'For a long time, I went to bed early'

This year is also the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of Marcel Proust's landmark roman-fleuve À la recherche du temps perdu. In June 1913 Proust was correcting the proofs, making significant changes, and the book would finally appear that November. The following year, the love of Proust's life, his one-time taxi driver and then secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, would die in a plane accident, to be resurrected as Albertine, the (female) love interest of the book's narrator. Edouard Launet wrote an article about the anniversary (L’atelier d’écriture de Proust, June 26) for Libération (my translation):

In September an avalanche of books analyzing and commemorating the anniversary will sweep into libraries. An avalanche, it must be said, that began at the beginning of this year. The most unusual of these works, and most certainly the most expensive (189 euros), is a large coffee-table book published by Gallimard and edited by Jean-Yves Tadié, who traces one of the most unbelievable literary paths of the 20th century. At the beginning of the month of April 1913, Proust received from his editor, Grasset, the first proofs of Swann, which he would completely rewrite in two months. "There is only one line out of every twenty in the original text that remains unchanged," the pale writer confided to his friend, the art historian Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, in a letter dated April 12. "It is striped with words, corrections in all the white space I could find, and I glued papers to the top, bottom, right, left, etc." In April and May, the amount of text would double, characters would be redefined, the famous opening phrase («Longtemps je me suis couché…») would be the object of much indecision, and most importantly the title of the novel sequence would change: goodbye, Les Intermittences du Cœur; hello, A la Recherche du temps perdu. That is, the work was truly born during these few weeks of almost hieroglyphic scratching, between the sound-proofed walls of a bedroom at no. 102, Boulevard Haussmann, in Paris.

These first galley proofs, which so altered the identity of the book, were for many years in private hands and largely impossible to consult. Shortly before the death of their owner, collector Jacques Guérin, they were sold at auction for a large sum, and the book includes a facsimile of the first 29 pages of the proofs.

Out There in Blogville

You know, I used to do a post of links to other people's blogs quite regularly, and then I stopped. This is not because of a lack of good reading in Blogville, certainly, and must have something to do with our craze for content lately.

Thanks to the Blowhards (are there really only 2 of them now?) for their kind mention of little old us in a (typically) thorough and wide-ranging post on the culture of the arts:

The culture-chat ground has been leveled. If you find that what the Sunday Times peddles is displeasing, it takes almost no effort to surf over and check in with the classy cast at IonArts.

As I was finishing up my last traversal of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Waggish started in on Waggish Reads Proust. It was a real attempt to blog the reading of Proust, and I enjoyed reading it, but it appears to have stalled out in the middle of Volume 4. However, Waggish's eclectic and profound, if infrequent, posts have continued on his regular blog, much to my enjoyment. Some of the good ones lately include an appraisal of a difficult but rewarding book, Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau and a series of reflections on the genre of blogging.

The Standing Room recounts a hilarious tragic story that befell a parking control officer in San Francisco. (Three-wheeled scooter, hill, brake failure, crash with carpet cleaning truck.) We returned from our trip to Santa Fe to discover a ticket on our car, which was parked in a completely legal spot. Fortunately, the hearing examiner agreed with me, on the basis of photographs I took with me to dispute the ticket. Do I stop there? No, I am trying to get the Department of Motor Vehicles to put an official complaint of frivolous citation in the officer's file. Sadly, we don't have many dangerous hills in Washington.

How long should recorded sounds be legally copyrighted? At The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson discusses the British plan to double it (or so) from the current length of 50 years. We have to be able to get around the copyright issue somehow, to move the information revolution ahead. What will happen to our grip on information if Google Library really is only allowed to scan books printed before 1923? Will our view of literary history be permanently skewed?

Not really bloggish but still funny are some of the great articles in this week's issue of The Onion:

• Rumsfeld Makes Surprise Visit to Wife's Vagina
  
• U.S. Intelligence: Nukehavistan May Have Nuclear Weapons
  
• Evangelical Scientists Refute Grave with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

I was planning to write something in reaction to this article (The New, Exciting and Soon Forgotten, August 15) by Allan Kozinn for the New York Times, about orchestral programming of new compositions. However, I can be lazy and direct you instead to two professional players' responses to it, from Patricia Mitchell at oboeinsight and Brian Sacawa at Sounds Like Now.

Did Someone Say Proust?

An Ionarts reader recently sent me an interesting and rather esoteric question about Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time), a book that occupied a lot of my time last year. With that reader's permission, here was the original message:

I came across your blog in my search for clarification of a reference Proust makes in his novel about "a mythical horse raised by eating nothing but rose petals" or something worded very close to that phrasing. I read all of Proust's novel from 2000 through 2002. I recall some passage that I think was in vol. V, The Captive and The Fugitive, where Proust is making an allusion to something which I don't now recall, but I do remember this reference to the mythical horse that only ate rose petals. I started asking around among those friends who had literature degrees, English degrees, well-read others, but have found no one who can tell me the name of any myth about a horse eating nothing but rose petals. Since your Blog indicates you are recently reading these last few volumes of Proust, I decided to venture this question to you:

Where in the novel is this reference? What is the exact quotation?
What myth is being alluded to and what is the name of the mythical horse so raised?

Finding a single quotation in 7 volumes of 2,500 pages reminded me of the proverbial haystack needle, but the description rang a bell. After a little bit of searching, I located the passage in question, I think. It comes from the last volume—Le temps retrouvé (in English, Time Regained)—which contains, along with the first two volumes, the most beautiful examples of what makes Proust's writing so great. In particular, this passage is found in the last volume's final chapter, An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes, in which the narrator recounts meeting all of his friends and acquaintances at a dinner party, after he has been committed to a sanatarium for many years. Seeing them all aged by the years that have gone by, he is struck by the futility of life and confronts his own fear that he will never be able to write the book he wants to write. Here is the translation by Stephen Hudson, who finished what C. K. Scott Moncrieff began:

How would it have profited if, for years longer, I had wasted my nights by letting the words they had just uttered fade into an equally vain echo of my own, for the sake of the sterile pleasure of a social contact which excludes all penetrating thought? Would it not be better I should try to describe the curve, to elicit the law that governed their gestures, their words, their lives, their nature? Unhappily, I should be compelled to fight against that habit of putting myself in another’s place which, though it may favour the conception of a work retards its execution. For, through an excess of politeness it makes us sacrifice to others not merely our pleasure but our duty even though putting oneself in the place of others, duty, whatever form it may take, even, were it helpful, that of remaining at the rear when one can render no service at the front, appears contrary to the truth, to be our pleasure. And far from believing myself unhappy because of a life without friends, without conversation, as some of the greatest have believed, I realised that the force and elation spent in friendship are a sort of false passport to an individual intimacy that leads nowhere and turns us back from a truth to which they might have conducted us. But anyhow, should intervals of repose and social intercourse be necessary to me, I felt that instead of the intellectual conversations which society people believe interesting to writers, light loves with young flowering girls would be the nourishment I might, at the most, allow my imagination, like the famous horse which was fed on nothing but roses. All of a sudden I longed again for what I had dreamed of at Balbec, when I saw Albertine and Andrée disporting themselves with their friends on the sea-shore before I knew them. But alas, those I now so much longed for, I could find no more. The years which had transformed all those I had seen to-day including Gilberte herself must, beyond question, have made of the other survivors as, had she not perished, of Albertine, women very different from the girls I remembered. I suffered at the thought of their attaint for time’s changes do not modify the images in our memory. There is nothing more painful than the contrast between the alteration in beings and the fixity of memory, than the realisation that what our memory keeps green has decayed and that there can be no exterior approach to the beauty within us which causes so great a yearning to see it once more. The intense desire for those girls of long ago which my memory excited, could never be quenched unless I sought its satisfaction in another being as young. I had often suspected that what seems unique in a creature we desire does not belong to that individual. But the passage of time gave me completer proof, since after twenty years I now wanted, instead of the girls I had known, those possessing their youth. Moreover, it is not only the awakening of physical desire that corresponds to no reality because it ignores the passing of time. At times I prayed that, by a miracle, my grandmother and Albertine had, in spite of my reason, survived and would come to me. I believed I saw them, my heart leaped towards them.

