Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.192-204: Gilberte and sensuality

Gilberte is the daughter of Swann's his unsatisfactory marriage to Odette, and by all accounts she seems to be taking after her mother (but I didn't think about that that until my second read, actually).

M meets her by accident when his family is walking along "Swann's Way" by her house, but it begins with him practically conjuring her:

"I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle Swann appear with her father, so close to us that we should not have time to avoid her, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance" (p.192)

because she was said to be out of town, so this almost makes her like a ghost, or a spirit, or a figment of his imagination.

The meeting of Gilberte is one of my favorite parts of this volume (Swann's Way). It is full of imagery, and a dichotomy of language that is stunning. M's description of the white hawthorns (p.194) draws a comparison with the church of Combray, which I believe we will find is a main point of comparison throughout the work. The terms are architectural, and religious, but become increasingly sensual, a "hedge that resembled a series of chapels," "flowers heaped upon altars," light passing "as through a stained glass window," melds with other references like "the Lady-altar," "glittering stamens," "delicate radiating veins," "fleshy whiteness."

M lingers near the hawthorns, "breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in [his] mind (which did not know what to do with it)." He is virginal, or at the very least naive. And the flowers are white and pure, teasing him almost, "offering [him] the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting [him] delve any more deeply".

But for sensuality that's nothing compared the pink hawthorns he finds, or the reference to pink sugar, or pink cream cheese. If white is the color of purity, and red of passion, then pink is the color of budding sexuality, of pubescence. It hints at the freshness of youth and virility found in rosy cheeks and good health, but also at the beginning of menstruation, or the loss of virginity. Keeping that in mind these pages read almost like a dirty joke.

"the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. For my own part, I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries." (p.196)

And my favorite, about the pink hawthorns:

"High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender shafts rose in a forest from the altar on major feast-days, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a bowl of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the thorn-brush which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could do so in pink alone. Embedded in the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women..." (p.197)

And the question comes to mind, is this as sensual as it is, the nature as laced with sex as it is, because these are memories, and M has already shown us that no memory is without our own imprint of emotion upon it, and M was, at this time, pubescent himself, his memories from the time all tainted by the first flush of his own sexual awakening?

After standing a while in these sensually pink flowers, he meets, or rather stumbles upon, Gilberte. His memory of her, too, is tainted by his thoughts at the time. She is pink—her hair is pink, her freckles are pink, and he admits he always remembered her blackeyes as bluer because he could not "reduce a strong impression to its objective elements" (p.198).

M is already impressed by Gilberte, and by her mother. He does not understand the social mores that make his family snub her, and he is in love with the idea that Gilberte shares dinner with is favorite author, Bergotte. Seeing her now he takes every movement of hers to be contempt for him and for his family. But Gilberte, by association with the pink Hawthorns, has been drawn as at least subtly sexual, and the "half-hidden smile" she gives him while trying to avoid notice by the adults, and the "indelicate gesture" she sends him may be less contempt, more flirtatious? Gilberte's mother, after all, is behind her on the lawn with her lover, while Swann is away in Paris.

M comes to feel an obsessive reverence for Swann and for Gilberte as for the Hawthorns, an attention that may mimic the obsession Swann feels for Odette (which we learn about later in the volume, but which obviously happened before the birth of either child).

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.186-195: The two ways

Beginning with "We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner" (after a break in the text).

Proust's descriptive language, drawing the picture of the setting sun, is remarkable.

The two ways to walk, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way (Swann's Way), M says are "diametrically opposed" and are irreconcilable.

"But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes." (p.189)

M sees them as ideals of their types (Méséglise as a plain view, Guermantes as river), and refers to them as sacred soil. They are also the namesakes of two volumes of the work, so I am looking to them as major symbols.

Guermantes way is the longer of the two walks, and Guermantes is also the old noble of the area. It is the walk they took the least. To M Guermantes "meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator or the Orient." And if the Guermantes way is intended as an ideal, perhaps a class ideal, then we get a bit of foreshadowing when M tells us "I was to know it well enough one day, but that day was still to come" (p.188)

Méséglise way, or "Swann's way," is a shorter walk that goes in the direction of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, and along which they pass by Swann's estate. It may be a commonly traveled road because M mentions seeing people in Combray whom they assume have come from Méséglise-la-Vineuse. Taking the Méséglise way is a relaxed walk, and they talk to people and tradesmen along the way.

With regards to Swann's estate: "My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same,, an dhow far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife's death" (p.191)
On their first walk by the land in some time because they refuse to go near it when the young Swann's wife might be present (because of the bad marriage) M might mean a comparison here between the old regime, when the decidedly middle class elder Swann was respected and devoted to his wife, and the new regime, when the younger Swann has risen in status, but has married beneath him, making both a socially bad and an unhappy match. Each generation sees a dying off of their parents' morals, and this was a time of class mobility for the French.

Notable passages:

"Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference," (pp.191-192)
Man vs. nature?

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.165-186: Another Françoise, and M. Legrandin

Beginning with "One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé and Eulalie..." (bottom, p.165)

M. Legrandin. We met him back on pp.91-92, as the launcher of "furious tirades" "at the aristrocracy, at fashionable life, at snobbishness." Now we see "a Legrandin altogether different" (p.175), actually a social climber, it would seem. He snubs the family on a number of occasions. M dines with him alone and he claims to be a Jacobin, but M senses duplicity in him.

