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By Root 551 0

the end of the nineteenth century, offers a fish-bowl-like social arena for all the classes to intermingle; here the upper crust, extricated from their sealed Parisian salons, become visible to the lower classes. As the belle époque saw the decline of the old aristocracy it also witnessed, in parallel with expanding commerce and industry, the steady rise of the bourgeoisie. Mme Verdurin, for example, ‘came from a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich and wholly undistinguished’ (SW, 225; 157). Her salon welcomes all stripes, from the lower middle classes to the professionals of the grande bourgeoisie – actresses, artists, doctors, academics – anyone who is not ‘a bore’. The criss-crossing trajectories of the Verdurins and their ‘faithful’, Cottard, Brichot, Elstir, Odette and others, can be tracked from the little clan in ‘Swann in Love’ through to the apotheosis of Mme Verdurin (after twice being widowed and twice remarrying) as the Princesse de Guermantes in Time Regained. Their loves, triumphs, betrayals and disappointments, by turns comic and revelatory of human frailties, form an instructive social pageant yet one to whose fragility, to whose potential to crumble with the next turn of the kaleidoscope, Proust keeps us always alert.

Science, technology and medicine

If received opinions are to be believed, In Search of Lost Time is not the sort of book in which one would find much space given over to the cold calculations and hard edges of science and technology. Proust’s, the argument goes, is a book about sensation and memory, about liquescent crumbs of cake and wistful reminiscence, page after metaphor-laden page of lengthy sentences and prim aestheticism; this is not a book in which one would find telephone exchanges and telegrams, bicycles, central heating, elevators and aeroplanes. Or is it? The answer, of course, is that it is.

Shortly before Proust’s eighteenth birthday the Eiffel Tower was opened, the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle marking the centenary of the Revolution. The Paris Exposition of 1867 had attracted some eleven million visitors and the centennial show was even bigger, drawing over twenty-five million throughout its six-month duration. France – and Paris in particular – considered itself the heart of a brave new industrial world, a booming world of mass consumption. The 1880s and 1890s saw considerable technological leaps forward, many of which find their way into Proust’s novel. The telephone, invented in 1876, spread in its use and accessibility during this time and Proust makes us look on what is now a mundane feature of our everyday existence with new eyes: the Narrator ponders at length this marvel that obliterates distance, uniting disparate places and people in a magical, disembodied encounter (G, 146–52; 847–51). The coming of indoor electrical lighting marks another step in Mme Verdurin’s rise (see BG, 211; JF, 481). The 1890s saw increased comfort and practicality in bicycle design and with this came not just increased speed of travel but also liberation from now impractical and antiquated conventions of dress, particularly for women. As bicycles became more affordable, they permitted a certain dissolution of class boundaries: the highways and byways of, for instance, the Normandy coast offered rather more opportunities for the intermixing of the classes than the rigid structures of society had hitherto permitted.

Perhaps disappointingly for those whose conception of Proust is limited to the romanticized, blissful moments of recall provoked by lime-blossom tea and cake, the developments of modern technology also have important roles to play in the unfolding of the themes of time, space, memory and identity. Motorcars, as well as madeleines, teach the Narrator valuable lessons. The number of automobiles on French roads grew dramatically from the turn of the century: there were approximately 3,000 in 1900 and by 1913, the year Swann’s Way was published, this number had risen to around 100,000. Motorcars, like the railways that had come before them,