I would apologize for the long quotation, but just read it! As for where the story of this "famous horse" comes from, I'm not sure. According to Greek legend, the rose acquired its red color from the blood of Adonis, as he lay dying from wounds inflicted by a boar he was hunting (he should have heeded Venus's warning). Hera's horses were fed on ambrosia, as were those of Apollo's chariot, which drew the sun across the sky (the horses that got out of poor Phaeton's control). I don't know exactly to what Proust was referring in that sentence, however. Any readers have an idea? The original French was "de légères amours avec des jeunes filles en fleurs seraient un aliment choisi que je pourrais à la rigueur permettre à mon imagination semblable au cheval fameux qu'on ne nourrissait que de roses!" I admit that I am baffled so far.

UPDATE:
The same reader informs me that, in response to the same question, Dr. Mark Calkins at TempsPerdu.com responded that the editors of the Pléiade edition of Proust's novel could not identify the myth to which Proust alludes. They surmise that it may be a reference to the story of the golden ass, told by Lucius Apuleius in his complete Latin novel Metamorphoses (translated as The Golden Asse by William Adlington), where the hero, Lucius, is transformed into a donkey and becomes human again after eating a crown of roses. That sounds plausible.

The Journey's End

WiFi is the best. I am blogging today from a Capitol Hill hotspot, Murky Coffee by Eastern Market (natch, they have a blog), which has its own free wireless hotspot, so I sat near a handful of other laptop-bound eggheads as I wrote this post. I'm also going down to the Capitol, to see if the National Mall wireless network, Openpark, is up and running (see my post on April 29).

Available at Amazon: William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, (2002)

It's hard to say goodbye to a companion who has been constantly under your arm for months. As regular readers know, I started on Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu back in September. (Here is the first post on it, Your Proust Excerpt for Today, September 15, 2003.) Well, I turned the last page at the start of this month, but I still have two or three posts to write about the experience. (You should now send your messages of support to Waggish Reads Proust, who after getting stalled in the third volume, is back in the saddle again. He has a nice recent post on the death of the narrator's grandmother, which is one of the most beautiful and horrible moments in the book, although I didn't really write anything about it.) So now I am halfway through the excellent biography of Proust by William C. Carter (shown at right), which is a most illuminating experience after having just finished the novel. Smartass Gérard Genette memorably summarized the plot of the Recherche as Marcel devient écrivain (Marcel becomes a writer), and while that is a humorous simplification, it is also true. The biography does a great job of showing the biographical background of that struggle to be born, to find a voice, and how the book was connected to the author's life. It's fascinating, and although the biography is itself just over 1,000 pages, it is much easier reading than the novel.

In fact, as of Bloomsday (see post on June 16), I have also been engrossed in Ulysses. Now this is no easy read, but in some ways, I am finding it easier to read so far than Proust. Where Proust is dense and often directionless, cloudlike, Joyce's style is surgically precise, although I am the sort of reader who delights in stopping to unpack Latin and Greek texts and other obscure references. The margins of my copy, the hardback version of the 1961 Modern Library edition, are covered with pencil annotations (p. 5, "epi oinwpa ponton, upon the wine-dark open sea, Homer catchphrase, qalatta, ocean"). (As Buck puts it, "Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original.") I am only in the "Hades" episode at this point, so I'm sure I will be complaining before too long.

Reading Proust and Remembering Lost Time

In the fifth book of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time), La Prisonnière (in English, The Captive), the narrator takes the subject of his jealous obsessions into his parents' home in Paris. Almost without Marcel understanding how it happens, Albertine becomes individuated from that delightful frieze of the petite bande of teenage girls in the second book (see my post on November 3, 2003). Marcel's worries that Albertine indulges in sexual encounters with other women continue and are eventually proven true. In some ways, she stands in for his mother, soothing his worries (which should give us all warm, fuzzy feelings for Mothers' Day), and in others she is guarded jealously by Marcel only as a means of controlling her lesbian tendencies. He describes the attraction of seeing her in his house every night:

It was a soothing power the like of which I had not known since the evening at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed, brought me repose in a kiss. To be sure, I should have been greatly astonished at that time, had anyone told me that I was not wholly virtuous, and more astonished still to be told that I would ever seek to deprive some one else of a pleasure. I must have known myself very slightly, for my pleasure in having Albertine to live with me was much less a positive pleasure than that of having withdrawn from the world, where everyone was free to enjoy her in turn, the blossoming damsel who, if she did not bring me any great joy, was at least withholding joy from others. Ambition, fame would have left me unmoved. Even more was I incapable of feeling hatred. And yet to me to love in a carnal sense was at any rate to enjoy a triumph over countless rivals. I can never repeat it often enough: it was first and foremost a sedative.

Their little rituals—Albertine playing the piano and Marcel listening (for more about the importance of music in the book, see my post on March 20), their rides and walks together, and goodnight play—are sustained with religious devotion, and Proust cannot resist some blasphemous imagery:

When it was Albertine's turn to bid me good night, kissing me on either side of my throat, her hair caressed me like a wing of softly bristling feathers. Incomparable as were those two kisses of peace, Albertine slipped into my mouth, making me the gift of her tongue, like a gift of the Holy Spirit, conveyed to me a viaticum, left me with a provision of tranquility almost as precious as when my mother in the evening at Combray used to lay her lips upon my brow.

If you're behind on your studies of Catholic theology, the Viaticum is the eating of the Holy Eucharist, usually with the administration of other rites, in the moments just before one's death. In Latin, this meant that unspecified thing, in the neuter, appropriate to the preparation before a journey or taking to the road (via). The expression dates from before the Romans, one suspects, to the ancient Greek practice of giving a departing guest a final supper for the road.

Another entertaining narrative strand in the novel is the narrator's technophobia, most pronounced in his aversion to that new and disconcerting invention, the telephone, which figures at several places in earlier books as well. In the fifth book, while Albertine is changing her clothes, Marcel tries to discover some information about her earlier whereabouts by telephoning her girlfriend Andrée:

Albertine went to take off her things and, so as to lose no time in finding out what I wanted to know, I attempted to telephone to Andrée; I took hold of the receiver, invoked the implacable deities, but succeeded only in arousing their fury which expressed itself in the single word 'Engaged!' Andrée was indeed engaged in talking to some one else. As I waited for her to finish her conversation, I asked myself how it was—now that so many of our painters are seeking to revive the feminine portraits of the eighteenth century, in which the cleverly devised setting is a pretext for portraying expressions of expectation, spleen, interest, distraction—how it was that none of our modern Bouchers or Fragonards had yet painted, instead of The Letter or The Harpsichord, this scene which might be entitled 'At the Telephone,' in which there would come spontaneously to the lips of the listener a smile all the more genuine in that it is conscious of being unobserved.

I hesitate to think what such a painting might look like if it were updated even more, instead of At the Telephone something like At the Laptop, Blogging. The fourth and fifth books devote many pages to lengthy narrations of notable dinner parties, both of the Guermantes set and the strange little arriviste circle of the Verdurins. Through all of this, the narrator does precious little that could be considered work and, from time to time, writes about his supposed avocation, writing, and how he is not doing a whole hell of a lot of it. It has often been uncomfortable for me, in these parts of the book, to think of Marcel wasting all that time when he has an enormous book to write. The end of the book really turns on the flight of Albertine at the end of the fifth book, with an unexpected turn of events that I will not spoil for those who want to read the novel. In the sixth book, La fugitive (later retitled Albertine disparue and, in English, The Sweet Cheat Gone), which I am about to finish, labors to free himself psychologically from Albertine's influence as her departure has done physically. He does this partly by making inquiries to prove or disprove his fears about Albertine's supposed involvement with other women, most of which is shown to be true.

