In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  29. Berlier: Jean-Baptiste Berlier (1843–1911), an engineer and inventor one of whose ideas led to the construction of the Paris Métro.

  30. Renan’s Life of Jesus: Ernest Renan (1823–92) published his Vie de Jésus in 1863, a biography of ‘a peerless man’ without supernatural dimension.

  31. Gérôme’s new painting: Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), painter and sculptor, neo-Greek and academic in genre.

  32. Colombin’s: once a fashionable English-style tea-room and pâtisserie in the rue Cambon.

  33. Wolf: Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by Homer, but were collations of short works by diverse anonymous authors.

  34. Union Générale: a leading bank, of Roman Catholic inspiration, the collapse of which in 1882 ruined many small investors.

  35. ‘Strangers to Speak in Sparta’: the allusion is to the memorial to the 300 erected at Thermopylae, as recorded in Herodotus, Book VII: ‘Stranger, go and speak in Sparta of us who lie here in obedience to her law.’

  36. an Opportunist: the ‘Opportunists’, Republicans who practised gradualism, belonged to governments, especially during the 1880s.

  37. husband: Pléiade I, 513 gives ami (=‘friend’), presumably an error. Earlier editions give mari (= ‘husband’).

  38. banging on the door: Proust says à la porte (= ‘on the door’). In the earlier scene, Swann rings the doorbell and knocks on the window.

  39. at six o’clock on that day: in the earlier scene, the time is both à trois heures (= ‘at three o’clock’) and vers cinq heures (= ‘about five o’clock’).

  40. Klingsor’s magic transmutations: Klingsor is the evil enchanter in Wagner’s Parsifal.

  41. a play by Sardou … different performance: the play was Fédora (1882), the leading lady Sarah Bernhardt. The ‘tiny non-speaking’ part, that of a corpse, lying on the stage, was ‘played’ by, among others, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII.

  42. Coquelin’s: Constant Coquelin (1841–1909) was a celebrated actor, noted for his performances of Molière and in the title role of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

  43. Île-de-France: the region round Paris which in medieval times was the origin of the French monarchy, and the dialect of which eventually became the French language.

  44. Winterhalter: Franz Xavier Winterhalter (1805–73), a German painter favoured in the courts of Europe.

  45. Taine: Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), a renowned historian and ideologue, was most influential in his determinist analyses of French (and English) society, literature and psychology.

  46. pronouncing cochon … bishop who tried Joan of Arc: an untranslatable reference to the name of the bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon (1371–1442).

  47. After that article of his … P.P.C.: Taine’s article, published in 1887, spoke of Napoleon’s mother’s lack of cleanliness. P.P.C. = pour prendre congé (‘to bid farewell’).

  48. Alfred de Musset: Louis Charles Alfred de Musset (1810–57), Romantic poet and dramatist.

  49. Prince Louis: Louis Napoléon (1864–1932), the nephew of Princesse Mathilde.

  50. Compiègne: the château, fifty miles north of Paris, was a favourite residence of Napoleon III.

  51. hansom cab: in English in the text.

  52. ‘Quite a tall man … a trifle mad’: Saint-Simon speaks of Villars, a military commander, in 1702. See note 26.

  53. when Racine spoke … the following day: Scarron was the former husband of the King’s mistress then secret wife, Mme de Maintenon. The story of Racine’s disgrace in 1699 can be read in the Mémoires of Saint-Simon. See note 26.

  54. Mélusine: a French water fairy, associated with elusiveness and transformations.

  55. a case of mistaken identity … Menaechmi: Plautus’s comedy turns on a pair of identical twins.

  56. ‘Where are we going … where we go’: this exchange makes no sense, given that the narrator leaves with Bergotte. It is an example of Proust’s careless correction of proofs: the scene, before he deleted some of it, was originally to end with the narrator accompanying Gilberte and Bergotte to Saint-Cloud.

  57. Bernardino Luini: (1480?–1532), a pupil of Leonardo.

  58. ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’: the nickname derives from the first four words of a famous aria, Rachel! Quand du Seigneur la grâce tutélaire … (act IV, scene v, La Juive [= The Jewess], an opera by Halévy, 1835).

  59. Mademoiselle Lili: a series of illustrated story-books published by P.-J. Stahl between the 1860s and the early 1900s.

  60. Julie de Lespinasse: having been befriended by Mme du Deffand, then banished by her in 1764, she formed a circle of philosophes and Encyclopédistes including d’Alembert and Condillac.

