Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [54]
On the rue de Bourgogne, the narrator’s butler observes the Baron de Charlus spending an hour in a pissotière, recognizing him by his bright yellow trousers.
Mme Verdurin holds her salon on the Quai de Conti, in a building she claims is the former residence of the Venetian ambassadors.
The Quai d’Orléans is where Swann lives as a bachelor. Odette, the lovely courtesan who will become his wife, considers the apartment musty and old-fashioned and the neighborhood inelegant because it is close to the Halle aux Vins, the wine market.
On the avenue Gabriel a homosexual propositions the narrator’s friend Saint-Loup, who is dressed in his officer’s uniform. Saint-Loup, shocked at the audacity of the “clique,” pummels the accoster savagely, but is later found to be himself a member.
To the Halles, or central market, the narrator’s servant, Françoise, goes to choose the ingredients for her famous boeuf en gelée, “as Michelangelo passed eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Jules II.”
The rue Rabelais is where the Jockey Club still stands. Swann is a member, as is the Baron de Charlus, who goes there every evening at six. When the obscure Chaussepierre is elected president over the Duc de Guermantes, the Duc concludes that the reason is his friendship with Swann, a Jew, at a time when the Jewish Captain Dreyfus had been accused of treason and anti-Semitism was raging. Guermantes would refer to the Dreyfus case, “ ‘which has been responsible for so many disasters,’ albeit he was really conscious of one and one only; his own failure to become president of the Jockey [Club].”
The Invalides is the tomb of Napoléon I, to which the government invites the Princesse Mathilde, his niece, to welcome the visiting Czar Nicholas of Russia. She sends the card back, saying that she needs no invitation to go to the Invalides, since her place in the crypt, next to the emperor, is reserved.
The pious Françoise has never been to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. “In all the years she had been living in Paris, Françoise had never had the curiosity to visit Notre-Dame. That was because Notre-Dame was part of Paris, a city in which her daily life unfolded, and in which, consequently, it was difficult for our old servant to place the object of her dreams.”
From the Gare Saint-Lazare, the narrator takes the train for the resort of Balbec, where he spent the summers as a young man and where he meets Albertine, his next love after Gilberte. He enters “one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds … into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross.”
Before her marriage, Odette has a small house on the rue La Pérouse. Swann is courting her, and the mere mention of the street is enough to start his heart fluttering. In a conversation with an army general Swann says: “ ‘Some fine lives have been lost … There was, you remember, that explorer whose remains Dumont d’Urville brought back, La Pérouse …’ (and he was at once happy again, as though he had named Odette)….
“ ‘Oh, yes, of course, La Pérouse,’ said the General.… ‘There’s a street called that.’
“ ‘Do you know anyone in the rue La Pérouse?’ asked Swann excitedly.
“ ‘Only Mme. de Chanlivault, the sister of that good fellow Chaussepierre.…’
“ ‘Oh, so she lives in the rue La Pérouse. It’s attractive; I like that street; it’s so sombre.’
“ ‘Indeed it isn’t. You can’t have been in it for a long time; it’s not at all sombre now; they’re beginning to build all round there.’ ”
The narrator remarks