"But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said tha the cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their displeasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come to light, that it should do so in his absence, a long way away, and 'by default.' In a word, he was a snob." (p.180)

Legrandin is really playing two people, one for the middle class and one for the upper, landed, or noble class, and for each he pretends to hate the other. There is implication of social mobility here, a characteristic of these years in the third republic. This also harks back to M's earlier reflection: "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23).

Legrandin is also another example of the social triangle, this time a man caught between two classes of people, trying to maintain relationships with both while keeping the other unawares.


Françoise the cruel (p.170) Another view of Françoise, as the chicken brutalizer and insensitive head maid, except that she would apparently lay down her life for her own family, and really goes to great lengths for Léonie as well (although that could be said to be for her own family in the end).

And M brings things around so neatly, that the scads of asparagus mentioned earlier (several times, but most notably in an exchange with Léonie on p.79 "What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular mania for asparagus you've got this year."), seemingly in passing, comes back on p.173 as a cunning plan of Françoise's to be rid of one of the kitchenmaids, who is allergic to it.


Cool stuff
Paul Desjardins (quoted by Legrandin on p.167) was a French philosopher who knew Proust and his family intimately.

Balbec is modeled off the real world Cabourg.


Notable (?) passages

"But what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet—still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed—with an iridescence that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like on of Shakespeare's fairies) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume." (pp.168-169)

There is no ode to asparagus like this one, and perhaps Proust can be quite the humorist

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.151-165: habit, hawthorns, M. Venteuil

Habits/routines. The household at Combray lives by strict routine, the breaking of which leads Léonie to become very upset. In the situation of the kitchen maid's confinement, her crying out during the night disrupted Léonie's rest and led to nightmares that terrified her. The household is so dependent on routine that neighbors ask before they do things that will break in on it.

The Combray routines are so intricate as to have regular variations that become part of a "uniform pattern upon the great uniformity of [Léonie's] life." (p.153). Saturdays are an example of this because, being a market day, lunch is served an hour earlier. The family is dependent upon the routine which is not just lived, but greeted and discussed like an active presence in their lives, and even has the ability to seemingly alter time:

"The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, 'What, only two o'clock!' on registering the passage of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire...the whole family would respond in chorus: 'Why, you're forgetting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday.'" (p.154)

The Saturday change in routine has the effect of uniting the family against outsiders who know nothing of it. They refer to outsiders as "barbarians," speak to them with ridicule, make fun of them between themselves. This gives the characteristics of a group mentality, like a clique.

But there's a softer side of habit that makes it attractive. M defines this for us, humanizing it further, upon returning home from a long walk with his family:

"And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child." (p.160)

And still it is as though Léonie wishes to be rid of her need for habit. Every week she longs for the variety that Saturday brings, and even more than that M implies that she has "exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is" (p.161) even though she does not have the energy to bring it about. She is a slave to her habits. In fact, it is her habit of illness that is weakening her:

"And I have no doubt that then...she would extract from the accumulation of these monotonous days which she treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration but violent enough to compel her to put into effect, once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her mind without some such stimulus." (p.161)

Hawthorns. MP falls in love with them at the Month of Mary (May) devotions, when they are used to decorate the church. This, and their white color, gives them almost a holy meaning, but MP also recognizes their origin in nature:

"I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery." (p.156)

And also sees in them "a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant and vivacious."
(p.156) a vision that, having read the volume once, I can say is foreshadowing of another young girl amongst the hawthorns.

M. Venteuil and daughter at church. M. Vinteuil is a piano teacher whose wife is now dead. He will not socialize with Swann because of Swann's "most unsuitable marriage" (p.156). His daughter is described as "boyish" and "robust" with a "mannish face" (p.156-157)

On their way home MP's father takes them on a detour. MP's mother has no sense of direction and relies entirely on his father to get them home. We have seen this before, her deference to his "superior mind" (on p.12).

On their walk M compares the gardens to the art of Hubert Robert (p.159). Perhaps I should have labeled this art and nature, but I'll file it under art in life.

And I see that Léonie is fueling the fire between Françoise and Eulalie by feeding each of them false fears about the other, which in turn goes to convince even her of Françoise's unfaithfulness. Although it would seem that it is all untrue, and that Léonie as a character is just full of a morbid quality that makes her imagine the death of her family so that she can morn them, and makes her imagine infidelity in her servants so that she can be cruel to them.

Cool stuff:
Hawthorn in flower (photo by David Hawgood on Geograph)


Hubert Robert (p.159) was an 18th century French artist. He painted "fashionably dilapidated gardens" for clients.

Proust and the paradox?

Stumbled on this NPR article—Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present, by Adam Frank —thanks to facebook today and thought it was particularly worth sharing. Harks back to these pages/this post from a few days ago.

An excerpt:

"Signal travel time constitutes a delay and all those overlapping delays constitute an essential separation. The inner world of your experience is, in a temporal sense, cut off from the outer world you inhabit.

Let's take a few examples. Light travels faster than any other entity in the physical universe, propagating with the tremendous velocity of c = 300,000,000 m/s. From high school physics you know that the time it takes a light signal moving at c to cross some distance D is simply t = D/c.

When you look at the mountain peak 30 kilometers away you see it not as it exists now but as it existed a 1/10,000 of a second ago. The light fixture three meters above your head is seen not as it exists now but as it was a hundred millionth of a second ago. Gazing into your partner's eyes, you see her (or him) not for who they are but for who they were 10^-10 of a second in the past. Yes, these numbers are small. Their implication, however, is vast.