The sixth book is on the short side, and about 100 pages into it, the tone of the novel seems to change. One of the disconcerting things about Proust's book is the indeterminacy of time in it. While it follows, to some degree, a chronological trajectory, from the narrator's childhood through adulthood, the narrator's fascination with the act of remembering means that the reader is never very clear about the timeframe of the narration. As Proust describes in beautiful and poetic language in several different contexts, all people in our lives are simultaneously several people, both real as they themselves change and in our imagination as we encounter them and, more devastatingly, remember them. Marcel's memories—of eating the madeleine dipped in tisane, of the hawthorn trees in Combray (see my post on January 3), of the petite bande of girls at Balbec, of his grandmother, and of countless other scenes—are more important really than the things themselves. As we begin to see at this point in the sixth book, the "cruelty of memory," as he calls it, is that what can be desired so strongly in memory no longer exists:

I read a letter from Albertine, in which she had said that she was coming to see me that evening, and I felt for an instant the joy of expectation. In these return journeys along the same line from a place to which we shall never return, when we recall the names, the appearance of all the places which we have passed on the outward journey, it happens that, while our train is halting at one of the stations, we feel for an instant the illusion that we are setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which we have come, as on the former journey. Soon the illusion vanishes, but for an instant we felt ourselves carried away once again: such is the cruelty of memory.

It may be cruel for Marcel, but it makes for delightful reading.

Music in Proust

The last post on my Proust reading was on January 27 (see list of Proust posts in the link bar to the right), and I am now almost finished with the fifth book, so it's clearly time to catch up on some thoughts. In spite of how common it is in the narrator's life, music has a vast power in À la recherche du temps perdu. For example, in the fourth book, Sodome et Gomorrhe (in English, Cities of the Plain), there is this very brief passage:

I went upstairs again to my room, but I was not alone there. I could hear some one softly playing Schumann. No doubt it happens at times that people, even those whom we love best, become saturated with the melancholy or irritation that emanates from us. There is nevertheless an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano.

I have the fortune of being a pianist and living in a musical home. When was the last time you heard music played live in your home or a friend's home, or played it yourself? Sadly, television and other forms of entertainment have largely eroded that tradition of amateur playing that was so common in Proust's life. In the fifth book, La Prisonnière (in English, The Captive), it is the narrator himself who is shown at the piano:

Taking advantage of the fact that I still was not alone, and drawing the curtains together so that the sun should not prevent me from reading the notes, I sat down at the piano, turned over the pages of Vinteuil's sonata which happened to be lying there, and began to play. . . . I did not take pains to remark how the combinations of the voluptuous and anxious motives corresponded even more closely now to my love for Albertine, from which jealousy had been absent for so long that I had been able to confess to Swann my ignorance of that sentiment. No, taking the sonata from another point of view, regarding it in itself as the work of a great artist, I was carried back upon the tide of sound to the days at Combray—I do not mean at Montjouvain and along the Méséglise way, but to walks along the Guermantes way—when I had myself longed to become an artist. In definitely abandoning that ambition, had I forfeited something real? Could life console me for the loss of art, was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?

==>> Continue reading this post.

Marcel the Judge

As you probably know, I have been reading Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu and, worse than that, subjecting the Ionarts faithful to posts about scenes and characters in the novel as I try to pick them apart in my mind. The book is a first-person narrative, meaning that the real subject is the author himself, or rather a somewhat dishonest transformation of him, since much of Proust's real experiences are embedded in other characters. In the fourth volume, Cities on the Plain (in French, much more evocatively, Sodome et Gomorrhe [Sodom and Gomorrha]), Proust lets us know quite explicitly that he knows the game he is playing, by fictionalizing his own life and the people he knew to make a book. Faced with the gift of manuscripts of three Ibsen plays, the Duc de Guermantes reveals his uneasiness about knowing authors:

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen or d'Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind's eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once 'put in' the people he meets. This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one can 'read between the lines', 'unmask' the characters. After all, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.

Le duc de Guermantes n'était pas enchanté de ces offres. Incertain si Ibsen ou d'Annunzio étaient morts ou vivants, il voyait déjà des écrivains, des dramaturges allant faire visite à sa femme et la mettant dans leurs ouvrages. Les gens du monde se représentent volontiers les livres comme une espèce de cube dont une face est enlevée, si bien que l'auteur se dépêche de <<faire entrer>> dedans les personnes qu'il rencontre. C'est déloyal évidemment, et ce ne sont que des gens de peu. Certes, ce ne serait pas ennuyeux de les voir <<en passant>>, car grâce à eux, si on lit un livre ou un article, on connaît <<le dessous des cartes>>, on peut <<lever les masques>>. Malgré tout le plus sage est de s'en tenir aux auteurs morts.

A sort of cube with one side removed, so that the author may at once put inside it the people he meets. The narrator Marcel is indeed a shameless voyeur. The major revelation about the Baron de Charlus, mentioned toward the end of the third book but delayed until the opening of the fourth, is discovered quite randomly by Marcel. Standing on a stairway, he observes, unnoticed, the mutual identification of Charlus and the tailor Jupien, part of what is called "cruising" in our day. (At this point in the story, Proust was probably picturing the older, fatter Robert de Montesquiou, as shown in the sketch portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche shown here. Thanks to Gabriella Alú's comprehensive and beautiful Marcel Proust site for the image.)

I was about to change my position again, so that he should not catch sight of me; I had neither the time nor the need to do so. What did I see? Face to face, in that courtyard where certainly they had never met before (M. de Charlus coming to the Hôtel de Guermantes only in the afternoon, during the time when Jupien was at his office), the Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-shut eyes, was studying with unusual attention the ex-tailor poised on the threshold of his shop, while the latter, fastened suddenly to the ground before M. de Charlus, taking root in it like a plant, was contemplating with a look of amazement the plump form of the middle-aged Baron. But, more astounding still, M. de Charlus's attitude having changed, Jupien's, as though in obedience to the laws of an occult art, at once brought itself into harmony with it. The Baron, who was now seeking to conceal the impression that had been made on him, and yet, in spite of his affectation of indifference, seemed unable to move away without regret, went, came, looked vaguely into the distance in the way which, he felt, most enhanced the beauty of his eyes, assumed a complacent, careless, fatuous air. Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble, honest expression which I had always associated with him, had—in perfect symmetry with the Baron—thrown up his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with a grotesque impertinence on his hip, stuck out his behind, posed himself with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee. I had not supposed that he could appear so repellent. But I was equally unaware that he was capable of improvising his part in this sort of dumb charade, which (albeit he found himself for the first time in the presence of M. de Charlus) seemed to have been long and carefully rehearsed; one does not arrive spontaneously at that pitch of perfection except when one meets in a foreign country a compatriot with whom an understanding then grows up of itself, both parties speaking the same language, even though they have never seen one another before.

This encounter leads ultimately to a casual tryst between the two men in the tailor's empty shop, for which Charlus tries to pay Jupien, overheard by Marcel who sneaks into the vacant shop next to that of the tailor. As the two men talk in the shop, Charlus inquires about other targets he has been eying in the neighborhood, including Marcel himself ("at the present moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an intelligent little bourgeois who shews with regard to myself a prodigious want of civility. He has absolutely no idea of the prodigious personage that I am, and of the microscopic animalcule that he his in comparison," he says). Marcel writes after revealing all this dirt:

Now the abstraction had become materialised, the creature at last discerned had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but, in retrospect, the very ups and downs of his relations with myself, everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if these letters be rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never afterwards forget.

This sets the tone for the fourth book, literally the central volume of the seven-volume series, the suspicion and outing by Marcel of the homosexual and lesbian proclivities of major characters. In what I have already identified as the self-hating attitude of the closeted homosexual (see post on December 29), Charlus and his various liaisons are exposed as ridiculous and grotesque. Marcel continues:

I now understood, moreover, how, earlier in the day, when I had seen him coming away from Mme. de Villeparisis's, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one! He belonged to that race of beings, less paradoxical than they appear, whose ideal is manly simply because their temperament is feminine and who in their life resemble in appearance only the rest of men; there where each of us carries, inscribed in those eyes through which he beholds everything in the universe, a human outline engraved on the surface of the pupil, for them it is that not of a nymph but of a youth.

Marcel's scorn for the aging homosexual Charlus only becomes harsher throughout the course of the fourth book.

