Issue 1: The Mirror that "Must Leave"

French:

J'étais tourmenté par la présence de petites bibliothèques à vitrines, qui couraient le long des murs, mais surtout par une grande glace à pieds, arrêtée en travers de la pièce et avant le départ de laquelle je sentais qu'il n'y aurait pas pour moi de détente possible.

English:

I was tormented by the presence of the little glassed-in bookcases that lined the walls, but especially by a tall cheval-glass that stood athwart a corner of the room and which I knew would have to leave if I was going to get any rest there.

Note: The French says "before the departure of which I felt there would be no possible relaxation for me." The narrator is powerless. He feels he cannot rest until the mirror is gone. He has no control over this. The English says "which I knew would have to leave"—implying the narrator himself decides the mirror must go, or at least knows it will be removed. This is the opposite of the original meaning. It changes the narrator from a passive, anxious sufferer to an active, decisive person.

Issue 2: "Rumour-mongers" for "Jalousies"

French:

Françoise ne voyait partout que « jalousies » et « racontages »...

English:

Françoise saw everywhere nothing but 'rumour-mongers' and 'telltales'...

Note: "Jalousies" in French means jealousies (the emotion) or sometimes venetian blinds. It does not mean "rumour-mongers" (people who spread rumours). Françoise is paranoid about envy and gossip as forces or emotions, not about specific people.

Issue 3: "Promiscuité" weakened to "Closeness"

French:

... j'avais l'illusion que cette promiscuité avec les flots devait matériellement, à mon insu, faire pénétrer en moi la notion de leur charme, à la façon de ces leçons qu'on apprend en dormant.

English:

...I had the illusion that this closeness to the waves must physically, without my realizing it, inculcate in me the sense of their charm, like those lessons you learn while asleep.

Note: "Promiscuité" in French means intimate mingling, sometimes with a sexual or transgressive connotation. The narrator imagines an almost illicit intimacy with the sea. "Closeness" is neutral and loses this entire register. This matters because the Balbec section is thematically structured around the narrator's sensual, even erotic, relationship with the sea and the girls. Flattening "promiscuité" to "closeness" removes that layer entirely.

Issue 4: Françoise's Malapropism Erased

French:

« Elle n'a dit ni quoi ni qu'est-ce et puis elle est partie », grommelait Françoise...

English:

'Without any whys and wherefores she just up and left,' grumbled Françoise...

Note: Françoise is trying to say "she didn't say what or why" but says it incorrectly: "ni quoi ni qu'est-ce" (neither what nor what's-it). This malapropism is a crucial part of her character throughout the novel. She constantly mangles language in charming, revealing ways. The English replaces this with a perfectly correct idiom: "without any whys and wherefores." The error is completely erased, and with it, a key aspect of Françoise's characterization.

Issue 5: "Vulgaire esbroufeur" flattened to "common loudmouth"

French:

Swann, avec son ostentation, avec sa manière de crier sur les toits ses moindres relations, était un vulgaire esbroufeur...

English:

Swann, with his ostentation, his way of shouting his slightest connections from the rooftops, was a common loudmouth...

Note: "Esbroufeur" is more specific than "loudmouth." An esbroufeur is a show-off or bluffer who creates a false impression of importance—someone who puts on a performance to seem bigger than they are. "Loudmouth" simply means someone who talks too much and too loudly, often saying obnoxious things. The connotation of pretentious, empty boasting is lost entirely. It flattens a very precise social judgment into something generic.

---

These are small quibbles in what is otherwise a truly excellent translation. Charlotte Mandell has done remarkable work here, and none of this should detract from the achievement. I would add that, of the Oxford volumes published so far, she is, in my view, the best translator. Proust is famously difficult to translate, and the overall quality of this volume is very high. I raise these points only because the translation deserves to be read closely and discussed seriously. I very much hope Mandell continues with more French classics.

From: At this date I was a lover of the theatre…

To: …the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.

*

I haven’t been so happy with my latest Proust posts, so I’m trying a new format. Let’s see how it goes!

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s love of the theater, his visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout, and his thoughts on the kitchen-maid.

His love of theater

The narrator calls himself a “Platonic” lover of the theater, Platonic because he has never entered a theater. He’s naive to the experience and believes that each person sees the stage as if through a stereoscope, an image that is similar to but unique from the images given to the other audience members. Since he’s never attended a show, he depends on posters and columns to experience the theater vicariously, determining through titles and colors the plays’ tones and themes.

