In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

  20. Talma’s: François-Joseph Talma, a famous tragic actor, a friend of Napoleon.

  21. the Three Years Law: introduced in 1913, this law increased the period of military service from two to three years.

  22. Mémoires d’outre tombe: Proust was particularly fond of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, not only for their style but because he found in Chateaubriand a similar attitude to memory and beauty.

  23. Sans-culotte… chouan… bleu: terms from the French Revolution: sans-culottes was a term for Revolutionary patriots, chouans (literally ‘owls’) were Royalist insurgents in Brittany and Normandy, and bleus were members of the Republican army.

  24. M. de Haussonville was a member: the Comte d’Haussonville, biographer and man of letters, was one of a group of seven or eight members of aristocratic families in the Académie française in the late nineteenth century, popularly known as the ‘Ducs’ Party’ as they were thought to control a substantial number of votes.

  25. Gallifet: Général Gallifet (1830–1909), hated by the left after his suppression of the 1871 Commune, was equally disliked by the right, later in his life, when he became Minister of War in the pro-Dreyfus cabinet of 1899.

  26. the ‘also-ran’: the baccarat player at the Balbec hotel, first encountered in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (see p. 457).

  27. Russian Ballet… Bakst… Dubufe: the Russian Ballet, under the direction of Serge Diaghilev, was extremely fashionable from its first appearance in France in 1909. Leon Bakst (of whom Proust was a great admirer) was one of many painters to design productions. Guillaume Dubufe (1853–1909) was a more conventional and extremely eminent designer of interiors, executing many major official commissions.

  28. Frenchman of Saint-André-des-Champs: a conventionally admirable, patriotic Frenchman.

  29. de Beers: diamond-mining shares.

  30. taubes: the German word for pigeon, the general word applied in Paris to the German bombing planes.

  31. ‘poilu’: the word generally used for common soldiers, as ‘Tommy’ was in English. It rapidly lost its initial vulgarity and accrued resonances of determination and courage.

  32. Rodin or Maillol: Aristide Maillol, like Auguste Rodin, was a major French sculptor.

  33. Romain Rolland: Rolland’s Above the Battle (1915), a series of newspaper articles republished in book form, argued idealistically against chauvinism, against the ‘moral epidemic’ of war, and for a sympathetic recognition of German culture. The book was widely regarded as betraying French war aims.

  34. La Fille aux mains coupées: Pierre Quillard, a keen supporter of Dreyfus, published this dramatic poem in 1886.

  35. Ferrari: François Ferrari, gossip and society columnist for the Figaro.

  36. Feydeau’s farce: Georges Feydeau co-authored this 1894 farce with Maurice Desvallières. Typically, it is full of nocturnal encounters, mistaken rendezvous and other staples of his oeuvre.

  37. Bressant or Delaunay: Bressant (1815–1886) and Delaunay (1826–1903) of the Comédie-Française were both actors famous for playing juvenile leads, even (in the case of the latter) when they were rather old for it.

  38. My uncle… à la Chambord: this is a rather laboured joke, with extensive reference. Essentially, M. de Charlus would consort with Mme Molé and Arthur Meyer (a Catholic, Royalist journalist of dubious reliability) out of monarchist sentiment, the former because of her connection with the late pretender to the French throne, the Comte de Chambord. Carp à la Chambord was a very lavish way of cooking it (in champagne), with stuffed sweetbreads, truffles and foie gras. The implication is that Charlus will swallow anything as long as it is dished up as monarchism.

  39. Bonnet rouge: ‘Red Cap’, a revolutionary pacifist paper.

  40. ‘from the unfathomable abyss./As every day renewed the sun shall climb the sky/Washed clean within the deeps of the profoundest seas.’ Baudelaire, ‘Le Balcon’ (slightly altered).

  41. Gothas: these German aeroplanes made regular and damaging raids on Paris in the first months of 1918. In the first raid alone, forty-five people died and over two hundred were injured.

  42. ‘time change’: the French government introduced ‘summer-time’ for the first time in 1916.

  43. Zouaves: colonial regiment whose soldiers wore colourful, Oriental uniforms.

  44. Anastasia: for some unclear reason, this was the term in general use for the censorship.

  45. L’Île du rêve: a light-operatic Polynesian idyll, based on a novel by Pierre Loti. The music was by Proust’s friend, Reynaldo Hahn.

