4 Maquereau=pimp.
5 Clarification of this expression can be found in an essay of Proust’s entitled En mémoire des églises assassinées, in which, during a drive through Normandy, he compares his chauffeur with his steering-wheel to the statues of apostles and martyrs in mediaeval cathedrals holding symbolic objects representing the arts which they practised in their lifetimes or the instruments of their martyrdom—in this case a stylised wheel: a circle enclosing a cross. Cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 580.
6 Comic opera by Adolphe Adam (1836).
7 Grue means “crane” (in both the ornithological and the mechanical sense) and also, by analogy, “prostitute.” Faire le pied de grue=“to kick one’s heels,” “to stand around for a long time”—like a crane standing on one leg, or a street-walker in search of custom. Morel’s use of the term is grammatically nonsensical.
8 Claude-Philibert Berthelot, Baron de Rambuteau: politician and administrator, préfet of the Seine in 1833, introduced public urinals with individual compartments.
9 Famous nineteenth-century tragedian.
10 This passage was obviously written before Proust composed his account of Bergotte’s death and inserted it at an earlier point in this volume.
11 Mme Pipelet is the concierge in Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. Mme Gibout and Mme Prudhomme are characters in Henri Monnier’s Scenes populaires and Les Mémoires de Joseph Prudhomme.
12 Famous Parisian caterers.
13 Cottard will nevertheless reappear—indeed at this same soiree (see p. 371)—to die during the Great War, in Time Regained.
14 The French has a play on the words allegro and allègre.
15 Mme Verdurin uses here the word tapette, no doubt unaware of its popular meaning (see Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, note 18 to p. 594).
16 The heroine of Victor Hugo’s Hernani: the reference is to the final scene, which ends with Hernani’s enforced suicide after the nuptial feast.
17 Thomas Couture, nineteenth-century French painter. The allusion is to his picture, Les Romains de la Decadence, shown in the Salon of 1847.
18 Auguste Vacquerie and Paul Meurice were two devoted disciples of Victor Hugo.
19 Mme de Villeparisis will reappear, extremely aged but very much alive, in The Fugitive.
20 To Condé’s lament: “My dear friend La Moussaye,/Ah, God, What weather!/We are going to perish in the flood,” La Moussaye replies: “Our lives are safe,/For we are Sodomites,/We have to die by fire.” There is a marginal note by Proust in the manuscript at this point: “Stress the fact that homosexuality has never precluded bravery, from Caesar to Kitchener.”
21 The blancs d’Espagne were a group of extreme legitimists who held that the true heirs to the French throne were the Spanish Bourbons who were descended in direct line from Louis XIV through his grandson Philip V of Spain.
22 Slang for anus. What Albertine had been about to say was “me faire casser le pot,” an obscene slang expression meaning to have anal intercourse (passive).
23 There is a gap in Proust’s manuscript at this point. For an illustration of the narrator’s point, see Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 315.
24 Racine’s Esther again.
25 “Notre mal ne vaut pas un seul de ses regards”—the line is from one of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Helene (cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 738).
26 Albert, Duc de Broglie, the grandson of Mme de Staël, was exiled by Napoleon I and retired to Chaumont-sur-Loire—whence the association of ideas.
27 Le chancelier Pasquier, friend of Mme de Boigne, who ran a famous salon under the July Monarchy and whose Mémoires (published in 1907) suggested those of Mme de Beausergent which the narrator’s grandmother loved to read. The Duc de Noailles was a friend and patron of Sainte-Beuve. Mme d’Arbouville was the latter’s mistress.
28 Mme de Guermantes has told this story before, at the expense of the Prince de Leon (see p. 38).
29 “The dead are sleeping peacefully” comes from Musset’s La Nuit d’Octobre, “You will make them weep … All those urchins” from Sully-Prudhomme’s Aux Tuileries, and “The very first night” from Charles Cros’s Nocturne.
30 The reference is to Phèdre, Act II, Scene 5, in which Phèdre declares her love for Hippolyte in cryptic terms: she loves him as she loved Thésée, “non point tel que l’ont vu les Enfers … mais fidèle, mais fier, et mëme un peu farouche.”
31 Roland Garros: famous French aviator.
32 An illegitimate daughter of the Duc de Berry, son of Charles X, married a Lucinge-Faucigny.
33 Sous-maîtresse: euphemism for a brothel-keeper or “madam.”
34 This passage is a little confusing. Proust never got round to marrying Gilberte to the Duc de Guermantes. In Time Regained she reappears as Saint-Loup’s widow while Oriane is still alive and married to the aged Duke.