In his love of theater, he’s particularly interested in the actors. As a keen observer of daily dramas, he believes that in the “trifling differences” between “one actor’s tricks of intonation and another” there will be a meaning of “incalculable importance.” And though he hasn’t seen them perform, he has ranked various famous actors, taking particular note of the actresses, many of whom know his uncle. Through a “futile and painful effort” he attempts “to form a picture” of the private lives of women whose faces he sees and who he imagines might be women from the stage. He is melding reality with fiction: The performers on the stage are meant to represent real people, and now to him the real people are representing actors on a stage.

His visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout

The talk of theater is mainly used as an introduction to his uncle, who knows many actresses and thus has cache with the narrator. His uncle frequently entertains actresses and women of lower regard, and he’s run afoul of the family for introducing disgraced women to family members. The narrator is thrilled at his uncle’s connections and imagines that his uncle could introduce him to otherwise unapproachable women.

He goes to visit his uncle one day and meets a lady dressed in pink, a meeting that clearly worries the uncle, for reasons the young narrator can’t fathom. The lady in pink remarks on how the narrator looks like his mother. She admires him, and he studies her and wonders how a man could give her so many gifts when she has so “simple and respectable an appearance.”

She mentions that she met the narrator’s father once and that he was charming, which the narrator disbelieves. He absorbs her words and considers how she and women like her, disreputable women disowned by their families, “devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.” Again he transforms the women, typically objects of beauty, into artists who shape and beautify the world around them with their words and graces. The woman before him has taken “some casual remark” by his dad and “given it a ‘turn,’ a precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.”

The narrator leaves quickly, and his uncle tells him not to mention the meeting, but he’s so thrilled and naive that he explains everything to his parents, which leads them to cut off ties with the uncle for having introduced the kid to a disgraced woman. Later on, the ashamed narrator runs into his uncle on the street and fights the urge to raise his hat to him because it would be inadequate to represent all the grief, gratitude, and remorse he feels toward his uncle, but in doing nothing, he appears to ignore his uncle, and his uncle takes it as a sign that the boy is following his parents’ orders. They never reconcile. The uncle dies many years later without ever seeing them again. The image of rebuke is in fact one of love and regret. Again the picture and reality don’t match, which will be underscored later when the lady in pink’s identity is revealed.

The kitchen-maid

Unlike Francoise, the kitchen-maid has no name because she’s not one person but a position, “an abstract personality, a permanent institution” where individual girls last for no more than 2 years. The one at this moment is a pregnant girl growing larger everyday, whose “ample smocks” evoke allegorical figures from Giotto paintings that Swann has given the narrator photographs of. Swann is also the one to point out the resemblance between the kitchen-maid and the paintings, appropriate for a man who, a predecessor to the adult narrator in many ways, is always connecting his daily life to high art, needing it for meaning.

This leads to an analysis of Giotto’s paintings, which the narrator only learns to appreciate later in life, when he can see that Giotto’s works shine through the symbols that are “actually felt or materially handled,” that they are concrete and real. Like the kitchen-maid’s large, pregnant stomach they don’t operate through abstractions but through physical practicalities, the inconvenience of the round belly, the pains in the abdomen. The allegorical paintings show real practicalities; the real girl becomes allegory.

He finishes by subverting common ideas on charity and goodness, on the true representations and says, “literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.” Within the face of a brute, the heart of an angel.

The unnamed kitchen-maid has stood in for a painting which has stood in for a concept. He’s been describing this for multiple pages, but now he admits that the image and what it represents don’t match. The disjunction stretches further, though, since In Search of Lost Time is often about living through the representation, about existing outside the moment, the event, the object, the emotion, and relying on symbols and stand-ins to fill the hole. But, really, what is he experiencing if the image is unreliable? And is it the real thing or the image of the real thing that he loves?

I adore the ending passage of Swanns Way:

“The reality that I had known no longer existed.  It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.  The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience.  None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years."

I know the French translation uses the words “Le regret”, and I remember reading the original French word for regret is similar to the English definition but also adds a sort of longing-ness and nostalgia to it.

However I have asked 2 French speaking friends about this and both said “ehh the French means the same as the English”. Maybe because I feel a regret that evokes this longing and nostalgia seem ‘more right’, but I find myself very drawn to how the French text might mean the word differently… and if it’s the case maybe 100 years ago in the way Proust used it it evokes longing and nostalgia but now the modern French has altered the way this word is used.

