Time Regained & a Guide to Proust

by Marcel Proust

  HAWTHORN. See Flowers.

  HEREDITY. Arbitrary laws of filial resemblance; Gilberte and her parents: II 190–92. Saint-Loup’s hereditary virtues: 432. “We take from our family … the ideas by which we live as well as the malady from which we shall die”: 644. Inheritance of mannerisms of speech, etc. (the “little band”); “the individual is steeped in something more general than himself”: 667. Andrée’s hair inherited from her mother: 717. Heredity gives uncles the same faults as they censure in their nephews: IV 124, 128–29. Hereditary resemblance of M’s mother and grandmother; “the dead annex the living”: 227–29, 711–12, 720–22. “The souls of the dead from whom we sprang … shower upon us their riches and their spells”—M comes to resemble all his relatives: V 95–97, 135–37, 474–76. Heredity and bad habits: 201–2. “We do not create ourselves of our own accord out of nothing;” hereditary accumulation of egoisms: 791–92. Atavistic wisdom of Mme de Marsantes: 923–24. Moral cells of which an individual is composed more durable than the individual himself: VI 334. Berma’s daughter inherits her mother’s defects: 453. Hereditary need for spiritual nourishment in the Duchesse de Guermantes: 466.

  HISTORY. M’s grandfather’s interest in history: I 26, 31. Swann’s curiosity about Odette’s occupations comes from the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history: 388–90. Charlus’s aristocratic prejudices reinforced by his interest in history: II 459–61. The Duc de Guermantes’s politeness a survival from the historic past: III 571. Aristocratic names bring history to life: 734–44. The wisdom of families inspired by the Muse of History: V 918–19. History and Society: VI 335.

  HOMOSEXUALITY. See Inversion.

  INTOXICATION. See Alcohol.

  INVERSION. “What is sometimes, most ineptly, termed homosexuality”: IV 9. The race of inverts: 19–44, their predicament; “a race upon which a curse is laid;” an extensive freemasonry: 20–24; “improperly” called a vice: 24 (cf. 18: “we use the term for linguistic convenience”); types of invert—the gregarious, the solitaries, the zealots, the gynophiles, the affected, the guilt-ridden backsliders: 24–34; typical career of a solitary invert: 31–36; subvarieties of invert; those who care only for elderly gentlemen; the miracle of their conjunction: 36–40 (cf. 9); botanical analogy: 38–4–1; inversion can be traced back to a primeval hermaphroditism: 40–4–1. Numerous progeny of the exiles from Sodom: 42–43. M. and Mme de Vaugoubert: a case of reversal of roles: 57–63. Characteristic voice of the invert: 86. Discussion between Charlus and Vaugoubert: 87–89 (cf. V 51–52). A “diplomatic Sodom”: 100–1. Bloch’s sister and an actress cause a scandal: 326–27, 337–38. Nissim Bernard and the waiters: 327–31, 342–44. “Astral signs” by which the daughters of Gomorrah recognise one another (as do also “the nostalgic, the hypocritical, sometimes the courageous exiles of Sodom”): 338–40. Instinctive behaviour of inverts on entering a strange drawing-room: 414–16. “By dint of thinking tenderly of men one becomes a woman”: 417. The cold shoulder of the invert on meeting his kind; rivalry among inverts; speed of mutual recognition: 431–34. Connexion between inversion and aesthetic sensibility: 479–80 (cf. V 291–92). Giveaway signs—voice, gestures, manner of speech: 497–99. Charm of unfamiliarity in the conversation of an invert: 598–99. Gomorrah disseminated all over the world: V 20. Gomorrah of today a jigsaw puzzle made up of unexpected pieces: 111. Distinction between conventional (classical) homosexuality and the “involuntary, neurotic” homosexuality of today: 269–73. Charlus’s “camping”: 275–77. Significance of the term “one of them” or “one of us”: 280–81 (cf. IV 462–63). Jealousy among inverts; attitude towards relations with women: 283–85. Paternal feelings of inverts: 322–23. Furtive party conversation among inverts: 323–24. Charlus and Brichot discuss the statistics of “what the Germans call homosexuality;” historical examples, present-day trends: 395–413. Recognition between daughters of Gomorrah in a crowd; a typical Gomorrhan encounter: 472–73. “Physiological evolution” of Saint-Loup: 922–36; VI 336. Homosexuals make good husbands: V 929–30; VI 337 (cf. V 409–10). “The phenomenon, so ill-understood and so needlessly condemned, of sexual inversion”: 321. Inverts as readers: 321–22.

  (For references to homosexuality, male and female, related to specific individuals, see the Index of Characters under Albertine; Andrée; Argencourt; Bernard, Nissim; Bloch’s sister(s) and cousin(s); Cambremer, Leonor; Charlus; Châtellerault; Foix; Gilberte; Guermantes, Prince de; Jupien; LEA; Legrandin; LEVY, Esther; Morel; Odette; Saint-Loup; Théodore; Vaugoubert; Vinteuil, Mlle).

  JEALOUSY. Swann’s jealousy: I 385–457 passim, 505–43 passim. Inquiries of the jealous lover compared to the researches of the scholar: 388–90, 445. Jealousy compared to physical pain: 391. Jealousy as it were the shadow of love: 392. Jealousy composed of an infinity of different, ephemeral jealousies: 529. Swann’s jealousy in retrospect; “that lamentable and contradictory excrescence of his love” revives for another woman: II 130–34. A certain kind of sensual music the most merciless of hells for the jealous lover: 534–35. Saint-Loup’s jealousy of Rachel: III 157–61, 217–24, 223–43, 476–77. Jealousy cannot contain many more ingredients than other products of the imagination; it outlives love: 476. Jealousy among inverts: IV 29–31 (see also V 283). Swann speaks of his jealousy to M: 139. Jealousy a resource that never fails: 270–71. “Jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability”: 314–15. “Every impulse of jealousy is unique and bears the imprint of the creature … who has aroused it”: 708. Arbitrary localisation of jealousy: 709–10. M’s jealousy: V 16–30, 63–252 passim; 445–585 passim; retrospective jealousy: 563–752 passim. An intermittent and capricious disease: 28–30 quickly detected, and regarded, by the person who is its object, as justifying deception:73–74, 111–12. Delayed-action jealousy: 106–7. Jealousy a form of tyranny: 112–13. “The demands of our jealousy and the blindness of our credulity are greater than the woman we love could ever suppose”: 119. “Revolving searchlights” of jealousy; “a demon that cannot be exorcised”: 129. Jealousy may perish for want of nourishment: 131–32. Jealousy like a historian without documents, “thrashes around in the void”: 188–89. Jealousy is “blindfold;” like the torture of the Danaides or Ixion: 195. A social form of jealousy (Mme Verdurin): 370–71. Blind ignorance of the jealous lover: 400–1. Albertine on M’s jealousy: 445–47. Jealousy lacks imagination: 585. For jealousy there can be neither past nor future, but invariably the present: 662. To the jealous man reality a “dizzy kaleidoscope”: 699–700. Retrospective jealousy proceeds from the same optical error as the desire for posthumous fame: 701. In jealousy we choose our own sufferings: 735. Retrospective jealousy a physical disease: 872–73. “Jealousy is a good recruiting-sergeant”: VI 338.

  JEWS. M’s grandfather distrusts M’s Jewish friends (Bloch): I 125–26. Mme de Gallardon on Swann’s Jewishness: 475–77. Swann illustrates all the successive stages in social behaviour through which the Jews have passed: II 2–3. Jews in society: 122–24, 127. A brothel-keeper offers M a Jewess as a special treat (Rachel): 206–7. Bloch affects anti-semitism: 433–34 (cf. 442, 445–46; III 334). Jewish colony at Balbec: 433–35. The Bloch family: 474–87. Albertine’s anti-semitism: 629, 659 (cf. III 487). Mater Semita: III 237 (cf. 321–22). Jews in a French drawing-room; racial atavism: 253–55. The “Syndicate”: 319 (cf. IV 132). Mme de Marsantes’s anti-semitism: 342, 346 (cf. 217, 237). Charlus and the Blochs: 389–93. Mme Sazerat both Dreyfusist and anti-Semitic: 392. Jewishness and Dreyfusism (Reinach and Bloch): 402–3. Reflections on Jews in a Paris restaurant: 559–60. Swann returns to “the spiritual fold of his fathers”: 796. Jews compared with inverts: IV 21–22. M. de Guermantes on the Jews: 105. Swann’s Jewishness; “certain Jews, men of great refinement and delicacy, in whom there remain in reserve … a cad and a prophet”: 122; “that stout Jewish race”: 141–42. Charlus’s tirade against the Jews: 687–91. Jews discussed by
the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes: V 45–46. Morel’s anti-semitism, the effect of a loan from Nissim Bernard through Bloch: 62–63 (cf. IV 691). Anti-semitism in society; Gilberte changes her name from Swann to Forcheville: 775–77 (cf. 790–92). Strong family feeling among Jews; Bloch’s devotion to his father’s memory: VI 339.

  (See Dreyfus Case.)

  LANGUAGE. Hereditary transmission of speech characteristics: II 667–68. The two laws of language—“we should express ourselves like others of our mental category and not of our caste;” the ephemeral vogue for certain modes of expression: III 317–18. The term “mentality”: 319. Refined expressions used in a given period by people of the same intellectual range: IV 438–39, 445. Expressions peculiar to families: V 437–38. Involuntary, give-away expressions blurted out under the impact of sudden emotion: VI 340. Quality of language rather than aesthetic theory the criterion for judging intellectual and moral value of a work: 278.