35 Agamemnon in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène.
36 This signature can be explained by the fact that Charles Morel was Bobby Santois in Proust’s original manuscript.
37 The widowed Gilberte, in Time Regained, appears to be the mother of an only daughter.
Addenda
*There is a brief passage inserted here in Proust’s manuscript which interrupts the thread of the narrative:
Lying is a very small matter; we live in the midst of it without giving it more than a smile, we practise it without meaning to harm anyone, but jealousy suffers because of it and sees more in it than it conceals (often one’s mistress refuses to spend the evening with one and goes to the theatre simply to prevent us from seeing that she is not looking her best), just as it often remains blind to what the truth conceals. But it can elicit nothing, for women who swear that they are not lying would refuse even with a knife at their throats to confess their true character.
*The Pléiade editors (references in these Addenda are to the 1954 edition) have relegated to their “Notes and Variants” the following isolated passage which the original editors inserted, somewhat arbitrarily, after “for so long.”
The curious thing is that, a few days before this quarrel with Albertine, I had already had one with her in Andrée’s presence. Now Andrée, in giving Albertine good advice, always appeared to be insinuating bad. “Come, don’t talk like that, hold your tongue,” she said, as though she were at the peak of happiness. Her face assumed the dry raspberry hue of those pious housekeepers who get all the servants sacked one by one. While I was heaping unjustified reproaches upon Albertine, Andrée looked as though she were sucking a lump of barley sugar with keen enjoyment. At length she was unable to restrain an affectionate laugh. “Come with me, Titine. You know I’m your dear little sister.”
I was not merely exasperated by this rather sickly exhibition; I wondered whether Andrée really felt the affection for Albertine that she pretended to feel. Seeing that Albertine, who knew Andrée far better than I did, always shrugged her shoulders when I asked her whether she was quite certain of Andrée’s affection, and always answered that nobody in the world cared for her more, I am convinced even now that Andrée’s affection was sincere. Possibly, in her wealthy but provincial family, one might find the equivalent in some of the shops in the Cathedral square, where certain sweetmeats are declared to be “the best going.” But I know that, for my part, even if I had invariably come to the opposite conclusion, I had so strong an impression that Andrée was trying to rap Albertine over the knuckles that my mistress at once regained my affection and my anger subsided.
*In the place of this passage, the manuscript contains the following:
“What? You wouldn’t kill yourself after all?” she said with a laugh.
“No, but it would be the greatest sorrow that I could possibly imagine.” And since, although living exclusively with me, and having become extremely intelligent, she none the less remained mysteriously in tune with the atmosphere of the world outside—as the roses in her bedroom flowered again in the spring—and followed as though by a pre-established accord (for
she spoke to almost no one) the charmingly idiotic fashions of feminine speech, she said to me: “Is it really true, that great big fib?” And indeed she must, if not love me more than I loved her, at least infer from my niceness to her that my tenderness was deeper than it was in reality, for she added: “You’re very sweet. I don’t doubt it at all, I know you’re fond of me.” And she went on: “Ah, well, perhaps it’s my destiny to die in a riding accident. I’ve often had a presentiment of it, but I don’t care a fig. I accept whatever fate has in store for me.”
I believe that, on the contrary, she had neither a presentiment of nor a contempt for death, and that her words were lacking in sincerity. I am sure in any case that there was no sincerity in mine, as to the greatest sorrow I could imagine. For, feeling that Albertine could henceforth only deprive me of pleasures or cause me sorrows, that I would be ruining my life for her sake, I remembered the wish that Swann had once formed apropos of Odette, and without daring to wish for Albertine’s death, I told myself that it would have restored to me, in the words of the Sultan, my peace of mind and freedom of action.
*There is an additional passage here, isolated by the Pléiade editors at the foot of the page. Saniette reappears further on.
“Pretty well played, what!” said M. Verdurin to Saniette. “My only fear,” the latter replied, stuttering, “is that Morel’s very virtuosity may somewhat offend against the general spirit of the work.” “Offend? What do you mean?” roared M. Verdurin while a number of the guests gathered round like lions ready to devour a man who has been laid low. “Oh, I’m not aiming at him alone …” “But the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Aiming at what?” “I … shall have … to listen to it … once again to form a judgment à la rigueur.” “À la rigueur! the man’s mad!” said M. Verdurin, clutching his head between his hands, “he ought to be put away.” “The term means with exactitude.’ You ca … ca … can say ‘with rigorous exactitude,’ after all. I’m saying that I can’t judge à la rigueur.” “And I’m telling you to go away,” M. Verdurin shouted, intoxicated by his own rage, and pointing to the door with blazing eyes. “I will not allow people to talk like that in my house!”