As an English only speaker it’s also fascinating to think about the idea of a symbol (if words are seen as simply symbols gesturing towards ‘something’) and if say the English word for ‘hello’ and the Spanish word are felt differently as everything from the tonality in which the words can be said to some social convention from 100 years ago can shape our phenomenological experience of using or hearing the word (or that’s my assumption at least as a English only speaker).

I would love to hear some input from some native French speakers!

There is of course a great deal written and debated and analyzed about the major figures in Proust - from the narrator to Albertine to Charlus to St. Loup and many others. But some of the less known and less frequently seen characters have their own staying power.

One of my favorites is M. Pierre, the "historian of the Fronde," who tries (and fails) to participate in small talk at Mme de Villeparisis' salon (vol. III): "As Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of...." "I serve on a committee at the Ministry of Education and..." Poor guy is totally ignored!

Recalling, but not finding, a quote by Proust about how, when someone dies, their memory disappears behind a kind of "screen," and how the world above the surface remains alive, continuing without them

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. A good, quick read. It’s like a mini biography with some thoughtful commentary along the way. I do recommend.

Mr. Proust was born on 10 July 1871, making this day his 155th birthday! I would give him a nice coat and cake for his birthday if he were alive.

From: While my aunt gossiped on in this way with Françoise I would have accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved it: how clearly I can see it still, our church at Combray!

To: “A quarter past two! Very good, sir... I will go and tell him....”

*

This week Proust goes crazy for the Combray church. He describes its architecture, its stones, its painted glass, and its steeple. He loves the sense of history etched into the “building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant.” Throughout time, the church transforms from one version to another, as if continually reborn, recalling earlier mentions about reincarnation, but in a building not a human.

The church’s painted glass receives special attention for the tales it tells and its “treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures.” These diaphanous tales, depicted through color and light, let the narrator feel as though he’s entering “a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage.” The narrator delights at being in a state of wonder.

The stories and the age let the building extend out from itself. There’s a smudging of borders here, as seen through the memorial stones, “beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray, who were buried there, furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened and sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky, frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered.” Time can transform, and time can soften and sweeten. Abbot remains can “melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins,” or they can contract into themselves like “crabbed Latin inscription.” Borders are hazy. As he’s already said, objects don’t hold still and appear to do so only because we cling to the notion that they do. This focus on borders reminds me of the scenes in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, where the borders between Lila’s self and the world threaten to dissolve in certain instances; though in that case it occurs in moments of great emotional distress and in Proust it is occurring constantly. And yet he states that there exists “between the church and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind,” for it stands alone, even as it shifts and warps.

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Another Proustian irony occurs when he mentions the painted glass windows “were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone.” And there’s his grandma, remarkably like her grandson in personifying an object, in her case the steeple, of which she says, “it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.”

In one of my favorite passages, he speaks of the steeple’s tip and says that it was, “so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of ‘nature,’ this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence.” As he continues to describe the church steeple, he returns it to nature by saying that in certain environments the color of the stones was “a ruin of purple, almost the colour of the wild vine.” The concepts of art and nature blend, as the steeple’s pink tip evokes a painting and speaks to an artist’s intent while the stones point to nature, which isn’t a paradox since so much of art stems from nature, either an attempt to copy or alter it.

This week’s reading still has some character development. We meet Legrandin, an engineer and writer whom everyone in the family aside from the grandmother admires (she thinks he speaks snobbishly and doesn’t like his attack on aristocrats when his sister is married to one), and he gives the narrator sweet advice to always “keep a patch of sky about your life” because “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

We also meet Eulalie, a spinster who passes Aunt Leonie’s weird tests by neither agreeing that she is as sick as she says nor saying that she isn’t sick at all. And, finally, the narrator returns to Francoise and tells us of her elaborate meals and elevates her to the level of an artist, a composer (because for Proust connections to art are never far away) and says that to the leave table without eating every morsel “would have shewn as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall while the ‘piece’ was still being played, and under the composer’s very eyes.”

And finally, the narrator introduces his uncle Adolph and mentions there has been a falling out between Adolph and the family, for which the narrator blames himself. We’re left with a glimpse of the visits he used to the pay uncle at his home in Combray, a small foreshadowing of a more consequential and more opaque introduction that is to come.

