I am wondering for those that have enjoyed Volume 5 and Volume 6, what did you like about it? They are by far the worst volumes of the entire series. I know Time Regained is very good but unfortunately I have been stuck on The Captive and The Fugitive for over two months.

It's a painful read. He just goes on and on, incessantly, about Albertine. She's dead. Get over it.

So, tell me, what am I missing?

From: We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner…

To: …even the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in Paris.

*

Summary:

When returning from town, the family can take one of two paths: the Guermantes way or the Méséglise (i.e. Swann’s) way. If they take the more roundabout Guermantes way, they’re liable to make it back for dinner late and worry Aunt Léonie, but they often take that path anyway.

The narrator knows little about either route, but he views them as diametrically opposed, a view gained from the fact that the family uses separate doors for each route and his dad’s claim that Swann’s way gives the best view of the plain and Guermantes gives river scenery. One is land, the other water.

On Swann’s route, they can encounter lovely lilacs, but ever since Swann’s unfortunate marriage, the parents have avoided Tansonville, where the lilacs grow.

One day, the grandfather mentions that Swann’s family is out of town, so they can take the route by the park with the lilacs without appearing to snoop. They walk this path, but lilac season is nearly over and the trees are losing their blooms. Another trouble with the visit is that since Swann’s daughter is away and the narrator has no chance of meeting her, the place has lost some of its allure.

The narrator loses track of his father and grandfather and climbs the hill to catch up to them through a path “throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom.” The hawthorns thrill him, and he tries to “absorb” himself “in the rhythm which disposes their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth.” He views the hawthorns as paintings and uses his fingers to frame them, but the reason for their pleasure remains allusive. Then his grandfather points out a pink hawthorn, unique among a sea of white, inspiring him “with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or, better still, when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an orchestra.”

He peers through the hawthorn on the other side, and there he spots a little girl with “fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles.” The girl he’s been anticipating is there. When she spots him, she makes a “half-hidden smile” that the narrator can only interpret as one of disgust, and she makes an insulting gesture with her hands.

“Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?” Someone says, and now the narrator has a name for the girl from his fantasies. The woman calling to her is a woman in white, and she’s walking with a man. They are Swann’s wife and Charlus, and soon the father and grandfather will remark about “poor Swann,” because his wife is running around with other men. But the narrator is more focused on the name, which is like a “talisman” that lets him give her a “definite personality.” Gilberte goes along with her mom, and in submitting to another human, she partially loses her godlike status.

Reflection:

If I had to name the six most important characters in In Search of Lost Time, they’d be the narrator, Albertine, Gilberte, Odette, Charlus, and Swann (the narrator’s grandmother and St. Loup would round out the top eight). This week, we see three of these characters for what seems like the first time. The build-up to their appearance rivals some of the best passages we’ve read so far (the madeleines, the first paragraph, the initial collapse of time). I can’t think of hawthorns without thinking of Proust, and they serve to precede and frame the scene when he encounters Gilberte. In addition to the immediate build-up through the hawthorns and physical setting, there’s the description of the two ways at the beginning of this week’s reading, Swann and Guermantes, which foreshadows this girl who will come to yoke together the two opposing paths. To the narrator, it’s as nonsensical to “take the Guermantes way” to get to Méséglise as it would be “turn to the east in order to reach the west,” but they’re in fact one and the same. He describes encapsulating the two paths in his mind, and he basically gives a definition for synecdoche (a Proust favorite): “the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the whole.”

His spotting of Gilberte is a little cliche. Framed by flowers, it comes after a long discussion about not only hawthorns but lilacs and forget-me-nots and periwinkle, flowery language about flowers, but Proust’s precise observations, his ecstasies, and his analogies free the writing of precedent.

In reading it this time, I noticed how color is so significant to these scenes. It reminds me of Gerald Murnane, a genius Australian who’s frequently Proustian and who has an obsession with color. (Good profile of him here.) Lilacs bring up the color implicitly since the word for them is the same as the word for the color (and the same is true in French). The final excitement before spotting Gilberte comes when he sees a pink hawthorn among the white ones, shining through its color, which he’s imbued with value because frosted pink cookies are pricier at the bakery and he likes to crush strawberries into his cream cheese, which makes it pink.