Saniette went off zigzagging like a drunken man. Some of the guests, seeing him thus ejected, assumed that he had not been invited. And a lady who had been extremely friendly with him hitherto, and to whom he had lent a precious book the day before, sent it back to him next day without a word, scarcely even wrapped in some paper on which she had her butler simply put Saniette’s address. She did not wish to be in any way “indebted” to someone who was obviously far from being in the good graces of the little clan. Saniette, as it happened, was never to know of this piece of rudeness. For scarcely five minutes had passed after M. Verdurin’s outburst when a footman came to inform the latter that M. Saniette had had a stroke in the courtyard. But the evening was not yet over. “Have him taken home; I’m sure it won’t be serious,” said M. Verdurin, whose hotel particulier, as the manager of the hotel at Balbec would have said, thus became assimilated to those grand hotels where the management hasten to conceal sudden deaths in order not to frighten off their customers, and where the deceased is temporarily hidden in a meat-safe until the moment when, even if he has been in his lifetime the most distinguished and the most generous of men, he is clandestinely evacuated by the door reserved for the dishwashers and sauce chefs. In fact Saniette was not quite dead. He lived for another few weeks, but only intermittently regaining consciousness.
*The Pléiade editors have inserted here as a footnote an additional passage which Proust placed a few pages later (clearly in error):
I was going to buy, in addition to the motor-cars, the finest yacht which then existed. It was for sale, but at so high a price that no buyer could be found. Moreover, once bought, even if we confined ourselves to four-month cruises, it would cost two hundred thousand francs a year in upkeep. We should be living at the rate of half a million francs a year. Would I be able to sustain it for more than seven or eight years? But never mind; when I had only an income of fifty thousand francs left, I could leave it to Albertine and kill myself. This was the decision I made. It made me think of myself. Now, since one’s ego lives by thinking incessantly of all sorts of things, since it is no more than the thought of those things, if by chance, instead of being preoccupied with those things, it suddenly thinks of itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something which it does not recognise and to which, in order to give it some reality, it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror. That peculiar smile, that untidy moustache—they are what would disappear from the face of the earth. When I killed myself five years hence, I would no longer be able to think all those things which passed through my mind unceasingly, I would no longer exist on the face of the earth and would never come back to it; my thought would stop for ever. And my ego seemed to me even more null when I saw it as something that no longer exists. How could it be difficult to sacrifice, for the sake of the person to whom one’s thought is constantly straining (the person we love), that other person of whom we never think: ourselves? Accordingly, this thought of my death, like the notion of my ego, seemed to me most strange, but I did not find it at all disagreeable. Then suddenly it struck me as being terribly sad; this was because, reflecting that if I did not have more money at my disposal it was because my parents were still alive, I suddenly thought of my mother. And I could not bear the idea of what she would suffer after my death.
