Swann's Way

But even as it relates to the most insignificant things of human life, we are not a materially constituted whole, identical to everyone and which a person need only come to know, like an account book or a will; our social personality is created by what others think. (Location 258)

Even this very simple act we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the being we’re seeing with all of our notions about him, and in the more complete picture we form of him, these notions predominate. (Location 260)

tried to attach myself to ideas for the future which would carry me, like over a bridge, across the imminent abyss that so terrified me. (Location 347)

I give credence to this Celtic belief that the souls of those we have lost are captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in an inanimate object, missing to us until the day, which for many never comes, where we find ourselves passing close to the tree, where we enter into possession of the object that is their prison. They begin to tremble, they call to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the enchantment is broken. We having delivered them, they have beaten death and come back to live with us. It’s the same with our past. It’s in vain that we look to conjure it; all the efforts of our intelligence are useless. It’s hidden outside of its domain and its grasp, in some material object (in the sensation this object gives us) we didn’t suspect. Whether or not we meet this object before our death is a question of chance. It had been many years since anything existed for (Location 674)

I had let a piece of madeleine soften. But at the very instant where the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I trembled, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, in isolation, without there being any notion of its cause. In the same instant it made me indifferent to all of life’s tribulations, made its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, operating in the same way as love in filling me with a precious essence: or, rather, this essence wasn’t in me but was me. I no longer felt mediocre, contingent, mortal. But where could this powerful joy have come from? I felt that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake but infinitely exceeded it, was not of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it signify? Where could I apprehend it? I drink a second mouthful which gives me nothing more than first, a third which gives me a little less than the second. It’s time that I stop, the virtue of this drink seems to be diminishing. It’s clear that the truth I’m seeking isn’t in the drink: it’s in me. The tea had awakened this truth but didn’t know it; it could only indefinitely repeat, with less and less force each time, this same testimony, which I wasn’t able to interpret and which I wanted at least to be able to call upon again shortly and find intact, at my disposal, so as to attain a decisive explanation: I put down the cup and turn to my thoughts. They alone could find the truth. But how? The grave incertitude that grips us any time the mind senses it has gone beyond its limits, when it, the searcher, is at the same time the obscure country it must search through and where its luggage is of no use… Search? Not only that: create. It’s in the face of something that’s yet to exist, that it alone can make real and bring to light. (Location 685)

After this central believe which, as I read, moved back and forth between the inner and outer domain, towards the discovery of Truth, came the emotions the action in which I was taking part inspired in me, for these afternoons were filled with as many dramatic events as might occur in a person’s lifetime. These events were those depicted in the book I was reading; it’s true that the people who figured into them weren’t “real,” as Françoise put it. But all the sentiments that make us feel another’s joy or misfortunes are produced in us only by the intermediary that is the image of this joy or misfortune; the ingenuity of the first novelist was in his understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential part, the simplification that constitutes eliminating real people, pure and simple, would be a distinct improvement. A real being, as deeply as we sympathize with him, we perceive him largely through our senses, that is to say he remains opaque to us, offers us a dead weight that can’t be lifted by our sensibility. If he’s struck by misfortune, it’s only in a small part of the complete notion we have of him that we can feel anything for him; and, for that matter, it’s only in a small part of the complete notion he has of himself that this individual can feel something towards his own person. The novelist’s great discovery was in having the idea to replace these impenetrable parts of the soul with a like quantity of immaterial contents, that is things our soul can incorporate into itself. What does it matter whether or not the actions, the emotions of this new genre of beings appear to us as true, when we’ve made them our own, when it’s in us that they’re being produced, when they’re regulating, as we feverishly turn the pages, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in this state of mind where, like in all purely interior s...

...tates, all emotion is heightened, where his book disturbs us in the way a dream does, but a dream that is more clear than those we have when sleeping and our memories of which are more enduring, all at once he unleashes in us, in the span of an hour, every possible joy and sorrow, some of which, in life, take years to come to know, and the most intense of which remain hidden from us because the nature of their slow development prevents us from perceiving them (so changes, in life, our heart, and it’s the greatest sorrow; we can only come to know of it through reading, through imagining: in reality it changes, like certain phenomena produced by nature, so slowly that, if we’re able to note each of its different states in succession, conversely, the feeling of passing through a change is lost on us). Next came—but not as deep within my inner domain as this (Location 1341)

look at the little peas, ranked and numbered like green marbles readied for a game; but what brought me to raptures was the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink and with little spots of lilac and azure, iridescent colours not of this world and whose hues imperceptibly changed all the way down the vegetable’s head and stalk, to its soil-stained feet. It seemed to me that these celestial nuances betrayed the delicious creatures who had been pleased to transform into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm and edible flesh, reveal, in these colours born of dawn, in these hints of a rainbow, in these vestiges of a blue night, this precious essence I still recognize when, the whole night following a dinner where this vegetable had been served, they, in their poetic and coarse farces, like those of Shakespeare’s fairies, played at changing my chamber pot into a vase of perfume. (Location 1951)