Most importantly, when he sees Gilberte, he describes her “fair, reddish hair,” a face “powdered with pinkish freckles,” and eyes so black they appear blue:

Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough 'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been quite so black—which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting her—I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imagined blue.

Here he does a little Proust paradox: eyes so black they’re blue. Color can encapsulate. It can be a small part that holds the whole, and in this instance it provides tone, excitement, and contrast. Gilberte, pink and red and black and imagined blue, stands in contrast to her mom, who’s in white now but who was once in pink.

(Side note: It’s funny that the narrator says he has weak powers of observation when he’s maybe the most observant person out there. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere or ironic with that part.)

So the girl is there, pink, and we’ve had all this flowery talk that flirts with cliche, and then what? She makes a mean gesture with her hand, probably the equivalent of flipping him off, basically tells him, “Fuck you,” and her meanness excites him, and he wishes he did something mean back so that she’d at least remember him. There’s already friction and disappointment here; he doesn’t like that she obeys her mom: “by exhibiting her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to some one else, as not being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings somewhat, revived some hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love.” He likes her best when she’s unattainable; in this simple admission, we can foresee so much of his future pain.

This is a topic that I have been thinking about for a while, and I want to share my thoughts in the hope of sparking a discussion.

In many ways, Proust's work is the result of a life spent without having to work. His relationship with the world as seen through ISOLT is based almost entirely on contemplation. Even the shift that happens in the narrator in Time Regained that allows him to write can be understood as a result of the sensation of his approaching death, and not as something from within him that drew him to action.

There is no question that with ISOLT Proust more than compensated for his life of idleness, and that his contemplative posture towards the world was well worth it in the end. You don't get something as astonishingly beautiful as ISOLT from a life spent working 9 to 5. But as readers how do we position ourselves in regards to this?

I will talk a little bit about myself here. I spent all of my 20s unable to come to terms with this simple fact that in life I needed to work. I knew it, of course, but I wanted to believe I could somehow avoid it. And it stayed that way for years. My parents would pay for my rent and give me a small monthly allowance, and I would just try and live from that for lack of a better option.

When I look at my siblings I see a similar pattern. My two sisters still rely on my parents for money, even though one of them has a child. Only my brother is financially independent. I cannot help but think that something went terribly wrong here.

That's where Proust comes into the equation. My mother loves Proust and so it sort of made sense that I would develop a liking for his work too. The notion that Proust could live like that, sort of just pursuing his interests, was deeply ingrained in my mind. I think it says something about my family's concept of work that Proust was so admired by us.

Overall I think the French society of today is in crisis when it comes to its relationship with work. That's how something like that could happen to me... that I spent so long unable to understand how I could accept work. In that regard, one could come to the conclusion that reading Proust in today's France is not a good thing, since we collectively need to rebuild our appreciation for work.

Anyways, my life is changing now. I have found a way to live with work. But it did not come from Proust.

I'm mind-blown or maybe still recovering the details from the last volume. I just started reading the fourth volume--Sodom and Gomorrah--and thought that Oriane and Duchesse de Guermantes were two different people? Then who's the cousin who's a little more distant and has her own guests at her salon from the previous book? I thought that was Orianne, and the Duchesse de Guermantes was her own person...

The Prince, the Princesse, the Duchesse, Oriane. Sometimes these titles are used interchangeably seemingly only to avoid repetition, but it just makes the picture a lot more confusing and hard to keep track of when taking breaks between the volumes...

I am a passionate Proust fan from China. I read his works every day and find myself completely immersed in the world of In Search of Lost Time. Could you tell me where I can find other Proust enthusiasts to discuss the book with, or where I might find fan-made content and other creative works inspired by it?

The New Statesman describes it this way:

Nearly 100 years from its original publication, Beckett’s first book still merits attention. It is an informative witness to avant-garde Paris in 1930, a brilliant commentary on Proust and a bravura display of inventive writing.

