Despite these apparent restrictions of life's activities she knows more of the happenings of the village than the town crier, and in a way she conditions the conduct of her neighbours whose first question is “What effect will it have on Aunt Leonie?” Her contact with people is limited to Françoise, a perfect servant, to Eulalie, a limping, energetic, deaf spinster, and to the reverend Curé.
“My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her eyes, of falling into one or other of the two categories of people she most detested. One group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those who advised her not to take so much care of herself, and preached (even if only negatively and with no outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours) than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other category was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said. And so none of those whom she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their visit had shown how unworthy they were of the honour which had been done them by venturing a timid: 'Don't you think that if you were just to stir out a little on really fine days...?' or who, on the other hand, when she said to them: 'I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!' had replied: 'Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while yet'; each party alike might be certain that her doors would never open to them again.”
A PAGE OF CORRECTED PROOF SHOWING
MARCEL PROUST'S METHOD OF REVISION
With all his literary art, and mastery of the mysterious powers that suggestion has to heighten awareness and deepen information, M. Proust does not succeed in enlightening us as to how the boy at Combray comes to possess so much information of people and such knowledge of the world. Part of it is intuitive, but understanding of Vinteuil's daughter, who “after a certain year we never saw alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end installed herself permanently at Montjouvain,” thus leading M. Vinteuil broken-hearted to the grave because of the shame and scandal of her sadism, is beyond possibility even for a boy of his precocity and prehensibility.
“For a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”
Thus does he introduce most casually a subject which bulks large in “Sodome et Gomorrhe,” and which M. Proust understands like a composite priest, physician, and biologist.
Most of the grist of the boy's mill comes over the road that skirts Swann's park, but some comes the Guermantes Way. In “Le Côté de Guermantes,” which followed “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs,” he makes us as intimately acquainted with the Duchesse de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis, and other notables of the société élegante, as he does in “Swann's Way” with the Verdurins and their “little nucleus” which furnishes a background to Odette, and furnishes M. Proust with canvas upon which to paint the portrait of an Æsculapian bounder, Dr. Cottard, who, it has been said, is still of the quick. M. Proust was the son and the brother of a physician and had abundant opportunity not only to get first-hand information but to have his natural insight quickened. In the same way one discovers his Jewish strain (his mother was a Jewess) in his mystic trends and in his characters such as Bloch and Swann. “Whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me that friend was invariably a Jew.” Moreover his lack of a sense of humour is an Hebraic trait. With the exception of the reaction provoked in his grandfather by the advent of one of these friends, “Swann's Way,” and indeed all M. Proust's writings, are humourless.
The genesis of Swann's love and the dissolution of Odette's take up one volume. If it is not a perfect description of the divine passion in a mature man surfeited by conquest and satiated by indulgence, it is an approximation to it.
He was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de Crocy by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature with whom he might very possibly come to an understanding. She made no appeal to Swann; indeed she not only left him indifferent, aroused in him no desire, but gave him a sort of physical repulsion. But Odette knew the ars amandi as did Circe or Sappho, and ere long she had entangled him in the meshes of Eros' net. When the net was drawn to her craft and the haul examined, it didn't interest her, though she kept it, for it contributed to her material welfare. Then M. Proust did a psychological stunt which reveals an important aspect of his mastery of the science. Swann identified Odette with Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, whose picture is to be seen in one of the Sixtine frescoes by Botticelli. Her similarity to it enhanced her beauty and rendered her more precious in his sight. Moreover it enabled him to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies where she assumed a new and nobler form. And whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his æsthetic principles. Instead of placing a photograph of Odette on his study table, he placed one of Jethro's daughter, and on it he lavished his admiration and concentrated his intensity in all the abandon of substitution.