The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [39]
Towards the close of ‘Mme Swann at Home’, the Narrator makes a sudden, spontaneous decision to see Gilberte again. On his way to her house, however, from his carriage he sees her out strolling with a young man. When he arrives chez Swann, pretending not to have seen Gilberte, he is told by Odette that she is out for a walk ‘with one of her girl friends’ (BG, 231; JF, 494). In his mind he and Gilberte were already reunited, as if they had never been apart, but, as so often in the Search, this chance event has a far greater impact than any carefully planned encounter: by all appearances Gilberte has a new love and this sends the Narrator crashing back into despair. Much later, in Time Regained, Gilberte explains that she was walking with the actress, Léa, who was dressed as a man. In the intervening volumes we see how much the Narrator suffers through his fear of the great unknown that lesbian love represents for him; although he does suffer as a result of what he sees, we might say in retrospect that his ignorance of the identity of Gilberte’s companion in fact prevented him from the excessive turmoil such knowledge would doubtless have provoked. For all his desperation, his analysis of love is extremely lucid, often focusing on the way time – that element over which we have no control – is frequently the determining factor in our frustrations:
time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change will have been spent by our own heart in changing itself too, so that when the goal we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal. (BG, 237; JF, 497)
So try as we might to improve our outlook or our mental wellbeing, the Narrator seems to be saying, even our best-intentioned efforts are futile. Suffering in love is a painful business but as the comments above illustrate, with suffering, a ‘journey from which no one can spare us’, to use Elstir’s words, comes wisdom.
Part One concludes with Odette and the attention she attracts as she walks in the Avenue du Bois. The Narrator delights in the apparent symbiosis of the seasons and her clothes, the beauty and elegance of her garments (whose traits of style his older self finds sorely lacking in the women he sees on his return to the Bois years later, the temporal perspective from which Swann’s Way draws to its close). In the warm spring air, Odette removes her jacket; the Narrator folds it over his arm:
I would see, and would lengthily gaze at … a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like those Gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as the bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains leave to climb up there among them. (BG, 248; JF, 504–5)
The cathedral, Proust’s structural paradigm par excellence, appears here growing in all