The Year of Reading Proust discussion

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The Guermantes Way
The Guermantes Way, vol. 3
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Through Sunday, 26 May: The Guermantes Way
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Jason
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In journalistic fashion instead, this is what I'm gleaning:
WHO: the Narrator, Mme. de Villeparisis, Mme. de Guermantes, three women of noble extraction including one reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, Bloch turned considerably more serious instead of farcical, miscellaneous others. Not mentioned are people like the Narrator's grandmother or anyone else in his family, Swann and his family, Mme. Verdurin, several others I would have thought might have rated a mention.
WHAT: Salons, though I can't tell how many and precisely who's playing host at all of them.
WHERE: Again, I can't tell whether they're at Mme. de Villeparisis' residence, at the elegant Guermantes salon, or a mixture of these.
WHEN: I'm guessing over a somewhat extended length of time, though maybe not if the Narrator is planning to return to Balbec early this year. Proust is as always vague about this aspect of what he's describing.
WHY: This one is at least mostly unambiguous -- the quest for social status and notoriety among the members of high society. But it's fun to see how Proust undercuts the whole enterprise by talking about the superficial conversations that go on and the subterfuges required (ensuring that men attend without their wives through a ruse, for instance). The principals seem serenely unaware that anything could be going wrong with their plans.
So do I have the basics right at least?

Even though I've read/listened to ISOLT before, this is the first time I've read it so closely. The salon scene spans 150 pages & I should read it all before I comment but for now: what a jerk the Duc is, he makes the Narrator look so much better, in fact all the attendees do. 2 more hours...I guess I could read, but what ;-?

I also appreciate how Proust sees words/names in colors:
".... beautiful and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of the closing syllable of her name ...."
".... without seeming to feel that there were latent in her name the glow of yellowing woods in autumn and a whole mysterious tract of country.... "
It's a wonderful dimension to his narrative description and, for me at least, creates a fuller picture of the people/objects being described, as I tend to "colorize" letters, numbers, and dates.

I have to say I'm finding this episode has more of a narrative drive than some of the other more philosophical ones, and it seems to me to be a faster read because I don't stop to reflect on what I've just read so much. Perhaps I'm missing some nuances but I'm not finding it very hard to follow at all.
As to the Where, you mention, Richard, it is definitely Mme de Villeparisis's home/apartment where Norpois seems to be a semi-permanent resident, at least in the first forty pages of this week's reading. My only query about that is where exactly is Mme de V's home located. In book two, the Narrator's grandmother visited Mme de V in her home and met the tailor, Jupion, who lived downstairs or in the same courtyard, and she was advised by Mme de V to move there as it would suit her health better. Now they have moved to this hôtel particulier where Jupion has his workshop, but it is Mme de G who is in residence in the main part of the building and there's no mention of Mme de V living within the same courtyard complex....
Eugene, the way the duc is described is very amusing, as is the very detailed portrait we get of his wife and her conversational style. Proust is so good at this kind of social satire and it gives us such a fascinating insight into the lives of such people, and the etiquette of their salons. It is quite like the world described in Anatole France's Le Lys Rouge although the satire there was less pointed.
Martin, I also marked the 'amarante' reference, pleased to have finally found the name of the flower that reminded the Narrator of the colour he associated with the name Guermantes although the 'amarante' flower seems to be a bordeaux colour and not orange or yellow...
And I think some familiar names are going to crop up in this section, already I was reminded of Swann when the Narrator describes the way Mme de G rarely mentioned poetry or literature to her author guests when she invites them to dinner, and then he actually does mention Swann. And then others...

Fionnuala, I thought amarante was yellow. I would have put my head under the guillotine. You just saved my life. And thank you for reminding us of Le Lys Rouge.


Thanks for clearing up the WHERE of this section. Part of the problem for me is that sometimes he makes it seem as if the salons belong to Mme. de Villeparisis, but then he portrays the Duchesse as dictating how the conversation is to proceed.



But yes, mostly it is of a fuchsia or bourdeaux color..
Here is the one Crête de coq

And I think this is the more common one:


Interesting is the atypical background of Marquise de Villeparisis; her close relationship with M. Norpois; that the Duc behaves, or talks, a bit like a bourgeois; that Mme de Cambremer the younger is not aging well; and that the Duchesse will soon fall from the pedestal on which our Narrator had placed her.
And also how very traumatic was the Dreyfus affair for everyone.