We live trapped in our own now."

From Where is Now? The Paradox of the Present, article by Adam Frank at NPR

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp. 139-151, The Curé, and Joas and Athalia

There is a break in the writing and we return to a description of Sundays in Combray.

Léonie's Sunday is defined by church times and times for medication (and the two are inseparable). Habits that cannot be broken or she is unsettled.

The Curé visits at the same time as Eulalie. MP says of him: "an excellent man, with whom I now regret not having conversed more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies" (p.142). In fact, the Curé seems to abhor all the things about the Combray church which MP holds sacred, such as the windows and the tombstones of the abbots. But then, like MP, he does seem most interested in their genealogies, and their etymology. He goes on about them comically and without breath for five pages until he "had so exahausted [Léonie] that she was obliged to send Eulalie away as well" (p.147).

Before Eulalie leaves, Léonie gives her some money. This is part of their Sunday routine, their habit, and Françoise does not approve. Though it is suggested she wouldn't begrudge money given to wealthy friends, Françoise sees Eulalie as "no better than" herself. The situation seems a comical one, with both Françoise and Eulalie believing the other to be receiving more than herself. MP implies that Françoise sees Eulalie as a usurper (Joas seeing Athalia).

Cool Stuff:
A Random Walk—Illiers-Combray

Vocabulary:
Rogation days (p.141) are religious designations.

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.121-139, Bergotte, and Swann and his daughter

This is basically an auto-biography, and because I am tired of writing "our hero" or "our narrator" I am going to refer to the teller of the tale as MP from now.

(p.121) Apparently the arrival of French soldiers marching through on a training exercise can throw the household, or at least the household's servants, into a tizzy. I find it interesting that their movement through the streets is compared to that of a swollen river, as though there is no stopping them, no slowing them, and as though there is no thought, no planning, in their movement.

Bloch is the friend who introduces MP to the (fictional) author Bergotte. He is a bit of a nihilist, having no interest in the quantifiable world and insisting that poetic lines would be "finer if they meant absolutely nothing". He is Jewish, like Swann (and Ephrussi), something of political note in that day thanks to the Dreyfus affair. Bloch is banned from the family home for telling MP that his great-aunt was a kept woman, but not before tells him "(a piece of news which had a great influence on [his] later life, making it happier at one time and then more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that there was not one of them whose resistance could not be overcome." (p.129) Foreshadow much? Also notable, the "kept" great-aunt was previously mentioned as being bound to duty and convention, and MP insinuates later that Bloch's impression of her was incorrect ("but in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly" implying previous falsehood [p,129])

Bergotte is a fictional character, an author. Since names of several real writers are also used I can only imagine that this creation will have some meaning throughout our tale (and perhaps the same goes with the earlier relation of actors). MP is obsessed with Bergotte. He mentions Bergotte's writing about nature, architecture (cathedrals), and literature, holds his opinions as godly, and refers to his writings as "mirrors of truth" (p.133).

"I had no doubt that [his opinion] would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an unknown sphere toward which I was striving to raise myself [and] if I happened to find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own mind, my heart would swell as though some deity had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be beautiful and right." (p.132)

Swann compares Bloch to a "Bellini portrait of Mahomet II" (p.134) (because Swann compares life to art a lot) and tells MP that he knows Bergotte well, that Bergotte's favorite actress is Berma (the one fictional writer loves the one fictional actor mentioned in the book).

More on Swann. He also likes Berma, and Bergotte. MP refers again to Swann's reluctance to express an opinion. I'm seeing this as a major character trait. He qualifies things only through their relation to art pieces. Does this remove him from feeling them? Is it similar to the grandmother's desire to have many layers of art between herself and a physical thing? MP does also imply that his mother and grandmother commit the same error.
Swann's wife is said by some to be having an affair with M. de Charlus. The daughter becomes an object of adoration for MP because she is friendly with Bergotte. Because of this, Swann's daughter becomes the woman in MP's dreams, standing on Cathedral steps, sharing with him his love for architecture and Bergotte.

Passages to remember:

"'Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?' I asked M. Swann.
'I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of print. Still, perhaps there has been a second impression. I'll find out. In fact I can ask Bergotte himself all you want to know next time he comes to dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year's end to another. He's my daughter's greatest friend. They go and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles together.'" (p.137)

Cool stuff:
(p.122) 1870 was the Franco-Prussian War which ended the second empire and led to the third republic.

(p.124) Bergotte is a fictional author, while Alfred de Musset was a real 19th century French author, and Jean Racine was a French playwright from the 17th century. Racine wrote both Athalie and Phédre (p.131)

(p.125) "cher maître" means "dear master".

(p.134) Bellini's portrait of Mahomet II:

Review: The Map of Time, by Félix Palma

I have to start by admitting that this book was a big disappointment to me. The cover, the synopses, the reviews all had me ready to read a book about the mysteries of time travel. Instead, set in late Victorian era London "The Map of Time" gives readers a bit of a love story, a bit of mystery, a bit of science fiction, even a bit of biography, but it fails to fully develop any of these aspects and left me feeling cheated on all fronts.

