The Guermantes Way
Finished — 2025-09-11
Started — 2025-03-30
This continued my beloved slow ritual of reading the Penguin Proust at the Katsushika Library, with significant detours into other translations: the Yale by Carter, and the famous Moncrieff via Standard Ebooks.
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Treharne is preserving the labyrinthine sentences, or they’re getting more labyrinthine in the original
A two-dimensional castle keep which was really no more than a strip of orange light where the lord and his lady, high up, decided upon life or death for their vassals, had been replaced—right at the end of the “Guermantes way,” along which I used to follow the course of the Vivonne with my parents on all those sunny afternoons—by the land of bubbling streams where the Duchesse taught me to fish for trout and to recognize the names of the flowers whose purple-and-reddish clusters adorned the low walls of the neighboring garden plots; then it had become the hereditary property, the poetic domain from which the proud race of the Guermantes, like a mellowing, crenellated tower spanning the ages, was rising already over France, at a time when the sky was still empty in those places where Notre-Dame de Paris and Notre-Dame de Chartres were later to rise; a time when on the summit of the hill in Laon the cathedral nave had not been placed like the Ark of the Flood on the summit of Mount Ararat, full of patriarchs and judges anxiously leaning from its windows to see whether the wrath of God has been appeased, carrying with it the species of plants that will multiply on earth, brimming over with animals spilling out even from the towers, where oxen, moving calmly around on the roofs, gaze down over the plains of Champagne; a time when the traveler who left Beauvais at close of day did not yet see, following him and turning with the bends in the road, the black branching wings of the cathedral spread out against the golden screen of sunset.
Now, every morning, well before the time she left the house, I made a long detour and went to post myself at the corner of the street she normally took, and when I thought she was about to appear, I would walk back along the street as if I were absorbed in my thoughts, looking in the opposite direction, and then raising my eyes toward her the moment I drew level with her, as if she were the last person I expected to see. Indeed, for the first few mornings, to be sure of not missing her, I even waited in front of the house. And every time the carriage gate opened (to let out a succession of people who were not the one I was waiting for), its shuddering clatter would go on vibrating in my heart and take a long time to die down. For never did a devotee of a famous actress whom he does not know, hanging around at the stage door, never did an angry or idolatrous crowd, gathered to insult or to carry in triumph through the streets the condemned man or the hero it believes to be about to emerge every time any sound is heard from inside the prison or the palace—never did either feel the emotion I felt as I awaited the departure of the aristocratic lady, who, in her ordinary dress, had the power, in the grace of her deportment (quite different from the manner she adopted when she entered a drawing room or a theater box), to transform her morning walk—and for me she was the only one in the world out walking—into a whole poem of elegance, into the most refined adornment, the rarest flower under the sun.
I love how much of a nerd Marcel is and how hard he tries to play it cool
Because of this whole succession of different faces offered in turn by Mme de Guermantes, faces that occupied a relative and changing space, sometimes narrow, sometimes vast, in her style of dress as a whole, my love was not attached to any particular part of flesh and fabric, different with each day, which she could modify or renew almost completely without affecting my state of agitation, because beneath them, the new cape and the unfamiliar cheek, I felt that it was still Mme de Guermantes. What I loved was the invisible person who set all this in motion, the woman whose hostility caused me distress, whose approaching presence threw me into turmoil, whose life I should have liked to exclude from her friends and hold as my own. Whether she wore a blue feather or displayed an inflamed complexion, her actions would lose none of their importance for me.
The depths of this novel, 1,129 pages in, continue to deepen
But Françoise was the first person to demonstrate to me by her example (which I was to understand only much later, when it was repeated more painfully, as the final volumes of this work will show, by a person who was much dearer to me) that the truth does not have to be spoken to be made apparent
These previews of later volumes!
I really was in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest boon I could have asked of God would have been that He should bring down upon her every possible calamity, and that-ruined, discredited, stripped of all the privileges that separated me from her, with no home of her own or people who would consent to speak to her-she would come to me for asylum.
Uh Dude that sentence sucks
He would listen to my explanation and respond pertinently; but before he had uttered a word he had transformed me into his own likeness; compared with the important duties that kept him so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries that a moment ago I had been unable to endure a second longer seemed to me as negligible as they did to him; I was like a man who, after being unable to open his eyes for days, sends for the doctor, who gently and adroitly raises his eyelid, removes a grain of sand, and shows it to him; the patient is healed and reassured.