Alas, we had to definitively alter our opinion on Legrandin. On a Sunday following the one where we talked with him on the Old Bridge, with my father having had to, afterwards, confess his error, as Mass finished, and as, along with the sunlight and the noise from outside, something so scarcely sacred entered into the church that Mme Goupil, Mme Percepied (everyone who, just before, at my slightly late arrival, was sitting still with their eyes absorbed in their prayers and whom I would have thought hadn’t seen me enter if their feet hadn’t at the same time gently pushed forward the little bench preventing me from getting to my seat) began to converse with us, loudly, on topical things, as though we were already in the square, we saw Legrandin on the porch’s burning threshold being presented, by the husband of the woman we had seen him with the other day, to the wife of another rich squire from the area. Legrandin’s face was suffused with an extraordinary animation and zeal; he made a deep bow with a secondary backwards retraction which abruptly brought his back beyond its initial position and which he must have learnt from his sister’s (Mme de Cambremer’s) husband. This rapid adjustment made Legrandin’s haunches, which I hadn’t supposed to be so fleshy, vibrate with a sort of zipping and muscular wave; and I don’t know why but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal current that lacked spiritual expression and which an eagerness that smacked of baseness had whipped into a storm, all of a sudden awoke in me the possibility of a Legrandin completely different from the one we knew. This lady asked him to say something to her coachman, and while he was stepping down from her carriage the imprint of timid and devout joy the introduction had stamped on his face still lingered there. In a sort of rapturous dream, he smiled, then he went back towards the lady, hurrying, and, as he was walking faster than ...

...usual, his two shoulders oscillated from left to right in a ridiculous manner; and so fully had he, in caring nothing for anything else, abandoned himself to his happiness that he looked as though he were the sentiment’s inert and mechanical puppet. Meanwhile, we were exiting at the porch and passing next to him; he was too well-bred to turn his head away but he fastened his gaze, suddenly charged with a deep dream, on a point so far off on the horizon that he couldn’t see us and so couldn’t acknowledge us with a greeting. His face was still ingenuous above a supple and straight jacket which had the appearance of feeling misled despite itself into detested luxury. And a polka-dotted lavallière (Location 2005)

It so happened that he had asked my parents, the day before, to send me to dine with him on this night, “Come keep your old friend company,” he had said to me. “Like the bouquet that a traveller sends us from a country to which we’ll never be returning, let me breathe in, from your distant adolescence, these spring flowers amid which I too used to dwell, many years ago. (Location 2033)

Legrandin’s behaviour had the same quality as all behaviour and actions that reveal a person’s deeper and concealed character: it didn’t conform with things he had previously said; and we’re unable to confirm its sense vis-à-vis the guilty part, who won’t confess; we’re left to rely on our senses, and ask ourselves, before this isolated and incoherent memory, if we hadn’t been subject to an illusion; to the effect that such behaviour, the only kind that has any importance, often leaves us with a certain amount of doubt. (Location 2044)

And that’s not to say that M. Legrandin wasn’t sincere when he railed against snobs. He couldn’t, at least by his own volition, know that he was a snob, since all we can ever know are others’ passions, and what we come to know about our own we learn only through our neighbours. (Location 2085)

Passing out of this park, the Vivonne again ran swiftly. How many times did I espy, did I dream of imitating, the day I was free to live as I pleased, a rower who, having dropped his oars, lies down flat on his back at the bottom of his boat and lets it drift along the current, seeing nothing but the sky running slowly past him, the taste of peace and happiness suffusing his face. (Location 2762)

I never thought back to this page, but at this moment where, at the seat-corner where the doctor’s coachman ordinarily put in a basket the poultry he had bought at the Martinville market, I had finished writing it, I found myself very happy, I felt it had cleared these steeples, and what they were concealing, from my mind, and like I myself was a hen and had just laid an egg; I sung at the top of the my lungs. (Location 2951)