The title is click-baity, but apparently AI tools were used to support the translation process of volume 5 of the oxford edition.

Curious about thoughts on this - I am stunned at how casual some translators apparently are about these tools (and without disclosing their use)

Can't even throw AI search a softball

Je viens de terminer « Le Temps retrouvé » et, par la même occasion, l'intégralité du cycle. Ai-je raison de penser que la fin reste ambiguë quant à la possibilité que le narrateur épouse la fille de Gilberte et Saint-Loup ? Comment l'avez-vous interprétée ? Avez-vous des ressources à ce sujet ? Existe-t-il une interprétation canonique ?

I have quite pronounced adhd, and so I struggle with impulse control, holding my attention for long periods, and with working memory (probably an irony there).

I also really want to read, and fully take in, ISOLT in all its sublime glory. These two contexts seem to be battling it out with my copy of volume 1 (penguin edition) as I can barely get through a couple lines before my mind drifts off or I lose track of what's happened in the last page.

Have any ISOLT veterans/people with more refined attention spans/organised brains got any tips on parsing the guy and his page-sentences? The writing style feels decently accessible to me so far, so ik this likely isn't the problem. Help? Thanks

Our (virtual) Proust book club is accepting new members. We were formed in January (2026), with the goal of reading (slowly and closely) all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. We are wrapping up Volume 2 and on July 6, we will start reading Volume 3, The Guermantes Way. We aim to finish the entire series by September 2027.

Structure: We read at a pace of 50-60 pages a week, roughly 10 pages a weekday. Discussions are conducted via a private Substack. Each week 1-2 group members are assigned to write post, and 1-2 members are assigned to comment. Additionally, we hope to have a virtual meeting once every volume.

Our group: We have a wonderful group comprised of smart, collegial folks. Though we are quite diverse in terms of our geographic locations, life experiences, and professions, we are united by our passion for literature and desire to connect with others who share this passion. While the group has quite a few members who have completed the series and have deeper knowledge of Proust , it was designed to support the reading of ISOLT.

How to join: If this sounds like something you wish to be a part of, please send me a DM with your name, city, and email address, and I will share full details via email. The schedule for Volume 3 will be finalized on July 5, so if you wish to join us, we would need you to CONFIRM by that date. We would especially love to welcome folks who come from outside of the US.

Thank you and happy reading!

I need to name a cat and ideally the name should be as excessive as I presume Saint Loup's full name would be.

The best I have it, per the Kilmartin "Guide to Proust" at the end of the Modern Library editions, is "Marquis Robert de Saint-Loup-en-Bray"

From: Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon…

To: “Church! why, they must be there now; you’d better not lose any time. Go and look after your luncheon.”

*

After the revelries that brought Combray to life, “Combray” arrives and continues to establish three characters: Aunt Léonie, Francoise, and, to a lesser extent, the narrator’s mother.

First, we receive a description of the town, with a focus on the church that epitomizes it from a distance and that gathers around itself “as a shepherd gathers his sheep” the rest of the town’s buildings in an outline “as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting.” Much of the town has faded in the narrator’s memory and is more insubstantial than the projections from his magic-lantern, and this wispiness adds to its supernatural character and makes the quaint town marvelous, a place where a church can be like a shepherd and the town can be like a painting, existing more in the mind than in space.

The true stars in this week’s reading are Francoise and her employer, Aunt Léonie. Since the death of her husband, Aunt Léonie has become more and more agoraphobic. First, she never leaves Combray. Then she never leaves her house. Finally, she never leaves her bedroom, a recession into herself that is reminiscent of the stories told about Proust, who spent much of his later years in a cork-lined bedroom. Her isolation mirrors and amplifies the town’s, but it’s also one of her many eccentricities. She speaks only in “low tones” because she believes something is broken in her head and that talking too loudly might dislodge it, and she’s often simply talking to herself in an “unceasing monologue.” She claims to have extreme insomnia, though it seems she exaggerates the severity. And she believes it’s her “great claim to distinction,” but sometimes she slips up and says “what made me wake up” or “I dreamed that.” Naturally, she immediately corrects herself.