Palma does a fine job of setting the Victorian stage. Historical fiction lovers will gobble up references to locations, people, and current events that almost disrupt the flow of the story by being too frequent and without impetus. The writing itself is Victorian in flavor with a flowery prose and the faux pas of author intrusion, which I found distracting. Other than that I find the book difficult to sum up or review because it's just not cohesive. Divided into three stories it relies on common characters, mainly the character of H. G. Wells, and the concept of time travel, to make it into one, but it just feels like the author is attempting too many things. The several pages devoted to Joseph Merrick, for instance, have no importance other than planting the scene firmly in the late 19th century and setting up a brief red herring in the form of a magic basket that isn't magic.

There are hints throughout the book of a greater discussion—a deeper meaning—but the allegory is left incomplete. References to class discrepancy, gender issues, and colonialism are present but never expounded on and leave the reader hanging. And if I started enjoying the book in the last 50 pages I can only say that I wish the first 500 had been so engaging. Some people will really like this book, and for a light read it isn't bad, I just can't give it a rave review.

Book 26 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.110-121

Proust (or our narrator) meditates here on symbolism and allegory in the Seven Vices of Giotto de Bondone with reference to the pregnant kitchen maid, who Swann compares to Giotto's Charity. This is another example of art in life (a comparison drawn by Swann). She may also be a symbol in the discussion of class, but Proust is writing out the allegory for us here. The images painted by Giotto to display the seven vices are entirely ignorant of what they symbolize, making them pure in the task. The kitchen maid is likewise unaware of being a symbol of charity, or of the lower classes. And much, much more.

On reading, also a form of art in life. Proust tells us a book can be internalized, while the physical world can only be sensed: "When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it..." (p.115), and with regard to people "A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift." (p.117). And yet he seeks the truth as imposed by the real world, only to be disillusioned (p.119).
This sends me back to the description of the grandmother's assignment of value to art. The more removed from the original, the greater value she gave it. In giving the narrator pictures of famous architecture she sought to "introduce, as it were, several 'thicknesses' of art: instead of photographs...she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted them" and sought photos of the art depicting the actual architecture. (pp.53-54)

Reference is made to "the dream of a woman who would enrich me with her love" (p.118) which makes me think of the woman invading his dreams in the very beginning ("Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh." [p.3]), but might actually reference his mother, since we know Proust believed his mother and grandmother to have been great source of support and enrichment in his life.

An ode to Sunday afternoons at Combray.

Cool stuff:

(p.110) Giotto's Charity, by Giotto de Bondone, part of the Seven Vices

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.91-110

We meet M. Legrandin. He is an engineer by trade, and a writer in his spare time. His job makes him more middle class, as opposed to Swann who is able to sometimes work on writing, sometimes do nothing, but the narrator's family considers him a gentleman of the "noblest and most delicate manner." All excepting the grandmother, that is, who thinks him unnatural, and we already know her affinity for the natural. Legrandin thinks highly of our hero's intellectual abilities, saying to him "You have a soul in you of rare quality, and artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs." (p.93)

Théodore is a wealth of information, being in regular contact with everyone in town because he is cantor and grocer's assistant, and what does everyone need? Food for the spirit and food for the physical body.

Eulalie is a retired maid or lady's companion and is now a regular visitor of Léonie. Eulalie's visits to Léonie are another example of habit, and of the discomfort of broken habits, since Léonie suffers greatly when she doesn't come or when she comes later than usual.

Uncle Adolphe, our hero's grandfather's brother, seems to have a love for theater, or at least for its women, and for "ladies of another class," as well. Our narrator's family will not associate with these women, but he sneaks an opportunity to do so and is disappointed to find that the actress (?) is not unlike other women. He is bothered by the fact that an immoral person could be so disguised as normal. Our narrator seems drawn to what is considered immoral, and yet repulsed by it.

The narrator's adoration of actors, even though he has yet to see a performance, is an example of obsession. It also fits into his tendency to compare life to art.

Social Triangles
Definitely a recurring theme. The narrator witnesses a triangle between Adolphe, the actress, and "the grand duke" that somewhat resembles (foreshadows) the triangle we see later with Swann and Odette. Also, the narrator is caught in a triangle that includes also his parents and his uncle, a triangle that because of miscommunication robs them all of each other's company.

Notable passages
"...thinking of the weary and fruitless novitiate eminent men would go through, perhaps for years on end, on the doorstep of some such lady who refused to answer their letters and had them sent packing by the hall-porter," (p.103) Foreshadowing/Swann

Interesting stuff:
Morris Columns (p.100) are cylindrical advertising structures on the sidewalks of Paris, a place for paper ads to be displayed. According to this article they've been a part of the Paris landscape for over 150 years, and their numbers have been (controversially) cut back in the last few.

Opéra-Comique (p.100)
Comédie-Française (p.101)

Diamants de la couronne and Domino Noir (p.101) are both works by Daniel Auber from the mid 19th century.

(p.102) Got, Delaunay, Febvre, Coquelin are real 19th century French actors, and I can find reference to a M. Thiron and Maubant as well.

(p.102) Sarah Bernhardt, Bartet, and Madeleine Brohan are all real 19th century French actresses. Jeanne Samary is also a real actress from the time, and was additionally a mistress of Renoir, showing up in many portraits, including the Luncheon of the Boating Party, which also includes our friend Charles Ephrussi (Swann). Art, mistress, Ephrussi...



I can find no reference to a Berma of the French theater, though.

Vocabulary
Blue (p.108) according to my book notes a blue, or bleu, is an "express letter transmitted by pneumatic tube (in Paris)"

A few thoughts on John Ruskin

Proust greatly admired John Ruskin, and spent about 10 years, from about 1895 to 1905, studying and translating some of his works, publishing a French translation of Ruskin's "The Bible of Amiens", which is a very detailed description of the Cathedral of Amiens of decorated gothic style.

