“suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart.... All his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”
It raised the flood-gate of the dam in which he had stored the memories of Odette when she loved him and before he loved her. Not only did it liberate the memories of her, but the memories that were associated with them: all the net-work of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory reactions, through which it extended over a series of groups its uniform meshes, by which his body now found itself inextricably held.
“When, after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard the sonata played....
“In his little phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness....
“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness....
“So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.”
From that evening Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive. He had made his bed, and he resolved to share it in holy matrimony with Odette, though this discomforted his friends and made him a species of Pariah.
Mme. Swann in Combray was a solitary, but not in Paris. There she queened it, as many lovely ladies had done before her. The account of that, and of the narrator's love for Gilberte, Swann's daughter, who, when he had encountered her casually at Combray, had made a stirring and deep impression on him; and the advent of Albertine, a potential Gomorrite, make up the contents of the succeeding instalment, entitled “A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs.” Gilberte, Swann's daughter, and the narrator now approaching puberty, came to play together in the Champs Elysées, frolicking like children, innocently, though another feeling began soon to bud in him, a feeling which he did not yet understand. In this volume the narrator relates the experiences he had when a youth, and therefore there is more precision in the description of the persons with whom he came in contact. The volume also throws much light indirectly on Proust's personality. From a certain incident which he tells regarding the way he was brought up, one sees that his father was a rigourous aristocrat, stiff in his demeanour, and very particular in the choice of his connections. He, the narrator, was brought up in a way the Germans would call “schablonenmässig”: everything was discussed at a family council, as though he were an inanimate plaything. His naïvete, the result of such training, is very characteristic.
For some time he had been longing to see “Phèdre” played by the famous Mme. La Berma (evidently Sarah Bernhardt, for at that time she was the only one who played “Phèdre”). After long deliberation because of his illness, it was decided he should go chaperoned by his grandmother, to see his ideal actress. The scene opened with two men who rushed on in the throes of heated argument. He did not know that this was part of the play and that the men were actors; he thought they were some ruffians who had forced their way into the theatre and who would surely be ejected by the officials. He wondered, though, that the spectators not only did not protest, but listened to them with the greatest attention. Only when the theatre re-echoed with applause did he understand that the two men were actors. Afterwards, when two ladies came upon the stage, both of portly bearing, he could not decide which one was La Berma; a little later he learned that neither of them was the great actress. To reconcile such unsophistication with the account of the peeping Tom episode when he laid bare Mlle. Vinteuil's deforming habituation is very difficult.
Swann, now ill, and repentant, was consumed with ambition to introduce his wife, Odette, into high society, in which he succeeded to a great extent. Though he did not like M. Buntemps because of his reactionary opinions, he, “the director of the minister's office,” was an important personage and his wife, Mme. Buntemps, was a steady visitor in Odette's salon. But once in a while he was malicious enough to exasperate Mme. Buntemps. He told her once he would invite the Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendome to dinner. Mme. Buntemps protested, saying it was not seemly that the Cottards should be at the same table with the Duchesse. In reality she was jealous of the Cottards who were going to share the honour with her. The Prince d'Agrigente was invited, because it was altogether “private”! Odette is described as a woman of low intelligence, without education, speaking faulty French, but shrewd, dominating her husband. One of her guests was Mme. Cottard, the wife of Dr. Cottard, the medical bounder who had now become Professor, a woman who did not belong to her present circle. But she had to invite a person who could tell her former friends of her high connections, so as to raise their envy.