*Proust’s manuscript has a different version of the Norpois-Villeparisis episode which the Pléiade editors print as an appendix. Passages that have become illegible are indicated by square brackets:
Several of the palaces on the Grand Canal were transformed into hotels, and by way of a change from the one at which we were staying, we decided one evening to dine in another where the food was said to be better. While my mother was paying the gondolier, I entered a vast marble-pillared hall that had once been entirely covered with frescoes, […]
One of the waiters asked if the “old couple” […] were coming down […], that they never gave any warning, and that it was most tiresome. Then he saw the lady appear. It was in fact Mme de Villeparisis […] but bent towards the ground, with that air of dejection and bemusement produced by extreme fatigue and the weight of years. We happened by chance to be given a table immediately behind hers, up against the splendid marble walls of the palace, and fortunately, since my mother was tired and wanted to avoid introductions, we had our backs to the Marquise and could not be seen by her, and were moreover protected by the relief of a massive column with a […] capital. Meanwhile I was wondering which of her relations was being referred to as M. de Villeparisis, when a few minutes later I saw her old lover, M. de Norpois, even more bent than she, sit down at her table, having just come down from their room. They still loved each other, and, now that he had given up his functions at the Ministry, as soon as the relative incognito which one enjoys abroad permitted, they lived together completely. In order to allow his old mistress a degree of respectability, he was careful not to give his name in hotels, and the waiters, ignorant at this distance of celebrated Parisian liaisons, and moreover seeing this old gentleman, even when he had gone out without her, invariably coming back to dine alone with the old lady, assumed that they were M. and Mme de Villeparisis. The matrimonial character of their relationship, which had been greatly accentuated by the carelessness of old age and travel, manifested itself at once in the fact that on sitting down to table M. de Norpois evinced none of those courtesies one shows towards a woman who is not one’s wife, any more than she herself made any effort for him. More lively than Mme de Villeparisis, he related to her with a familiarity that surprised me what he had learned that day from a foreign ambassador he had been to see. She let a fair proportion of his words go by without answering, either from fatigue, or lack of interest, or deafness and a desire to conceal it. From time to time she addressed a few words to him in a faint voice, as though overcome with exhaust
ion. It was obvious that she now lived almost exclusively for him, and had long since lost touch with the social world—from which, with considerable volubility and in a rather loud voice (perhaps to enable her to hear him), he brought her the latest news—for she put to him, in a low-pitched, weary voice, questions that seemed strange on the lips of a person who, even though excluded from it for a long time, nevertheless belonged to the highest society. After a long silence […] asked: “So this Bisaccia you […] this afternoon, is he one of Sosthène’s sons?” “Yes, of course, he’s the one who became Duc de Bisaccia when Arnaud took the name Doudeauville. He’s charming; he’s a bit like Carnot’s youngest son, only better-looking.” And once more there was silence. What seemed most of all to be preoccupying the old woman, whose charming eyes in that ruined face no one could have identified through the mists which the distance from Paris and the remoteness of age accumulated round her, was a war over Morocco. In spite of what the foreign ambassador had said to M. de Norpois, she did not seem reassured. “Ah, but you always see the black side,” said M. de Norpois with some asperity. “I admit that Emperor William is often unfortunate in his choice of words and gestures. But the fact that certain things must be taken seriously doesn’t mean that they should be taken tragically. It would be a case of Jupiter making mad those he wishes to destroy; for war is in nobody’s interest, least of all Germany’s. They’re perfectly aware in the Wilhelmstrasse that Morocco isn’t worth the blood of a single Pomeranian grenadier. You’re alarming yourself about trifles.” And again there was silence, prolonged indefinitely by Mme de Villeparisis, whose beauty, which was said to have been so striking, had been as thoroughly effaced as the frescoes that had decorated the ceiling of this magnificent hall with its broad red pillars, and whose personality was as well concealed, if not from the eyes of Parisians who might perhaps have identified her, at least from the hotel’s Venetian staff, as if she had been wearing a carnival mask as in the old days in Venice. M. de Norpois addressed an occasional reproof to a waiter who had failed to bring something he had ordered. I noticed that he enjoyed good food as much as at the time when he used to dine with my family, and Mme de Villeparisis was as finicky as she had been at Balbec. “No no, don’t ask them for a soufflé,” M. de Norpois said, “they’ve no idea what it is. They’ll bring you something that bears not the slightest resemblance to a soufflé. In any case it’s your own fault, since you won’t hear of Italian cooking.” Mme de Villeparisis did not answer; then after a while, in a plaintive voice, as sad and faint as the murmur of the wind, she wailed: “No one knows how to make anything any more. I don’t know whether you remember, in the old days at my mother’s house, they used to bring off to perfection a dish called a crime renversée. Perhaps we could ask for one of those.” “In fact it hadn’t yet come to be called a crème renversée; it was called,” said M. de Norpois, putting the phrase in inverted commas, “ ‘creamed eggs.’ What they give you here won’t be up to much. Creamed eggs were so smooth and succulent, do you remember?” But, whether because she did not in fact remember, or because she had talked enough, Mme de Villeparisis said nothing. She relapsed into a long silence which did not offend M. de Norpois, presumably because it did not surprise him and because it must have been one of the characteristics, perhaps one of the charms, of his life with her. And while she laboriously cut up her beans, he went back to telling her how interesting, and on the whole optimistic, the foreign ambassador had been, meanwhile keeping an eye out for a waiter from whom he could order their dessert. Before this had been served, my mother and I rose from the table, and, while keeping my head turned away so as not to attract their attention, I could nevertheless still see the two aged lovers, seemingly indifferent to one another, but in reality bent by time like two branches which have developed the same tilt, which have drawn so close to each other that they almost touch, and which nothing will ever either straighten up or separate again.
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