Novelty in the Arts

One theme that reappears constantly in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu is that of art criticism. It is interesting to see how Proust writes about the reactions of his characters to challenging art of their time (writing about the past as he is). The acceptance of Manet's Olympia (from 1863, shown here), a painting which had caused considerable controversy when it was first shown, is one such case, as described near the end of the third volume, The Guermantes Way (in French, Le Côté de Guermantes), in a conversation between the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Parme:

"Basin was talking to you just now about Beethoven. We heard a thing of his played the other day which was really quite good, though a little stiff, with a Russian theme in it. It's pathetic to think that he believed it to be Russian. In the same way as the Chinese painters believed they were copying Bellini. Besides, even in the same country, whenever anybody begins to look at things in a way that is slightly novel, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are totally incapable of seeing what he puts before them. It takes at least forty years before they can manage to make it out." "Forty years!" the Princess cried in alarm. "Why, yes," went on the Duchess, adding more and more to her words (which were practically my own, for I had just been expressing a similar idea to her), thanks to her way of pronouncing them, the equivalent of what on the printed page is called italics: "it's like a sort of first isolated individual of a species which does not yet exist but is going to multiply in the future, an individual endowed with a kind of sense which the human race of his generation does not possess. I can hardly give myself as an instance because I, on the contrary, have always loved any interesting production from the very start, however novel it might be. But really, the other day I was with the Grand Duchess in the Louvre and we happened to pass before Manet's Olympia. Nowadays nobody is in the least surprised by it. It looks just like an Ingres! And yet, heaven only knows how many spears I've had to break for that picture, which I don't altogether like but which is unquestionably the work of somebody."

Around the time of the novel's action, in 1891, Paul Gauguin was making a copy of Manet's Olympia, which is now in a private collection. Manet's painting is now on display in the Musée d'Orsay. Art is used by Proust's characters in all sorts of interesting ways. The refined tastes of Charlus come into play in the advances he makes to Marcel, culminating in the infamous interview at the end of The Guermantes Way. Having given Marcel a carefully chosen book by his favorite author, Charlus is outraged that the young man did not understand what he was trying to communicate by it.

"What!" he cried with fury, and indeed his face, convulsed and white, differed as much from his ordinary face as does the sea when on a morning of storm one finds instead of its customary smiling surface a thousand serpents writhing in spray and foam, "do you mean to pretend that you did not receive my message—almost a declaration—that you were to remember me? What was there in the way of decoration round the cover of the book that I sent you?" "Some very pretty twined garlands with tooled ornaments," I told him. "Ah!" he replied, with an air of scorn, "these young Frenchmen know little of the treasures of our land. What would be said of a young Berliner who had never heard of the Walküre? Besides, you must have eyes to see and see not, since you yourself told me that you had stood for two hours in front of that particular treasure. I can see that you know no more about flowers than you do about styles; don't protest that you know about styles," he cried in a shrill scream of rage, "you can't even tell me what you are sitting on. You offer your hindquarters a Directory chauffeuse as a Louis XIV bergère. One of these days you'll be mistaking Mme. de Villeparisis's knees for the seat of the rear, and a fine mess you'll make of things then. It's precisely the same; you didn't even recognise on the binding of Bergotte's book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there be any clearer way of saying to you: 'Forget me not!'?" I looked at M. de Charlus. Undoubtedly his magnificent head, though repellent, yet far surpassed that of any of his relatives; you would have called him an Apollo grown old; but an olive-hued, bilious juice seemed ready to start from the corners of his evil mouth; as for intellect, one could not deny that his, over a vast compass, had taken in many things which must always remain unknown to his brother Guermantes. But whatever the fine words with which he coloured all his hatreds, one felt that, even if there was now an offended pride, now a disappointment in love, or a rancour, or sadism, a love of teasing, a fixed obsession, this man was capable of doing murder, and of proving by force of logic that he had been right in doing it and was still superior by a hundred cubits in moral stature to his brother, his sister-in-law, or any of the rest. "Just as, in Velazquez’s Lances," he went on, "the victor advances towards him who is the humbler in rank, as is the duty of every noble nature, since I was everything and you were nothing, it was I who took the first steps towards you. You have made an idiotic reply to what it is not for me to describe as an act of greatness. But I have not allowed myself to be discouraged. Our religion inculcates patience. The patience I have shewn towards you will be counted, I hope, to my credit, and also my having only smiled at what might be denounced as impertinence, were it within your power to offer any impertinence to me who surpass you in stature by so many cubits; but after all, Sir, all this is now neither here nor there. I have subjected you to the test which the one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test of excessive friendliness, and which he rightly declares to be the most terrible of all, the only one that can separate the good grain from the tares. I could scarcely reproach you for having undergone it without success, for those who emerge from it triumphant are very few. But at least, and this is the conclusion which I am entitled to draw from the last words that we shall exchange on this earth, at least I intend to hear nothing more of your calumnious fabrications."

The Velázquez reference is to the Surrender of Breda, sometimes known as Las Lanzas (see this extensive analysis of the painting).

Elstir and the Hawthorn

Proust was a sort of culture vulture in his day, and in À la recherche du temps perdu, among Marcel the narrator's many discoveries, interpretators and creators of all forms of art become known to him. If he had lived in our era, he would probably be a blogger, but instead his multivolume book transfigures his encounters with the arts and artists. Marcel admires the painting of Elstir, is introduced to him while on vacation at Balbec, finally meets Albertine while at a party in the artist's country home, and uses his introduction to the Duchesse de Guermantes to see the paintings by Elstir in her house in Paris (and also vice versa). In the third volume, The Guermantes Way (in French, Le Côté de Guermantes), Marcel describes Elstir's work:

If, on my visits to Elstir, what I had asked of his painting had been that it should lead me to the comprehension and love of things better than itself, a real thaw, an authentic square in a country town, live women on a beach (all the more would I have commissioned from it the portraits of the realities which I had not been able to fathom, such as a lane of hawthorn-blossoms, not so much that it might perpetuate their beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now, on the other hand, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above anything else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.

It seemed to me, also, that the least of his pictures were something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, whose frontiers were not to be passed, matchless in substance. Eagerly collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and his work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscapes and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two of these in his studio), and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art.

Most critics and scholars believe that Elstir most closely represents American expatriate painter James Whistler (the two names are almost anagrams of one another), but he may be mixed with elements of Moreau, Renoir, or Vuillard. (I mentioned Whistler in a post on July 28, A Whole New Perspective on Realism, and a Whistler Festival just concluded in Glasgow, where there is a Centre for Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow.) Although Whistler may not have the famous reputation now as some of his fellow artists of the same period, at the time of his death, he was much beloved in France, as you can see in this monument by Auguste Rodin, La Muse Whistler, made in 1903, the year of Whistler's death, and now in the Musée d'Orsay. As for his resemblance to Elstir, Whistler's career has a lot in common with what Marcel says about Elstir (when Marcel mentions the landscapes he so admires, Proust may have had Whistler's "Nocturne" paintings in mind), and his admiration for Japanese art can be seen in the famous Peacock Room, now in the Freer Gallery of Art here in Washington. In another connection to Proust, Whistler spent over ten years on a portrait of Robert de Montesquiou (Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac), probable model for Proust's character the Baron de Charlus (see post on December 23, Evocation of a Royalist Past), which is the image I see in my mind when I read about Charlus in the book.

In the quotation above, Marcel refers to his desire to have Elstir paint those things he finds mysterious in life, such as a lane of hawthorn-blossoms. This is a reference to a memory that is introduced in the first volume (in French, Du côté de chez Swann; in English, Swann's Way), the sight and smell of hawthorn flowers in the church of Combray and in the yard of the Swanns' home. Up to this point in the novel, the hawthorn (aubépine) image is much more pervasive in Marcel's memory than that of the more famous petite madeleine, which is primarily a memory of taste. Here is the first description of the white hawthorn, seen in the church of Combray during the "Month of Mary service" (still celebrated in some places in honor of the Virgin Mary, Queen of May). If you are botanically challenged, the image to the left should help you:

When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle. Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles.

Later, while walking with his family, Marcel strays into the Swanns' garden:

I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves' in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like strawberry-beds in spring. [. . . After looking away,] I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, will be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes.

The image of a hawthorn tree at right shows what Proust is trying to capture, the cascading presentation of flowers.