  61. Henry Gréville: the pen-name of Alice Durand (1842–1902), many of whose novels are set in Russia.

  62. ‘Well, that’s how history’s written, isn’t it?’: the allusion is to a saying coined or adapted by Voltaire (in a letter of 24 September 1766), about the unreliability of accepted accounts of things: Voilà comme on écrit l’histoire.

  63. As La Bruyère says … without wealth: Jean de la Bruyère (1645–96) is remembered for a single book, Les caractères (1688). The quotation is from IV, 20: ‘Il est triste d’aimer sans une grande fortune.’

  64. As both Joseph and the Pharaoh … the dream: see Genesis, ch. 41.

  65. Ice Saints: the expression, also known in the form ‘Frost Saints’, denotes three saints whose days fall in ‘the blackthorn winter’, i.e. the second week of May.

  66. the Good Friday Spell: the allusion is to the end of the first part of Act III of Wagner’s Parsifal.

  67. like Hypatia … measured tread: the French sentence contains an unretrievable echo of ‘Hypatie’, one of Leconte de Lisle’s Poèmes antiques (1852): ‘Et les mondes encor roulent sous ses pieds blancs!’

  68. Sagan: Charles-Guillaume-Boson de Talleyrand Périgord (1832–1910), known as the Prince de Sagan, an arbiter of elegance, may be the source of some features of Charlus and of the Duc de Guermantes.

  69. Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency: Like Sagan, Antoine de Castellane (1844–1917) and Adalbert de Montmorency (1837–1915) were real people.

  PART II: Place-names: the Place

  1. Mme de Sévigné … ‘the Pont-Audemer’: Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626–96), is remembered for her many letters, almost 800 of which she wrote to her daughter, Mme de Grignan. With some of these place-names in this sentence, Proust reproduces Mme de Sévigné’s seventeenth-century usage: ‘L’Orient’, for example, is now Lorient.

  2. Céline and Victoire: in ‘Combray’, these aunts are called Céline and Flora.

  3. Balbec-Plage: roughly, ‘Balbec-on-Sea’.

  4. depictions of Anne of Brittany … in a book of hours: Les Heures d’Anne de Bretagne, the work of a French miniaturist Jean Bourdichon (1457?–1521).

  5. Regulus was accustomed, at moments of great consequence: a form of words modelled on one of the Lives of Plutarch.

  6. ‘I’ll have to draw on all the courage which you lack’: this quotation, like many others, is very approximate (letter of 9 February 1671).

  7. Mme de Beausergent: a fictitious writer.

  8. Mme de Simiane: Pauline de Simiane (1674–1737) was a grand-daughter of Mme de Sévigné.

  9. ‘I could not resist … trees, etc.’: Proust quotes (approximately) from the letter of 12 June 1680, in which Mme de Sévigné describes uncanny optical illusions caused by the moonlight. The italics are his.

  10. Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus: sons of Zeus who became the three judges of the shades in Hades.

  11. Duguay-Trouin: Proust borrows this statue from Saint-Malo, the birthplace of René Duguay-Trouin (1673–1736), an admiral and privateer who left memoirs of his exploits.

  12. Cardinal la Balue: Jean Balue, or La Balueu (1421?–91), was imprisoned for eleven years by Louis XI (1423–83). Modern historians tend to doubt whether he was h
eld in a cage.

  13. for the Duc de Guise to have been assassinated in: the Duc de Guise was assassinated at Blois in 1588 on the orders of Henri III.

  14. Saint Blandine: one of the first Christian martyrs in Gaul, put to death in Lyon in 177, remembered for her serenity under torture.

  15. First President … bâtonnier: a First President is a leading magistrate; the bâtonnier is the president of the barristers attached to a French law court.

  16. Cour de cassation: supreme court of appeal.

  17. They’re the de Cambremers, aren’t they: in many French names, de is a vestige of noble birth.

  18. ‘So now I must give you the half of my Estate?’: the quotation is from Racine, Esther, line 660: ‘Faut-il de mes États vous donner la moitié?’

  19. ‘so sumptuous that you starve’: letter of 30 July 1689.

  20. the Cimmerians: in the Odyssey, Homer speaks of the mythical Cimmerii, who dwelt at the western edge of the world, by the deep-flowing ocean, amid perpetual mists and darkness.