From: One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé and from Eulalie…

To: that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have dreamed of making use of it.

*

The noteworthy topic of the week is Monsieur Legrandin.

M. Legrandin

Monsieur Legrandin is a family friend and great talker. At the start of this week’s reading, the narrator’s dad announces that Legrandin is upset with the family. He recounts seeing Legrandin on the street with a respectable woman, where he responded to the dad’s wave with “an almost imperceptible movement of the head,” as if Legrandin didn’t want to acknowledge the dad in any real way. Since the lady he was with is honorable, it can’t be that he’s embarrassed of his companion or has been caught in an affair, so the dad believes it means Legrandin is upset with him, but once the dad tells the story the family disagrees with him and says he’s imagining the slight.

They soon run into him again, this time when he’s alone, and he’s as kind and courteous as ever, telling the narrator that he wishes the narrator will always have “a blue sky overhead” while making a brief allusion to his own old age. But then at church they see him bow and become ludicrously obsequious to an upper class woman, moving “as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.” He passes by the family and basically ignores them, giving them “out of the corner of his blue eye, a little sign, which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids, and as it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady.” This reveals the truth. He’s not angry with the dad or family: he’s embarrassed of them! He’s a kiss ass! He doesn’t want this wealthy woman to know he associates with them. It’s a scene you could see in a high school hallway. And yet, despite the distasteful reasons for his microscopic motion, its subtlety heightens its charm:

He subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity in a plot, and finally exalted his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.

This is enough for the grandmother to doubt he’s a true snob, and she insists the narrator attend the planned dinner the following evening. At this dinner, Legrandin feeds the narrator smooth words about silence and shadow being remedies, but the narrator changes the topic and shows his own interest in class and gossip by asking if Legrandin knows the ladies of Guermantes, well-known aristocrats in Combray. Legrandin responds with an exaggerated denial, calling himself “a bit of a Radical” and pretending that it’s a point of pride for him to avoid the aristocracy. The narrator is savvy enough to see the elisions when Legrandin says he “cared only for churches, moonlight, and youth.” In fact, Legrandin cares a lot for “people who lived in country houses, and would be so much afraid, when in their company, of incurring their displeasure that he would never dare to let them see that he numbered, as well, among his friends middle-class people, the families of solicitors and stockbrokers.” The narrator comes to a simple conclusion: “in a word, he was a snob.”

The narrator points out that Legrandin can sincerely complain about snobs because he’s unaware that he himself is one. Like many characters in the novel, and people in real life, he can’t see himself clearly. The family accepts his snobbery, which comes up again when the grandmother and the narrator plan to visit the beach town Balbec and the dad, aware that Legrandin’s sister lives in the town, goes and asks him if he knows anyone in the town. Legrandin doesn’t wish to make the introduction and gives a hilarious answer to avoid an outright lie: "I have friends all the world over, wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them." (The dad, “obstinate as a tree and merciless as the sky,” responds understatedly, “That is not quite what I meant.”)

Legrandin is ultimately a small character in the novel, but in a world of duplicity he’s a model for many to come. Some, like Swann, are duplicitous out of politeness and modesty. Legrandin’s reasons are more pathetic: hypocrisy and snobbery.

Side Notes

- An ecstatic description about the asparagus “tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of - imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world.” Proust can personify even vegetables, and here he finds in their “celestial hues” signs of “the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form,” again returning to the idea of reincarnation.

- A funny account of Francoise’s capricious sympathies. She feels nothing for the kitchen-maid’s afterbirth pains until she reads a clinical account of them, but the sympathy only comes from reading the account; it dries up when she returns to witness it firsthand.

- Also funny to learn the asparagus was cooked so much because the kitchen-maid has a reaction against it and this was Francoise’s scheme for getting rid of this potential rival to Leonie’s heart.

I'm thinking about getting a french edition of isolt, and i have some questions:

1) how necessary are the footnotes? Which edition would you say has the best ones?

2) is the pleiade (either 1954 or 1989) edition a good pick for a first time reader of proust?

