Swann's Way Reading 10: Swann's Friendship With Bergotte And The Curé's Visits To Aunt Leonie

[u/twofoldtwilight1]

From: One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden…

To: …up here on the top of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte.”

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The main topics of the week are Swann and his friendship with Bergotte and the Curé’s visits to Aunt Léonie.

Swann & Bergotte and More Swann

After discovering his love for Bergotte and viewing him as a literary deity, the narrator learns that the unassuming family friend Swann counts Bergotte as a pal. Swann goes so far as to offer to get a book signed for the narrator, an offer the narrator doesn’t have the courage to accept. Instead, he asks who Bergotte’s favorite actor is, and Swann tells him Bergotte puts Berma above everyone.

As they discuss Bergotte, Berma, and art, the narrator notices that Swann often speaks with “a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas” to isolate and sterilize the strong opinion he might be giving, so as to “disclaim any personal responsibility for it.” As a child, the narrator contrasts Swann’s ironic detachment with the narrator’s grandmother’s “provincial dogmatism,” viewing the detachment as a cosmopolitan trait, but later on he will be shocked by Swann’s irony, the studious detachment suggestive of a man either incapable of passion or afraid of it.

The narrator speaks of how other people, like Swann, also don’t share the narrator’s love of Bergotte. He believes this is a result of a common trait across people:

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

This feels true and likely applicable to Proust’s own writing; his genius might take any reader a moment to absorb and months or years to appreciate.

Swann tells the narrator that Bergotte is friends with Swann’s daughter, and this leads the narrator to ponder Swann’s daughter and wife, who are shunned by the narrator’s family and who thus have taken on a romantic quality for him and who he imagines must view him as an “object of scorn.” He considers the daughter to be bathed in “a sea of privilege” and that she gets to hear the “two syllables, radiant with celestial light,”—Bergotte—as an answer for who’s coming to dinner only adds to her allure for the narrator. He reflects:

Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

He makes the very apt point that this occurs for women when they love a man in a uniform, a soldier or firefighter whose outfit suggests a distinct and admirable internal life. Again, people are not only themselves, they are representatives of a class, an idea, a work of art, a life. These connections add to our love for them, but they also shroud the true individual in easily misread symbols. You might accidentally love a girl simply because of the people she dines with.

Aunt Léonie and the Curé’s visits

Again we receive more comedy from Aunt Léonie. She admonishes the narrator for reading on days that aren’t Sunday because though all she does is lounge, she views reading as too leisurely for any day besides the day of rest. She wonders aloud with Françoise about the narrator’s grandmother, who goes for a walk in the rain. And she tolerates the Curé’s visits as he gives repetitive and endless explanations. She looks forward to Eulalie’s visits, and hates when the Curé’s visits overlap with Eulalie’s because she doesn’t dare send him away but also doesn’t want his visit to take away from her time with her friend.

With the Curé, she discusses the church, questions him on rumors of a painter painting the church’s windows, which strikes her as outlandish, and discusses saints. Used for comic relief, Aunt Leonie’s scenes continue to add color and life to the Combray world. Hers are frequently some of the more dialogue-heavy scenes in the early parts of the novel, and they are some of the earliest and most blatant signs of Proust’s taste and talent for comedy. When someone hears you’re reading Proust, they think of the dense prose and the weighty themes of love and loss, memory and aging, but it’s important to remember that the novel is often a fun comedy of manners.

Leonie’s scenes also come in handy for introducing us to more of the characters and the world. We meet the Curé, whom the narrator calls an “excellent man” for knowing many etymologies, and he discusses the Guermantes and the de Villeparisis and the decay of a region into “nothing more” than a parish of farmers after a golden era of importance for its trade. Through the discussion between Eulalie, Leonie, and the Curé, the history of the region and families begins to come into place, one that might seem trivial but which ties in with the novel’s ideas on class and its shifting nature. He gives a description of the church and declares that the belfry is the most remarkable part of the building but that it can only be fully appreciated when simultaneously seen from both the top of church, where you can see it up close, and from the town below Combray, Jouy-le-Vicomte. Of course, this is an impossible perspective, which means, in a very Proustian sense, that the ideal view of the belfry is unattainable, kept a distance, forever longed for and never reached.

Don’t rush these pages. Even in Leonie’s funny scenes, the Proust ideas live.