  46. fêtes galantes: the best-known such painter was Watteau (whose painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère, an important example of this genre, is mentioned below, p. 220).

  47. a novel by a Swiss writer… militarists: the book in question is Die Mädchenfeinde (1907), a short novel by Carl Spitteler, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.

  48. General de Boisdeffre… Colonel du Paty de Clam… Colonel Henry’s forgery: three of the officers deeply involved in the fabrication of evidence against Dreyfus.

  49. Vauquois: the 1915 battle for the village of Vauquois, twenty-five kilometres west of Verdun, though fiercely contested, was not a battle of world-historical significance.

  50. Caillaux: leader of the Radical Party, imprisoned in 1918 for treating with the enemy and endangering state security.

  51. Giolitti: a pro-German Italian politician, who opposed Italy’s alliance with France and England.

  52. Diadoch: heir to the Greek throne.

  53. Ferdinand of Coburg: i.e. the Bulgarian Tsar.

  54. habent sua fata libelli: ‘books have their destinies.’

  55. self is always hateful: see Pascal, Pensées, 136. Anatole France wrote a preface to Emile Combes’s Une campagne laïque 1902–1903.

  56. Père Didon… a Duval Restaurant: Father Henri Didon (1840–1900) was a famous Dominican preacher. The ‘Duval Bouillons’ were Paris restaurants serving cheap, nutritious food; they were clean, respectable, and the waitresses wore a severely unsexy uniform.

  57. Clarisse: the first of the three novellas which make up Paul Morand’s Tendre stocks (1921). An essay Proust wrote on Morand in 1920 was reprinted as that book’s preface.

  58. as M. Barrès would call it: the reference is to Les Déracinés (1897), the first volume of a trilogy of novels preaching a mystical French nationalism, by Maurice Barrès.

  59. Déroulède: President of the League of Patriots.

  60. Dreyfus… murmur from anyone: Picquart suffered for being one of the main defenders of Dreyfus, but was reinstated in the army, and became Minister of War in 1906.

  61. You once made me read… waged by the Empire: Charles Maurras’s elegant essay was collected in his L’Avenir de l’intelligence (1905). Aimée de Coigny’s Mémoires were not published until 1902, although she died in 1820. What she wanted, in 1812, despite her earlier advocacy of revolutionary opinions, was the restoration of the monarchy, but she had not yet been persuaded of the desirability of a return to absolute monarchy and consequently supported the liberal Duc d’Orléans and the establishment of a bourgeois, constitutional monarchy.

  62. M. Syveton: Gabriel Syveton, one of the founders of the ‘Ligue de la patrie française’, a Nationalist deputy, famously slapped the face of the War Minister in 1904.

  63. the heroines of M. Becque: see Henry Becque’s La Parisienne (1885), a novel with a cynically immoral heroine.

  64. the Duc d’Enghien: in 1804, at the instigation of Napoleon, the Duc d’Enghien was first court-martialled and then shot in the moat of Vincennes Castle.

  65. Inculcabis super leonem et aspidem: Psalm 91:13: ‘Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and dragon shalt thou trample under feet.’

  66. Action libérale: a political party of the moderate Catholic Republican right.

  67. Action française: a group centred upon the newspaper of that name, edited by Léon Daudet (son of Alphonse) and Charles Maurras, which began as a pam
phlet in 1899, becoming a daily paper in 1908. Their politics were very right-wing, anti-Semitic, Royalist and Nationalist.

  68. the Capets: the ruling house of France from 987 to 1328. By extending and consolidating their power, the Capetian kings laid the foundation of the French nation-state.

  69. a newspaper that was appearing at the time: Clemenceau’s paper L’Homme libre (The Freeman) had been rechristened L’Homme enchaîné in protest against wartime censorship.

  70. poutana: whore.

  71. Boissier’s… Gouache’s: Paris shops selling cakes, pastries and confectionery.

  72. it is the opposite of the Carmelites, it is the vice that takes care of virtue: the Carmelites used not only to pray for the sins of the world, but also to mortify their flesh, by means of flagellation among other methods.

