The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [43]
Part Two
Chapter One details the grandmother’s illness and death. In the much longer Chapter Two Saint-Loup breaks with Rachel; Albertine visits the Narrator; and a greatly anticipated amorous assignation with Mme de Stermaria falls through. He is finally invited to dinner by the Duchesse de Guermantes, an event narrated at exhaustive length. The same evening he visits Charlus who harangues him for neglecting to respond to his offer of guidance and allegedly speaking ill of him. Charlus rants, mocking the Narrator’s ignorance of manners, aesthetics, society; he returns home quite bewildered. An invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes causes delight and disbelief. The volume ends with Swann announcing his terminal illness to the Duc and Duchesse, who unthinkingly fob him off, more concerned about the colour of the Duchesse’s shoes than the ominous pallor about their old friend’s cheeks.
The Guermantes Way, as Malcolm Bowie has neatly summarized, ‘is the story of a youthful infatuation with superior people told by the scathing critic of human vanity that the youth concerned has now become’.4 This combination of wide-eyed wonder and cutting critique brings insight, humour and irony. The social set-pieces are wrought in luxuriant yet purposeful prose, laced through with wit and studded with observations of the human animal that, for all their great length, make for extremely memorable reading.
A reflection on names – a familiar theme by now – begins the volume, picking up the Narrator’s concerns with structure, duration and longevity. The Guermantes name can be traced back beyond the time of the construction of France’s great cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (G, 6; 756); the family it represents thus by association has an enduring historicity and something, perhaps, of the four-dimensionality discerned in the Combray church. Readers should recall that before the war The Guermantes Way had been envisaged as the second of the Search’s three projected volumes. This might explain why surprisingly Françoise is described as already having ‘snow-white hair’ and being ‘in her old age’ (G, 10; 758–9). Her remarkable resilience, still being at the Narrator’s side in his old age in Time Regained, would be less incongruous had Sodom and Gomorrah and the Albertine volumes not made us quite so aware of the many intervening years between the family’s change of address in The Guermantes Way and the Narrator’s revelations in the novel’s final volume.
While much of The Guermantes Way is dedicated to the interactions of the aristocracy, through the conversations of Françoise and the Guermantes’ domestic staff and the exposure we receive to the demi-monde to which Robert’s mistress Rachel belongs, Proust’s critical eye takes in a social panorama reaching well beyond the faubourg Saint-Germain. The threshold to this magical world, so long experienced by the Narrator only in his mind, takes material form in the Guermantes’ rather shabby doormat (G, 26; 769). Undeterred by this unexpected reality, the Narrator is soon waiting outside each morning to catch a glimpse of Mme de Guermantes, as he did at the end of Within a Budding Grove for Mme Swann. And just as he realized that his love for Albertine was for a multitude of disparate figures who made up the girl of that name, so with Mme de Guermantes he realizes that he loves not any single one of her various manifestations, seen at different times and in different weathers, but rather ‘the invisible person who set all this outward show in motion’ (G, 65; 794). This suggests that his love is in fact for his idea or idealized construction of the woman and not the Duchesse herself.
He is able to come to this reasoned conclusion thanks, in part, to the lesson learned on his second trip to see Berma. He explains:
We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap … The difference which exists between a person or a work of art that are markedly