Proust Progress Report 18: The beginning of the end

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (text established under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié ©1987–1992): Book 6, Albertine disparue, page 2000 to end; beginning Book 7, Le temps retrouvé

Someone recently commented on a sporting event, probably a cricket match, that watching it was like reading Proust. I would have been tempted to reply, ‘You mean it made you obsess about the sexuality of the players?’ In the sixth book, Albertine disparue, the narrator gradually gets over the loss of his beloved Albertine, but even when his grief is well and truly in the past, he still frets over her probable lesbianism, no longer writhing with jealousy perhaps, but now ruminating for pages on the unreliability of witness accounts, on the universality of lying, and – of course – on memory, imagination, and the gap between them and reality.

So much has happened in what I’ve read this month. When I began, the narrator was in Venice with his mother lusting after young Venetian women, his lust being largely based in what he thought would have stirred Albertine’s desire. There are a couple of encounters with characters from earlier books. M de Norpois, now retired, is still wielding influence in diplomatic circles. Mme de Villeparisis has a lovely cameo appearance which, to use the cricket analogy, is like someone hitting a six. On hearing Mme de Villeparisis’s name, Mme Sazerat, who is a guest of the narrator and his mother, gets all excited. Her father, she explains, had an affair with Mme de Villeparisis many years previously, and was ruined. Mme Sazerat’s only consolation was that the terrible suffering her whole family endured was a result of his having been involved with the greatest beauty of the day. Now she would love to clap eyes on that great beauty for the first time. Marcel escorts her to the restaurant and points out the object of her fascination:

Mais comme les aveugles qui dirigent leurs yeux ailleurs qu’où il faut, Mme Sazerat n’arrêta pas ses regards à la table où dînait Mme de Villeparisis, et, cherchant un autre point de la salle:
– Mais elle doit être partie, je ne la vois pas où vous me dites.
Et elle cherchait toujours, poursuivant la vision détestée, adorée, qui habitait son imagination depuis si longtemps.
– Mais si, à la seconde table.
– C’est que nous ne comptons pas à partir du même point. Moi, comme je compte, la seconde table, c’est une table où il y a seulement, à côté d’un vieux monsieur, une petite bossue, rougeaude, affreuse.
– C’est elle!

(page 2082–2083)

But, like blind people who look in the wrong direction, Mme Sazerat did not bring her gaze to rest at the table at which Mme de Villeparisis was dining, and, looking towards another part of the room:
‘But she must have gone, I can’t see her where you say.’
And she searched on in pursuit of the loathed, adored vision that had haunted her imagination for so long.
‘But yes, at the second table.’
‘We mustn’t be counting from the same point. The second table by my count is one where there is only, beside an old gentleman, a little hunchback, red-faced and hideous.’
‘That is she!’

Perhaps because Proust died before making a final revision of this book, he lets that tragicomic moment stand without even a sentence reflecting on the gap between imagination and reality. We can be glad of that. And yet it looks as if Mme Sazerat’s great disillusionment is a kind of hinge: from here on, disparate threads of the narrative are tied up, imagined meanings of long-ago events are punctured, and there’s a general sense of things closing down.

When his mother is about to leave Venice, Marcel decides to stay behind in the hope of meeting up with a Mme Putbus for carnal purposes, but at the last minute joins her on the train. They both open letters and the thread-tying begins in earnest: they learn of two marriages. To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say that Robert gets married, and Gilberte gets married, and Jupien’s daughter gets married, and it turns out that Robert (no spoiler here, I hope) has realised he’s gay and is pretty open about it, which causes his new wife considerable distress. M de Charlus has made a kind of amends to Jupien by providing for his daughter. Morel, who seduced Jupien’s daughter and dumped M de Charlus a couple of books back, is now doing very well with another rich patron of Guermantes lineage, thank you very much. The narrator is still curious about Albertine’s sexuality, and has a lot to say about male homosexuality, including speculating that all the Guermantes men are homosexual with only an occasional aberration, and surmising that homosexual men make the best husbands (he does enjoy salaciousness, paradox and gossip, and all the better if he can combine all three).

At the start of the final book, the narrator is staying at Gilberte’s place in the country. After, among other things, completely reinterpreting his earliest memories of her, she lends him some bedtime reading – an unpublished diary of the Goncourts – and in what I think of as a typical Proustian moment, he gives us six pages word for word of what he read before he went to sleep. In those pages, we are given a version of a salon that our narrator has mocked relentlessly: in this version, the guests are witty, intelligent, creative, and are given credit for inspiring, educating and even instructing at least one artist that Marcel reveres. I think I read correctly that the shock of seeing this difference is so great that Marcel decides he isn’t talented enough to be a writer, or alternatively that literature is too far removed from reality to be taken seriously in any way. And he turns his back on the whole writing enterprise.

Years later – and this is where I’m up to – after spending years far from Paris in a maison de santé (a sanatarium?), he comes back to the capital in 1916 (the first time he has mentioned a date). I’m sure something is about to happen, but currently he is having a fine time mocking the way clothes design has replaced art at the cultural centre, and the newspapers are celebrating the way the war allows glorious innovations in women’s fashion.