The narrator’s mother, on the other hand, is a very stable and sane woman. The little we see of her this week highlights her kindness and compassion. She instructs the narrator on appropriate behavior toward Francoise, telling him to give Francoise a five-franc note only once his mother has said good morning to her. Her empathy comes through when, as she did with Swann and his outcast wife, she asks Francoise about her daughter, nephews, and grandson. She’s conscientious enough to ask about Francoise’s recently deceased parents only when they’re alone together, “asking her endless little questions about them and their lives,” and she can make jokes about Francoise’s annoying son-in-law, sarcastically saying, “Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away, and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but will make the best of it, won’t you?”

This gets Francoise to respond, somewhat embarrassed, “Madame is worse than the X-rays,” and we learn that “she pronounced ‘x’ with an affectation of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered woman’s, daring to employ a scientific term,” which gives us a small insight into class politics again, this time with its emphasis on the language differences, and lets us peer into Francoise’s psyche: she accepts her position. The small exchange is possibly enough to bring Francoise to tears because the narrator’s mom is “the first person who had given her the pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to someone other than herself.”

The class relations come through more drastically in the relationship between Francoise and Aunt Léonie. For the time being, Aunt Léonie employs her (when she dies, Francoise will work for the narrator’s immediate family). Unlike how most people think of the employer-employee relationship, it’s Léonie who depends on Francoise more, who’s an excellent maid and, more importantly, understands Léonie, knows how to soothe her, and clear her mind of troubles.

When Léonie sees a strange face in town, she asks Francoise about this, and Francoise clears this up by mentioning who the person is (someone’s daughter) and why Léonie hasn’t seen her before. The town is so insular that an unfamiliar face is remarkable. Quickly, this scene repeats itself but now as a caricature. Léonie’s asking about an unfamiliar dog, and Francoise, again, has the answer (“That will be Mme. Sazerat’s dog.”) and knows how to ease Léonie by gossiping with details (“a most engaging animal…as clever as a Christian.”) and leaving her only because she must go make a meal for the family.

The weeks’ reading is more in-scene than the Overture ever was. As the novel progresses there will continue to be a swaying between the more introspective, lofty passages, and the more settled ones, where events actually play out in succession and dialogue develops character. We’re settling in now. It’s going. No rush. As Francoise says to Leonie this week, wise as usual: “my time is not so precious; whoever made our time didn’t sell it to us.”

I am on a weight loss diet, and one of the recommendations was to occupy my mind with a really long book to distract myself from hunger pangs. I asked ChatGPT what the longest books were, and it said Proust. What really interested me, was that ChatGPT also said Proust spent 22 hours a day in bed and that's how he wrote his books!!!!

How did Proust stay so thin lying in bed all the time??? My weight loss diet has me in the gym all weekend; consuming only disgustingly chalky meal replacement shakes and counting my steps. So much suffering, and I haven't lost a single pound! Yet Proust gets to lie in bed all day writing about the Madeline cakes he's stuffing his face with, and look like a French K-Pop model???? Life is unfair!

Help it make sense???? I checked and he didn't have tuberculosis, so how did he stay so thin????

What was Proust's diet to stay rail thin without doing any exercise? Was he having lots of sex - that's how to burn off calories in bed??

I'm just really curious how this specific bit was translated. In French it's "se faire casser le pot" (literally "to get one's jar broken"), which is something I had never seen or heard anywhere before.

Edit: to clarify, I am asking this as a person who's first language is French, and read ISOLT in French.

Finished up the overture section and wrote about it on my blog. Full essay found below!

From: And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel…

To: … so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

*

We’ve reached the madeleines. Very exciting stuff! I know… While it’s not my favorite Proust passage, it’s better than the best passages most writers ever write, and it’s easy to understand why a “madeleine moment” has come to stand for the whole Proust project: It’s an ecstatic piece of writing early enough in the novel that most people who make a go at Proust will reach it. It’s at the end of the Overture section, so it closes off the first section and has extra memorability. And since it’s about spontaneous memory in a book that people say is about spontaneous memory (though it’s about much more than that) people believe it can encapsulate the novel’s main themes. It also illustrates a universal experience with only a bit of Proustian hyperbole, letting readers relate to it without straining their imagination.

For Proust, there are two types of memory: willful, declarative memory, where you recall facts and events, and spontaneous memory, which can create and revive and not simply recall. The first floats up to our mind when someone asks what we had for dinner last week or where we went on vacation last year—something easily put into words. The second pierces through our consciousness unbridled—an act of recreation we give in to.

At the start of this week’s reading, the narrator says that when he looked back on Combray, he only saw a piece:

no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate… the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night.