  Language of individual characters. Albertine’s slangy speech: II 509, 631–34; her voice and vocabulary: 666–68; significant changes in her vocabulary: III 482–88; V 13.

  Voices and speech mannerisms of the “little band”: II 666–68.

  Bergotte’s mannerisms of speech and vocabulary: II 168–79.

  Bloch’s affected style of speech and mock-Homeric jargon: I 124–25; II 443–44, 477–78, 489; III 328; IV 319, 682.

  Bréauté’s voice and pronunciation: V 44–47.

  Brichot’s pedantic language: I 357–60; IV 371–72, 380–81, 481–83, 611–14.

  Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin’s pretentious vocabulary and pronunciation: III 271; IV 294–97, 437–45, 512–13.

  Colourful language of Céleste Albaret and her sister: IV 331–35; Celeste’s strange linguistic genius: V 12–13, 167.

  Cottard’s puns: I 283 et sqq.

  Mme Cottard’s stately language: II 234–35, 242–51.

  Franchise’s malapropisms: I 217; her colourful idiom: 233; her language, “like the French language,” thickly strewn with errors: III 20–21; speaks the language of Mme de Sévigné: 21; of La Bruyère: 25; of Saint-Simon: 84; her speech traditional and local, “governed by extremely ancient laws”: 77 (cf. IV 171–72); her vocabulary contaminated by her daughter’s slang: V 199–200; VI 341 (cf. III 194, 464; IV 172–73).

  Verbal mannerisms of the Guermantes set: I 475, 479–87; II 113–14, 129. The Duke’s odd vocabulary: III 305, 317–22, 570; his bad French: IV 162, 479 (cf. V 43). Old-fashioned purity of the Duchess’s language; her richly flavoured vocabulary; voice and accent that betray “a rudeness of the soil”: III 677–78, 688–89, 781, V 34–39.

  Jupien’s cultured speech: III 17–18, 418.

  Legrandin’s flowery speech: I 92–93, 177–86.

  The idiom of Norpois: II 9, 29–71 passim; III 302–55 passim; V 855–66.

  Rachel’s language, “the jargon of the coteries and studios”: III 220–21.

  Saint-Loup’s mannerisms of speech; cultivates up-to-date expressions: II 451, 468–69; III 87–88, 698; IV 207.

  Saniette’s pedantic phraseology: V 298–99, 301–3.

  Swann’s verbal mannerisms: I 134–36, 483–84; II 104, 113–14.

  Mme de Villeparisis affects “the almost rustic speech of the old nobility”: III 265.

  LAUGHTER. Not a well-defined language: II 217. “Let us show all pity and tenderness to those who laugh”: IV 262. Verbal descriptions incomplete without the means to represent a laugh (Charlus): 463–64.

  Laughter of individual characters. Albertine’s laughter—“indecent in the way that the cooing of doves or certain animal cries can be”: II 681; M longs to hear it again: IV 243, “pungent, sensual and revealing”: 263; “deep and penetrating”: 264; “provoking”: 348; “that laugh in which she gave utterance as it were to the strange sound of her pleasure”: 705; “that laugh that I always found so disturbing”: V 152, 165; “insolent” laughter on the beach at Balbec: 226–27; “blithe and tender” laugh on awakening: 522.

  Bloch’s braying laugh which echoes his father’s: II 476.

  M. de Cambremer’s laugh and its possible meanings: IV 440–41, 513–14.

  Charlus’s laughter, expressing his “lordly insolence and hysterical glee”: IV 78; his tinkling laugh with its ancestral sonorities: 463–64.

  Mme Cottard’s “charming, girlish” laugh: I 363.

  Gilberte’s laugh which seems to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane: II 86, 217.

  Insolent and coquettish laugh of the Princesse des Laumes: I 473–74, 477.

  Odette’s little simpering laugh: I 311.

  “Merry ángelus” of Ski’s laugh: V 384–85.

  Mme Verdurin dislocates her jaw from laughing too much: I 266–67; symbolical dumb-show as a substitute for laughter: 289–90 (cf. IV 482).