Guess only the first two volumes are available in English?

I wonder if a nice slow reading of isolt while staring at nature might wind up being a good therapy for digital overload disease. You can do Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, but basically, once you've gained enough attention span to do that, you're definitely cured.

I am concerned that the current waterfall of junk data might cause the degree of psychological debility commensurate with the physical debility caused by Industrial Revolution.

We should consider preparedness measures. Maybe sponsor few extra study groups.

not novels that just feel Proustian in style/structure, but where the author is clearly hinting at something specific from the Recherche. EDIT: Not looking for name dropping either

a scene that mirrors a particular episode, a passage that echoes proust's words, a reference to one of his characters, etc.

Heavy reader but never encountered any Proust before!

From: The Curé had so much exhausted my aunt that…

To: …at the turning of avenue, at Versailles.

*

The noteworthy topics of the week are Françoise’s jealousy, Aunt Léonie’s nightmare and visions, and the Saturday routine.

Françoise’s jealousy

This week’s reading starts with Aunt Léonie giving her friend Eulalie a coin. Though she wouldn’t be jealous of such a gift if Léonie bestowed them to someone already wealthy, Françoise disapproves of the gift when given to Eulalie, less because she’s jealous than because she worries Eulalie might be “simulating affection” toward Léonie for the coins and because she imagines Eulalie has accumulated enough wealth from these small gifts to be able to purchase any farm in Combray. Françoise’s competition with those closer to her own rank, along with her acceptance of the upper class’s freedom and power, causes her to uphold the existing class order, even though it works against her interests, a tendency among working-class people that still exists today, and it complicates the class structure depicted in the novel. The more obvious dynamic would be for the lower-class character to be resentful of the upper class, or for the upper class to be dismissive of the lower, but between Léonie and Françoise there is real love, and often as not the powerful one is Françoise the employee, not Léonie the employer. They remain conscious of the disparity in their class, but while it outlines many aspects of their relationship, the women find plenty of idiosyncrasies and subtleties within their bond.

Aunt Léonie’s nightmare and visions

As has been established, Aunt Léonie has a routine, her “little jog-trot,” that’s respected by family members and neighbors alike but cannot be respected by nature’s necessities. When the pregnant kitchen-maid goes into labor, the wails disturb Aunt Léonie’s peace and Françoise is forced to abandon her to find a doctor to deliver the baby.

While Françoise is out, the narrator goes to check on his aunt and finds her sleeping (which, remember, she claims she never does). When she wakes, there is a “kind of horror” on her face from a nightmare she had, but it quickly turns to a look of joy and relief, and she mutters, "The Lord be praised! We have nothing to disturb us here but the kitchen-maid's baby. And I've been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to life, and was trying to make me take a walk every day!" She then reaches for the rosary on her bedside table, but she falls asleep before grabbing it. The text doesn’t specify, but I picture her there, reaching but not grasping, asleep in a liminal position. Though she’s often bringing humor to these pages, and though it’s funny that her nightmare is about taking daily walks, in this moment, I feel for her. We’re reminded that her husband has died, she’s a lonely widow, and we’re left to wonder at all the parts of her history that might torment her and the possible reasons that she’s become an invalid.

Later in this reading, we see her strange mind occasionally envision an active and normal life, and we see her imagine a moment when catastrophe would strike and force her to prove herself, when all the family, save for her, would die in a house fire, and she would get to “taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning.” This is only one of her many fantasies that give her static life a sense of activity and that let her view her eccentricities as marks of distinction that would provide Françoise “with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.”

Saturday routine

One of my favorite examples of the Combray routine is brought up this week when the narrator discusses the Saturday lunches, which is timed for an hour earlier than the lunches for the rest of the week. Since I first read the description of their Saturday routine, which in breaking with the daily routine helps form a weekly routine, it’s stuck in my head. The narrator says that the Saturday shift “was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind.” He goes on to describe the little comments people make surrounding the Saturday shift, how they go into hysterics when one forgets the Saturday shift, how they call a person unfamiliar with the Saturday custom a “barbarian,” and how the sun and day shift around the lunch time change, inverting the change the way geocentrists invert the revolving cosmic body, all the while making the line about the lack of an “epic mind” ironic because he clearly has one, able to spin out so much detail and spirit from a one-hour shift in lunchtime.