Proust and Homosexuality

This is one of the main themes of Marcel Proust's vast novel À la recherche du temps perdu, a book written by a homosexual, writing in the person of a heterosexual narrator, who passes judgment on homosexual behavior. In a sense, the narrator's eyes are gradually opened to an understanding of a sort of shadow world of homosexuality, and he seeks to understand more completely the motivations and lifestyle of those involved in it. Given the complicated background of the author and his book, two passages dealing with antihomosexual violence, what is called in our time "gay bashing," present difficulties in interpretation. The first occurs in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (in English, Within a Budding Grove) where the narrator's friend Saint-Loup describes the youthful sexual activities of his uncle Palamède, also known as the Baron de Charlus (see my previous post on the model for this character, Evocation of a Royalist Past, December 23):

Saint-Loup told me about his uncle's early life, now a long time ago. Every day he used to take women to a bachelor establishment which he shared with two of his friends, as good-looking as himself, on account of which they were known as 'The Three Graces'.

"One day, a man who just now is very much in the eye, as Balzac would say, of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but who at a rather awkward period of his early life displayed odd tastes, asked my uncle to let him come to this place. But no sooner had he arrived than it was not to the ladies but to my uncle Palamède that he began to make overtures. My uncle pretended not to understand, made an excuse to send for his two friends; they appeared on the scene, seized the offender, stripped him, thrashed him till he bled, and then with twenty degrees of frost outside kicked him into the street where he was found more dead than alive; so much so that the police started an inquiry which the poor devil had the greatest difficulty in getting them to abandon. My uncle would never go in for such drastic methods now, in fact you can't conceive the number of men of humble position that he, who is so haughty with people in society, has shewn his affection, taken under his wing, even if he is paid for it with ingratitude. It may be a servant who has looked after him in a hotel, for whom he will find a place in Paris, or a farm-labourer whom he will pay to have taught a trade. That is really the rather nice side of his character, in contrast to his social side."

The second passage involves Saint-Loup himself in the third volume, The Guermantes Way (in French, Le Côté de Guermantes). After Saint-Loup has already had a fight with a journalist at the theater, he has another fight in the street while walking with Marcel, who has fallen slightly behind him:

I tried for a few seconds to recall those distant impressions, and was hurrying at a 'gymnastic' pace to overtake Saint-Loup when I saw that a gentleman, somewhat shabbily attired, appeared to be talking to him confidentially. I concluded that this was a personal friend of Robert; at the same time they seemed to be drawing even closer to one another; suddenly, as a meteor flashes through the sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a giddy swiftness all the positions necessary for them to form, before Saint-Loup's face and body, a flickering constellation. Flung out like stones from a catapult, they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were merely, however, Saint-Loup's pair of fists, multiplied by the speed with which they were changing their places in this—to all appearance ideal and decorative—arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the true character of which, aggressive rather than aesthetic, was first revealed to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of blood. He gave fictitious explanations to the people who came up to question him, turned his head and, seeing that Saint-Loup had made off and was hastening to rejoin me, stood gazing after him with an offended, crushed, but by no means furious expression on his face. Saint-Loup, on the other hand, was furious, although he himself had received no blow, and his eyes were still blazing with anger when he reached me. The incident was in no way connected (as I had supposed) with the assault in the theatre. It was an impassioned loiterer who, seeing the fine-looking young soldier that Saint-Loup was, had made overtures to him. My friend could not get over the audacity of this 'clique' who no longer even waited for the shades of night to cover their operations, and spoke of the suggestion that had been made to him with the same indignation as the newspapers use in reporting an armed assault and robbery, in broad daylight, in the centre of Paris. And yet the recipient of his blow was excusable in one respect, for the trend of the downward slope brings desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that beauty by itself appears to imply consent. Now, that Saint-Loup was beautiful was beyond dispute. Castigation such as he had just administered has this value, for men of the type that had accosted him, that it makes them think seriously of their conduct, though never for long enough to enable them to amend their ways and thus escape correction at the hands of the law. And so, although Saint-Loup's arm had shot out instinctively, without any preliminary thought, all such punishments, even when they reinforce the law, are powerless to bring about any uniformity in morals.

The final two sentences of this passage are a clear endorsement of gay bashing as a valid way to "reinforce the law." I don't know if one is meant to interpret this as a self-deceived statement from a closeted homosexual or, if we turn that on its head, as a criticism of heterosexual morality through the person of a heterosexual narrator. What is clear is that homosexuality in Proust's novel is linked to a staggering sense of self-hatred. As Proust and his narrator peel away the onion-like layers of Charlus at the end of the third volume and especially in the fourth volume, Cities on the Plain (in French, Sodome et Gomorrhe), Marcel's scorn for Charlus becomes more and more pronounced. As I have just now begun the fourth volume, I will have to say more about that later. (The heterosexuality of Proust's narrator is questioned by Gregory Woods in his interesting article on Proust for glbtq.com, which is obviously written from a homosexual viewpoint.)

Evocation of a Royalist Past

Of all the things that might inspire nostalgia, the joys of a monarchical society would seem to me to be somewhere near the bottom of the list. However, as an American, I am perhaps incapable of understanding the sentiment of a certain sector of French society that has wanted and still wants to reinstate a king on the throne of France. In an article (Nostalgies Ancien Régime, December 23) in Le Figaro, Eric Biétry-Rivierre reviews an exhibit on some people who devoted themselves to that very cause. The Musée Lambinet, a little museum in an 18th-century house on the Boulevard de la Reine in Versailles, is showing Versailles, Vie artistique, Littéraire et Mondaine, 1889–1939, until February 29.

One of the items on display is the first edition of the collected poems of Robert de Montesquiou (portrait by Boldini shown at right), from whose Sonnets historiques comes the line that became a royalist slogan, "Un lis est toujours un lis" [A lily is always a lily, referring to the fleur-de-lis, symbol of the Bourbon family. (Here is a selection of his poems and there are several portraits of him here and here.) Montesquiou was one of the foremost arbiters of taste, notoriously arrogant and scandalously degenerate, who was the model for the character of the Baron de Charlus in Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu. (Montesquiou also inspired other literary characters, including Floressas des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours [1884], the Comte de Muzarett in Paul Duval [Jean Lorrain]'s Monsieur de Phocas [1901], the Vicomte de Serpigny in Henri de Régnier's Le Mariage de Minuit [1903], and Peacock in Edmond Rostand's Chanteclerc [1907].) Proust first met Montesquiou's cousin, the Comtesse Greffulhe, on a visit to Versailles when he was 23. Proust memorialized his infatuation with her beauty and social grace in the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Support for Reading Proust

If you are reading Ionarts because of Proust, here is another blog you should be reading, the journal of a Proust reader called Waggish Reads Proust. This was brought to me by way of Nathalie at Cup of Chicha (in an entry on December 15, "Whether I actually want to read it is debatable."), who says, "So, ionarts, despite finding a niche market, now has competition." Waggish (whose regular blog is on hold during the Proust reading) is in the middle of Proust's second volume right now and appears to be making a good handful of longish posts about each volume, on whatever subjects present themselves.

Reading 3,000 pages of Proust's prose is not something to be undertaken lightly. When the chips are down and you think are going to throw in the towel, when you think you can't face another sentence, you need to ask for help. Maybe reading the musings of a fellow reader online is not enough, and you need to seek assistance from a real person. A Proust reading group is just what the doctor ordered. In the San Francisco area, you need to go to the meetings sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the Proust Society of America, featuring Dr. Mark Calkins of TempsPerdu.com (either the First-Time Readers' Group or, for the heavy-hitters who carry about bags of madeleines and can fall asleep only with the light of a magic lantern, the Veteran Readers' Group). Another group meets in London. Don't feel bad if it takes you longer than you think: one online reading group took two years to finish reading the novel. Whatever you do, don't stop reading, since you never know when you will run out of time. To remind yourself of this, look at Man Ray's photograph of Marcel Proust on His Deathbed, from 1922 (from the Getty Museum). Remember that, shortly before he died, Proust was dictating final changes to the novel: keep reading, for God's sake!

La Juive and, once again, Proust

It was great to hear the live performance of Halévy's opera La Juive from the Met on the radio this past Saturday (see my post on November 15 and take a look at the great information on La Juive from the Met). The cast gave an excellent performance, particularly Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski (Rachel), Neil Shicoff (Eléazar), and the stupendous bass Ferruccio Furlanetto (Cardinal Brogni).

