The end of the day.

Our narrator is looking back from his vast distance of time, and sad that the Bois he loved is no more, that elegant ladies no longer stroll beside their carriages, with a style and grace that was a joy to see. And I have come to the end of volume one, and going to leave this blog at that. As I come upon favourite quotes I shall add them, but no more big chunks. I know some of you have enjoyed this, and hope you get as much pleasure in the future as I continue to get from Proust.

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 now only to the little world
of space on which we map them for our own 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 form is but regret for a
particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the
years.

Bedrooms and sleepless nights.

PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME

Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which, washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline.

Charles Swann - free of Odette at last

Our hero, Charles Swann, now believes himself to be free of his love for Odette. The pain, jealousy and anguish are over (for now). The end of the volume finds him reflecting on this experience.

But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which—in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her—he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: “To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”

In one film version of Time Regained, Odette de Crecy was played by Catherine Deneuve. Most beautifully, one might add.

Swann meets an old friend on an omnibus

Our dear friend Swann meets Mme Cottard on an omnibus, and she tells him all about Odette and the boating trip with the Verdurins. So engaged in conversation is she, that she almost misses her stop. But she never loses her sense of form, and even though Swann has long been out of favour with the little gang, she doesn't hesitate to offer him her hand in parting.

And Mme. Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a white-gloved hand from which there floated, with a transier-ticket, an atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with the harsher fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme. Verdurin (and almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described, now, as love), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with loving eyes, as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte, her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she clasped her umbrella and her card-case, so that its monogram could be seen, her muff dancing in the air before her as she went.

One for you to try at home.

First we find the Princess de Laumes in a reflective mood:

Brought up in a provincial household with few friends or visitors, hardly ever invited to a ball, she had fuddled her mind, in the solitude of her old manor-house, over setting the pace, now crawling-slow, now passionate, whirling, breathless, for all those imaginary waltzing couples, gathering them like flowers, leaving the ball-room for a moment to listen, where the wind sighed among the pine-trees, on the shore of the lake, and seeing of a sudden advancing towards her, more different from anything one had ever dreamed of than earthly lovers are, a slender young man, whose voice was resonant and strange and false, in white gloves.

The Princess de Laumes is enjoying the Chopin, and found it quite 'ch charming', so that her lips... Do read on:

And so Mme. des Laumes could let her head sway to and fro, fully aware of the cause, with a perfect appreciation of the manner in which the pianist was rendering this Prelude, since she knew it by heart. The closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded already on her lips. And she murmured “How charming it is!” with a stress on the opening consonants of the adjective, a token of her refinement by which she felt her lips so romantically compressed, like the petals of a beautiful, budding flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony, illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental gaze.

So do practise saying 'charming' until your lips are like the petals of a beautiful, budding flower.
Pip pip

Odette begins to tire of Swan, or at least somewhat cool towards him.

In the first flashes of love, Odette would do many things to demonstrate her affection for our friend Charles Swann, but now she behaves in a very different manner.

"It sometimes happened, again, that, when, after meeting Swann, she saw some man approaching whom he did not know, he could distinguish upon Odette’s face that look of sorrow which she had worn on the day when he had come to her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for, on the days when, in spite of all that she had to do, and of her dread of what people would think, she did actually manage to see Swann, the predominant quality in her attitude, now, was self-assurance; a striking contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge for, perhaps a natural reaction from the timorous emotion which, in the early days of their friendship, she had felt in his presence, and even in his absence, when she began a letter to him with the words: “My dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write.” (So, at least, she pretended, and a little of that emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have been anxious to enlarge and emphasise it.) So Swann had been pleasing to her then. Our hands do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love. When they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful, how easy, how bold do we become in their presence!"

Swann in Love

Over the last few days I have been reading the chapter 'Swann in Love', and there are no short little quotable quotes that I can discern, save the start of long sentences or bits that occur at the end of longer passages that might need some explanation. I love the opening lines 'To be adimitted....', so I have chosen them, a middle bit about Swann's thoughts on Odetter (the lady in pink of the Uncle Adolphe episode', and Swanns fall from grace in the salon of the Verdurins'. As I recall, I am ending around the point when Swann truly realises he is on love with Odetter.

'To admit you to the ‘little nucleus,’ the ‘little group,’ the ‘little clan’ at the Verdurins’, one condition sufficed, but that one was indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under her patronage that year, and of whom she said “Really, it oughtn’t to be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!” left both Planté and Rubinstein ‘sitting’; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant diagnostician than Potain. Each ‘new recruit’ whom the Verdurins failed to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out for themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical spirit and this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to expel, one after another, all those of the ‘faithful’ who were of the female sex.'

'He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the more or less good quality of her cheeks, and the softness and sweetness—as of carnation-petals—which, he supposed, would greet his lips there, should he ever hazard an embrace, but regarded it rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken threads, which his gazing eyes collected and wound together, following the curving line from the skein to the ball, where he mingled the cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself, in which her type was made clearly intelligible.'

But before we lose Swann from the salon, there was the episode with the cattleyas:

'She had in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was wearing, under her cloak, a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a large triangular patch of her white silk skirt, with an ‘insertion,’ also of white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word; just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I put the flowers straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I’m afraid of their dropping out; I’m just going to fasten them a little more securely.”

She was not used to being treated with so much formality by men, and smiled as she answered: “No, not at all; I don’t mind in the least.”'

And now the Verdurins' have engineered Swann's fall from grace, and pairing Odette with Forcheville.
Dr Cottard sets the question:

“Why, aren’t we going to see M. Swann this evening? He is quite what you might call a personal friend...” “I sincerely trust that we sha’n’t!” cried Mme. Verdurin. “Heaven preserve us from him; he’s too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor.”

On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth which contradicted everything that he had previously believed, but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; with timorous emotion he bowed his head over his plate, and merely replied: “Oh—oh—oh—oh—oh!” traversing, in an orderly retirement of his forces, into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole compass of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann at the Verdurins’.

Heigh ho.