The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  “But how do you know the Château de Guermantes?” Saint-Loup asked me. “Have you visited it—or perhaps you knew my aunt de Guermantes-La Trémoïlle who lived there before?” he added, whether because, finding it quite natural that one should know the same people as he did, he failed to realise that I came from a different background, or because he was pretending not to realise out of politeness.

  “No … but … I’ve heard of the château. They have all the busts of the old lords of Guermantes there, haven’t they?”

  “Yes, it’s a fine sight …”

  At this point in the holograph material the Pléiade editors found some loose sheets containing the following passage which Proust failed to complete and incorporate in his novel. (Santois was the name Proust originally gave to the violinist, Morel, who does not make his first appearance until The Guermantes Way.):

  N.B. This, which was originally intended for the last Guermantes party, is for the evening in the Casino at Balbec, but may perhaps be changed. I might split it in two, keeping the quintet for the Guermantes party and the organ for Balbec?

  At the back of the Casino’s dance hall was a stage from which some excessively steep and widely spaced steps led up to an organ. The “famous Lepic Quintet,” composed of women, came in to play a quintet by Franck (insert another name). Although this quintet was her favourite piece, the pianist executed it with the same feverish concentration both on the score and on her fingers as she would have shown had she been sight-reading, and with such a striving towards speed that she seemed not so much to be playing the music as catching up with it as fast as she could go. The piano might perhaps be shattered by the end of it, but she would get there. Since she was a distinguished lady, dressed with studied elegance, she gave her feverish attentiveness a knowing air which from a distance seemed almost mischievous; and indeed whenever she played wrong notes—which happened all the time—she smiled as though she were playing a joke on them, as one laughs when one splashes someone in order to pretend that one has done it on purpose. All the people there were sufficiently elegant and musical not to be paying attention to anything but the music, as would have happened at a bourgeois soirée … Put in here the remarks made to me by Mme de Cambremer about the quintet, perhaps even put in here, to vary it a bit, my observations on art and love … and in that case perhaps bring on the man who says “It’s devilish fine,” who will be a character already introduced but who has gone grey. Before putting in Mme de Cambremer’s reflexions during the interval, say: Nevertheless the minds of all these people were preoccupied less with what they were listening to than with the way they were listening and the impression they were making all round them. They endeavoured with their boas or their fans to give the appearance of knowing what was being played, of judging the performers and waiting for the extremely difficult allegro vivace to compose a satisfying ensemble. The minuet set all their heads nodding and wagging, with knowing smiles which signified both “Isn’t it charming!” and “Of course I know it!” Meanwhile my unintentionally ironical smile upset the head-wagging of a few intrepid listeners who replaced the knowing smile with a furious glance and abandoned the head-wagging, though—in order not to appear to be surrendering to a threat—not at once but rather as if under the pressure of Westinghouse brakes, which slow trains down gradually until they come to a complete stop. An artistic gentleman, anxious to show that he knew the quintet, shouted “Bravo, bravo” when he judged that it had reached its conclusion, and began to clap. Unfortunately, what he had taken for the end of the quintet was not even the end of one of its movements but simply a two-bar pause. He consoled himself with the thought that people might imagine that he knew the pianist and had merely wished to encourage her. When the end, longed for by the more musical members of the audience, came at last, I said to Mme de Cambremer …

  Meanwhile the organ recital had begun. At that moment a paralytic old man, who could walk with some difficulty but was utterly incapable of climbing the steps, conceived the strange intention of going to sit on a chair right at the top beside the organ, and three young men pushed him up. But after a while, as the organ’s crisp keyboard notes were executing their pastoral variations, he got up again, with the three young men in hot pursuit. I thought he must have had a stroke, and I admired the obliviousness of the organist who, having ceased to uncoil the spirals of his rustic pipes, covered the descent of the unfortunate paralytic with a thunderous noise. Pushed and carried by the three young men, the old gentleman disappeared into the wings. The pianist, performer turned critic, had now come to sit on the stage. In spite of the suffocating heat, she had donned a white fur coat, of which she was evidently extremely proud. Moreover her hands, so active on the keyboard only a moment before, were buried in an immense white fur muff, either because she simply wanted to show how elegant she was, or in order to enclose the precious relics of her piano-playing in a shrine worthy of them, or to exchange the activity of the keyboard for the motionless but skilful exercise of the muff, which moreover dispensed her from having to applaud her colleagues. No one understood the rôle of this muff, about which Saint-Loup interrogated me in vain. But what surprised me more was that scarcely two minutes had passed before the paralytic old man, evidently warming to the very exercise of which he was all but incapable, returned, pushed by the three young men, to take his useless place beside the organ. He nodded off there for a moment, then awoke and climbed down again, and since the organist was invisible behind his instrument, the stage was to all intents and purposes occupied by the perilous exertions of the clumsy quinquagenarian [sic] squirrel. When the organist came down in his turn to take his bow, it was to him that the thankless task devolved of helping down the impotent dotard, whose every step made the frail executant stumble. But with a wiliness that is often characteristic of the moribund, the old man clung to the organist in such a way that it was he who appeared to be supporting the man who was more or less carrying him, to be protecting him, to be presenting him to the audience, and to be receiving his share of the applause, which out of pure modesty he seemed not to wish to take for himself by pointing to the organist, who, tottering beneath his human burden and afraid of falling down the steep steps, could not make his bow.

