Swann in Love, pp.341-355: Vulgar Odette, and social commentary

Beginning with "Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase..."

A closer look at Odette. She does not understand Swann—he is so far superior to her intellectually that she can't see the forest for the trees and instead believes him "inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed." At the same time "she was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact," (p.342) which makes sense, if she is basically a courtesan.

Odette apparently also has her own sense of fashion which deviates from the classic definition of the word as given by Swann, saying that

"it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index." (p.343)

Odette longs to be in fashion, but her fashion plight may be similar to her social plight, when she refuses Swann's invitations to take her into society, and that of the Verdurins, who declaim all the most popular salons to be boring, perhaps as a means of protecting themselves from the disappointment of social shunning.

She doesn't find Swann to be as in fashion as she would like. She is displeased with his choice of abode, as she believes the Quai d'Orleans to be "unworthy of him." Interestingly, the Quai d'Orleans was (and is) an established part of town, apparently called home by many artists and writers during the late 19th century. Odette's real beef with the place seems to be its age. She has more respect for the "sham-antique" and would not have him living "among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets." She does greatly respect those who enjoyed "picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love," but believes "there was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them." (p.247) So again we see Odette as duplicitous vulgar: not only does she fail to see established value, but again her speech is peppered with English phrases, like "rummaging," "bric-a-brac," and especially "smart," which implies she has traded French tradition for the vulgarity of contemporary English or even American.

Swann is in love with being in love, and he will do anything to keep that feeling alive, and to keep Odette in love with him, right down to lowering himself.

"But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share in her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love," (p.349)

He is seriously love sick, and Proust writes his plight very naturally and deeply. The mental journey makes me think of a D. H. Lawrence character or two.

But oh the social commentary. Odette is not really a likeable person. She is a twit at best, short of intelligence and identifiable values would seem a satire of the lower classes doing their best to move their way up—the proverbial social climber—but then Swann assigns no more value than Odette to the social establishment, and he is far more likeable and no less of a social climber, having once been more middle class along with M's family and now moving in the upper most social circles.

"the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined." (of Swann's opinion, p.350)

The late 19th century was a time of social mobility, and these are Proust's sketches of the times, but I'd like to read more about his position on the situation.

There are a lot of cool references in this section that I didn't research this time. Some of that information has been informative, and all of it has been fun, but I do want to finish this book during my lifetime.

Swann in Love, pp.320-341: Odette, Swann, and blinding art

Beginning with "Thus the simple and regular manifestations of this social organism, the 'little clan,' automatically provided Swann with a daily rendezvous with Odette..."

Proust and character writing, delving right into Swann's psyche. The onset or growth of Swann's feelings for Odette, which are ultimately his downfall, is like an internal battle to which we have a first seat row. In fact we seem to have a better handle on what's happening to him than he does, and so do his friends and acquaintances, who felt that "indeed Swann was no longer the same man" (p.333). Even the Verdurins have decided "the man must be a prize idiot" (p.322)

Swann is too busy making love out of nothing at all. He recognizes that his recent behavior is "foreign to his nature" (p.323) but he imagines himself in love. He goes so far as to "cease to be able to even think of her, so busy would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately" (p.324). He turns her into what he considers a classic beauty by continuing to imagine her as Botticelli's Zipporah, and when it comes to the final moment of consummation, he begs her not to speak but to give only signs, perhaps because her voice will give her away for what she is...not much different from the shadowy figures of women who approached him in the dark on the same street where later he finds her, Odette. Even the act itself is disguised as something else when they persist in referring to it (sex) as doing a cattleya (p.331). By giving it a different name he is convincing himself that this is a "pleasure which had never before existed" but it's also a pleasure which has to "create" (p.332).

Swann fights with himself. He knows in his mind that Odette is nothing special, that her "qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company" (p.335) but we see him losing the battle, and the first hints of jealousy when he thinks of her existing outside of the time they have together. He already recognizes, and we are warned, that this love is sinking like the moon (p.338), the only problem, which we find soon enough, is that he goes down with it.

Art and life: In a way Swann ruins his life because he isn't actually living it. Instead he is living in a reproduction of the art he loves so much. He has ceased to see the world at all for what it really is. This may be the exact opposite of art being a means of saving history, or moments in time, and of providing a more pure form of experiencing existence, now art is getting in the way of experiencing life as it really is.

Cool stuff

I love that, different from Combray, Paris being a real place Proust has peppered the text with references to real locations.
The Café Anglais, and the Maison Dorée and Tortoni's on the Boulevard des Italiens (p.327) where Swann searches for Odette


"and the life of Odette at all other times...appeared to him, with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Wateau" (p.340)

Swann in Love, pp.303-320: the sonata, Odette, and art

Beginning with "Greatly to Mme Verdurin's surprise, he never failed them."

Swann is already starting to lose his footing with the Verdurin's group because he is too well connected (dining with the president of the Third Republic and the prince of Wales).

The Sonata in F has become the symbol of the relationship between Swann and Odette, and as that changes, so does Swann's perception of the Sonata.

"but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware of how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed the way." (p.308)

Swann would like to hear the other movements of the piece, but Odette urges him to be happy with what he has already heard. Having already read Swann in Love before I see this as foreshadowing of the difficulties he will ultimately face: Swann wanting more from her, Odette being unwilling to give him all of herself.

Swann visits Odette at home, where she lives on a street of cookie cutter row houses, an area with connections to prostitution at least in the past. She sets the stage with perfectly placed lamps and flowers and ornaments from the far east. Everything about her is fake or duplicitous. She likes the flowers only "because they had the supreme merit of not looking like flowers," (p.312) and by continually using English and decorating her home in the fashion of the Far East she is denying her French heritage. Even her handwriting is British, which hides its hint at "an untidiness of mind and will-power" (p.314).

Swann is being untruthful with himself, too, as he tries to convince himself that Odette is more attractive than he finds her. He compares her to figures in art, which he apparently does with many people he knows. About this M says:

"perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the need to find in an old masterpiece some such anticipatory and rejuvenating allusion to personalities of today." (p.315)

which makes me think of earlier references to art being the stabilizer and means of preservation in architecture and the like, and here we see it possibly as the stabilizer of moral character, especially as regards Odette.

In fact, while Odette seems to drown herself in the current fashionable, Swann is doing his best to align her with the classical art of the fresco of Zipporah, even to the point of denying the artist's, Alessandro de Mariano's, popularized and fashionable name—Botticelli—which he, or our narrator, does vehemently.

Cool stuff

"and what a nuisance it had been not having one on the day of Gambetta's funeral." (Mme Verdurin, p.304)
Léon Gambetta was a statesman of the French Third Republic from 1881 until his accidental death in 1882 (at 44 years old). He was a moderate Republican and a great orator whose funeral became a well attended event. Proust treats it here as just another show.

"You shall have it int ime for the 'Danicheff' revival. I happen to be lunching with the Prefectof Police tomorrow at the Elysée...at M. Grévy's" (Swann, p.304)
I will guess that Les Danicheff refers to the play by Alexandre Dumas, first performed in 1876.

The Elysée (Palace) is the current home of the French president. It came under government usage during Napoleon's reign in 1808, then passed through many stages of political use, becoming the official residence of the French president during the third republic.


Jules Grévy was president of the French Third Republic from 1879-1887.

Swann, regarding the Sonata: "as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half-opened door" (p.308)
Pieter de Hooch was another Dutch painter from the 17th century who focused on middle class life, like Vermeer.


"Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom people more willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli" (p.314)
Zipporah is depicted in two frescoes in the Sistine Chapel: one by Perugino, and this one by Botticelli:

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)