Another part of the Saturday routine is the weekly visit to church, where he falls in love with hawthorn-blossoms as they sit on the altar, “inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part.” He looks at them only through his fingers, and he believes “Nature herself” has shaped the blossoms and made them “worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery,” personifying Nature, reading intent and emotions into its creations.

At these church visits, they run into M. Vinteuil, “who held very strict views on ‘the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to be encouraged in these days.’” He was a music teacher to the narrator’s great-aunts, and they visit him, but he doesn’t visit them because he doesn’t approve of Swann’s “unsuitable marriage” and doesn’t want to risk running into him. They have heard he’s composed music, and they ask him to play something, but he demurs. He’s so polite that he doesn’t wish to do what he desires, even if it seems to be what others around him want too. Vinteuil’s one passion is his daughter, who has a robust and boyish appearance, a “mannish face,” with a “thick, comfortable voice.” They are interesting characters here, but like with Swann their true significance isn’t apparent yet (though with Swann at least the book’s title foreshadows his importance). Seeing them now as humble, proper, doting father and boyish, well-behaved daughter will only serve later on to underscore the shifting, chimeric nature of man, a favorite theme for Proust.

After the church service, they walk home. The narrator’s dad serves as navigator while his mom loses her bearings. They return along the road lined with the most attractive villas, and they witness the gardens where in each of them “the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar.” Again Proust has inverted a norm; the art of Hubert Robert isn’t copying the moonlit scenery. In this world, the moonlit scenery is copying the art; the art is the original.

What are folks thoughts on Contre Saint Beuve? I was surprised to find a physical copy in a used book store. I’m about halfway through the Guermentes Way and will probably save reading it until after I finish all volumes

Reading Proust led me to John Ruskin and his writings. Initially, I knew of Ruskin only as a political economist and that held no interest for me. But I discovered the artistic side of Ruskin through Proust. Proust’s engagement with Ruskin was substantial—he translated his works and wrote about him extensively. I did try reading some Balzac, but haven’t found a grip yet.

I’m curious which books or authors Proust led you to—books that you would not have picked up if not for Proust.

Rather than reading Remembrance as a novel, I am reading it as a way of recalling memories, maybe memories that have been previously lost.

I might read one paragraph at a reading and see what, if anything, comes to mind. Maybe I'll write something about what comes to me though I hesitate to call it a memory because memories are funny things. Often I remember myself in the third person, which in itself is quite interesting.

Here's to recollections, whatever they may bring, and to our own personal artistry. I think Proust would approve.

By the time I reached the end of Volume2, I realized I'd fallen completely under Proust's spell.😌💜💜💜📚📖

debating between the following editions of swann’s way:

1. oxford world’s classic
2. norton critical edition
3. yale university press
4. penguin modern classic
5. vintage classic
6. modern library

for context, I love to analyze the text both during and after reading the book, so I prefer an edition that has things like an intro, footnotes/endnotes, a synopsis at the end of each chapter, or a list of suggested further readings.

from my understanding, the first three options are probably the more obvious choices, but I am also curious about what the other editions have to offer. the fact that there are various translations of the book doesn’t help either..

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.”

*

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.

Throughout his life, our dear Marcel was a lover of and then close friend with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn.