All day long, in these walks, I had been able to dream of how pleasant it would be to be the Duchess of Guermantes’ friend, to fish for trout, to float down the Vivonne in a little row boat, and, greedy for happiness, in these moments I asked for nothing from life except that it always consist of a succession of pleasant afternoons. (Location 2954)

Guermantes Way no doubt left me exposed, when I was older, to many disappointments, and many mistakes even. For I often wanted to see a person again without realizing that it was simply because they reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns; (Location 3006)

certainly didn’t find her to lack beauty, her beauty was of a kind to which he was indifferent, that didn’t stir his desires but, to the contrary, in a way physically repulsed him, she being one of these women who exist for every man, who was of a type opposed to what his senses demanded; that he should find her pleasing, her profile was too sharp, her skin too fragile, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too drawn. Her eyes were beautiful but so large that they sunk under their own weight, exhausting the muscles of her face and giving her an air of seeming in bad humour or in poor health. (Location 3166)

This love for this musical phrase even seemed, for a moment, to present the possibility of a kind of rejuvenation for Swann. He had long since given up applying himself towards any set goal and had confined his existence to the pursuit of his everyday pleasures, a habit which, without ever formally stating it to himself, he believed would persist until his death. His mind entertaining no elevated notions, he, while unable to affirm their nonexistence, had ceased to regard them as real. Also, he had formed the habit of taking refuge in trivial thoughts, something which allowed him to ignore the more fundamental questions; he would never ask himself if he would have been better off not having entered into society but knew for certain that if he had accepted an invitation he was obliged to honour the commitment and, afterwards, if he didn’t follow up the visit, had to “send cards”; also, he never let himself express any heartfelt opinions in conversation and instead was content with supplying material facts which were in a way valuable in themselves and which made it so that he avoided giving his measure on the subject at hand. He was, for instance, extremely precise when it came to relating a recipe or giving the date of birth of a painter and the list of his works. Sometimes, despite all this, he let himself make a judgement on a particular work of art, or on someone’s view of life, but would attach a certain irony to his words, like he didn’t wholly agree with what he was saying. (Location 3413)

It was the same with the one or two remarks Swann made on his favourite phrase: “That’s funny, I’ve never paid much attention to it. But I’ll tell you that I don’t care much for splitting hairs or getting into the nitty gritty. We don’t waste time nitpicking here, it’s not that kind of place,” Mme Verdurin had said, as Dr. Cottard looked on with admiration and studious zeal at encountering this stream of stock phrases. As for he and Mme Cottard, with a common sense of a sort that certain people from the masses have, they were careful not to express an opinion on or feign admiration for a piece of music that they, at arriving home, would confess to one another as having understood no better than M. Biche’s paintings. As the majority can’t recognize natural forms, don’t know Nature’s charm and grace, save what they’ve gathered from the clichés that, through repetition, have been slowly assimilated into the domain of art—these which an original artist begins by rejecting—, (Location 3457)

Those who loved to shop for antiques, loved poetry, despised all talk of money and dreamt of honour and love, belonged, for Odette, to a superior class of beings. It wasn’t important whether or not the person truly had these tastes, it mattered only that they were proclaimed. (Location 4006)

But, on the contrary, since falling for Odette, since coming to sympathize with her, to try to have but a single soul between them seemed something so tender that he looked to enjoy the things she loved, and even felt a great pleasure at, not only copying her habits, but adopting her opinions, which he preferred to his own because, as they were foreign to his own sense of intelligence, they recalled only his love. (Location 4031)

In reality, not a one among the faithful wasn’t more malicious than Swann; but they all took care to season their slanderous remarks with familiar pleasantries, with a small touch of emotion and cordiality; while any reservations Swann expressed, however slight, but which he never qualified with conventional sayings like “I don’t mean to be unkind but…” which he considered beneath him, appeared to them as treacherous. There are certain original authors who at showing the least bit of boldness are rejected by the general public because they didn’t first flatter the reader’s tastes and didn’t dole out the commonplace sentiments people are accustomed to. It was for this same reason that Swann offended M. Verdurin. As with these writers, it was the novelty of Swann’s language that brought M. Verdurin to perceive certain dark intentions behind his remarks. (Location 4375)

