Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [49]
WITH THE EXCEPTION of summer vacations in Combray, when the narrator was a child, and in the Channel resort of Balbec, where as a young man he meets Albertine, later his fiancée, and of a short trip to Venice with his mother, all of Remembrance of Things Past takes place in Paris. The presence of the city saturates the novel the way moisture saturates the air and determines its atmospheric pressure.
I can think of one other city so present in a great modern novel, and that is Joyce’s Dublin. But unlike Joyce, who delivers Dublin in a single day, Proust makes Paris unfold over a period of roughly forty-five years, from 1875 to 1920. To read Proust is to observe the flowering and decline of a period in the capital’s history, for the debacle of 1870 and the horrors of the Commune were followed by years of determined amusement known as la belle époque. Those who had expected a wake found, instead, a celebration that was interrupted only by another war.
Proust was born in 1871 in a Paris already physically transformed by the Baron Haussmann, who destroyed entire neighborhoods to build long, straight thoroughfares like the rue de Rivoli, who crossed the Seine with five new bridges, and who built the Halles central market. The transformation continued during Proust’s life. The avenue of the Opéra linked the rue de Rivoli with Garnier’s opera house, inaugurated in 1874. The young Proust saw the Eiffel Tower go up, its four perforated iron legs rising from the green meadow of the Champ de Mars. In 1900 the Petit and Grand Palais were opened to the public. In the same year the first line of the Métro was inaugurated, and the fanciful wrought-iron entrances, with their orange lights and insectlike appearance, contributed to what became known as the “firefly” style of decoration.
And yet the capital of two and a half million people still resembled a collection of villages. The Champs-Élysées remained unpaved until the twentieth century. The houses on the avenue du Bois (today’s avenue Foch) still had private stables. Passy was a rustic suburb. Public transportation consisted mainly of horse-drawn omnibuses, despite the Métro, which Proust mentions only once.
Electric street lighting was still a novelty, so that the narrator, going to visit Mme Swann, the mother of Gilberte, was guided by the light in her living room, which shone like a beacon in the dark. Houses, even the houses of the rich, were badly heated. In the early spring Mme Swann received visitors with an ermine wrap over her shoulders and her hands in an ermine muff, like “the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest, which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had succeeded in melting.”
The traditional coexistence of luxury and discomfort was tempered by new inventions. Thus, the narrator acquires a telephone. As he waits for a call from Albertine, he remarks: “The advance of civilisation enables each of us to display unsuspected merits or fresh defects which make him dearer or more insupportable to his friends. Thus Dr. Bell’s invention had enabled Françoise [his maid] to acquire an additional defect, which was that of refusing, however important, however urgent the occasion might be, to make use of the telephone. She would manage to disappear whenever anybody was going to teach her how to use it, as people disappear when it is time for them to be vaccinated.”
This, then, was the city the narrator inhabited, not a mere setting, or a series of useful addresses, but a source of daily nourishment for his senses. Its sounds reached him as he lay ill in his room: “On certain fine days, the weather was