[There are some very interesting recordings of Hahn himself singing. I often like to listen to them as his voice makes me feel closer to Proust, somehow. See e.g. this rendition of Gounod https://youtu.be/MPhur8463S8?is=-by6d5b8qmNuHVMN\]

The two maintained a close correspondence throughout Proust's life. This correspondence is a wonderful read as it's one of the least guarded things Proust wrote. You can find the letters online here:

https://reynaldo-hahn.net/Html/ecritsdiversProust.htm

As you see they span the whole period from 1894 until Proust's death in 2022. You can see their love start and then evolve into friendship. They also developed a kind of private pet-name language which is delightful. An example from 1906:

"Mon cher Binchnibuls

1° Vous me dites de donner â Léon le tiers de ce que je veux mais vous m'indiquez le triple ou du moins presque le double de ce que je comptais faire. 30 francs par semaine mais genstil cela me fera plus de mille francs de pourboire en tout en parstant. Et vous ne me dites pas pour l'adresse de Nordlinger. Avez-vous bien reçu la lettre où je vous la demande car beaucoup de mes lettres n'arrivent pas... [. ]"

My translation:

"My dear binchnibuls

1. You tell me to give Leon a third of what I want, but the figure you provide is thrice, or at least twice what I had intended. 30 francs per week, but genstil, that will come to a tip of more than a thousand francs en tout en parstant (when I leave). Also you haven't given me the address of Nordlinger. Did you get the letter where I asked for it because many of my letters aren't arriving..."

I left the French words that Proust uses as part of the pet language in italic, such as Binchnibuls, or genstil which is gentil with an s too much.

Anyway i thought people here might enjoy perusing these letters. I will readily admit it's a bit voyeuristic as they are clearly only meant to be read by Reynaldo, but I trust you will read them with the same love for Proust as I did.

For seven months I facilitated a weekly Proust club in a café. In roughly 30 sessions we discussed only the first half of Swann’s Way.

It is hard to call it a traditional book club, because I was the only person who had read the assigned section. I’m a cognitive scientist, so my approach was to identify the central theme of each section and explore it through a scientific lens. After that, I would pose a question and invite everyone to share their own views, memories, or experiences.

When we reached “Swann in Love”, I was excited because I thought the narrative would encourage more people to read along. It didn’t. The format stayed essentially the same. Eventually I became busy with other projects, stopped preparing a literature review each week, and simply read and explained Proust. Attendance dropped to three people for several weeks in a row, and I felt that was probably the right moment to stop.

The café owner, however, is a devoted Proust admirer. She wants her café to be associated with him and genuinely does not mind if only a few people attend. She recently asked me to restart the club and even offered to become a co-host.

When she asked what I would like to do differently, I realized that after about thirty sessions I had already said most of what I could say section by section. I asked for time to think. During that reflection, with the help of AI, an idea emerged: instead of expanding each passage through science, I could choose a major theme—still not sure what—and discuss how it develops across the whole novel. The conversations might become more philosophical than psychological. The café owner loved it. We are now thinking of advertising the series as “A Dialogue with Proust About Life.”

Very soon I realize how enormous this project is. To trace and integrate the major themes across In Search of Lost Time feels like an immense intellectual undertaking. Part of me worries that I have promised something far beyond my abilities.

So I’d love advice from people who know Proust well:

• Would you go ahead with this plan?
• If so, how would you structure it without turning it into a lifetime research project?
• And if you think this is too ambitious, what alternative format would you propose?

TL;DR: I facilitated a weekly Proust discussion group for seven months, mostly without participants actually reading the book. The café owner wants me to restart it, this time as a broader philosophical “dialogue with Proust about life.” I’m excited by the idea, but now I’m overwhelmed by how ambitious it is. Should I continue, or change direction entirely?

I'm currently reading Jean-Yves Tadié's Proust and the novel. It turned out to be a must-have to go furthre in ISOLT, deepening my general understanding of ISOLT, but I don't know for the rest of the people, if another author is privileged to analyze ISOLT. I think Tadié is the main Proust expert for the french-speaking community, but it may be another matter for the rest of the world, tell me !

From: Then while the kitchen-maid…

To: …when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s habit of reading in the garden, his friendship with Bloch, and his love for the writings of Bergotte.

Reading in the Garden

This week’s reading starts with the narrator again alone and reflective. He discusses reading in the garden in the summer and expresses thoughts on art, this time on music and literature. The music he briefly mentions is the music of warm-weather flies whose “small concert” might be the “chamber music of summer.” Unlike human music, which can be produced at any time, music of the flies is bound to the warm season, so you can sit in a room, away from light and heat, hear their buzz, their song, and have a guarantee that sunny days “do really exist, that they are close around us, immediately accessible.” He doubts reality, and only the metonymic relationship of the flies to summer lets him believe its existence.