Habit, among all the plants that grow in human beings, is the one that has least need of nutritious soil in order to live, the first to appear on the most apparently arid rock,
And if, in the captain’s features, there was something of Napoleon I—if not in his natural expression, then at least in the studied majesty he adopted—the officer somehow reminded one, too, particularly in his kindly, melancholic gaze and with his drooping mustache, of Napoleon III; this was so striking that, when he asked permission to join the Emperor after Sedan and was summarily dismissed by Bismarck, into whose presence he had been ushered, the latter, happening to look up at the young man, who was preparing to leave the room, was instantly struck by the likeness and, reconsidering the matter, called him back and granted the request, which, like everyone else, he had just been refused.
These sentences man
she put continents and centuries between us
deliquescent
tending to become liquid
I left Legrandin without any particular ill-feeling toward him. Some memories are like friends in common, they can bring about reconciliations; set there, amid fields of buttercups and the mounds of feudal ruins, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and myself, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.
Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naive heroine of a play, her attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who had just taken his seat in the theater, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamored eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me, too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights—created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part—the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating, too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to meet again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors, who are no longer what they were in their roles, into a script that no longer shows the actors' faces, into a colored powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.
And, more generally, there is nothing, not even the insignificance of the remarks made by the people among whom we spend our lives, that does not offer a sense of the supernatural, in our poor everyday world where even a man of genius from whom, as we gather around him like a séance table, we wait to hear the secret of the infinite, simply utters the words—words that had just escaped from Bloch—“Take care of my top hat.”
The Prince’s name, with the bold attack—in musical terms—of its opening syllables, and the stammering repetition that marked them, preserved the vigor, the mannered simplicity, the heavy-handed “refinements” of the Germanic race, projected like greenish boughs over the “-heim” of dark-blue enamel, which shed the mystic gleam of a Rhenish stained-glass window behind the pale and finely chiseled gildings of the German eighteenth century. The name included, among the several names of which it was composed, that of a little German spa-town I had visited with my grandmother as a child, beneath a mountain distinguished by the fact that Goethe had walked there; from its vineyards we used to drink at the Kurhof the illustrious vintages with their compound and sonorous names, like the epithets that Homer gives to his heroes. And so, the instant I heard it uttered, and before I had recalled the spa town, the Prince’s name seemed to shrink, to become charged with humanity, to accommodate itself comfortably in a small corner in my memory, where it stayed, familiar, earthbound, picturesque, appetizing, light, somehow authorized and prescribed. And in addition to this, M. de Guermantes, in explaining who the Prince was, referred at length to a number of his titles, and I recognized the name of the village with the river running through it on which, at the end of a day’s treatment, I used to go boating amid the mosquitoes, and the name of a forest far enough away for the doctor not to allow me to make the journey. And in effect it was understandable that the suzerainty of this nobleman should extend to the surrounding places, and that the enumeration of his titles should associate afresh the various names that could be read side by side on a map. Thus, beneath the visor of a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and a knight of Franconia, what I saw was the face of a beloved land, where the light of the evening sun had often lingered for me, at least before the Prince, Rhinegrave, and Elector Palatine had entered the room.
And this is how the Prince de Faffenheim came to find himself calling on Mme de Villeparisis.
Chuckling out loud at this whole pleasant section over wine at the futaba-chou table
I turned my attention to M. de Charlus. The tuft of his gray hair, the twinkling eye beneath the eyebrow pushed up by his monocle, the red flowers in his buttonhole were like three mobile apexes in a convulsive and striking triangle.
Next to her M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One would have said that the notion omnipresent in all his limbs of his vast riches gave him a particular high density, as though they had been melted in a crucible into a single human ingot to form this man whose value was so immense.
Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth century Painter. But when they say this they forget time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest—more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.
mousmé
I shall close this episode by remarking that from one point of view there was something of true grandeur about Mme de Guermantes, in that she had the capacity to efface utterly from her memory the things that other people would have only partially forgotten. Even if she had never experienced me pestering her, following her, tracking her down on her morning walks, if she had never had to acknowledge my daily greeting with riled impatience, or to send Saint-Loup packing when he begged her to invite me, she could not have behaved toward me with more gracious and natural charm. Not only did she waste no time on postmortems, hints, meaningful smiles, and innuendos, not only did her present affability, by not dwelling on the past or showing the least reticence, have something as proudly upright about it as her own majestic stature, but the grudges she might have borne anyone in the past were so completely reduced to ashes, and the ashes were themselves cast so far from her memory or at least from her behavior, that to look at her face, whenever she needed to treat with the most admirable simplicity what for so many people would have been a pretext for rekindling smoldering resentments and recriminations, was to experience something like a process of purification.
If, as I came downstairs, I relived those evenings in Doncières, suddenly, when we reached the street, the almost total darkness, in which the fog seemed to have extinguished the streetlamps (they were visible, and even then very faintly, only from close up), took me back to some dim memory of arrival in Combray by night, when the town was lit only at distant intervals and you groped your way through a humid, warm, holy criblike darkness in which the lamps flickered here and there with no more light than from a candle. Between that year (whichever year it was and the evenings in Rivebelle, reflected a while back above the curtains in my bedroom, what a world of difference! As I took note of this, I felt a sense of inspired exhilaration, which might have resulted in something had I remained alone and so avoided the detour of the many futile years I was yet to spend before discovering the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book. Had this discovery been made that evening, the carriage I found myself in would have deserved to rank as more memorable than Dr. Percepied’s, in which I had composed the little descriptive piece about the Martinville steeples, recently unearthed, as it happened, which I had reworked and offered without success to the Figaro. Is it because we relive past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but by fixing our memory on the coolness or sunshine of one particular morning or evening spent in the shade of some isolated setting, enclosed, static, arrested, lost, remote from everything else, and because the changes gradually effected not only in the world outside but in our dreams and in our developing personality, changes that have carried us along through life from one phase to a wholly different one without our noticing, are therefore nullified, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, the gaps, the immense stretches of oblivion between the two, make us feel something like a huge gulf of difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two utterly dissimilar qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration? But between the successive memories of Combray, Doncières, and Rivebelle which had recently occurred, I now felt that, much more than a distance in time, there was the sort of distance there would be between different universes whose substance was not the same. Had I wanted to reproduce in writing the material in which my slightest memories of Rivebelle were carved, I would have had to take the substance that had up until now resembled the somber, rugged sandstone of Combray, vein it in pink, and suddenly transform it into something translucent, dense, cool, and resonant. But Robert had finished giving his instructions to the driver and now joined me in the carriage. The ideas that had been passing through my mind were dispelled. They are goddesses who sometimes deign to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a crossroads, or even in his bedroom while he sleeps, and they stand in the doorway to bring him their annunciation. But as soon as he is no longer alone, they vanish in a refusal to appear to more than one person at a time. So instead I found myself thrown back on friendship.
There was something magical about this waterside carnival. The river, the women’s dresses, the sails of the boats, the numerous reflections between the various elements in the painting all fitted together on the square of canvas Elstir had cut out of a wonderful afternoon. The marvelous shimmer on the dress of a woman who had stopped dancing for a moment because she was hot and out of breath was reflected, too, in the same way, in the cloth of a motionless sail, in the water of the little port, in the wooden landing stage, in the leaves on trees and in the sky. In one of the pictures I had seen in Balbec, the hospital, as beautiful beneath its lapis-lazuli sky as the cathedral itself, with a daring that surpassed Elstir the theorist, Elstir the man of taste, the lover of medieval culture, seemed to be singing out, “There is no such thing as Gothic, as a masterpiece; a humdrum hospital is every bit as good as an illustrious porch”; what I now heard was: “The slightly vulgar lady whom the man with an eye for women wouldn’t bother to look at as he passed by, and would exclude from the poetic scene nature presents to his eyes, is beautiful, too; the light on her dress is the same light that falls on the sail of that boat; everything is equally precious; the tawdry dress and the sail that is beautiful in itself are both mirrors of the same light. All the worth they have is conferred upon them by the painter’s eye.” And this eye had been able to arrest the passage of the hours for all time in this luminous moment when the lady had felt hot and stopped dancing, when the tree was encircled by a ring of shade, when the sails seemed to be gliding over a glaze of gold. But precisely because that moment had such a forceful impact, the fixity of the canvas conveyed the impression of something highly elusive: you felt that the lady would soon return home, the boats vanish from the scene, the shadow shift, night begin to fall; that pleasure fades away, that life passes, and that the instant, illuminated by multiple and simultaneous plays of light, cannot be recaptured.