  21. Archduke Rudolf: the Archduke Rudolf of Habsburg (1858–89), the son of the Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph I, was found dead in a hunting-lodge with his mistress Marie Vetsera.

  22. ‘Each time I receive your letter … what I feel’: letters of February 1671.

  23. Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter … mere female mortal: the reference is probably to Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter and Sémélé (1895).

  24. Baronne d’Ange: the title assumed by a courtesan in the play Le demi-monde (Dumas fils, 1855).

  25. Mathurin Régnier and Macette: Régnier (1573–1613) was a satirical poet. His character Macette is a reformed bawd.

  26. Glauconome: a Nereid, often depicted as all smiles, one of the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris.

  27. Esther or Joad: characters from Racine’s last two tragedies, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written for Mme de Maintenon’s school for young noblewomen.

  28. ‘like a flight of raptors … hundred thousand oars’: Proust quotes from Leconte de Lisle’s tragedy Les Érynnies, after Aeschylus: ‘tel qu’un vol d’oiseaux carnassiers dans l’aurore’; and ‘de cent mille avirons battaient le flot sonore’. See also p. 480 and note 106 to Part II.

  29. Molé … Daru: many of these men, politicians or members of the Académie française in the early nineteenth century, dabbled in history or left memoirs, which the critic Sainte-Beuve admired. Proust here gives to Mme de Villeparisis something of an admiration which he deplored.

  30. As M. Sainte-Beuve used to say … properly: Proust’s novel grew out of a projected essay on Sainte-Beuve, which criticized the critic for letting his judgment of writing be influenced by his knowledge of the writer. The superiority of Bergotte the writer over Bergotte the speaker is another reflection of this criticism.

  31. ‘The moon … august and solemn’: the quotations, two of which Proust has slightly misremembered, are ‘Bientôt elle répandit dans les bois ce grand secret de mélancolie’ (Chateaubriand, Atala); ‘Pleurant, comme Diane au bord de ses fontaines’ (Vigny, ‘La maison du berger’); and ‘L ’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle’ (Hugo, ‘Booz endormi’).

  32. Hernani: the first night of Hugo’s verse drama, in 1830, was a triumph for the new Romanticism.

  33. The Duc de Nemours: probably the second son, also known as the Prince d’Orléans, of King Louis-Philippe.

  34. Bagard: César Bagard (1639–1709) a sculptor from Nancy, whose work figured in certain fine houses in Paris.

  35. the ill-fated Duchesse de Praslin: the daughter of General Sebastiani, married to the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, was ‘ill-fated’ because in 1847 her husband, having abandoned her for the governess of their ten children, then stabbed her (and poisoned himself when arrested).

  36. Doudan or M. de Rémusat … a Joubert: Ximénès Doudan (1800–1872), an administrator and civil servant, whose correspondence (Mélanges et lettres, 4 vols.) was published in 1876. Charles, Comte de Rémusat (1797–1875), a minister in governments between the 1840s and 1870s. Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), a moralist and friend of Chateaubriand, known mainly for a posthumous selection from his notebooks, Pensées, maximes, essais.

  37. Doncières: an invented name.

  38. Proudhon: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), a theorist of French socialism, one of whose most celebrated statements was ‘Private property is theft.’

  39. ‘intellectuals’: the use of intellectuel as a noun became widespread in 1898, an acute phase of the Dreyfus Affair.

  40. Boieldieu or Labiche: François-Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834), a composer of songs and light opera. Eugène Labiche (1815–88) wrote about 100 comedies.

  41. La Belle-Hélène: a comic opera by Jacques Offenbach, first staged in 1864.

  42. rue d’Aboukir: a street in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, a noted Jewish quarter.

  43. Concours général … universités populaires: the Concours général is a competitive public examination in different subjects, taken by only the best pupils in each lycée. The one sat by Bloch and Saint-Loup would have been in French literature. The universités populaires were private adult-education establishments set up in the late nineteenth century with the aim of promoting knowledge and technical qualifications among the working classes.

  44. ‘lyfte’: referring to the liftman, Bloch mispronounces English ‘lift’, as though it rhymed with ‘knifed’.

  45. ‘common sense which is the commonest thing in the world’: Descartes’s ironic dictum ‘Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée’ is here slightly misquoted by Proust (Discours de la méthode, I).

  46. Barbey d’Aurevilly: Jules-Amédée Barbey d’ Aurevilly (1808–89), a Catholic dandy and polemicist from Normandy who wrote novels of provincial life in a belated Gothic-Romantic and derivatively Balzacian vein.