  Meanwhile, I was looking at the programme to see what the next piece was to be when I was struck by the name of the soloist: Santois. “He has the same name as the son of my uncle’s former valet,” I thought to myself. I heard someone say: “Look, a soldier.” I raised my eyes and at once recognised the young Santois, who was indeed now a soldier for a year, or rather disguised as a soldier, so much did he give the impression of being in fancy dress.

  He played well, looking down at his instrument with that charming Gallic face, the open yet pious demeanour of some contemporary of St Louis or Louis XI, with the defiance of the peasant who feels that there would be little point in having had a revolution if one still had to say “Monsieur le Comte.” To these agreeable features there was added, after the first two pieces, as though to complete the picture of the traditional young violinist, a symmetrical adjunct to the redness of the neck at the spot where the instrument rests (the product of the allegro although it was non troppo), a curvaceous lock of hair, as round as if it had been in a locket, … charming, belated, perhaps not entirely fortuitous, but activated at the appropriate moment by a virtuoso who knew what a contribution it can make to the seductiveness of a performance.

  After he had finished playing, I sent a message round to him asking if I could come and pay my compliments. He replied in a few words scribbled on his card saying that he looked forward to seeing me and assuring me of his “amicable regards.” I thought of the indignation Françoise would have felt, she who since she had learned, fairly recently it was true, the use of the third person, had prescribed it to the whole of her family, down to the most remote degrees of kinship or descent, every time a young cousin of hers came “to pay her respects to Monsieur.” But if I found this deference towards me of the whole of F
rançoise’s family very traditionally domestic, it seemed to me that, although it was at the opposite extreme, there was something no less characteristically French in the cavalier tone of the young Santois, scion of a race that made the Revolution, implying that a peasant’s son, educated or not, considers himself nobody’s inferior, and when a prince is mentioned insists on showing by his demeanour that such a person seems to him no better than his father or himself—though with a tinge of hauteur in the way he manifests it that betrays the fact that the age when princes were indeed superior is still fairly recent and that he may be afraid that people still remember it.

  After the concert I went round to congratulate him, and recognised him without difficulty, not from the face I remembered, since there is always a certain discrepancy, a certain displacement in the memory, but because his appearance accorded with the impression he had made on me in Paris and which I had forgotten. He was doing his military service near Balbec, and he too had immediately recognised me. We had nothing in common save a few mental images, and the memory of the things we had said to one another during the short visit he had paid to me, and which were of little moment. But it would seem that faces are fairly individual, and moreover that the memory is a pretty faithful organ, since we had remembered each other and our meeting.

  Santois was presently joined by his colleagues, the other players, for each of whom, as an aeroplane adds wings to an aviator, his instrument was as it were the beak and the throat of a melodious song-bird; a twittering troupe that had gathered for the summer season at this resort and would shortly, with the first frosts, take off elsewhere. I left Santois with his friends, but when I got back to the hotel I regretted not having asked him who the mountaineering paralytic was who had scaled the heights of the organ so many times, and also whether Santois, his father, had ever told him how my uncle had come to have the portrait of Mme Swann by Elstir. I resolved not to forget to ask him these two questions if I saw him again.

  Synopsis

  MADAME SWANN AT HOME

  A new Swann: Odette’s husband. A new Cottard: Professor Cottard.

  Norpois; the “governmental mind”; an ambassador’s conversation. “ ‘Although’ is always an unrecognised ‘because” ’. Norpois advises my father to let me follow a literary career.

  My first experience of Berma. My high expectations of her—as of Balbee and Venice. A great disappointment. Françoise and Michelangelo. The auditorium and the stage.

  Norpois dines at our house. His notions about literature; financial investments; Berma; Françoise’s spiced beef; King Theodosius’ visit to Paris; Balbec church; Mme Swann; Odette and the Comte de Paris; Bergotte; my prose poem; Gilberte. Gestures which we believe have gone unnoticed. Why M. de Norpois would not speak to Mme Swann about me.

  How I came to say of Berma: “What a great artist!”. The laws of Time. Effect produced by Norpois on my parents, on Françoise; the latter’s views on Parisian restaurants.