Proust also claimed to know Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture" by heart, a work that was about the philosophy of architecture as well as its physical study. From Wikipedia, Ruskin's seven "lamps" (or principles) of architecture are:

1. Sacrifice – dedication of man's craft to God, as visible proofs of man's love and obedience
2. Truth – handcrafted and honest display of materials and structure.
   
3. Power – buildings should be thought of in terms of their massing and reach towards the sublimity of nature by the action of the human mind upon them and the organization of physical effort in constructing buildings.
4. Beauty – aspiration towards God expressed in ornamentation drawn from nature, his creation
5. Life – buildings should be made by human hands, so that the joy of masons and stonecarvers is associated with the expressive freedom given them
6. Memory – buildings should respect the culture from which they have developed
7. Obedience – no originality for its own sake, but conforming to the finest among existing English values, in particular expressed through the "English Early Decorated" Gothic as the safest choice of style.

And Proust was heavily influenced by the philosophies and writings of Ruskin, so if we look at the descriptions of the Combray church again...

No. 4 Beauty—the church is given human traits time and time again, bringing to mind the idea that man is created in God's image, so likening the church to man certainly seems like "drawing ornamentation...from his creation".

No. 6 Memory—the church not only respects the culture from which it has developed, it is inextricably linked to it, at least in our narrator's mind. Biblical culture (Esther), French historical culture (Merovingian), Combray culture (Guermantes), and the culture of the masses (the peasant class) are all part the building itself, if not in the images on the windows, then in the erosion of the flooring.

No. 7 Obedience—the church conforms by being defined by history, and by being susceptible to erosion at the hand of habit. It is also described frequently as Gothic.

The church at Combray (pp.80-91)

In the second section of Swann's Way we arrive in Combray, described for us as "no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses, which the remains of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting." (p.65)

The church dominates Proust's memory of Combray, and 11 pages of Combray II (pp.80-91) are dedicated to its detailed description. The first five pages to the church itself, the next six to just the steeple. The careful attention given to the church makes it a self-contained example of themes found elsewhere in the work.

Time/history/past
The church seems to belong to all eras, and a lot of time setting words are used to describe it: "primitve," "age-long repetition," "mediaeval style," "silver antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries," and "Merovingian darkness," and reference is made to people and legends from the past, like the King Charles VI cards, Esther, Saint Eloi, and Sigebert. An historical figure or aspect is assigned to every part of the church.

"all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant..." (p.83)

In "Romancing the Cathedral", Elizabeth Nicole Emery explains this as the narrator's or, as she calls him, the hero's appreciation for the church only through its connection to history and people from history. This reminds me of his grandmother's attraction to antiques over contemporary, useful items. And in fact, his grandmother turns out to be a fan of the church and its steeple in ways that the other characters are not (p.87)

Class
As I noted before, the church seems to be a unifier of class as well as time. It is visited for ages by peasant-women, houses the "noble dust of the Abbots of Combray," and the narrator and his family are middle class, (pp.80-81).

Art in life
The church personified. I remember that later in Swann's Way people are often given the qualities of art, but here the art, or architecture, is being given many human qualities:
• The dust of the long dead noble Abbots is related to the flooring (p.80)
• Proust tells us that at moments the church is "more human somehow" (p.81)
• One window "had taken on the shimmering of a peacock's tail, then quivered and rippled in a flaming and fantastic shower that streamed from the groin of the dark and stony vault down the moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some grotto glowing with sinuous stalactites..." (pp.81-82).
• It is equated to "coquettish" "grown-up sisters" and a "peevish and ill-dressed younger brother" (p.83)
• It is "...raising up into the sky above the square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to see him still; and thrusting down with its crypt..." and "guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault" (pp.83-84)
• "The church! Homely and familiar, cheek by jowl in the Rue Saint-Hilaire...a simple citizen of Combray.." (p.85)
• The tower windows are placed symmetrically "with that right and original proportion in their spacing which gives beauty and dignity not only to human faces..." (p.86)
• It is "like a solid body" while "the apse, crouched muscularly..."

Habit
Church is, of course, a regular habit for those who take part. Its sessions help define Leonie's days, and the narrator's, really much of the town's. Its visibility creates additional habits as well, such as looking for the steeple when traversing the town, or upon arriving.

"The old porch....was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides...just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force..." (p.80)

Habit has previously been portrayed as a destructive force in its breaking, such as the disruption in the narrator's habitual night-time rituals bringing him grief.

Interesting links
Someone's pictures of the church at Illiers-Combray.

More Info
Ashlar (p.83) is stonework prepared for masonry.

Lethe (p.91) was one of the rivers of Hades.

Swann's Way, beginning Combray II, pp. 65-83

A description of Combray, using terms such as medieval and primitive (p.65) creates a direct connection to the distant past. (A bit on Illiers-Combray on this site and also on Wikipedia.)

A re-mentioning of the magic lantern (p.65) and Golo and Geneviéve de Brabant (p.66)

We meet Léonie, the narrator's great aunt (his grandfather's cousin) who, when he was a child, gave him the madeleine cakes that later trigger his memories of her home. She is an invalid (self-proclaimed?) "perpetually in a vague state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety." (p.66) She never leaves her room, she claims to never sleep. She is associated with death or illness, and with God or church—She loves the taste of the "dead lime leaves or faded blossom" (in her tissane), and by her bed is"a table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vchiy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions..." (p.70)

Memories, descriptions, again very linked to a sense of smell (pp.66-68, and previously noted in the stairway in Combray I).