  M. Verdurin’s dumb-show of “shaking with laughter”: I 372–73, and his laugh like a smoker’s choking fit: V 385.

  LETTERS. Note from M to his mother at Combray: I 37–39. Letters from Odette to Swann: 276, 314, 319. Swann’s letter of feigned disappointment and simulated anger to Odette: 319. Odette’s letter to Forcheville: 400–2. Anonymous letter to Swann about Odette’s infidelities: 506–7. Express letter (pneu) from M to Gilberte: 572–73. Norpois’s promptness in answering letters: II 11. M’s New Year letter to Gilberte: 80–81. M’s self-justifying letter to Swann: 86–87. Gilberte’s letter of invitation to M; her signature: 98–101; her writing-paper: 104–5. M’s letters to Gilberte during the crisis of his love: 219–23, 258–60. The pain of hostile letters from the beloved: 278. Correspondence between M and Gilberte concerning the imaginary “misunderstanding” between them: 285–87. Saint-Loup’s letter from Doncières: 611–12. Charlus’s violent letter to Mme de Villeparisis: III 263–64. Saint-Loup’s vituperative letter to M: 417. The footman’s letters, peppered with quotations from the poets: 437; example of these: 776–77. Saint-Loup writes to M from Morocco: 475: Note to M from Mme de Stermaria: 536. Letter to Charlus from the Princesse de Guermantes: IV 157 (cf. 732–33). M’s unemotional letter to Gilberte: 187. The charm of first letters from women: 322–23. Mme de Cambremer’s letter inviting M to dinner; the rule of the three adjectives: 468–69 (cf. 663–64). Charlus’s letter to Aimé: 530–33. Charlus’s letter to Morel announcing his imaginary duel: 631–35. Charlus’s letter from a club doorman: V 51. M’s mother writes to him, quoting Mme de Sévigné: 180. Albertine’s note to M after leaving the Trocadéro: 202–3. Letter from Lea to Morel intercepted by Charlus: 279–80. Albertine’s farewell letter: 565–66. Letter which M receives from a niece of Mme de Guermantes: 606. Letter from Albertine after Saint-Loup’s démarche; M’s reply: 610–15. “How little there is of a person in a letter”: 611–12. Albertine’s second letter and M’s reply: 630–33. M’s letter to Andrée: 632. Albertine’s posthumous letters: 643–44. Aimé’s letter from Balbec; his grammatical eccentricities: 694–96. Aimé’s letter from Touraine: 707–8. Letters congratulating M on his article in the Figaro: 797–99. Bourgeois conventionality in letters: 798–99. M receives a letter from his stockbroker: 866–88. Letters announcing marriages: 888–93. Letters from Gilberte at Tansonville during the war: VI 342. Saint-Loup’s letter from the front: 88–92. Charlus’s posthumous letter: 167–68.

  LIFTS. Lift in the Grand Hotel, Balbec; M’s sensations on going up in it: II 331, 519. Professor E—’s lift and his mania for working it: III 430–31. Lift in M’s flat; sentence of solitary confinement represented by the sound of its not stopping at his floor: 478–79 (cf. V 703).

  LITERATURE. Reflexions on reading; the art of the novelist: I 55–57, 114–20. Style and genius of Bergotte: 124–25, 129–38, II 165–75 (cf. III 443–47); the nature of originality in literature: 168–69; relation between speech and writing: 168–75; “unforeseeable beauty” of the work of great writers: 170; style of the writer and character of the man: 179–80. A good book is something special and unforeseeable: 318. Mme de Villeparisis’s literary judgments; her incompr
ehension of great writers: 394–95 (cf. III 247). Creation in a writer superior to observation: 476. Literature and fashionable society: III 246–52; literary talent the living product of a certain moral conformation that conflicts with purely social duties: 248. Vagaries of literary reputation; problems of appreciating new original writers; does art, after all, progress like science?:444–46. Depravity of taste in literary criticism: 644–46. Profit which a writer can derive from the conversation of aristocrats: 751–56. The same people are interesting in a book and boring in life: 780. Practical men wrong to despise the pursuit of literature: IV 591. Incompleteness a characteristic of the great works of the nineteenth century; their retrospective unity; the importance of prefaces: V 207–8. Sensual pleasure helpful to literary work: 239–40. Literature and music—is literature, which analyses what we feel about life, less true than music, which recomposes it?: 503–4; unique identity underlying the works of a great writer; M’s observations on Dostoievsky, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Hardy, Tolstoy, Baudelaire: 506–13. Certain novels bring us into temporary contact with the reality of life—“the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book”: 757–58. Discrepancy between the thoughts of author and reader; basic flaws in literary journalism: 767–72. Objections against literature raised by M’s reading of the Goncourt Journal: VI 343. Relation of literature to life: 126. Reflexions on literary creativity: 274–335; falsity of realism in literature; absurdity of popular or patriotic literature: 277–85; “the function and the task of a writer are those of a translator”: 291; aberrations of literary criticism: 294–96; “real books … the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence”: 302; in literary creation, imagination and sensibility are interchangeable: 307; writing is for the writer a wholesome and necessary function comparable to exercise, sweat and baths for a man of more physical nature: 308; “a book is a huge cemetery”: 310; our passions inspire our books, and intervals of repose write them: 317; futility of trying to guess an author’s models: 317–18; a writer’s works “like the water in an artesian well”: 318; a work of literature a kind of optical instrument enabling the reader to see himself more clearly: 344–45.