In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [313]
Singers’ Bridge: headquarters of the Russian Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg.
Montecitorio: the Italian Chamber of Deputies in Rome.
Ballplatz (more correctly Ballhausplatz): the Austrian Foreign Ministry in Vienna.
The tomb of Tourville, the seventeenth-century French admiral, is in fact in the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris.
The word is cocu, cuckold. Norpois is being comically prudish.
August Wolf: German philologist (1759-1824) who was the most notable adherent of the view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of a number of anonymous bards.
The letters p.p.c. stand for pour prendre congé, to take one’s leave.
Rachel quand du Seigneur . . . : famous aria from Halévy’s opera La Juive.
Vatel: chef, after the famous maître d’hôtel of the great Condé.
This is an imaginary work. No such Memoirs exist.
Baronne d’Ange: character in Le Demi-monde by Alexandre Dumas fils—a courtesan who tries to marry into high society without success.
Concours général: competitive examination open to all secondary schools at baccalauréat level. “People’s universities” were established between 1898 and 1901 with the object of raising the intellectual level of the workers and bringing different social classes together. They mainly consisted of evening lecture courses.
The reference is to Amphion, who, according to Greek legend, rebuilt the walls of Thebes, charming the stones into place with his lyre.
Arvède Barine was the pseudonym of Mme Charles Vincens (1840-1908), a French woman writer who published several volumes of critical and historical essays.
Le jeu du furet is the French equivalent of “hunt-the-slipper.”
Addenda
The original manuscript has a more detailed version of the scene, which the Pléiade editors (1954) reproduce in their “Notes and Variants”:
Odette was quite prepared to cut short her visit, but could not leave at once since she had only just arrived. Either to get round the difficulty, or as a studied insult to her niece, “I should be most interested to look over your house,” Lady Israels had said to Mme de Marsantes, knowing that the latter had a great regard for her and an even greater need of her. Moreover Lady Israels, who was extremely beneficent and upright, was also very haughty. “I shall be delighted to show it to you,” Mme de Marsantes had replied, and at once set off with Lady Jacob [sic] as though she felt she had no need to bother about Mme Swann who must be only too happy to be in her house, leaving the unfortunate woman standing there alone, kicking her heels for half an hour. Then Mme de Marsantes had returned and said curtly to Mme Swann: “Excuse me”; whereupon Lady Jacob had raised her lorgnette and looked at Odette as at a person she had not even noticed before and who must have arrived in the meantime, or as yet another feature of the house. This feature no doubt failed to impress her, for it was the only one on which she made no comment, and turning towards Mme de Marsantes she started up a conversation with her in which Odette was not invited to join. “I trust you won’t go back there,” Swann had said to her afterwards, and this single visit had not encouraged Odette to pursue her offensive in that direction. Let us hasten to add, however, that this was not the world that preoccupied Mme Swann. On matters concerning the nobility, on pedigrees and ducal houses, she lacked even the petty erudition that peaceful bourgeois citizens of Nantes or Tours cultivate night and day, although they may never know anyone from that world. When, as we shall see, it began to flock to the house of the aged Odette, it did not come to fill a void, to gratify a craving induced by the reading of old memoirs and the Almanach de Gotha; it was received without the slightest mental preparation. Mme de Guermantes was for Odette no more than a superior Mme Verdurin whom it was “smart” to have to one’s house, and she was far less concerned about who the Guermantes family were than a great many people who would never know them . . .
The manuscript gives a longer and more detailed