More on Françoise, and her service to the family (first to Léonie, then the narrator's), and her own family, and the narrator's mother is kind to her, asking her about her children and grandchildren (I remember she also asked Swann about his daughter during the dinner). (pp.71-72)

The church at Combray: ancient, visited for ages by peasant-women, housing the "noble dust of the Abbots of Combray" that are "themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter", and the windows all "so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries" (pp.80-81).
Two things about this: A return to the concept of transmigration(?), and a mention of class. Françoise was also noted as a peasant earlier, but the narrator and his family are middle class, and the Abbots are referred to as noble. Church as the great unifier? Time as the unifier of class?

Guermantes: since the name heads a whole volume of Proust's work, it might be worth noting its arrival on the scene, from inside the church at Combray, as part of the stained glass depiction of "the coronation of Esther (tradition had it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of hte kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been)" (p.82)

Side note: Interesting History on cards
Proust describes one of the church windows as "composed of a hundred little rectangular panes, of blue principally, like an enormous pack of cards of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI" (p.81).
From tradegames.org.uk "The earliest references to cards in Europe are mostly in France (the records of King Charles VI show that he bought 3 packs in 1392). These original cards featured four suits (Cups, Swords, Coins and Batons) of 14 cards each - there was an additional card in each suit - the "Cavalier" or "Mounted Valet", the lowest of the four court cards."
Some believed the cards of Charles VI to have been among the first decks of tarot cards, but more recent belief is that they were simply playing cards, tarot cards having been invented about 100 years later.

Passages of note
"...the pleasure of finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time;" (p.69, with respect to the lime-blossom for making Léonie's tissane).

Vocabulary
antimacassar (p.67, noun) small covering on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture to prevent wear.

priedieu (p.67, noun) a desk used for kneeling in prayer.

Book review: The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor

The women of Brewster Place have ended up together in place and time. They are not necessarily friends, nor are they necessarily enemies, and at first look the book seems to be a collection of their individual short stories, but look more closely and it is much, much more. Though each of these women comes to Brewster Place with a story in tow, each with their own cross to bear, the book as a whole is less about their individuality than about their need to unite and claim their rightful place in the world.

In "The Women of Brewster Place" each character, seven women and one man, has followed her own road to come to the projects, to Brewster Place, where they have been shut off from the growing and modernizing world behind a wall erected long ago by those in power in the city, those who you can bet were neither African American or female. The women arrive carrying burdens, in many cases burdens that they have created for themselves, or have at least accepted, and further cripple their own strength by fighting amongst themselves, allowing the world to drive wedges between them. The end of the story shows them finally combining their strengths to tear down the wall once built by the outside world and release themselves from the cage they had been put in.

The thread of the African American story is strong Naylor's writing—stronger here than in Bailey's Cafe, but not so strong as in Mama Day. Shades of segregation and hints at abuse, and abuse of power, as well as the debate between embracing the culture of ancestry versus the culture of inheritance, all of these issues are very real, and Naylor brings them to life with her characters. But some critics have accused her of sidestepping the African American issue, of not making a real statement. And they may be right, but I don't think it's a matter of unwillingness, I just think she's writing about something else. While Gloria Naylor is often considered one of the most talented writers of contemporary African American fiction, the empowerment of women is also a common theme for her, and that is where her statement lies. She is writing about African American women.

Of the seven women we meet at Brewster Place, five have allowed themselves to be controlled or hurt by men or by their gender roles: Mattie by her son, Etta by her need of a man, Cora Lee by strict confinement to traditional gender roles, Ceil in the traditional sense by an abusive man, and Lorraine by both gender expectation and by male fear. And these women have more or less accepted their places, and are harassed not only by the world but by each other as well. They are trapped by their inability to change their situation.

Ben is their biggest hurdle. Though the janitor seems innocuous, he is the connecting piece between the neglectful, possibly abusive, landlord, and he has been there almost as long as the wall, is part of the wall as we see in the end. And it is because, at the behest of his wife, he refused to take action that his daughter suffered repeated rape and abuse at the hand of a white man. He allowed his wife's acceptance of that man's right to their daughter to stop him from acting, and when his daughter found her own strength and left, he lost her. Now he, and the wall, stand between the women of Brewster Place and their ability to find their strength and stop accepting the abuse, because that would lead to their leaving him just like his daughter. Lorraine is the first of the women to get to know him, and she sees him for what he is. After Ben is gone the women find their strength and they take the (rest of the) wall down together.

The characters of Brewster Place are expertly drawn, and the symbolism is woven finely throughout. Naylor's hallmark voodoo-like mysticism makes a short appearance at the end, and might be readable in the very beginning of Mattie's story as well, but I'd have liked to see more of it. I don't think Brewster Place is as tight a narrative as Naylor's other works, and the stories are not as neatly threaded together as they are in Bailey's Cafe, but The Women of Brewster Place is a beautiful novel and most definitely worth reading in its own right.

Book 25 on my way to 52 in 2011

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 53-65 (end chapter, Combray I)

Up to the this point we've floated through time and space, the focus narrowing as we went and finally landing on the evening in Combray when the narrator was sent to bed without the kiss, waited for his mother, and suffered a loss of innocence when she gave in to his nervous tendencies.