And is it related to amaryllis?

And is it related to amaryllis?"
Well, I am just relieved that we finally know why he saw the Guermantes as orange... from the early Combray section that was a mystery.
As for amaryllis, I am not an expert, but it does not seem so. The funny thing is that yellow in Spanish is "amarillo".
But there is this poem by Rimbeaud called Plates-bandes d'Amarantes
Juillet, Boulevard du Régent.
Plates-bandes d'amarantes jusqu'à
L'agréable palais de Jupiter.
- Je sais que c'est Toi qui, dans ces lieux,
Mêles ton Bleu presque de Sahara !
Puis, comme rose et sapin du soleil
Et liane ont ici leur jeux enclos,
Cage de la petite veuve !...
Quelles
Troupes d'oiseaux, ô iaio, iaio !...
- Calmes maisons, anciennes passions !
Kiosque de la Folle par affection.
Après les fesses des rosiers, balcon
Ombreux et très bas de la Juliette.
- La Juliette, ça rappelle l'Henriette,
Charmante station du chemin de fer,
Au coeur d'un mont, comme au fond d'un verger
Où mille diables bleus dansent dans l'air !
Banc vert où chante au paradis d'orage,
Sur la guitare, la blanche Irlandaise.
Puis, de la salle à manger guyanaise,
Bavardage des enfants et des cages.
Fenêtre du duc qui fais que je pense
Au poison des escargots et du buis
Qui dort ici-bas au soleil.
Et puis
C'est trop beau ! trop ! Gardons notre silence.
- Boulevard sans mouvement ni commerce,
Muet, tout drame et toute comédie,
Réunion des scènes infinie,
Je te connais et t'admire en silence.
Est-elle almée ?...
Est-elle almée ?... aux premières heures bleues
Se détruira-t-elle comme les fleurs feues...
Devant la splendide étendue où l'on sente
Souffler la ville énormément florissante !
C'est trop beau ! c'est trop beau ! mais c'est nécessaire
- Pour la Pêcheuse et la chanson du Corsaire,
Et aussi puisque les derniers masques crurent
Encore aux fêtes de nuit sur la mer pure !
Juillet 1872.
Arthur Rimbaud
In my first fast reading I got all excited as I read "orate" as "orange"..
Watch out for the White Irlandaise...

I also know I'm missing something in the talk about hats - carried in the hand at home and lain on the floor. What does it mean to people of the period?

Jeux enclos,
Kiosque, station de chemin de fer,
cages, fesses des rosiers?
Lots of little echoes of Proust here...
And the white Irlandaise - must be a type of rose, Irish people aren't famous for the guitar unlike the Spanish. Now If it had been a fiddle...

Mme de G lying down with her eyes open ( but not visible here.)?

I think it's simply a new fashion the younger set had of wearing their hats all the time and just placing them on the floor while in the presence of women. But the narrator leaves his in the hall à l'ancienne. And then Norpois borrows it, in order to appear like the younger set, entering the room still carrying his hat, as if he was still young, and had just come from somewhere else, or as if this was a peculiarity of his own...

But the idea of a man carrying his hat around in his own home, well, that was a weird one!

Do you mean Norpois, Karen? I don't think he's meant to be 'in his own home', just at home chez Mme de V. but trying to appear as if he isn't, for the sake of appearances...

We have those around here. We call them Rooster Combs.
Re the duc's bourgeois-style conversation. He's an idiot.

LOL

We have those around here. We call them Rooster Combs.
Re the duc's bourgeois-style conversation. He's an idiot."
We have the Crêtes de Coq here too, and the funny thing is that I have the purple and most common one in front of my house! I knew they were called amaranthus but did not even make the connection. The truth is right now I am totally enthralled by the blooming jacarandas. A veritable feast for the eye which easily eclipses the amaranths.

Do you mean Norpois, Karen? I don't think he's meant to be 'in his own home', just at ..."
No, this was really last week... Mme de Villeparisis talking to Bloch about something to do with a man and his hat and then telling Bloch that when the King came to call then he turned every home into his court, so that you were then a visitor in your own house. Did I get that right? Something like that.
I still haven't really started this week. Work and life getting in the way of reading.

