The Marquis de Norpais, a former ambassador, is admirably drawn. He was naturally considered by the narrator's father as the cream of society. Just think of it! a man with two titles: Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, and Son Excellence Monsieur le Marquis! It is true that he was an ambassador under a republican government. But because of this he was interesting, for despite his antecedents he was entrusted with several extraordinary missions by very radical ministers. When a monarchist would not accept that honour, the republican government having had no fear that he might betray it, M. de Norpais himself willingly accepted the charge. Being in his blood a diplomat, he could not help exercising the functions of a diplomat, though in his heart he detested the republican spirit of government.
The narrator's mother did not admire his intelligence, but for the father every word of M. l'Ambassadeur de Norpais was an oracle. He had always wished that his son should become a diplomat, while the son wished to take up literature so as not to be separated from Gilberte. M. de Norpais, who did not much like the new style diplomats, told the narrator's father that a writer could gain as much consideration and more independence than a diplomat. His father changed his mind.
It is quite impossible, within the space of an essay, to give even an outline of the remaining volumes that have already appeared of this amazing and epochal novel.
Without doubt M. Proust had a definite idea in mind, a determination to make a contribution: to prove that the dominant force in mental life is association, the chief resource of mentality reminiscence. Thus the primitive instincts of mankind and their efforts to obtain convention's approbation furnish the material with which he has built. It is extraordinary how large association bulks: individuals remind him of famous paintings, not merely the general characters of the people whom he encounters in his daily life, but rather what seem least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knows. For instance, a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, is suggested by the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rami; the colouring of a Ghirlandajo, by the nose of M. de Palancy; a portrait by Tintoretto, by the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Bolbon.
If, on descending the stairs after one of the Doncières evenings, suddenly on arriving in the street, the misty night and the lights shining through suggest a time when he arrived at Combray, at once there is thrown on the screen of his consciousness a picture of incidents there and experiences elsewhere that are as vivid and as distinct as if he were looking at them on a moving-picture screen. Then suddenly there appears a legend “the useless years which slipped by before my invisible vocation declared itself, that invisible vocation of which this work is the history.” Like the monk who seeks God in solitude, like Nietzsche who sought Him in reason, M. Proust has sought to reveal his soul, his personality, the sum total of all his various forms of consciousness by getting memory to disgorge her contents, the key to the chamber being association.
“We try to discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.”
There are so many features of M. Proust's work that excite admiration that it is possible to enumerate only a few. Despite a studied style of confusion and interminable sentences, suspended, hyphenated, alembicated, and syncopated, that must forever make him the despair of anyone whose knowledge of French is not both fundamental and colloquial, he makes telling, life-like pen pictures of things and persons. Such is one of Françoise, the maid at Combray,
“who looked as smart at five o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for church-going; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and show him no special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.
“The daughter of Françoise, on the contrary, spoke, thinking herself a woman of today and freed from all customs, the Parisian argot and did not miss one of the jokes belonging to it. Françoise having told her that I had come from a Princess: 'Ah, doubtless a Princess of the cocoanut.' Seeing that I was expecting a visitor, she pretended to think that I was called Charles. I answered 'No,' naïvely, which permitted her to exclaim 'Ah, I thought so! And I was saying to myself Charles waits (charlatan).' It wasn't very good taste, but I was less indifferent when as a consolation for the tardiness of Albertine, she said, 'I think you can wait for her in perpetuity. She will not come any more.' Ah, our gigolettes of today!
“Thus her conversation differed from that of her mother but what is more curious the manner of speaking of her mother was not the same as that of her grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin which was near the country of Françoise. However the patois were slightly different, like the two country places. The country of the mother of Françoise was made up of hills descending into a ravine full of willows. And, very far from there, on the contrary, there was in France a little region where one spoke almost exactly the same patois as at Meseglise. I made the discovery at the same time that I was bored by it. In fact, I once found Françoise talking fluently with a chambermaid of the house who came from the country and spoke its patois. They understood each other mostly. I did not understand them at all. They knew this but did not stop on this account, excused, so they thought, by the joy of being compatriots, although born so far apart, for continuing to speak before me this foreign language as if they did not wish to be understood. This picturesque study of linguistic geography and comradeship was followed each week in the kitchen without my taking any pleasure in it.”