Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [53]
He has stepped outside the flow of time and experienced a sensation that is not disappointing, for it is given to him whole, recaptured. Reality was disappointing because at the moment he perceived it he could not imagine it, “by virtue of the inevitable law that we can only imagine what is absent,” and it was only through his imagination that he was capable of grasping beauty.
But now, thanks to the physical sensation in the present that has restored the past, reality and imagination are fused and allow the narrator to apprehend “a fragment of time in the pure state … A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this joy, one can understand that the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him; situated outside time, why should he fear the future?”
The privileged moment is brief, and once over, the narrator must return to the aging faces and the eroding landscape. And this is the final, melancholy lesson taught not only by Proust’s characters but by the city streets they walk on and the buildings they live in, by the restless spirit of the great city: “The places that we have known belong now not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
THE CITY THAT PROUST KNEW
The Champs-Élysées is where the narrator as a child becomes the playmate of Gilberte, daughter of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy—themselves major characters in the novel. The children play on the lawns near the Alcazar d’Été. Under century-old cedars, candy and soft drinks are sold from wooden booths. A little farther down stands the cast-iron public lavatory where the narrator’s grandmother suffers the stroke that leads to her death. On the corner of the Champs-Élysées, above the rue de Berri, the narrator, now grown up, sells a family vase to a Chinese curio shop for ten thousand francs, in order to buy flowers for Gilberte. On his way back from the shop, he sees Gilberte with a young man he cannot identify, and suffers pangs of jealous uncertainty. On the corner of the rue Royale stands a photographer’s stall, where the narrator’s servant, Françoise, buys a snapshot of Pope Pius IX, while the narrator chooses one of the actress La Berma.
Swann, the rich aesthete, is invited to lunch at the Élysée Palace, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with the president of France, Jules Grévy. It is an invitation that astonishes Doctor Cottard, one of the members of the “little clan,” as Mme Verdurin’s tacky, bourgeois salon is known. “What’s that you say? M. Grévy? Do you know M. Grévy?” asks Cottard, finding it hard to believe that someone he was having dinner with, and who held no official post, could be on friendly enough terms with the head of state to be invited for lunch at the Élysée.
The old Trocadéro is described as a gingerbread castle “whose towers at twilight glowed so that they seemed covered with currant jelly like the towers pastrycooks make.” It was torn down in 1937 to make way for the present Palais de Chaillot.
The musician