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: