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Place-names: The Name
And now we return to our narrator, Marcel, who is keen on visiting either the storm tossed shore at Balbec or else the cities of northern Italy.
P298 “...even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go full tilt singing as one goes. During this month -- in which I went laboriously over, as though over a tune... these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person -- I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all...”
Young Marcel then gets so worked up at the realization that he is actually going to Italy that,
P299 “I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out o the question, but warned them that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.
P300 “And, alas, he forbade also, most categorically, my being allowed to go to the theater, to hear Berma... My parents had to be content with sending me, every day, to the Champs-Elysees, in the custody of a person who would see that I did not tire myself; this person was none other than Francoise, who had entered our service after the death of my aunt Leonie. Going to the Champs-Elysees I found unendurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his books, I should, no doubt, have longed to see and to know it... but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.”
Before we get to Gilberte, I went to Google Map to see where the Champs-Élysées is and found some things of interest for this section about names. A few things Proust would not have remembered: Avenue du General Eisenhower, Avenue Winston Churchill, Voie Georges Pompidou, Avenue FDR, and running through the middle of the formal gardens, Allee Marcel Proust. There are also statues of Clemenceau and of de Gaul.
When I visited Paris I recall spending a fair amount of time in the Tuileries Garden but I don’t know that I ever made it across Place de la Concorde to these gardens. I don’t think I had read Proust at that point.
While this is hardly a surprise, it is still shocking to scroll around Paris in Google Map and see “Temporarily closed” next to almost everything.
I had forgotten that we immediately go to Marcel singing Swann’s tune in his own, much younger voice. Marcel runs into Gilberte while both are playing in the Champs-Élysées and soon his life revolves around her.
P305 “...although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-Élysées; when one is in love one has not love left for anyone), yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments... I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her... But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist, apart from ourselves...
...
“Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in classic drama, I had asked her whether she had not a copy of a pamphlet in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print...that evening I had sent her a little telegram, writing on its envelope the name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often traced in my exercise-books. Next day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white wax, the pamphlet, a copy of which she had managed to find... But in the address on the pneumatic message -- which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a ‘little blue’ that I had written, and, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte’s porter and a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one of the ‘little blues’ that she had received in the course of the day -- I had difficulty in recognizing the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil by a postman, signs of effectual realization, seals of the external world, violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream. ”
Doing a little research on ‘little blues’ I found THIS.
Young Marcel is now torn between his need to declare his love for Gilberte and to hear her say she loves him. I’m guessing they are about nine. I would laugh, but if I were to have a “Madeleine” moment, what I wouldn’t want would be for it to take me back to Valentine’s Day when I was in elementary school. I don’t recall the details now, but there was always some girl or other I had a crush on and I struggled with how much to say. This was especially fraught as this was likely the only day of the year she might be aware of my existence. And nothing ever came of it. Every few years some little girl would feel the need to kiss me, but they were never the girls I was interested in. I did eventually learn to kiss in this manner, but it never led to romance.
We are now at the point where M. Swann is reintroduced to the story after a long interval, measured primarily by the age of Gilberte.
P 310 “He [Swann] responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte’s companions, even to mine, for all that he was no longer on good terms with my family, but without appearing to know who I was. (This reminded me that he had constantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had become pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann; as the ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, which I utilized not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another person; still I attached him by an artificial thread, secondary and transversal, to our former guest...)
“On one of these sunny days which had not realized my hopes, I had not the courage to conceal my disappointment from Gilberte.
“‘I had ever so many things to ask you,’ I said to her; ‘I thought that today was going to mean so much in our friendship. And no sooner have you come than you go away! Try to come early to-morrow, so that I can talk to you.’
“Her face lighted up and she jumped for joy as she answered: ‘To-morrow you may make up your mind, my dear friend, I sha’n’t come! First of all I’ve a big luncheon-party; then in the afternoon I am going to a friend’s house to see King Theodosious arrive from her windows; won’t that be splendid? -- and then, next day, I’m going to Michel Strogoff, and after that it will soon be Christmas, and the New Year holidays! Perhaps they’ll take me south, to the Riviera; won’t that be nice?... if I do stay in Paris, I sha’n’t be coming here, because I shall be out paying calls with Mamma. Good-bye -- there’s Papa calling me.’”
...
P312 “Every evening I would beguile myself into imagining this letter [from Gilberte explaining her seeming indifference and how she actually loved him], believing that I was actually reading it, reciting each of its sentences in turn. Suddenly I would stop, in alarm. I had realized that, if I were to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it... I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just these identical words... from the field of possible events...
...
“As for Bergotte, that infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first, before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte, now it was for Gilberte’s sake, chiefly, that I still loved him...”
P316 [His mother reports on running into Swann while shopping] “‘...He asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter --’ my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my existence in Swann’s mind...”
...
P318 “But most of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allee des Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I would guide Francoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne.”
The book ends with much more about Mme. Swann cruising the Bois and with the narrator’s return many years later when the coaches have been replaced by motor-cars and the women’s hats have grown ridiculous. Even the residential neighborhood has gone to pot. Change is never agreeable to the people who came of age in a different era. Of course what older people of today mean by “the good old days” followed this sad decline by at least a generation. We do love to complain.
And now, on to Some Do Not.
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