To the adult narrator, the only piece still alive from his Combray past has been the anxious nights spent alone in his room. He admits that he can recall other scenes, but he admits that these would be through will, an “intellectual memory” that “preserves nothing of the past itself” and thus is dead.

This gets at a core tension underlying In Search of Lost Time: there is a difference between describing something and recreating it. Ultimately, a novel is a series of declarations, able to recreate literally only written correspondence. In a certain light, ISOLT’s maximalism is a byproduct of the anxiety felt when trying to recreate a feeling or scene. To describe a simple scene, the narrator must give as much detail and specificity as possible, must use similes and metaphors to open it to possible connections. He can’t describe moonlit night as simply being “like a map;” it must be a map in a precise moment, “a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.”

This trouble stems from the mystical qualities that even the simplest objects can store. A tree or vase, a flower or dog, all can have the “souls of those whom we have lost.” The souls might sit captive in some inanimate object or plant or animal, lost to us until the day when “they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.” Proust tries to reveal this quality, this spirit, through the winding sentences and layered descriptions, though it’s ineffable and untamable, like the desire and anxiety so often bursting from the narrator, and must be reckoned with.

This talk of souls and abortive memory is all prelude to the madeleine moment, when the taste of the tea-dipped pastry will bloom into the entirety of his Combray past. He’s tired after “a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow,” and his mom offers him tea with “the plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell.” (Moncrieff’s translation sings here: “fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.”) The narrator dips and nibbles almost out of duty until he experiences the ecstasy of a revival:

a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

The “essence” is difficult to convey, hence the many words and seemingly convoluted structures. Paradox helps, since it suggests the impossibility of fully accurate descriptions. Metaphor and simile help by joining disparate objects and forming a tension between their minor similarities and vast differences. Metonymy and synecdoche help by expanding the object and reminding us that it can be representative. And here, in the above passage, there is a small backtracking, an adjustment—“this essence was not in me, it was myself”—which feels paradoxical but remains irrefutable.

Crucially, the memory arrives through physical senses, not intellectual meandering. This is key for when people are dead and the objects “broken and scattered” the “smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”  The “drop” here can be the literal drop of tea moistening the madeleine, but it’s also the essence through which all details revive, details that build structure and without which the memory would be lifeless.

Finally, he recognizes the taste and memory and recalls the tea-soaked madeleine he used to have at his aunt’s, and with this realization the entire Combray world flourishes:

 immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Proust does less stream-of-consciousness than his fellow modernists, but at the start of the passage above the rush and abundance of detail mimic the scene’s rushing into memory. My favorite part, however, is the simile comparing the moist madeleine to the origami that blooms when wet. The physical actions match each other exquisitely—you dip a dry thing in a liquid—and the geometric blooming of the origami matches the gustatory blooming of the moist madeleine and the figurative blooming of the scene, which is also like the scenery in the theater. Thus, we end the Overture with the Combray past now fully alive to the narrator through a delicious treat and to us through a perfect analogy.

Hi,

I've listened to ISoLT as an audiobook a few years ago and I've long been thinking about a scene around the end of Time Regained but I can't seem to find it. It's in the last part of the novel, where the narrator is going to a party after such a long time away from society. He is shocked that people grew older, and also realizes his own age by the way people look at him.

More specifically, I remember a scene where he's around young people and he sees himself as one of them, until he is reminded that he is old. Tbh I'm not sure I didn't imagine it by collageing other bits from the end of the book?

What I've found while looking for this : Létourville signing his letter to the narrator "votre petit ami" (your small/young friend) ; narrator saying he's old to other old people hoping to get a denegation and getting none ("Et je pus me voir, comme dans la première glace véridique que j'eusse rencontrée, dans les yeux de vieillards restés jeunes, à leur avis, comme je le croyais moi-même de moi, et qui, quand je me citais à eux, pour entendre un démenti, comme exemple de vieux, n'avaient pas dans leur regard qui me voyait tel qu'ils ne se voyaient pas eux-mêmes et tel que je les voyais, une seule protestation.") ; narrator describing himself as a "young man" when talking about dinner with Gilberte, only to realize it makes people laugh.

I'm hoping this crosses the feed of people who know the text enough to tell me where I can find the specific scene I described, or to even confirm if it exists or not.