One of the things that appears necessary for modern performances of French grand opera is judicious cutting, and there is a lot missing from the Met's production of La Juive, all of which make good sense. In some cases the primary purpose of a cut is to eliminate unnecessary repetition or elaboration (some of the emotional shifts are dragged out by Scribe and Halévy for maximum dramatic effect). In others, it is to avoid the embarrassing nature of some of the opera's text, in particular, passages that would surely strike modern listeners as evoking the worst Jewish stereotypes. For example, the section cut out of the Act II trio of Eudoxie, Léopold, and Eléazar features the following lyrics for Eléazar, who clearly relishes the profits that will he will gain from the sale of a prized piece of historic jewelry to Princess Eudoxie (the translation is mine):

Je tremblais que cette femme Ne surprit tous nos secrets Et je maudissais dans l'âme Tous ces chrétiens que je hais, Mais pour moi plaisir extrême Et quel heureux avenir, Ces bons écus d'or que j'aime Chez moi vont donc revenir! Chez moi, chez moi des écus, des ducats. Des ducats, des ducats, des florins, quel plaisir de tromper ces chrétiens, ah! quel plaisir, ah! quel plaisir de tromper, tromper ces chrétiens je les hais tous, je les hais tous, ces ennemis, ces ennemis de mon Dieu de ma foi.

I was trembling that this woman Would discover all our secrets And I was cursing in my soul All these Christians whom I hate, But for me what great pleasure And what a joyous future, These good golden coins that I love Are going to come back to me, To me, to me, ecus, ducats, Ducats, ducats, florins, What pleasure to deceive these Christians, ah! what pleasure, ah! what pleasure to deceive, to deceive these Christians, I hate them all, I hate them all, these enemies, these enemies of my God and my faith.

Lest you thought you would get out of this without more Proust, listening to La Juive on Saturday made clear in my mind another of Proust's references to the opera that I hadn't really understood before. In the second book (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur in French; Within a Budding Grove in English) of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator's friend Bloch takes him for his first trip to a brothel, where he meets a prostitute to whom he gives an unusual nickname (I have altered Moncrieff's translation in some places):

It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of happiness (which, for that matter, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, in contradiction of what I believed at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love. He completed this service by providing me a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later; it was he who took me for the first time into a whorehouse. He had indeed told me that there were many pretty women whom one can have. But I could see them only in a vague outline for which whorehouses were to enable me to substitute actual human features.
[. . .]

The mistress of this house knew none of the women one asked her about and was always suggesting others whom one did not want. She boasted to me of one in particular, one of whom, with a smile full of promises (as though this had been a rarity and a special treat) she said: "She is a Jewess! Doesn’t that do it for you?" (That, by the way, was probably why she called her Rachel.) And with a silly and affected excitement which, she hoped, would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of orgasm: "Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn’t that be lovely? Rah!" This Rachel, of whom I caught a glimpse without her seeing me, had dark hair, was not pretty, but had an air of intelligence, and not without passing the tip of her tongue over her lips, smiled with a look full of impertinence at the tricks who were introduced to her and whom I could hear making conversation with her. Her thin and narrow face was framed in short curls of black hair, irregular as though they were outlined in pen-strokes upon a wash-drawing in Indian ink. Every evening I promised the madame who offered her to me with a special insistence, boasting of her superior intelligence and her education, that I would not fail to come some day on purpose to make the acquaintance of Rachel, whom I had nicknamed "Rachel when from the Lord." But the first evening I had heard her, as she was leaving the house, say to the mistress: "That’s settled then; I shall be free to-morrow, if you have anyone you won’t forget to send for me."

And these words had prevented me from recognizing her as a person because they had made me classify her at once in a general category of women whose habit, common to all of them, was to come there in the evening to see whether there might not be a louis or two to be earned. She would simply vary her formula, saying indifferently: "If you want me" or "If you want anybody."

Marcel never manages to have a "date" with "Rachel when from the Lord," due to various circumstances, until finally he stops going to that particular house, because he donated to it some old furniture left to him by his aunt and is tortured with the guilt of having abandoned his aunt's furniture in such a place. This pathetic image of the prostitute asking if there are any tricks for her night after night is made all the more terrible when the narrator encounters "Rachel when from the Lord" next, in the third book (Le côté de chez Guermantes in French; The Guermantes Way in English). After hearing about his dear friend Saint-Loup's beloved mistress constantly from the time he first meets him on vacation in Balbec, Marcel finally meets her back in Paris and realizes with dread that she is "Rachel when from the Lord":

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in this woman who was for him all the love, every possible delight in life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a tabernacle, was the object that still occupied incessantly the toiling imagination of my friend, whom he felt that he would never really know, as to whom he was perpetually asking himself what could be her secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh, in this woman I recognised at once "Rachel when from the Lord," her who, but a few years since—women change their position so rapidly in that world, when they do change—used to say to the procuress: "Tomorrow evening, then, if you want me for anyone, you will send round, won't you?"

And when they had "come round" for her, and she found herself alone in the room with the "anyone," she had known so well what was required of her that after locking the door, as a prudent woman's precaution or a ritual gesture, she would begin to take off all her things, as one does before the doctor who is going to sound one's chest, never stopping in the process unless the "someone," not caring for nudity, told her that she might keep on her shift, as specialists do sometimes who, having an extremely fine ear and being afraid of their patient's catching a chill, are satisfied with listening to his breathing and the beating of his heart through his shirt. On this woman whose whole life, all her thoughts, all her past, all the men who at one time or another had had her were to me so utterly unimportant that if she had begun to tell me about them I should have listened to her only out of politeness, and should barely have heard what she said, I felt that the anxiety, the torment, the love of Saint-Loup had been concentrated in such a way as to make—out of what was for me a mechanical toy, nothing more—the cause of endless suffering, the very object and reward of existence. Seeing these two elements separately (because I had known "Rachel when from the Lord" in a house of ill fame), I realized that many women for the sake of whom men live, suffer, take their lives, may be in themselves or for other people what Rachel was for me. The idea that anyone could be tormented by curiosity with regard to her life stupefied me. I could have told Robert of any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me the most uninteresting things in the world. And how they would have pained him! And what had he not given to learn them, without avail!

I realised also then all that the human imagination can put behind a little scrap of face, such as this girl's face was, if it is the imagination that was the first to know it; and conversely into what wretched elements, crudely material and utterly without value, might be decomposed what had been the inspiration of countless dreams if, on the contrary, it should be so to speak controverted by the slightest actual acquaintance. I saw that what had appeared to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in the house of ill fame, where it was then for me simply a woman desirous of earning twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than one's family, more than all the most coveted positions in life if one had begun by imagining her to embody a strange creature, interesting to know, difficult to seize and to hold. No doubt it was the same thin and narrow face that we saw, Robert and I. But we had arrived at it by two opposite ways, between which there was no communication, and we should never both see it from the same side. That face, with its stares, its smiles, the movements of its lips, I had known from outside as being simply that of a woman of the sort who for twenty francs would do anything that I asked. And so her stares, her smiles, the movements of her lips had seemed to me significant merely of the general actions of a class without any distinctive quality. And beneath them I should not have had the curiosity to look for a person. But what to me had in a sense been offered at the start, that consenting face, had been for Robert an ultimate goal towards which he had made his way through endless hopes and doubts, suspicions, dreams. He gave more than a million francs in order to have for himself, in order that there might not be offered to others what had been offered to me, as to all and sundry, for a score. [. . .] As for Rachel's favours, however, Saint-Loup had by mere accident succeeded in winning them all. Certainly if he had now learned that they had been offered to all the world for a louis, he would have suffered, of course, acutely, but would still have given a million francs for the right to keep them, for nothing that he might have learned could have made him emerge—since that is beyond human control and can be brought to pass only in spite of it by the action of some great natural law—from the path he was treading, from which that face could appear to him only through the web of the dreams that he had already spun. The immobility of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be being maintained by two infinities which abutted on her without meeting, for she held them apart. And indeed, when Robert and I were both looking at her we did not both see her from the same side of the mystery.