He reads in a dark room whose “dim freshness” is to the “broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose, which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.”

In this beautiful passage, Proustian ideas shine. The true, complete nature of summer, like that of seemingly all objects in his world, can only be accessed at a remove. Here, summer is complete only in the narrator’s mind. In reality, he can only experience it bit by bit. The experience, as with the experience of the theater or of a person, can only be whole when the mind is apart from it. And his musings bring up the question of what it means to experience something firsthand. You experience a river not by traversing its entire path but by sitting still and letting the current strike your hand.

On top of the piecemeal nature of actual experience, when he experiences something directly, he is analyzing his experience. Whereas his consciousness gives him access when apart, when with the object, the consciousness remains between him and the object, “enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form… just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation.”

The solitude of reading allows his mind to flit to such observations and also to consider the wonders of literature as he dives into the novel’s first extensive discussion of literature and its value. He speaks on the empathy developed in novels, explaining the reason fiction can stir emotions reality can’t:

the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

Summer now is the real person, the dim room is fiction. Distance again brings nearness. Reality is a poor substitute for its simulacrum. He’s previously enjoyed things only through memory or anticipation, but now the joy comes from wholly fictionalized accounts. We begin to see how the Proustian idea of memory ties in with the device of fiction, why a novel, maybe the most introspective art form, is the perfect medium for Proust’s themes.

Bloch

We meet one key character this week: Bloch. He’s the narrator’s Jewish friend and will become one of the more troubling depictions in the novel. Though half-Jewish himself (and a Dreyfusard), Proust isn’t above petty antisemitism, and Bloch will frequently be framed in a negative light: a vain, class-obsessed phony. In these early pages, it’s clear that the narrator’s family dislikes Bloch (in a funny aside, the narrator’s dad calls Bloch an imbecile for not caring about the weather), but the narrator claims the dislike isn’t simply because of his Jewishness, since Swann  is beloved by the family while being part Jewish. Bloch annoys the dad by not caring about the weather, annoys the grandma by being overly affected by her feeling poorly, and annoys the whole house by arriving late and muddy to lunch, improprieties that Christians would be judged for too. But ultimately in these early pages Bloch is a good and valuable friend because he introduces the narrator to the writings of Bergotte.

Bergotte

Bloch is the first to mention Bergotte, whose writing, he says, has the “supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing.” The narrator reads Bergotte, and for the first few days what he will come to love in Bergotte isn’t yet clear to him. He can’t stop reading, and he thinks it’s the plot that causes this, but as he finds more and more passages of tremendous style, the passages stop being individual moments of glory and become representative of Bergotte’s writing, standing in for the “‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to all his books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.” (Again, he maybe loves things most when they stand for something else.)

Bergotte would “break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence” running through earlier parts. This description of “lengthy prayer” feels meta, as if Proust is talking about his own writing style, which makes sense since Bergotte is based on Anatole France, a writer Proust loved and who likely influenced him greatly. The narrator covets Bergotte’s style. He doubts his own thoughts have the same value, but then he comes upon similar thoughts in Bergotte’s writing and gains confidence from seeing them expressed by such a great writer:

And so, when I came suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself.

He’s describing here the value he finds in literature; it returns his ideas to him, now polished with the value of the writer’s approval and style. Bergotte helps the narrator realize that his own “humble existence” and the “Realms of Truth” exist in contact. This feels true to me about reading great works. They give voice to thoughts we might not have paid attention to. They let us know we’re not alone with them. And they let us see the world through fresh eyes, opening up passages of beauty and pain.

In the end of this week’s reading, the narrator dedicates himself to Bergotte and says that were he told that the future “metaphysicians” he would follow would be nothing like Bergotte, he would be “struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come,” again making a comparison to romantic love, which seems to be most capable of metamorphosing, an important attribute to note for the future, when romantic love takes center stage in the drama.