Proust cuts between speaking voices in the salon scene; they are different and appear to be what the Narrator overhears. He comments on the speakers and what they say as the present Narrator and as the reflective Narrator, but in this case that could be Marcel Proust himself.
About Mme de Marsantes,
Possibly the reflective Narrator or Proust is speaking:
Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent, playing at simplicity. It is a pastime which costs a great deal of money, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know that you are capable of not living simply, that is to say that you are very rich.
The present Narrator is speaking:
Someone said to me afterwards, when I mentioned that I had seen her: "You saw of course that she must have been lovely as a young woman."
Possibly the reflective Narrator or Proust is speaking:
But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognize it as beauty.
The present Narrator is speaking:
I said to myself that afternoon only that she had a tiny nose, very blue eyes, a long neck and a sad expression. ML p. 340
The verbal textures, the way people speak, alternate between speakers and between Narrators: I find these changes beautiful, Proust is to be lauded for them--how interesting, how fresh, how... And what he has to say about beauty is as contemporary now as it was when it was written 100 or so years ago, beauty is "...individual...novel...one does not recognize it...", another reason I enjoy reading ISOLT.

Look where Proust takes you when the Narrator speaks/thinks at
Mme de Villeparisis's salon:
Mme de Villeparisis's evening party
Afternoon outings in Paris
Shopping in Paris
A succession of salons
The streets of Paris from tall open windows
Combray
Tansonville
Rue de la Paix
The length of the sentence is required to travel as the reader does.
Perhaps I should have been not quite so deeply stirred had I met her at Mme de Villeparisis's at an evening party, instead of seeing her thus at one of the Marquise's "at homes," at one of those tea-parties which are for women no more than a brief halt in the course of their afternoon's outing, when, keeping on the hats in which they have been doing their shopping, they waft into a succession of salons the quality of the fresh air outside, and offer a better view of Paris in the late afternoon than do the tall open Windows through which one can hear the rumble of victorias: Mme de Guermantes wore a straw hat trimmed with cornflowers, and what they re-called to me was not the sunlight of bygone years among the tilled fields round Combray where I had so often gathered them on the slope adjoining the Tansonville hedge, but the smell and the dust of twilight as they had been an hour ago when Mme de Guermantes had walked through them in the Rue de la Paix. ML p. 274
Might also I note a lovely string of words in the sentence "the smell and the dust of twilight" Ahh, what does twilight smell like, we ask. If this is not antithesis but called another rhetorical term, it matters not, it pleases.

Yes, she seemed to be saying that her father only ever wore his hat in his own house if the king visited but that M le comte Molé, a contemporary of her father's and whom she seemed to rate highly, always carried his when he came down to dinner in his own home regardless of any royal visits. I'm wondering if Proust isn't trying to make a connection, via all this talk of the etiquette of hat holding, between Molé and Norpois, as if Mme de V is subtly transferring an extra veneer of prestige on Norpois by linking him with Molé since Norpois eventually enters the room holding a hat and she has indicated to everyone that he has been in another room all the time, attending to his own affairs, as if in his own home, and not coming from the outside like everyone else.
@Eugene, I loved that wonderful phrase about the flowers in Mme de G's hat (which she wears indoors because it is kate afternoon and not evening) and how they didn't evoke the sun-filled years of childhood when the Narrator had picked such flowers in Combray or Tansonville, but instead threw extra light on Paris life as it appears in the late afternoon by evoking the smell of dust at twilight, in the rue de la Paix:
Mme de Guermantes était coiffé d'un canotier fleuri de bluets; et ce qu'ils évoquaient, ce n'était pas, sur les sillons de Combray où si souvent j'en avais cueilli, sur le talus contigu à la haie de Tansonville, les soleils des lointaines années, c'était l'odeur de la poussière du crépuscule, telles qu'elles étaient tout à l'heure, au moment où Mme de Guermantes venait de les traverser, rue de la Paix
@Kalliope, so can we now presume that the spelling of the name Guermantes, and not just the 'colour' of the name, was somehow inspired by the word 'amarantes'?