Proust calls this "voluntary memory" (on p.59), an attempt to use the mind to recall the past, an attempt that he says will be incomplete and leaves the past as a "residue", as "dead".

Next he tackles "involuntary memory", which he equates to the beliefs of the Celts that "the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object" from which we can set them free by recognizing and naming them. I could find no evidence of Celtic belief matching this to the letter, but I did read a bit about their beliefs regarding animation/reincarnation/transmigration and there's enough similarity to go with.

So after this, his illustration of reclaiming lost time, of being transported, by recognition of the past via a petite madeleine cake, only the memory of the past is in himself, not in the cake. The cake only triggers the memory. And where before he remembered nothing but the staircase, he now remembers everything about Combray.

End chapter, Combray I (Overture, in the older translation)

Vocabulary:
vicissitude (noun, p.60), change or variation in the course of something

tisane (noun, p.63), aromatic or herb-flavored tea

On George Sand, and incenst

"I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to fetch a parcel of books of which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, any more than their short, wide format but which, even at this first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already the paintbox of New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year before. The books were La Mare au Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Les Maitres Sonneurs." (pp.52)

"La Mare au Diable", "Francois le Champi", "La Petite Fadette" and "Les Maitres Sonneurs" are all works of George Sand.

George Sand was the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) lived and wrote during the 1848 revolution that ultimately brought about the third republic. She started life in a pretty standard way for time period, married and had two children, then left her husband in 1831. From there she diverged from the customary; She wore mens clothing, she openly smoked tobacco, and she lived an independent life prolific in writing and love affairs. She was a contemporary and lover of Chopin and Musset, among others, and a close friend of Flaubert. I have not read any of her works, but understand from their synopses that she wrote often about romantic affairs and used her novels to paint a picture of French customs and class and gender discrepancies while paving the way for stronger female literary characters. Again, since I haven't read them this is speculation based on summaries I've read here and there.

Two Sand factoids interest me most with regard to Proust. First, that some of her works may have challenged traditional gender roles, the word lesbianism having been thrown around some. We'll see that in "Search" as well. Second, that she wrote strong female characters into her novels, including one, in "The Country Waif", that ends up having a love affair with, and marrying, her adopted son. The word incest comes to mind, and so does Proust's very strong attachment to his own mother. That The Country Waif is the exact novel his mother reads to him on the night she spends with him in his room should not be skipped over. Beginning on pg.16, in his book "Proust, Beckett, and Narration", James H. Reid discusses the narrator's mother and her reading on that night.

Stage 4, incest and silence... from "Proust and the Sense of Time", by Julia Kristeva

p. 16 of "Proust, Becket, and Narration", by James H. Reid,

George Sand on Wikipedia

George Sand on AMSAW

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.35-58

At a dinner party our young narrator is sent to bed without being able to say goodnight to his mother. Swann is the dinner guest, and we meet Francoise, a house maid, who is described as uncompromising and ancient and devoted to the family.

A connection made between narrator and Swann: "As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he ;" (p.39) Foreshadowing/social triangulation

Our narrator has a nervous nature. This is played out in his waiting anxiously for his mother to come to bed so he can ambush her, on the stairway outside his door, into kissing him goodnight, even at the risk of angering both her and his father. Here, as he waits in the hall, memory is linked with sense of smell, and again with the inflexibility of place—the staircase as a horrible location because it signified the separation from his mother.

When he meets his mother his father arrives soon after, but gives him no punishment. In general the narrator believed his father to be hasty or unfair, which left him somewhat afraid of his father, or uncertain ("Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him..." [p.49-50]), but he does not doubt that his father loves him.

He is reunited with his mother, who spends the night reading (George Sand novels) to him in his room, but his victory at this moment is actually a loss of innocence, which he writes "brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me..." (p.51)

In regard to the books we learn more about the grandmother, who is strongly connected to the past, to the old, to the un-useful.
She "could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than n the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (p.53) And when forced to buy something "useful" "would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own." (p.53)
She prefers the antique to something more conventional and useful. Even in books she has chosen for him George Sand novels which he accuses of being "regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque..", and she prefers ancient depictions of place as well, avoiding photographs in favor of prints (or photographs of prints) or artists' renderings.

Art in life
"...[I] would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence." (p.35)

Art imitating life is not always accurate, as images of paintings of locations (Venice) do not always portray them accurately.

Time and memory
Perception is a part of reality. Is it immovable? Movement through the class system, for instance, breaks the concept of immobility in reality, but perception of class is maintained, as when we meet Francoise:
"refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or The Quatre Fils Aymon." (p.37-38)
Francoise may in reality have changed class status, but yet she holds onto her original status as immoveable. This way she is a blend of past and present.
The Miracle of Theophilus and the Quatre Fils Aymon are both French textual works from the middle ages, another blending of time periods like the references to Golo and Genevieve de Brabant.

And in reference to Swann, immobility of perception:
"said my great-aunt, 'what a change I find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!' She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him." (p.45)

Compare this to the immobility of perception of a person's character or physical appearance mentioned on p.23 (always the same for one, never the same for any two people), and of physical space on p.5: "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."

And the difference between the physical state of something, and its state in our memory is revisited often, like here in the staircase as he stands with his mother before his father arrives:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished...It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell mamma to 'Go along with the child.' Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased;" (p.49)

Love as pain
Our narrator loves his mother so much that he suffers for the emotion. We spend the latter part of this section mired in his anguish over a missed goodnight kiss, and then suffer with him a loss of innocence even after he receives it. Love is pain and suffering, because even when achieved it cannot atone for the struggle, or it cannot live up to the desire.

