled miles to see. ... "We never grow tired of it" and she turned her attention back to her cards. 72-73 Music and affectation Mme Verdurin, even when she heard it (the little phrase) played, she was no longer obliged to assume the air of attenuated admiration which she used to assume then, for that had become her normal expression. Under the influence of the countless neuralgias which the music of Bach, Wagner, Vinteuil, Debussy had given her, Mme Verdurin's brow had assumed enormous proportions, like limbs that are finally crippled by rheumatism. Her temples, suggestive of a pair of beautiful, pain-stricken, milk-white spheres, in which harmony rolled endlessly, flung back upon either side her silvered tresses, and proclaimed on the Mistress's behalf, without any need for her to say a word: “I know what is in store for me tonight". Her features no longer took the trouble to formulate successively aesthetic impressions of undue violence, for they had themselves become the permanent expression on a countenance ravaged and superb. This attitude of resignation to the ever impending sufferings inflicted by Beauty, and of the courage that was required to make her dress for dinner when she had barely recovered for ten effects of the last sonata, had the result that Mme V, even when listening to the most heartrending music, preserved a disdainfully passive countenance, and actually withdrew into retirement to swallow her two spoonfuls of aspirin. 104-5 de Saulces ae Freycinet, meaning a spot planted with willows and ashes, salix et fraxinetum; his nephew M de Selves combines more trees still, since he is named de Selves, de sylvis. |
105.. an eminent Norwegian philosopher who spoke French very well but slowly, for the twofold reason that, in the first place, having learned the language only recently and not wishing to make mistakes (he did, nevertheless, make some), he referred each word to a sort of mental dictionary, and secondly, being a metaphysician, he always thought of what he intended to say while he was saying it, which, even in a Frenchman causes slowness. .
123 .. for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain.
130-1 Compliments She was like almost all women, who imagine that a compliment that is paid to them is a literal statement of the truth, and is a judgment impartially, irresistibly pronounced, as though it referred to a work of art that has no connection with a person.
148-9 Sleep Whether a determination to remain awake survived in Mme Cottard, even in the state of sleep, or because the armchair offered no support to her head, it was jerked mechanically from left to right, and up and down, in the empty air, like a lifeless object, and Mme Cottard, with her nodding poll, appeared now to be listening to music, now to be in the last throws of death. .. "My bath is nice and hot" .
174-178 Sleep .. I entered a state of slumber which it like a second room that we take, into which, leaving our own room, we go when we want to sleep. It has noises of its own and we are sometimes violently awakened by the sound of a bell, perfectly heard by our ears, although nobody has rung. It has servants, special visitors who call to take us out so that we are ready to get up when we are compelled to realise, but our almost immediate transmigration into the other room, the room of overnight, that it is empty, that nobody has called. The race that inhabits it is, like that of our first human ancestors, androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman. Things in it shew a tendency to turn into men, men into friends and enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, during these spells of slumber, is absolutely different from the time in which the life of the waking man is passed. Sometimes its course is far more rapid, a quarter of an hour seems a day, at other times far longer, we think we have taken only a short nap, when we have slept through the day. Then, in the chariot of sleep, we descend into depths in which memory can no longer overtake it, and on the brink of which the mind has been obliged to retrace its steps. .... Well, on those mornings (and this is what makes me say that sleep is perhaps unconscious of the law of time) my effort to awaken consisted chiefly in an effort to make the obscure, undefined mass of the sleep in which I had just been living enter into the scale of time. It is no easy task; sleep, which does not know whether we have slept for two hours or two days, cannot provide any indication. And if we do not find one outside, not being able to re-enter time, we fall asleep again, for five minutes which seem to us three hours.
179 Memory We possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them.
208 It may be thought that my love of magic journeys by train ought to have prevented me from sharing Albertine’s wonder at the motor car which takes even the invalid wherever he wishes to go and destroys our conception - which I had held hitherto - of position in space as the individual mark, the irreplaceable essence of irremovable beauties. And no doubt this position in space was not to the motor-car, as it had been to the railway train, when I came from Paris to Balbec, a goal exempt from the contingencies of ordinary life, almost ideal at the point of departure, and, as it remains so at that of arrival, at our arrival in that great dwelling where no one dwells and which bears only the name of the town, the station, seeming to promise at last the accessibility of the town, as though the station were its materialisation. No, the motor-car did not convey us thus by magic into a town which we saw at first in the whole that is summarised by its name, and with the illusions of a spectator in a theatre. It made us enter that theatre by the wings which were the streets, stopped to ask the way of an inhabitant. But, as a compensation for so familiar a progress one has the gropings of the chauffeur uncertain of his way and retracing his course, the ’general post’ of perspective which sets a castle dancing about with a hill, a church and the sea, while one draws nearer to it, in spite of its vain efforts to hide beneath its primeval foliage; those ever narrowing circles which the motor-car describes round a spellbound town which darts off in every direction to escape it and upon which finally it drops down, straight, into the heart of the valley where it lies palpitating on the ground; so that this position in space, this unique point, which the motor-car seems to have stripped of the mystery of express trains, it gives us on the contrary the impression of discovering, of determining for ourselves as with a compass, of helping us to feel with a more fondly exploring hand, with a finer precision, the true geometry, the fair measure of the earth.
