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.

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, 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.