Hard to say about the name.. there is a place called Guermantes and also this château:
http://www.balades-en-brie.com/brie/g...
Someone may have access to this article...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307...
I have registered and can read the article... (can only be read on line, and no copy/paste is possible)
One extract...
Pourtant Guermantes existe. C’est un petit village de Moniz de deux mille habitants qui se situe non pas dans la Beauce comme Illiers-Combray, main en Ile-de-France, près de Lagny-sur-Marne, à vingt-cinq kilomètres à l’est de Paris.
A Guermantes on trouve en effet une allée Swann, une allée du Temps perdu une rue de la Madeleine, un espace Marcel Proust. Mais si les proustiens y sont si peu sensibles, c’est bien sûr parce qu’ils savent que la beauté et le charme de Guermantes n’existent pour le narrateur de la Recherche que dans son nom et que tout ce qui fait référence au Guermantes réel, telles ces explications que Saint-Loup croit bon de lui fournir de l’histoire de sa famille….

Yes, the ML translation is more 'mystical' than what Proust wrote, l'odeur de la poussière du crépuscule...; either way the words are evocative as is the sentence.

Pourtant Guermantes existe. C’est un petit village de Moniz de deux mille habitants qui se situe non pas dans la Beauce comme Illiers-Combray, main en Ile-de-France, près de Lagny-sur-Marne, à vingt-cinq kilomètres à l’est de Paris.
A Guermantes on trouve en effet une allée Swann, une allée du Temps perdu une rue de la Madeleine, un espace Marcel Proust. Mais si les proustiens y sont si peu sensibles, c’est bien sûr parce qu’ils savent que la beauté et le charme de Guermantes n’existent pour le narrateur de la Recherche que dans son nom et que tout ce qui fait référence au Guermantes réel, telles ces explications que Saint-Loup croit bon de lui fournir de l’histoire de sa famille….
Comme le dit Kristeva.. Guermantes, c’est dans la Recherche la « métaphore par excellence de l’Être en tant qu’objet littéraire », celle qui assure la transsubstantiation des fantasmagories de l’enfance en œuvre d’art, une fois dépassés les désenchantements qu’entraînent inévitablement toute confrontation et tout rapprochement avec le réel – une leçon que Philip Kolb a manifestement bien retenue lorsqu’il privilégie le motif euphonique pour expliquer le choix de Guermantes de préférence à Villebon

Thank you for looking this up, Kalliope. And you have been well rewarded in your quest to throw light on the 'Guermantes' image which so fascinates the Narrator. The academics seem intrigued by it too, that there is a 'euphonic' motivation in the choice of the name as well as a link to colour, via the flower, amarante that we have worked out here. It is as if all the major themes of the Recherche are contained in the name...when we say it aloud, that long middle syllable can even suggests time passing; a little like the sound of 'maintes fois', so many times..
@Eugene, doesn't the 'odeur de la poussière du crépuscule suggest death in a vague kind of way too, death of an infatuation perhaps?..

Thank you for look..."
Looking at the etymology of the word Amarante... from the French Wiki
Amaranthus vient du grec ancien αμάρανθος, formé du privatif a-, « sans » et de maranthos, « qui se fane » : en effet, l'amarante a la réputation de ne pas se faner, et est pour cette raison un symbole de l’immortalité. Certaines espèces sont d'ailleurs utilisées dans les bouquets secs.
Proust has certainly made the name Guermantes immortal...!!!
But I keep thinking that he may have known the Rimbaud poem. He read everything and remembered.


Yes, it could suggest death but I try to 'stay on the page' and take only what's written by Proust & to not follow my fancies. The late afternoon is the 'death' of the day, if you will, and that is what I read.
Also, the utterance was by the present (younger) narrator who doesn't yet know that he will be "indifferent" to her. He's still infatuated with her at the moment of speaking; he experiences melancholy but not her figurative death, not yet.

I've reached the part where the young baron and Châtellerault put their hat down on the floor, and my edition gives me an annotation here: The handbook of etiquette of the day Les usages et le savoir-vivre en toutes les circonstances de la vie (Autran) says that it is only acceptable to leave your hat in the hall at a ball or an evening entertainment. Visiting a salon, the gentleman should hold his hat and his cane in his hand all the time, never putting it down anywhere. Also he should never have anything but the outside of the hat visible to anyone else. "En montrer la coiffe et ridicule" I presume coiffe is the lining? I didn't find any sensible translation.
Same as GB then.
And it explains Mme de Villeparisis's little joke (haha) about Saint Loup, who likes to leave his hat in the hall, so she teases him, saying he must have come to wind the clocks - she is a card isn't she? Presumably the workman would come in by the workman's entrance and would leave his cap in the kitchen.
I lived in one of these huge houses in the 8ème arrondissement in Paris when I was working as an au pair. It had a magnificent front staircase, all gold and mirrors and plush carpet, and then there was the narrow wooden servants' staircase that went past the kitchen and up to the servants' rooms under the attics. It took you out past the other side of the concierge's office, out into the street through a much less sumptuous door. You still had to sneak past the nosy concierge though.