Thank you (:

Does such a thing exist? Something that isn't clunky, reads lightly but has enough intellectual heft and emotional ressonance to keep one engaged? At times i feel Proust could have written the greatest spy novel there ever was with his powers of building suspense and keeping us guessing with his playful cues.

​

In short, is there something close to a joy to read as is ISOLT?

Hi all.

I’m going to be spending a small amount of time in Illiers-Combray this Summer— an afternoon, evening, and the morning of the next day.

Is anyone familiar with points of interest, activities, etc. that are ISOLT-related? Or maybe can point me to resources?

Thanks!

A Reader’s Personal Guide to Swann’s Way

4.

From: In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it highly improbable that—barring an outbreak of fire—Françoise would go down and disturb Mamma

To: … albeit the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will, and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from me by this short interval.

*

When I think of “Proustian” in terms of style, I think of sinuous sentences overflowing with figurative language: metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, paradox, metonymy, synecdoche, and more. When I think of “Proustian” in terms of theme, I think about memory, grief, obsession, art, love, class, and the tension between expectations and reality. In my rereading of Swann’s Way, I find the style and themes present from the get-go. Within the first 50 pages, you can see the structure and ideas that will flourish across the remaining thousands.

A typical passage, which is no less striking for being typical, comes this week when he describes the outdoor, nighttime landscape:

Things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer, like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.

He personifies the landscape, “mute expectation,” presents a subtle paradox, “a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance,” which ties in with the idea that projections can be more potent than their source, and ends with a simile of remarkable specificity and detail, “like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.” This all works in concert with the narrator’s own emotions, as he’s silently waiting for his mother, so the landscape’s mood is a projection of his interiority, just as the shadows are projections of the objects, another Proust hallmark.

Last week’s reading left off with the narrator sent to bed. He wants his mom to join him. He needs to connect with her in some way, so he asks the maid, Francoise, to deliver a note, claiming his mom demanded he send it, but Francoise can see through the lie. (Here he makes an observation that rings of the “noble savage” stereotype, saying that “like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her.”) He’s in agony, but the writing of the note and the belief that his mom will read it soothes him:

for that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself—with burned nuts in it—and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides, that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.

The style again comes through. The simile “like a ripe fruit” and the hyperbole “my intoxicated heart” pair with his obsession for his mother. The power the writing gives him to insert himself into her dinner, of joining her psychically if not physically, lets him bear the separation. The agony he feels for her will find echoes in romantic loves, and the narrator makes this plain already when he compares his waiting for an answer from his mom to a man waiting for an answer from a lover after sending a message through a third party.

He waits anxiously and listens as the dinner winds down and the family talks of Swann’s change and pity him for his “wretched wife” who’s involved with Monsieur de Charlus (one of Proust’s greatest creations who will have a spotlight in later volumes). When the narrator’s mom climbs the stairs, the narrator pounces on her, knowing that his father is close behind and that the fear of a scene might cause her to step into the room with the narrator, aware that he is using his father’s approach as “means of blackmail,” which fails because the father arrives before the boy can hide. But the narrator is surprised to find that his father tells her to go with him, because the father isn’t so rigid and maybe because he doesn’t love the narrator as much as the mother and grandmother do, because “they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother: ‘Go and comfort him.’”

Amidst all this, we get a glimpse of time’s tragic passing:

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. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours 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. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Swiftly and briefly, the narrative opens to the future, we’re reminded that what we’ve been reading is in a distant past, and the child’s pain of missing his Mamma for the short dinner gives way to the adult’s grief for the extended separation that has come in adulthood, grief at the fact that while he can hear the echoes he can never return to their source. And the abstract loss of a moment, which we often might not feel because it happens all around and all the time, is replicated and embodied by the demolition of the staircase wall.

In the past, though, in the narrator’s childhood, he’s momentarily happy. He gets to possess his mother for an instant. She’ll read to him. There’s a fun drama to choosing the right books. His grandma has gifted him George Sand novels because she refuses to get him anything poorly written. His agony is soothed, but in the midst of this victory, he reminds himself that this night can’t be repeated, that his desire runs counter to “general requirements” and that the following night he would again be a “victim of anguish.” Time’s passing and its destruction of static bliss haunts him even when he’s a child. He sees his future self suffering; his future self remembers this past and finds little solace. Scenes echo through the grief.

Has anyone read this? I bought it today. It looks really good though and quite a nice companion to the novel.