In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [398]
NOTES · ADDENDA · SYNOPSIS
Notes
1 From Racine’s Esther, Act I, Scene 3.
2 Famous Siamese twins who appeared in music halls and had a succès de curiosité at the 1900 World’s Fair.
3 These words appear neither in the libretto of Pelleas et Mélisande nor in any of Rameau’s operas, but in Gluck’s Armide in this form: “Ah, si la liberié me doit être ravie, est-ce à toi d’être mon vainqueur!” Similarly, one or two of the phrases attributed to Arkel and Golaud in the next paragraph are a little fanciful: Proust invariably quoted from memory.
4 Maquereau=pimp.
5 Clarification of this expression can be found in an essay of Proust’s entitled En mémoire des églises assassinées, in which, during a drive through Normandy, he compares his chauffeur with his steering-wheel to the statues of apostles and martyrs in mediaeval cathedrals holding symbolic objects representing the arts which they practised in their lifetimes or the instruments of their martyrdom—in this case a stylised wheel: a circle enclosing a cross. Cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 580.
6 Comic opera by Adolphe Adam (1836).
7 Grue means “crane” (in both the ornithological and the mechanical sense) and also, by analogy, “prostitute.” Faire le pied de grue=“to kick one’s heels,” “to stand around for a long time”—like a crane standing on one leg, or a street-walker in search of custom. Morel’s use of the term is grammatically nonsensical.
8 Claude-Philibert Berthelot, Baron de Rambuteau: politician and administrator, préfet of the Seine in 1833, introduced public urinals with individual compartments.
9 Famous nineteenth-century tragedian.
10 This passage was obviously written before Proust composed his account of Bergotte’s death and inserted it at an earlier point in this volume.
11 Mme Pipelet is the concierge in Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. Mme Gibout and Mme Prudhomme are characters in Henri Monnier’s Scenes populaires and Les Mémoires de Joseph Prudhomme.
12 Famous Parisian caterers.
13 Cottard will nevertheless reappear—indeed at this same soiree (see p. 371)—to die during the Great War, in Time Regained.
14 The French has a play on the words allegro and allègre.
15 Mme Verdurin uses here the word tapette, no doubt unaware of its popular meaning (see Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, note 18 to p. 594).
16 The heroine of Victor Hugo’s Hernani: the reference is to the final scene, which ends with Hernani’s enforced suicide after the nuptial feast.
17 Thomas Couture, nineteenth-century French painter. The allusion is to his picture, Les Romains de la Decadence, shown in the Salon of 1847.
18 Auguste Vacquerie and Paul Meurice were two devoted disciples of Victor Hugo.
19 Mme de Villeparisis will reappear, extremely aged but very much alive, in The Fugitive.
20 To Condé’s lament: “My dear friend La Moussaye,/Ah, God, What weather!/We are going to perish in the flood,” La Moussaye replies: “Our lives are safe,/For we are Sodomites,/We have to die by fire.” There is a marginal note by Proust in the manuscript at this point: “Stress the fact that homosexuality has never precluded bravery, from Caesar to Kitchener.”
21 The blancs d’Espagne were a group of extreme legitimists who held that the true heirs to the French throne were the Spanish Bourbons who were descended in direct line from Louis XIV through his grandson Philip V of Spain.
22 Slang for anus. What Albertine had been about to say was “me faire casser le pot,” an obscene slang expression meaning to have anal intercourse (passive).
23 There is a gap in Proust’s manuscript at this point. For an illustration of the narrator’s point, see Vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, p. 315.
24 Racine’s Esther again.
25 “Notre mal ne vaut pas un seul de ses regards”—the line is from one of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Helene (cf. Vol. IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 738).
26 Albert, Duc de Broglie, the grandson of