  New Year’s Day visits. I propose to Gilberte that we should rebuild our friendship on a new basis; but that same evening I realise that New Year’s Day is not the first day of a new world. Berma and love. Gabriel’s palaces. I can no longer recall Gilberte’s face. She returns to the Champs-Elysées. “They can’t stand you!” I write to Swann. Reawakening, thanks to involuntary memory, in the little pavilion in the Champs-Elysées, of the impressions experienced in Uncle Adolphe’s sanctum at Combray. Amorous wrestle with Gilberte. I fall ill. Cottard’s diagnoses.

  A letter from Gilberte. Love’s miracles, happy and unhappy. Change of attitude towards me of Gilberte’s parents, unwillingly brought about by Bloch and Cottard. The Swann apartment; the concierge; the windows. Gilberte’s writing-paper. The Henri II staircase. The chocolate cake. Mme Swann’s praise of Françoise: “your old nurse”. The heart of the Sanctuary: Swann’s library; his wife’s bedroom. Odette’s “at home”. The “famous Albertine,” niece of Mme Bontemps. The evolution of society. Swann’s “amusing sociological experiments”. Swann’s old jealousy and new love.

  Outings with the Swanns. Lunch with them. Odette plays Vinteuil’s sonata to me. A work of genius creates its own posterity. What the little phrase now means to Swann. “Me nigger; you old cow!”. Consistent charm of Mme Swann’s heterogeneous drawing-room. Princess Mathilde. Gilberte’s unexpected behaviour.

  Lunch at the Swanns’ with Bergotte. The gentle white-haired bard and the man with the snail-shell nose and black goatee. A writer’s voice and his style. Bergotte and his imitators. Unforeseeable beauty of the sentences of a great writer. Reflecting power of genius. Vices of the man and morality of the writer. Bergotte and Berma. “A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the man who contradicts it”. A remark of Swann’s, prelude to the theme of The Captive. Gilberte’s characteristics inherited from both parents. Swann’s confidence in his daughter. Are my pleasures those of the intelligence?. Why Swann, according to Bergotte, needs a good doctor. Combray society and the social world. My parents’ change of mind about Bergotte and Gilberte; a problem of etiquette.

  Revelations about love; Bloch takes me to a second-rate house of assignation. “Rachel when from the Lord”. Aunt Léonie’s furniture in the brothel. Amatory initiation at Combray on Aunt Léonie’s sofa. Work projects constantly postponed. Impossibility of happiness in love. My last visit to Gilberte. I decide not to see her again. Unjust fury with the Swanns’ butler. Waiting for a letter. I renounce Gilberte for ever; but the hope of a reconciliation is superimposed on my resolve. Intermittency, law of the human soul.

  Odette’s “winter-garden”: splendour of the chrysanthemums and poverty of the conversation: Mme Cottard; Mme Bontemps; effrontery of her niece Albertine; the Prince d’Agrigente; Mme Verdurin. Painful New Year’s Day. “suicide of that self which loved Gilberte”. Clumsy interventions. Letters to Gilberte: “one speaks for oneself alone”. Odette’s drawing-room: retreat of the Far East and invasion of the eighteenth century. New hair-styles and silhouettes.

  A sudden impulse interrupts the cure of detachment; Aunt Léonie’s Chinese vase. Two walkers in the Elysian twilight. Impossibility of happiness. The opposing forces of memory and imagination. Because of Gilberte, I decline an invitation to a dinner-party where I would have met Albertine. Cruel memories. Gilberte’s strange laugh, evoked in a dream. Fewer visits to Mme Swann. Exchange of tender letters and progress of indifference. Approach of spring: Mme Swann’s ermine and the guelder-roses in her drawing-room; nostalgia for Combray. Odette and the “Down-and-outs Club”. An intermediate social class.

  PLACE-NAMES · THE PLACE

  Departure for Balbec. Subjectiveness of love. Contradictory effects of habit. Railway stations. Françoise’s simple and infallible taste. Alcoholic euphoria. Mme de Sévigné and Dostoievsky. Sunrise from the train; the milk-girl. Balbec church. “The tyranny of the Particular”. Place-names on the way to Balbec-Plage.

  Arrival at Balbec-Plage. The manager of the Grand Hotel. My room at the top of the hotel. Attention and habit. My grandmother’s kindness. The sea in the morning. Balbec tourists. Balbec and Rivebelle. Mme de Villeparisis. M. and Mlle de Stermaria. An actress and three friends. The weekly Cambremer garden-party. Resemblances. Poetic visions of Mlle de Stermaria. The general manager. Françoise’s Grand Hotel connections. Meeting of Mme de Villeparisis and my grandmother. The “sordid moment” at the end of meals. The Princesse de Luxembourg. Mme de Villeparisis, M. de Norpois and my father. The bourgeoisie and the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

  Different seas. Drives with Mme de Villeparisis. The ivy-covered church. Mme de Villeparisis’s conversation. Norman girls. The handsome fishergirl. The three trees of Hudimesnil. The fat Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld. My grandmother and I: intimations of death.