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By Root 1278 0

me because, at the time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualised them and had provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue—the myrtle-alley—I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what they had once been, wandering, desperately searching for heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long since fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds flew swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonian majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

NOTES • SYNOPSIS

Notes

1 Bressant: a well-known actor (1815–1886) who introduced a new hair-style which involved wearing the hair short in front and fairly long behind.

2 O ciel, que de vertus vous nous faites haïr. From Corneille’s Mort de Pompée.

3 à contre-coeur: reluctantly.

4 Le Miracle de Théophile: verse play by the thirteenth-century troubadour, Rutebeuf. Les quatres fils Aymon or Renaud de Montauban: twelfth-century chanson de geste.

5 bleu: express letter transmitted by pneumatic tube (in Paris).

6 The first edition of Du côté de chez Swann had “pour Chartres” instead of “pour Reims.” Proust moved Combray (which as we know was modelled on Illiers, near Chartres) to the fighting zone between Laon and Rheims when he decided to incorporate the 1914–1918 war into his book.

7 Indirect quotation from Racine’s Phèdre, Act I, Scene 3:

Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent!

Quelle importune main en formant tous ces noeuds

A pris soin sur mon front d’assembler mes cheveux?

8 In English in the original. Odette’s speech is peppered with English expressions.

9 “Home” is in English in the original, as is “smart” on this page.

10 La Reine Topaze: a light opera by Victor Massé presented at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1856.

11 Serge Panine: play by Georges Ohnet (1848–1918), adapted from a novel of the same name, which had a great success in 1881 in spite of its mediocre literary qualities.

Olivier Métra: composer of such popular works as La Valse des Roses and a famous lancers quadrille, and conductor at the Opéra-Comique.

12 Serpent à sonnettes means rattlesnake.

13 Pays du Tendre (or, more correctly, Pays de Tendre): the country of the sentiments, the tender emotions, mapped (the carte de Tendre) by Mlle de Scudéry in her novel, Clélie (1654–1670).

14 The rather forced joke on the name Cambremer conceives of it as being made up of abbreviations of Cambronne and merde (shit). Le mot de Cambronne (said to have been flung defiantly at the enemy by a general at Waterloo) is the traditional euphemism for merde.

15 Pneumatique or petit bleu: see note to this page above.

Synopsis

COMBRAY

Awakenings (1). Bedrooms of the past, at Combray (4), at Tansonville (6), at Balbec (8; cf. II 333). Habit (8).

Bedtime at Combray (cf. 57). The magic lantern; Genevi