  73. Phèdre… Les Saltimbanques: Racine’s greatest tragedy is contrasted with a contemporary operetta.

  74. Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: Proust’s translation was published in 1906.

  75. Gilbert the Bad: ancestor of the Guermantes, depicted on a stained-glass window at Combray.

  76. the rod of justice: an iron bar to which prisoners who had been clapped in irons were fastened as a punishment on board French naval vessels.

  77. the ‘expulsion of the nuns’: one of the consequences of the law of 1 July 1901 was that many religious communities, especially teaching communities which ran their own schools, were disbanded. (See also below, p.222.)

  78. Lectures pour tous: a popular magazine, which ran from 1898 until 1939.

  79. M. Arthur Meyer: see note 38 above.

  80. Bossuet: seventeenth-century cleric, preacher and writer, best known for the eloquence of his funeral orations.

  81. François le Champi by George Sand: this, of course, is the novel which the narrator’s mother reads to him at the beginning of the novel. Published in 1850, it deals with the love between the eponymous foundling child and the young woman, later a widow, who becomes his adoptive mother.

  82. Foucquet: Jean Foucquet, a fifteenth-century illuminator of books.

  83. the Confédération Générale de Travail: the General Confederation of Labour, to which trade unions were affiliated and through which they might speak with a collective voice.

  84. Port-Royalist: the convent of Port-Royal gave its name in the seventeenth century to a spiritual and educational movement associated with Jansenist ideas (and hence anti-Jesuit) which laid considerable stress on logic and rigorous thinking as well as conscience. Pascal and Racine are the best-known names associated with Port-Royal; Sainte-Beuve devoted a major work to it.

  85. ‘Men often want… to remain free’: La Bruyère, Caractères, ‘Du Coeur’, No. 16.

  86. Young Werther: the quintessentially noble, Romantic lover in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

  87. Embarquement pour Cythère: the painting by Watteau (see note 45).

  88. Reinach: Joseph Reinach (1856–1921), an outspoken supporter of Dreyfus and a leader of the campaign to prove his innocence.

  89. Church Schools against nature… temporarily rehabilitated: all examples of current attitudes influential in one circle or another.

  90. knew… at the same time as the Russians: the reference is to an enquiry by Général Roques into the leadership methods of Sarrail, who commanded an allied expeditionary force to Salonika in 1915.

  91. Tout-Paris… Annuaire des châteaux: Tout-Paris was a sort of cross between Who’s Who and the telephone directory; the Annuaire des châteaux listed 40,000 owners of country houses, with their names and addresses.

  92. Yesterday… and of youth: Chateaubriand’s posthumously published Memoirs, one of the great works of French prose, contain passages (like these) which seem to anticipate Proust’s understanding of spontaneous memory.

  93. L’azur… et de mâts: ‘The blue of heaven, spacious, curved’ and ‘A harbour thick with pennants and with masts’ (from ‘Parfum exotique’, in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal).

  94. Regnard… Labiche: Jean-François Regnard (1655–1709), a comic dramatist sometimes regarded as the successor to Molière. The reference here is to Le Légataire universel in which a young man’s valet impersonates an ancient uncle. Eugène Labiche (1815–88) was an immensely prolific comic playwright.

  95. Général Dourakine: the Russian-born Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874) was the author of quantities of children’s books, of which Général Dourakine was one.

  96. intrigué: there was, so far as I know, no equivalent English usage to this: to ‘intrigue’ somebody with whom you were enjoying yourself at a masked ball was to show them that you recognized them, without revealing your own identity.

  97. Fregoli: Leopoldo Fregoli was best known as a virtuoso quick-change artist, so much so that his name became a synonym for rapid transformations.

  98. the 1878 Exhibition: the Universal Exhibition of 1878 was one of the international fairs and exhibitions which became popular in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It was actually personified by an actress, whose dress was decorated with lots of different national flags, in a revue on the Paris stage that year.

  99. Boulangist: a short-lived political movement of national regeneration. Général Boulanger himself, a former war minister, was elected Deputy in 1889, but disappointed his followers by not attempting a coup, fled the country, was condemned for treason, and committed suicide in 1891. So this is another instance of Time’s rehabilitation of the formerly discredited.