What I finally realized is that "Rachel when from the Lord" is the not-so-well-translated first line of a famous aria from La Juive, "Rachel quand du Seigneur," sung by Eléazar in Act IV at what is, I think, the emotional climax of the opera:

Rachel, quand du seigneur La grâce tutélaire A mes tremblantes mains confia ton berceau, J'avais à ton bonheur Voué ma vie entière. Et c'est moi qui te livre au bourreau.

Rachel, when the Lord's Tutelary grace Entrusted your cradle to my trembling hands, To your happiness I had Sworn my entire life. And it is I who hand you over to the executioner.

In this slow, lilting minor-key aria, Eléazar contemplates what actions he will take in the final act: will he really be able to sacrifice his adopted daughter (Rachel) in order to punish the Christians who are persecuting him? Léopold will lose the woman he loves, and Cardinal Brogni will lose his daughter, who unbeknownst to him was saved from a fire by Eléazar years ago when she was a child, before he became a priest. On Saturday, Neil Shicoff gave an excellent and dramatically charged performance of this central piece in La Juive.

Goncourt Manuscript on Exhibit at the B.n.

An article (Double hommage au Goncourt à la BNF, December 2) from French news organization TV5 announced that the Bibliothèque nationale de France will honor the 100th anniversary of the Prix Goncourt (see my post on August 27, Centenary of the Prix Goncourt) with a special exhibit:

From December 9 to February 22, the French National Library (BNF) will exhibit at its François Mitterand site the Journal of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in honor of the centenary of the prize awarded for the first time in 1903 to John-Antoine Nau for Enemy Force. On December 10 and 11, the BNF also offers a two-day conference on the two brothers and the celebrated prize.

Donated to the Library by Edmond de Goncourt, the manuscript of the Journal will be exhibited in its entirety for the first time and will form the basis of the exhibition, which will be open to the public. It will be accompanied by a selection of works of the Goncourts, letters, portraits, and photographs taken for the most part from the BNF's collections. Besides the manuscript of the first honoree, manuscripts of ten other works that received the prize will also be exhibited, including À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Proust), La condition humaine (Malraux), Les Mandarins (Beauvoir), and so on.

Someone out there should make a blog out of the Goncourt journal, modeled on the brilliant Diary of Samuel Pepys. I would like to read it, but as far as I know, it is not yet available online.

What's a Negative?

In the subject line is one of those questions I will probably have to answer toward the end of my career, posed by some future student puzzled by a passage in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (translated into English by Moncrieff as Within a Budding Grove), the second book of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust uses an image from the process of photographic development, whose obsolescence is imminent due to the advent of digital photography, in one of his many attempts to pick apart the human act of remembering. The narrator, Marcel, is about to be introduced to Albertine, the love interest who appears in the story after the first obsession with Swann's daughter Gilberte (I have modified Moncrieff's translation somewhat to be closer to the original).

These images of the "negative" and the "inner darkroom" are so vivid to a reader at least somewhat familiar with the analog photographic process: the idea that your experience is the simple exposed film but your memory is the result of a much more complicated chemical process of development that must take place in a separate, lonely room. As we continue to think about the impact of digital photography supplanting film photography (see post on November 25, Nicéphore Niépce), these are images that we have to realize will become as foreign to future readers as references to falconry in medieval literature are to us.

At the moment when Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to Albertine, who was sitting a little further away, I first of all finished eating a coffee éclair and, with keen interest, asked an old gentleman, whose acquaintance I had just made and to whom I thought I might offer the rose he was admiring in my buttonhole, to give me some details about certain Norman fairs. This is not to say that the introduction that followed did not give me any pleasure or did not assume a definite importance in my eyes. As for the pleasure, I was naturally not aware of it until some time later when, having returned to the hotel and been alone, I became myself again. There are some pleasures that are like photographs. What we take in the presence of the loved one is only a negative image; we develop it later, as soon as we are home, when we have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is "blocked off" as long as we see other people.

Au moment où Elstir me demanda de venir pour qu'il me présentât à Albertine, assise un peu plus loin, je finis d'abord de manger un éclair au café et demandai avec intérêt à un vieux monsieur dont je venais de faire connaissance et auquel je crus pouvoir offrir la rose qu'il admirait à ma boutonnière, de me donner des détails sur certaines foires normandes. Ce n'est pas à dire que la présentation qui suivit ne me causa aucun plaisir et n'offrit pas à mes yeux, une certaine gravité. Pour le plaisir, je ne le connus naturellement qu'un peu plus tard, quand, rentré à l'hôtel, resté seul, je fus redevenu moi-même. Il en est des plaisirs comme des photographies. Ce qu'on prend en présence de l'être aimé, n'est qu'un cliché négatif, on le développe plus tard, une fois chez soi, quand on a retrouvé à sa disposition cette chambre noire intérieure dont l'entrée est <<condamnée>> tant qu'on voit du monde.

La Juive in Proust

Philip Kennicott's article on La Juive (see yesterday's post) stole my thunder on this point, but the talk about this opera reminded me of the very funny use of La Juive (along with other operas on Old Testament stories) in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. A melody from Halévy's opera is hummed, without the words, by the narrator's grandfather in reference to the narrator's friend Bloch (I have modified the Moncrieff translation slightly).

Malheureusement, je ne pus pas apaiser en causant avec Bloch et en lui demandant des explications, le trouble où il m'avait jeté quand il m'avait dit que les beaux vers (à moi qui n'attendais d’eux rien moins que la révélation de la vérité) étaient d'autant plus beaux qu'ils ne signifiaient rien du tout. Bloch en effet ne fut pas réinvité à la maison. Il y avait d'abord été bien accueilli. Mon grand-père, il est vrai, prétendait que chaque fois que je me liais avec un de mes camarades plus qu'avec les autres et que je l'amenais chez nous, c'était toujours un juif, ce qui ne lui eût pas déplu en principe—même son ami Swann était d'origine juive—s'il n'avait trouvé que ce n'était pas d'habitude parmi les meilleurs que je le choisissais. Aussi quand j'amenais un nouvel ami il était bien rare qu'il ne fredonnât pas: "O Dieu de nos Pères" de la Juive ou bien "Israël romps ta chaîne," ne chantant que l'air naturellement (Ti la lam ta lam, talim), mais j'avais peur que mon camarade ne le connût et ne rétablît les paroles. Avant de les avoir vus, rien qu'en entendant leur nom qui, bien souvent, n'avait rien de particulièrement israélite, il devinait non seulement l'origine juive de ceux de mes amis qui l'étaient en effet, mais même ce qu'il y avait quelquefois de fâcheux dans leur famille. —"Et comment s'appelle-t-il ton ami qui vient ce soir?" —"Dumont, grand-père." —"Dumont! Oh! je me méfie." Et il chantait: "Archers, faites bonne garde! Veillez sans trêve et sans bruit"; Et après nous avoir posé adroitement quelques questions plus précises, il s'écriait: "A la garde! A la garde!" ou, si c'était le patient lui-même déjà arrivé qu'il avait forcé à son insu, par un interrogatoire dissimulé, à confesser ses origines, alors pour nous montrer qu'il n'avait plus aucun doute, il se contentait de nous regarder en fredonnant imperceptiblement: "De ce timide Israëlite Quoi! vous guidez ici les pas!" ou: "Champs paternels, Hébron, douce vallée." ou encore: "Oui, je suis de la race élue." Ces petites manies de mon grand-père n'impliquaient aucun sentiment malveillant à l'endroit de mes camarades.

Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I expected nothing less than the revelation of truth) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he had been well received there. It is true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have objected on principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish extraction—had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were not usually of the best type. And so I was hardly ever able to bring a new friend home without my grandfather’s humming the "O, God of our fathers" from La Juive, or else "Israel, break thy chain," singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the sound, and so being able to reconstruct the words. Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as often as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not only the Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their family. "And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?" "Dumont, grandfather." "Dumont! Oh, I’m suspicious." And he would sing: "Archers, be on your guard! Watch without rest, without sound," and then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would call out "On guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who had already arrived, and had been obliged, unconsciously, by my grandfather's subtle examination, to admit his origin, then my grandfather, to show us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely look at us, humming almost inaudibly the air of "What! do you hither guide the feet Of this timid Israelite?" or of "Sweet vale of Hebron, dear paternal fields," or, perhaps, of "Yes, I am of the chosen race." These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will whatsoever towards my friends.