217-8 Phantoms These roads, these streets which I walked hoping that Mme de Guermantes might pass.. Now the profound monotony, the moral significance of a sort of ruled line that my character must follow. It was natural, and yet it was not without importance; they reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; there are people indeed - and this had been my case from my childhood – for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, leave no stone unturned, make everything else subservient to the capture of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another, prepared to return later on to the first. It was not the first time that I had gone in quest of Albertine, the girl I had seen that first year outlined against the sea. Other women, it is true, had been interposed between the Albertine whom I had first loved and her from whom I was scarcely separated at this moment; other women, notably the Duchesse de Guermantes. .... Of phantoms pursued, forgotten, sought afresh sometimes for a single meeting and in order to establish contact with an unreal life which at once escaped, these Balbec roads were full. When I thought that their trees, pear trees, apple trees, tamarisks, would outlive me, I seemed to receive from them the warning to set myself to work at last, before the hour should strike of rest everlasting.
219.. I found Albertine painting in front of the church all spires and crockets, thorny and red, blossoming like a rose bush. The lantern alone shewed an unbroken front; and the smiling surface of the stone was abloom with angels who continued, before the twentieth century couple that we were, to celebrate, taper in hand, the ceremonies of the thirteenth. 227 ... then to our fevered eyes the narrow slip of moon appeared at first, like the slight, fine rind, then like the cool section of a fruit which an invisible knife was beginning to peel in the sky. 241 The Narrator is overcome by his first glimpse of the new technology Suddenly, my horse gave a start; he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle, then I raised in the direction from which the sound seemed to come my eyes filled with tears and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were carrying him on, a creature whose barely visible face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. I was as deeply moved as a Greek upon seeing for the first time a demi-god. I cried also, for I was ready to cry the moment I realised that the sound came from above my head – aeroplanes were still rare in those days - at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. Then, just as when in a newspaper one feels that one is coming to a moving passage, the mere sight of the machine was enough to make me burst into tears. Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him–before me, had not habit made me a prisoner–all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments, over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight movement of his golden wings, rose sheer into the sky. 250 "Being busy, having nothing better to do" And in the hall the chief magistrate was saying to us: "Ah! You are going to la Raspelière! Sapristi, she has a nerve, your Mme. Verdurin, to make you travel an hour by train in the dark, simply to dine with her. And then to start off again at ten o'clock at night, with a wind blowing like the very devil. It is easy to see that you have nothing else to do," he added, rubbing his hands together. No doubt he spoke thus from annoyance at not having been invited, and also from the satisfaction that people feel who are "busy", although it be with the most idiotic occupation, at "not having time" to do what you are doing. Certainly it is only right that the man who draws up reports, adds up figures, answers business letters, follows the movements of the stock exchange, should feel when he says to you with a sneer: " It's all very well for you; you have nothing better to do," an agreeable sense of his own superiority. But this would be no less contemptuous, would be even more so (for dining out is a thing that the busy man does also) were your recreation writing Hamlet or merely reading it. Wherein busy men shew a want of reflection. For the disinterested culture which seems to them a comic pastime of idle people at the moment when they find them engaged in it is, they ought to remember, the same that in their own profession brings to the fore men who may not be better magistrates or administrators than themselves but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: "It appears he's a great reader, a most distinguished individual”. |
Mr de Charlus' retreat to his inner sanctum
267-8 How could M. de Charlus have imagined the remark made of him by a certain tender relative: "How on earth can you suppose that Mémé is in love with me, you forget that I am a woman!" And yet she was genuinely, deeply attached to M. de Charlus. Why then need we be surprised that in the case of the Verdurins, whose affection and goodwill he had no title to expect, the remarks which they made behind his back (and they did not, as we shall see, confine themselves to remarks), were so different from what he imagined them to be, that is to say from a mere repetition of the remarks that he heard when he was present? The latter alone decorated with affectionate inscriptions the little ideal tent to which M de Charlus retired at times to dream by himself, when he introduced his imagination for a moment into the idea that the Verdurin's held of him. Its atmosphere was so congenial, so cordial, the repose it offered so comforting, that when M de Charlus, before going to sleep, had withdrawn to it for a momentary relief from his worries, he never emerged from it without a smile... And so M de Ch lived in a state of deception like the fish which thinks that the water in which it is swimming extends beyond the glass wall of its aquarium which (269) mirrors it, while it does not see close beside it in the shadow the human visitor who is watching its movements.. 348 " Where does your friend live in Paris? As 3 streets out of 4 take their name from a church or abbey, there seems every chance of further sacrilege there. One can't prevent Jews from living in the Bvde de la Madeleine, Faubourg Saint-Honore or Place Saint-Augustin. So long as they do not carry their perfidy a stage farther, and pitch their tents in the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, Quai de l' Archeveche, Rue Chanoinesse or Rue de l' Avemaria, we must make allowance for their difficulties". Doncières! 354 To me, even after I had come to know it and had awakened from my dream, how much had long survived in that name of pleasantly glacial streets, lighted windows, succulent flesh of birds. Doncières! Now it was nothing more than the station at which Morel joined the train.. 371 So, when they grow up, children remember with resentment the people who have been unkind to them. A poetical, vain image of memory and dreams 382-3 It seemed indeed almost unreal, like a painted view. Facing us, where the cliff of Parville jutted out, the little wood in which we had played ’ferret’ thrust down to the sea’s edge, beneath the varnish, still all golden, of the water, the picture of its foliage, as at the hour when often, at the close of day, after I had gone there to rest in the shade with Albertine, we had risen as we saw the sun sink in the sky. In the confusion of the night mists which still hung in rags of pink and blue over the water littered with the pearly fragments of the dawn, boats were going past smiling at the slanting light which gilded their sails and the point of their bowsprits as when they are homeward bound at evening; a scene imaginary, chilling and deserted, a pure evocation of the sunset which did not rest, as at evening, upon the sequence of the hours of the day which I was accustomed to see precede it, detached, interpolated, more insubstantial even than the horrible image of Montjouvan which it did not succeed in cancelling, covering, concealing - a poetical, vain image of memory and dreams. |