  100. Gotha: the Gotha Almanach was the European equivalent of Burke’s Peerage, the annual register of the aristocracy and its continuing pedigree.

  101. Hedwige’s: i.e. the first Princesse de Guermantes’s.

  102. that Clemenceau and Viviani… conservatives: Clemenceau was already a radical Republican at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, the experience of which made him an extreme left-winger. His increasingly independent critical position, however, saw him move further and further rightwards. Viviani was a Socialist Deputy who became leader of the Nationalist coalition government for a while during the war.

  103. the Golden Legend: the work of Jacob of Voragine (?1228–98), a collection of lives of the saints, and similar religious material, translated into all western European languages and very influential on medieval art and iconography.

  104. the Prince of Wales: Proust does not actually say ‘by the Prince of Wales’ (or ‘by the Duc d’Orléans’, whom it might equally be), but this is generally thought to be an omission.

  105. Twickenham: York House, Twickenham, was the home of the Comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne.

  106. the Salute: the dome of the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice marks the beginning of the Grand Canal.

  107. M. Henri Bidou: during the war, Henri Bidou wrote a regular column on military affairs for Le Journal des Débats. Proust was a keen reader of it.

  108. as Mounet-Sully said to Coquelin: Jean Mounet-Sully (1841–1916), a famous tragic actor; Constant-Benoît Coquelin (1841–1909), an actor long associated with the Comédie-Française, wrote Molière et le Misanthrope in 1881.

  109. Balthy and Mistinguett: Louise Balthy (1869–1925) was a singer in operetta and revue; Mistinguett (the stage name of Jeanne Bourgeois (1875–1956)) was a music-hall artiste.

  110. her son and daughter-in-law: for some reason, Proust has got this the wrong way round: it is her daughter and son-in-law.

  111. Réjane: (1857–1920), an internationally acclaimed actress. She retired in 1915.

  112. Mid-Lent: actually it was New Year’s Day: see In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I, pp. 61–2).

  113. one of the marble figures in the Erechtheum: see In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I, p. 135, where Bergotte compares La Berma to one of these marble maidens.

  114. Fagon: Guy-Crescent Fagon (1638–1718) was Louis XIV’s doctor. He is eulogized by Saint-Simon in his Mémoires.

  115. Emporte le bonheur et laisse-moi l’ennui:
‘Take the happiness and leave the boredom to me’ (Victor Hugo, from Les Contemplations, iv. ii).

  116. Meilhac: Henri Meilhac wrote witty, amusing drawing-room comedies and operetta libretti, the latter (with Halévy) for Offenbach.

  117. The reality… I think?: repetition, slightly rephrased, of a passage from pp. 269–70 above.

  118. to see her: i.e. to see Odette.

  119. Géronte: a stock comedy name for an old man: Molière has two characters so called.

  120. Empire: Empire style (reflecting the period of the Napoleonic Empire between 1804 and 1815), in furniture as in architecture and painting, had a strong archaeological influence, derived from Egypt as well as from Greece and Rome. Mahogany veneers, ormolu mounts, winged-lion supports, pilasters headed with sphinxes, busts or palm leaves, were all popular. Contemporary designs were mingled with symbolic motifs, often referring to Napoleon’s reign, such as winged victories and the laurel wreaths for triumph, bees, sheaves of grain and cornucopias for prosperity.

  121. Mme Récamier: a beauty and intellectual, she had the most eminent literary and political salon in Paris during the Napoleonic and Restoration periods.

  122. the Kreutzer Sonata: Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 47 is generally known as the Kreutzer Sonata.

  123. the poet… broken by life: Proust is referring to Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Rayons et les ombres’, ‘How little time is needed for everything to change/ Nature with skies serene, how you forget!/And how in your metamorphoses you break/The mysterious threads in which our hearts are bound!’

  124. ‘Il faut… et que les enfants meurent’: ‘Grass has to grow, and children have to die.’

  125. déjeuner sur l’herbe: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is the painting by Manet, disrespectfully reworking a painting by Giorgione.

  126. ‘the funerary gate’: ‘And I shall follow those who love me, in my banishment./Their fixed eyes draw me to the depths of the infinite/I run towards them. Close not the funerary gate’ (Victor Hugo).

  127. ‘except a corn of wheat… much fruit’: John 12: 24.