This is zen and it nearly made me weep at the pool and then again at the library
Proust capitalizes “the Instant” like a zen practitioner and then doesn’t follow up on why
In one of these watercolors, a poet, exhausted by a long journey in the mountains, has encountered a centaur, who, pitying his exhaustion, is carrying him home on his back. In others, the vast landscape (in which the mythical scene, the legendary heroes occupy a tiny place and seem almost lost) is rendered, from the mountaintops to the sea, with an exactitude that conveys the time of day not to the hour but to the very minute, by depicting the precise angle of the setting sun and the fleeting fidelity of the shadows. And by making the symbolic world of legend instantaneous in this way, the artist gives it a sort of lived historical reality, painting and relating it as a vivid instance of the past.
I then asked the Duc to introduce me to the Prince d’Agrigente. “You mean to tell me that you haven’t met our wonderful Gri-Gri!” he exclaimed and gave M. d’Agrigente my name. The Prince’s own, so often dropped by Françoise, had always seemed to me like a transparent sheet of glass, through which I could see, struck by the slanting rays of a golden sun on the shore of the violet sea, the pink cubes of an ancient city of which I did not doubt that the Prince — who happened by some brief miracle to be passing through Paris — was himself the actual sovereign, as luminously Sicilian and shiny with age as the city itself. Alas, the vulgar bumbler to whom I was introduced, and who wheeled around to bid me good evening with a heavy-handed nonchalance he mistook for elegance, was as remote from his name as he was from a work of art he might have owned without betraying any reflection of it, or without ever having looked at it. The Prince d’Agrigente was so entirely devoid of anything princely, anything remotely reminiscent of Agrigento, that one began to imagine that it was his name alone, utterly distinct from himself, bound in no way to his person, that had been able to draw into itself anything vaguely poetic there might have been about this man, as about any other, and then to have imprisoned it in its magic syllables. If such a process had occurred, then it had done so most successfully, for there remained not an atom of charm to be elicited from this kinsman of the Guermantes. With the result that he found himself at one and the same time the only man in the world who was the Prince d’Agrigente and, of all the men in the world, the one who was perhaps least so. For all that, he was very happy to be what he was, but as a banker is happy to hold a number of shares in a mine, without caring whether the mine answers to the charming name of Ivanhoe or Primrose or is simply called Mine Number One.
The whole description of how Guermanteses greet people is hilarious
A grace and sweetness that were conditional, one might say, upon the meekness with which the arriving guest bent her knee. This was probably the case; and it seems that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would disappear, not, as people imagine, through lack of breeding, but because the one side would lose the deference due to a prestige that must be imaginary to be effective, while, more important, the other would lose the affability that is generously dispensed and cultivated when it is felt to be infinitely precious to the recipient, a sense of the precious that, in a world based on equality, would suddenly die a death, like everything that has only a fiduciary value. But this disappearance of social etiquette in a transformed society is by no means a certainty, and we are occasionally too ready to believe that present circumstances are the only ones in which certain phenomena can thrive. People of great intelligence believed that there could not be any diplomacy or foreign alliances in a republic, and that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation of church and state. After all, the existence of social etiquette in an egalitarian society would be no more miraculous than the success of the railways, or the use of the airplane in war. And, then, if etiquette was to disappear, there is nothing to show that this would be a bad thing. And would not a society become secretly more hierarchical as it became ostensibly more democratic? Very possibly. The political power of the Popes has increased enormously since they ceased to possess either states or an army; cathedrals meant far less to a devout Catholic of the seventeenth century than they do for a twentieth-century atheist, and if the Princess of Parma had been the sovereign ruler of a state, no doubt it would have occurred to me to speak of her about as much as of a president of the Republic-which is to say, not at all.
I think I must admit that I prefer the Treharne, and likely the rest of the Penguins, to the Carter
Thus does the heavy structure of the aristocracy, with its rare windows, admitting a scant amount of daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar, but also the same massive, blind force as Romanesque architecture, enclose all our history within its sullen walls.