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By Root 998 0

All love “evolves rapidly towards a farewell”: 474–75. “In love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit”: 519. “Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart”: 519. The unknown element in Albertine “formed the core” of M’s love: 580–81 (cf. 669–70). “There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer”: 669 (cf. 834–36; VI 348). “One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves”: 670. Natural to love “a certain type of woman;” “unique, we suppose? She is legion”: 677–82. “Death does not make any great difference”: 705–6. “We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder”: 715. Love is “a striking example of how little reality means to us”: 764. “A mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one”: 825–26. Reasons for love remaining platonic: VI 349. Love is “a portion of our mind more durable than the various selves which successively die within us,” a portion of the mind which gives the understanding of this love “to the universal spirit”: 301. Value of love and grief to the writer; “ideas come to us as the substitutes for grief”; “had we not been happy … the unhappinesses that befall us would be without cruelty and therefore without fruit;” the painful dilemmas consequent on love “reveal to us, layer after layer, the material of which we are made”: 311–19.

LYING. Odette’s lies; fragment of truth that gives her away: I 394–96; signs of distress that accompany her lying: 398–99, 413–14, 421. Nissim Bernard’s perpetual lying: II 485–86. Andrée’s lying; people who lie once will lie again: 636–37. Albertine’s polymorphous lies prompted by a desire to please everybody: 706–8. Unconscious mendacity: III 80. A complete lie more easily believed than a half-lie: IV 156. Albertine’s lies; the Infreville story: 268–70 (cf. V 137); how she gives herself away when lying: 677–78; how to decipher her lies; jealousy multiplies the tendency to lie in the person loved: V 72–74, 111–12; a liar by nature: 122–23; her contradictory lies; we fail to notice our mistress’s first lies: 186–98; her aptitude for lying; her “charming skill in lying naturally”: 232–36, 246–52. A lie “the most necessary means of self-preservation”: 221–22. “Impenetrable solidarity” of the little band as liars: 233–34. Lovers’ lies to a third person: 277–79. Value of lies and liars to literary men; “the perfect lie … is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown”: 281–82. Disparity between the truth which a lying woman has travestied and the idea which the lover has formed of that truth: 448–49. Perseverance in falsehood of those who deceive us: 517. Lying formulas that turn out to have been prophetic truths: 621–22, 684–85. “Lying is essential to humanity;” we lie to protect our pleasure or our honour; “one lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one”: 823–25 (cf. 943). Lying is a trait of character as well as a natural defence: 834–37. “One ruins oneself, makes oneself ill, kills oneself all for lies”—a lode from which one can extract a little truth: VI 350.

MARRIAGE. Swann’s marriage: II 1–2, 50–58, 126–34. “Ignominious marriages are the most estimable of all”: 56. The “subservience of refinement to vulgarity” the rule in many marriages: 126. Marital schemes of the Prince de Foix and his friends: III 553–54. Skin-deep Christianity of the Guermantes set invariably leads to “a colossally mercenary marriage”: 560. Happy marriages arranged by inverts for their nieces: IV 129. Reflexions on the marriage of Gilberte to Saint-Loup and of Jupien’s niece to young Cambremer: V 891–905; effects of these marriages: 905–20. An “unfortunate” marriage may be the only poetical action in a man’s life: 923. Advantage for a young husband of having kept a mistress: 925–26. Homosexuals make good husbands: 929–30; VI 351.

MEDICINE. Mysterious flair of the diagnostician; “we realised