Nights he dined out, he would have his carriage brought at half past seven; while he got dressed he would be dreaming of Odette and therefore didn’t find himself alone, for the constant thought of his mistress gave these moments where he was away from her the same charm he felt at being next to her. He climbed into his carriage, and felt that this thought had jumped in at the same time and settled on his lap like a beloved pet that stays always at its owner’s side. He kept it with him at the table, to the ignorance of the other guests. He caressed it, warmed himself against it, and, feeling a sort of listlessness, abandoned himself to a light shiver he had never before felt and which tensed his neck and nostrils—all while attaching a bouquet of orchids to his buttonhole. As he had been suffering and feeling melancholy for some time, and particularly since the night Odette had brought Forcheville to the Verdurins’, he would have liked to retreat to the country to calm his nerves, but as long as Odette was there he couldn’t bring himself to leave Paris, even for a single day. (Location 4435)

There was a moment during Swann’s speech where Odette had begun to show signs of emotion, of uncertainty. Although she couldn’t grasp its meaning, she understood that it could be classified under the general category of “tirades,” of reproaches or appeals, and her experience with men allowed her to, while overlooking the words themselves, conclude that he wouldn’t be pronouncing them was he not still in love with her, and that so long as he was in love with her obeying him was pointless, for by not obeying him she would only make him love her the more. (Location 4796)

And so it was that he strongly suspected that what he truly longed for was a calm, a peacefulness, which, incidentally, wouldn’t have served his love. When Odette ceased to be an always absent figure, always missed, imaginary, when the sentiment tying him to her was no longer this mysterious turmoil as what the phrase of the sonata caused him, but affection, recognition, when a normal rapport was established between them, putting an end to his mania and his melancholy, then without a doubt Odette’s day to day actions would appear less interesting in themselves—as he now and again suspected was the case, for instance on the day he had read, through the envelope, the letter addressed to Forcheville. Examining his sickness as shrewdly as though he had inoculated himself with it for the purpose of study, he told himself that once he was cured he wouldn’t care what Odette did with her time. But plunged as he was inside his morbid state, he dreaded such a recovery as much as he did death—and, in effect, it would be the death of all that he was presently. (Location 4945)

For, contrary to Swann’s calculations, Odette’s consent changed everything. Like anyone who possesses something dear to him, to know what would come about if for a moment he ceased to possess it, he had removed it from his mind, while leaving everything else in the same state as before. But, with such an absence, it’s more than just an absence and isn’t simply a missing part; it’s an overhaul of everything else, a new state we couldn’t have anticipated in the other. (Location 5043)

she didn’t want that; he went home; on the way he forced himself to form plans for the next day, he stopped dreaming of Odette; he even, as he undressed, met a few happy thoughts; and it was with a hopeful heart, at the thought that tomorrow he would go to look upon a great masterpiece, that he got into bed and put out the light; but as soon as, dressing for bed, he ceased to exercise this constraint over this thoughts, which he had been unconscious of, it being so habitual to him, in this same instant a cold shiver ran through him and he started to sob. (Location 5229)

This compulsion towards a never-ending, unchanging, unprofitable task was so cruel to him that one day, noticing a lump on his stomach, he felt a true sense of joy at the thought that he might have a fatal tumour, that he wasn’t going to have to do anything more, that this illness was going to dictate his life, do with him as it pleased until his imminent death. And, in effect, if, in this period, he often, without admitting it to himself, came to desire death, it was less to escape the violence of his suffering than the monotony of his struggle. (Location 5235)

I find it ridiculous that a man as intelligent as he is can be made to suffer by a woman of that sort, and someone who’s not even interesting, for, from what I hear, she’s fully an idiot,” she added with the wisdom of one not in love, who thinks that a smart man shouldn’t be unhappy unless it’s for someone who’s “worth it”; it’s a bit like being shocked that another would deign to suffer from cholera when the comma bacillus is such a minuscule life-form. (Location 5671)

“It’s plain to see that you’re a musician at heart, Madame,” the general said to her, unconsciously alluding to the candle incident. But the concert started up again, and Swann knew he couldn’t leave before this new piece had finished. He suffered at being stuck among these people whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully because, ignorant of his love, and incapable, had they known about it, of taking any interest in it, of doing anything other than dismiss it with a patronizing smile or deplore it as madness, they made it appear to him from the point of view of a subjective state, existing for none but him, with nothing exterior to it affirming its reality. He suffered especially, and to the point where just the sound of the instruments made him want to scream, at having to prolong his exile in this place where Odette had never stepped foot, where no one, nothing knew her, where she was entirely absent. (Location 5694)