The first of these tunes is, I think, "O Dieu, Dieu de nos pères, parmis nous descends!" from the beginning of Act II of La Juive (1835). "Israël romps ta chaine" is from Saint-Saëns's opera Samson et Dalila (1877). "Champs paternels, Hébron, douce vallée" is from Méhul's Joseph en Egypte (1807).

Your Proust Excerpt for Today

One of the most captivating parts of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu is the final section of the second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur [In the shadow of the blossoming young girls] (Moncrieff's translation is called, blandly, Within a Budding Grove). This section is subtitled, in Moncrieff's translation, Seascape with Frieze of Girls, a phrase which creates an indelible image in my mind, again a way of creating and elevating memory by association with art. The descriptions of the band of girls the narrator encounters during his stay in the hotel at Balbec are lyric and beautiful and incarnate adolescence in an inimitable way. Perhaps Proust had in mind something like the image below, from the eastern side of the Parthenon frieze, showing girls in the Panathenaic procession.

Balbec is a fictional beach town based on Proust's many vacations to the Grand-Hôtel in Cabourg, a real place that is well worth a visit. You can actually stay in a room (the Chambre souvenirs Marcel Proust), which has been decorated to match the careful description of the narrator's room in the hotel in the novel. I have made some corrections to Moncrieff's translation at points where I think it strays too far from the original. However, it is probably impossible to capture the insolence of the girl's mean-spirited and clipped remark about the old man, but a modern American equivalent might be something like "Old dude's bringin' me down with his half-dead self."

And were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld there, in front of the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight upon a Grecian shore? Just as if, in the heart of their band, which progressed along the shore walk like a luminous comet, they had decided that the surrounding crowd was composed of creatures of another race whose sufferings even could not awaken in them any sense of fellowship, they appeared not to see them, forced those who had stopped to talk to step aside, as though from the path of a machine that had been let loose and which you should not expect to avoid pedestrians, and if some old gentleman of whom they did not admit the existence and thrust from them the contact, had fled with a frightened, furious, headlong or ludicrous motion, they were even happier to look at one another laughing. They had, for whatever did not form part of their group, no affectation of contempt; their genuine contempt was sufficient. But they could not set eyes on an obstacle without amusing themselves by crossing it, either in a running jump or with both feet together, because they were all filled to the brim, exuberant with that youth which we need so urgently to spend that even when we are unhappy or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of our age than to the mood of the day, we can never pass anything that can be jumped over or slid down without indulging ourselves conscientiously, interrupting, interspersing our slow progress—as Chopin his most melancholy phrase—with graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with virtuosity. The wife of an elderly banker, after hesitating between various possible exposures for her husband, had settled him on a folding chair, facing the shore walk, sheltered from wind and sun by the band-stand. Having seen him comfortably installed there, she had just gone to buy a newspaper which she would read aloud to him, to distract him—little absences during which she left him alone and which she never prolonged for more than five minutes, which seemed long enough to him but which she repeated at frequent intervals so that this old husband on whom she lavished an attention that she took care to conceal, should have the impression that he was still quite alive and like other people and was in no need of protection. The platform of the band-stand provided above him a natural and tempting springboard, across which, without a moment's hesitation, the eldest of the little band began to run; she jumped over the terrified old man, whose yachting cap was brushed by the nimble feet, to the great delight of the other girls, especially of a pair of green eyes in a doll-like face, which expressed for that act an admiration and a merriment in which I seemed to discern a trace of timidity, a shamefaced and blustering timidity which did not exist in the others. "Oh, the poor old man; he makes me sick; he looks half dead," said a girl with a croaking voice and with a half-ironic tone. They walked on a few steps, then stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, with no thought whether they were impeding the passage of other people, in a council, an aggregation of irregular shape, compact, unusual and shrill, like birds that gather on the ground at the moment of flight; then they resumed their leisurely stroll along the shore walk, above the sea.

Et n'étaient-ce pas de nobles et calmes modèles de beauté humaine que je voyais là, devant la mer, comme des statues exposées au soleil sur un rivage de la Grèce? Telles que si, du sein de leur bande qui progressait le long de la digue comme une lumineuse comète, elles eussent jugé que la foule environnante était composée d'êtres d'une autre race et dont la souffrance même n'eût pu éveiller en elles un sentiment de solidarité, elles ne paraissaient pas la voir, forçaient les personnes arrêtées à s'écarter ainsi que sur le passage d'une machine qui eût été lâchée et dont il ne fallait pas attendre qu'elle évitât les piétons, et se contentaient tout au plus si quelque vieux monsieur dont elles n'admettaient pas l'existence et dont elles repoussaient le contact s'était enfui avec des mouvements craintifs ou furieux, précipités ou risibles, de se regarder entre elles en riant. Elles n'avaient à l'égard de ce qui n'était pas de leur groupe aucune affectation de mépris, leur mépris sincère suffisait. Mais elles ne pouvaient voir un obstacle sans s'amuser à le franchir en prenant leur élan ou à pieds joints, parce qu'elles étaient toutes remplies, exubérantes, de cette jeunesse qu'on a si grand besoin de dépenser même quand on est triste ou souffrant, obéissant plus aux nécessités de l'âge qu'à l'humeur de la journée, on ne laisse jamais passer une occasion de saut ou de glissade sans s'y livrer consciencieusement, interrompant, semant, sa marche lente—comme Chopin la phrase la plus mélancolique—de gracieux détours où le caprice se mêle à la virtuosité. La femme d'un vieux banquier, après avoir hésité pour son mari entre diverses expositions, l'avait assis, sur un pliant, face à la digue, abrité du vent et du soleil par le kiosque des musiciens. Le voyant bien installé, elle venait de le quitter pour aller lui acheter un journal qu'elle lui lirait et qui le distrairait, petites absences pendant lesquelles elle le laissait seul et qu'elle ne prolongeait jamais au delà de cinq minutes, ce qui lui semblait bien long, mais qu'elle renouvelait assez fréquemment pour que le vieil époux à qui elle prodiguait à la fois et dissimulait ses soins eût l'impression qu'il était encore en état de vivre comme tout le monde et n'avait nul besoin de protection. La tribune des musiciens formait au-dessus de lui un tremplin naturel et tentant sur lequel sans une hésitation l'aînée de la petite bande se mit à courir: elle sauta par-dessus le vieillard épouvanté, dont la casquette marine fut effleurée par les pieds agiles, au grand amusement des autres jeunes filles, surtout de deux yeux verts dans une figure poupine qui exprimèrent pour cet acte une admiration et une gaieté où je crus discerner un peu de timidité, d'une timidité honteuse et fanfaronne, qui n'existait pas chez les autres. "C'pauvre vieux, i m'fait d'la peine, il a l'air à moitié crevé", dit l'une de ces filles d'une voix rogommeuse et avec un accent à demi-ironique. Elles firent quelques pas encore, puis s’arrêtèrent un moment au milieu du chemin sans s'occuper d'arrêter la circulation des passants, en un conciliabule, un agrégat de forme irrégulière, compact, insolite et piaillant, comme des oiseaux qui s'assemblent au moment de s'envoler; puis elles reprirent leur lente promenade le long de la digue, au-dessus de la mer.

Rereading this passage now brings to mind a very different encounter between youth and age on a beach, that of von Aschenbach and Tadzio on the Lido in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach watches Tadzio come back out of the water at the call of his governess: "He turned and ran back against the water, churning the waves to a foam, his head flung high. The sight of this living figure, virginally pure and austere, with dripping locks, beautiful as a tender young god, emerging from the depths of sea and sky, outrunning the element—it conjured up mythologies, it was like a primeval legend, handed down from the beginning of time, of the birth of form, of the origin of the gods." What von Aschenbach first admires when he sees Tadzio is his disdain for the world around him, exactly what sets the "petite bande" apart for Marcel, the petulance, single-minded and ignorant, of the blissful young.