  47. ‘by the Kroniôn Zeus, keeper of oaths’: here, as elsewhere, Bloch borrows tags from Leconte de Lisle’s poems and translations from Greek.

  48. Samuel Bernard: (1651–1739) a financier who lent much money to Louis XIV and Louis XV.

  49. Menier of the swift ships: It has been suggested that Bloch’s Homeric reference is to the family of the chocolate-maker Gaston Menier, whose yacht Ariane was well known.

  50. Heredia: José Maria de Heredia (1842–1905), a poet who began as an admirer of Leconte de Lisle and became, like him, a major poet of the Parnassian group.

  51. he just got a group of musicians … a few of his friends: Proust himself did the same thing with the Poulet Quartet during the Great War.

  52. Passavant … Combraysis: Passavant is made up from the verb passer (to pass) and the adverb avant (before), the utterance meaning roughly ‘Forward!’. Combraysis is a word of Proust’s own coinage, suggesting the lands around Combray (or perhaps the inhabitants of them).

  53. Carrière: Eugène Carrière (1849–1906), a painter of portraits (including those of Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet and Anatole France), of family scenes and works of religious and allegorical inspiration.

  54. Gustave Moreau: (1826–93) a painter of mainly symbolic, mythological and allegorical subjects.

  55. Île-de-France: see note 43 to Part I.

  56. Lebourg and Guillaumin: Albert Lebourg (1849–1928) and Armand Guillaumin (1841–1927), minor painters from the fringes of Impressionism and fauvism.

  57. Fénelon: François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), an archbishop, remembered for educational works and as the tutor of a prince, the Duc de Bourgogne, who, though he did not live to reign, was to be the father of Louis XV.

  58. Mme de Grignan: see note 1 to Part II.

  59. in La Fontaine … the other pigeon: Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95) was a writer of fables and stories. The fables quoted here are ‘Les Deux Amis’ (Book VIII, xi) and ‘Les Deux Pigeons’ (IX, ii).

  60. ‘This separation … the time we long for’: Proust conflates and misquotes two letters of Mme de Sévigné to Mme de Grignan (18 February 1671 and 10 January 1689).


  61. ‘so slight … ever notices them’: an approximate quotation from Mme de Sévigné (29 May 1675).

  62. ‘To be with those … all the same’: another misremembered quotation: La Bruyère, Les caractères, ‘Du cœur’, 23 (see note 63 to Part I).

  63. Le Nôtre: André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), a landscape designer who became ‘King’s gardener’ to Louis XIV. Among his gardens are those of the Tuileries and Versailles.

  64. Clara de Chimay: a reference to a rich American, Clara Ward, who married the Prince de Caraman-Chimay in 1890, then eloped with a gipsy violinist.

  65. Petit Trianon … English garden in front of it: this refers to Le Hameau, a pseudo-rustic dwelling built at Versailles in 1783 by Marie-Antoinette, near the mini-châteaux of the Petit Trianon and the Grand Trianon.

  66. hilarious and undeserved Christian name: the Christian name Charlus refers to is ‘Aimé’, which means literally ‘loved’.

  67. À Sainte-Blaise … Adriatique: these lines from Musset’s Poésies nouvelles, so fragmentary as to be barely translatable, speak of places: Padua, Le Havre, Venice, etc.

  68. Mme Cornuel: of Anne-Marie Cornuel (1605–94) Saint-Simon says that, on her death-bed, she said to Soubise, of his forthcoming marriage to an heiress, ‘Oh, Monsieur, what a fine marriage that will be in sixty or eighty years’ time!’

  69. he’s not my father: a sexual innuendo and catch-phrase, from Georges Feydeau’s play La Dame de chez Maxim’s (1899): a young woman of no great chastity, speaking of men, says it throughout the play, giving an unambiguous suggestiveness to her activities.

  70. ‘the Duc d’Aumale’s double’: the Duc d’Aumale (1822–97) was a son of the last king of France, Louis-Philippe.

  71. Gramont-Caderousse: Proust may be referring to Charles-Robert de Gramont-Caderousse (1808–65?), the prodigal son of a noble family.

  72. one of your Villiers or your Catulles: Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89), a minor writer of some note, from the fringes of late Romanticism and early Symbolism. Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), a prolific minor writer, associated with movements such as Parnassianism, Decadence and Wagnerism.