Then Swann is "much less unhappy of late" because "he no longer loves that [his wife]." (p.45)

And the role of the social triangle:
"Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone." (p.41)

Vocabulary, etc.:
viaticum (p.36, noun) 1. Communion as given to a dying person, 2. provisions for travel

desuetude (p.53, noun) 1. The state of being no longer used or practiced

Benozzo Gozzoli was an Italian Renaissance painter from the 15th century, but I was unable to find an image of the print or painting mentioned (of Abraham and Sarah, p.49)

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.15-35

Ah, holiday weekend, you sucked away the extra time I usually get when I'm not the only adult in the house. Thankfully beach time, fireworks, and good beer were worth it. But I'd wanted to read 100 pages over the weekend and I only squeezed in 10 before the work week returned.

Class issues
We meet the eponymous Swann. The narrator and his family appear to belong to the middle class, and while Swann used to belong to this set as well, he appears to have risen a half class or more in popularity. We are told that this elevation of his position escapes the family's knowledge because "middle class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied..." (p.19) and we are also given distinct examples of how this was untrue in a reality where class was more fluid. Swann is the obvious example, but then the narrator's great aunt provides a second: she is described as being "the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle 'common,'" (p.21). And later, the grandmother is said to feel that "distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position," that a tailor was "the best and most distinguished man she had ever seen" while "a nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house [was] 'so common!'" (p.25)

A comment about titles: "[my great-aunt] had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer of our acquaintance because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped down—in her eyes—from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens have sometimes shown their favours." (p.26-27)

Some philosophy
Swann's place in society sets up a narration on class but also on the nature of self and perception. The narrator reflects on our being seen as different to each person of our acquaintance, that "even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people." (p.23)

And referring not only to this philosophy, but the concept of memory and fluid time, the existence not of a Swann who was different, but of a different Swann, and also a reference to art as life: "this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth, and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a picture gallery in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the similar tonality—this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon." (p.24)

A bit of humor
As the dinner party gets underway, the party that will separate the narrator from his mother earlier than he would like and will deny him that goodnight kiss in his bed, we are introduced to the grandmother's sisters, who are perfect caricatures of old biddies from earlier novels. Their attempts to thank Swann for a gift of wine and to mention his having been written up in a recent newspaper article suffer from such "a wealth of ingenious circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed" (pp.29). And their meaning may be subtle, but their method is not, so we are treated to a scene of satirical humor, while Swann is left "in some bewilderment." (p.33)

About Swann
Swann is purported to have been fashioned at least in part after Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art historian and collector

I admit to being disappointed that he wears his hair in the Bressant style (p.17), better known today as a mullet. But I also wonder if this isn't part of his characterization (by which I mean as a patron of nineteenth century pop-culture—theater, art, politics—not as a hillbilly).

He frequents the Jockey Club and the Faubourge Saint-Germain, and hangs out with folks like the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales, so he is popular with the elite French society, the haute bourgeoisie and the upper class or nobility, such as it is.

He lives on the Quai d'Orléans, and I found a great article about that here which describes this as the "perfect place for Swann, connoisseur, collector, writer marqué who once imagined he would publish a study of Vermeer." (p.19)

He has made a disadvantageous marriage, at least in the minds of the narrator's family, possibly on the grounds of pregnancy, and he has a daughter.

Vocabulary:
Ferruginous (p.16, adj) 1. Containing iron oxides or rust. 2. Reddish brown; rust-colored.

Other passages/quotes worth noting:
p.20 "when challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost disobligingly silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been painted." (a character trait to which I think we return later)

Proust on the beach

Whenever I go on vacation I imagine myself with lots of extra relaxing and reading time, but that time never seems to materialize. We ended up taking an impromptu three day vacation, on which I lugged my ancient library copy of In Search, and on which I managed to re-read about 10 pages, and all of those on our last day at the beach. When I think of beach books Proust does not usually make the cut.

Review: The Royal Book of Oz

First of all, this book, in most forms, is credited to L. Frank Baum, but this is not merely misleading, but completely incorrect: The Royal Book of Oz was written by Thompson after Baum's death. This is what I've read in many places, and certain newer versions of the book do properly credit the real author, but even without having been told nothing could have been more obvious than Baum's absence upon reading the book. If the writing style alone hadn't been a dead giveaway, then the characters having gone through complete personality changes probably would have done the trick. Ozma as cross? Dorothy as annoyed? The Wogglebug as rude and haughty? Though there were hints of their former selves, these were not the characters that we'd come to know and love, a change that was our biggest disappointment. And this was not the smooth and enchanting writing style to which we had become accustomed, either. Though Thompson does include some witty remarks and word play that will be enjoyable to older readers, some of her sentence formation—especially around the speaking of characters—is on the complex side for younger readers to follow. This is a far cry from Baum who, though writing at the turn of the century and with a style did reflect this, was still accessible for the younger set. And you might be tempted to wonder if the book would have been better were I treating it as its own thing, but first, she didn't write it as its own thing—she even published it under Baum's name!—and second, her style is choppy even when held up entirely on its own. This book was a huge disappointment to me, and though Calvin said he enjoyed it fine, for the first time Calvin he not asked me to get the next Oz book "right away", so I think we'll be taking checking out a new series for now.