He saw everything: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum she had thrown to him as he sat in his carriage and which he had pressed to his lips; the address to the Maison Dorée embossed on the letter where he had read, “My hand is trembling so violently I can hardly write”; her scrunched eyebrows when she had said to him, imploringly, “Will it be very long before I hear from you?”; he smelt the scent of the barber’s heated iron which retouched his brosse while Loredon went to pick up the little seamstress; he tasted the rainstorms that came so often that spring, the crisp air of the nights where he rode home in his victoria under moonlight; he was reacquainted with all the mental habits, the impressions of the season, the tactile sensations, which together had formed part of a uniform network spanning a series of weeks and which now overtook his body. It was a moment in time where he had satisfied a voluptuous curiosity in coming to know the pleasures granted to those who live for love. He had thought he could go on tasting love’s delights, that he wouldn’t be forced to learn of its sorrows. Now how minuscule was Odette’s charm next to this formidable terror that spun it around her like a stormy halo, this tremendous anxiety he felt at not knowing at every second what Odette was doing, what she had done, at not possessing her everywhere and always! (Location 5711)

And yet, this Odette who was the cause of so much pain, she didn’t become less dear to him in consequence, but became, to the contrary, all the more precious to him, as if, as his sufferings increased, so did, and in proportion, the price of their sedative, their antidote, which this woman alone possessed. He wanted to devote more care to her, as though to an illness that we’ve suddenly discovered is more serious than we thought. He wanted to arrange so that this horrific thing she had professed to have done “two or three times” never be repeated. To accomplish this, he would have to keep watch over her. It’s often said that in outlining to a friend his mistress’s faults, we manage only to strengthen his attachment to her because he places no faith in what we’re saying: but how much more attached to her would he become if he did believe you! (Location 6010)

“When one feels he has fallen in love with a woman, he should ask himself, What kind of people does she surround herself with? What has her life been? Beneath these questions lies all of one’s happiness.” (Location 6079)

Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his cruel jealousy placed him, that he be struck by Odette’s confession, in the position of someone who still didn’t know it, and several months on this old story would still break on him like a revelation. He admired the terrible regenerative powers of his memory. It was only by the weakening of this creative force, which becomes less fecund as we age, that he could hope his suffering be mitigated. (Location 6085)

And on this morning, no longer, like the days before, hearing the rain fall, but seeing the good weather smiling at the corners of the drawn curtains like at the corners of a closed pair of lips that are letting the secret to their happiness escape, I had felt that these yellow leaves, that I might see them penetrated by light, in their supreme beauty; and no less capable of keeping myself from going to look at the trees than, at an earlier time, when the wind blew fiercely in the chimney, from going to look at the sea, I had left to go to Trianon, passing through the Bois de Boulogne. (Location 6964)

But when a belief disappears, it is survived—and with more and more stubbornness, so as to mask the absence of this power, once possessed by us and now lost, to make new things real to us—by a fetishist attachment to what it had once animated, as if the Divine resided in these things and not in us, and as if our present skepticism had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods. (Location 7017)

How awful! I said to myself: are there really people who find these automobiles elegant? more elegant than the old horse-drawn carriages? I’m already too old, no doubt, but I wasn’t made for a world where women put on dresses that aren’t even made of cloth. What’s the use of coming here, beneath these trees, if nothing remains of that which used to assemble beneath their delicate reddening leaves, if vulgarity and lunacy have replaced all the exquisiteness they once framed? (Location 7020)

They had long fled; in vain did I still interrogate the deserted paths. The sun was in hiding. Nature resumed its dominion over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman had receded; above the fake windmill, the sky—the true sky—was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Big Lake with little waves, like it was a lake and nothing more; large birds flew across the Bois, like a forest, and, letting out sharp cries, perched, one after another, on the great oak trees which, under their Druidical crowns and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disused forest, and helped me to better understand the contradiction that is searching reality for memory’s tableaus, which would always lack the charm derived from memory itself and from them not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer exists. That Mme Swann did not arrive, in the same manner as before, at the same moment, this sufficed to make the Avenue something other than what it once was. The places we have known do not belong only to this spacial realm wherein we, for the sake of utility, situate them. They were but a narrow slice among adjacent impressions that constituted our life at the time; the memory of a certain image is merely our regret for a certain instant; and the houses, the roads, the paths are, alas, fleeting, like the years. (Location 7044)