Thank you for look..."
Should I feel a little miffed that Guermantes is more euphonic than Villebon, although I have to agree. Thank you Kalliope for looking that up. I like Fionnuala's linking the name to a color but it would have to be the yellow amarante. The name has mystery that glitters in it. I never thought of the passage of time being evoked by 'mantes' but I like it a lot.

Does anyone understand the weird Norman saying about apples? My annotations complete it:
Pour une année où il y a des pommes, il n'y a pas de pommes; mais pour une année où il n'y a pas de pommes, il y a des pommes.
I think I shall take that one into my repertoire: no-one will understand it, but it sounds really deep.

I am wondering about the high incidence of albuminuria at the time. It almost sounds like a fashionable disease of the time. How come we never hear the term now? Or is kidney failure what was then called albuminuria? I can't help wondering whether a hundred years from now, people reading our contemporary litterature will ask the same question about cancer.

I'm thinking they didn't wanted to avoid anyone having to look at the greasy inner band of the hat!
But if this was the etiquette of the day, and not just a vogue that some young people like Châtellerualt practiced, the Narrator, by leaving his in the hall, must be following Saint-Loup's clock-winder practice?
I siffler fromage Jay rêver
That was my French keyboard's version of : I suffer from hay fever too.

Correction: The 1st half of the sentence, we were discussing in messages 32 & 35, before the ":" was said the the older (reflective) Narrator & what follows that was said by the younger (present) Narrator.

Yes, it makes sense to 'stay on the page', Eugene and not anticipate the events of the story too much. There is more than enough to satisfy us in the present of the narrative.
But I'm struck by how copying out Proust's sentences here reveals even more about them than just passively reading the text. That is why I made that comment about death. Having copied out the words, the poussière and the crépuscule suddenly evoked endings and death.
Re the two Narrators, I am trying to read with more awareness of the difference in there perspectives and it does help.

But true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognize it as beauty. ML p. 340
Five years...

"I don't remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one before, now she's the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of the ox. Or rather, it isn't quite that, because ail her swelling is concentrated in her stomach: she's more like a frog in an interesting condition."
"Ah, I do find that funny," said Mme de Villeparisis, secretly proud that her guests should be witnessing this display of her niece's wit. ML p. 282
As Proust must 'indict' the Duchess to show why the young Narrator falls out of love with her as disclosed earlier by an omniscient narrator, isn't this part of the indictment? Is making fun of a person you suspect to be ill, particularly one who will dine with you next week, wit or even funny? Probably more damned than the Duchess here is Mme de Villeparisis, as much as I've liked, among other things, the rebel in her, she's guilty of a poorly chosen pride.
These are disagreeable people at the salon, almost all of them. As offensive as Bloch is, he almost had me admiring him when he almost left the salon but he, true to character, stayed to talk to M de Norpois. Him, I best like among the attendees as he is such a master of conversational language, never to be pinned down. He has the almost good Bloch spinning about the Dreyfus case: 'does he or doesn't he' after listening to the ambassador's diplomatic, but sophistic, rhetoric.
This is less cartoonish than Mme Verdurin's get together but meaner.

Memories are conflated into a deceiving linear continuum. I do not think one can identify two discrete points in this narrative.

This is the beauty of this search, I think. Sometimes-linear, and sometimes a kaleidoscope of swirling colors, memories, emotions, smells, and tastes.

Martin,
I love your image of the kaleidoscope.. perfect.. it matches the Magic Lantern...

I remember marveling when I was very young at how memoirists were able to recall all the details of experiences and conversations months or years after the event, when I could barely remember what I did just yesterday. Only much later did I have an insight into the artifice of the writer.
Books mentioned in this topic
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (other topics)Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (other topics)