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By Root 617 0

the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer’ (F, 567; AD, 1977). By the end of the chapter, his suffering does seem to have brought him to a point of relative stability and lucidity. His mind, characteristically, is already reaching beyond Albertine to the formulation of a law that might hold for all relations. What is salutary for self-preservation in the short to medium term (he will forget Albertine and be able to get on with his life) is negative in the long run because of the implications it has for emotional interaction and ‘love’ more generally: ‘it is the tragedy of other people’, he summarizes, ‘that they are merely showcases for the very perishable collections of one’s own mind … one bases upon them projects which have all the fervour of thought; but thought languishes and memory decays’ (F, 637; AD, 2024). And so, staggering under the heft of this gloomy observation, we pass on to Chapter Two.

‘It was not that I did not still love Albertine’, he begins, and we wonder whether there will be any end to his vacillations. He realizes that he must make the retrograde journey through the different phases of his love in order to arrive at his ‘initial stage of indifference’ (F, 638; AD, 2024), a phrase which recalls the opening lines of ‘Place-names: The Place’, in Within a Budding Grove, where he confidently announced having ‘arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte’ by the time of his first trip to Balbec (BG, 253; JF, 511). He is aware (and careful, retentive readers will remember) that he has been through this process before: it was his renewed indifference to Gilberte that allowed him to pay heed to the young girls at Balbec in the first place.

Out walking one day he finds himself humming Vinteuil’s sonata in which, towards the end, the notes of the little phrase become dispersed. This takes on a new significance: ‘aware that, day by day, one element after another of my love was vanishing … it was my love that, in the scattered notes of the little phrase, I seemed to see disintegrating before my eyes’ (F, 640; AD, 2026). On the same walk he catches sight of a group of young women whom he tries, unsuccessfully, to follow. Seeing them again leaving the Guermantes’ doorway a few days later, the Narrator is ‘set aflame’ by the lingering gaze of one of them. A note from the Guermantes’ concierge reveals her name to be Mlle Deporcheville, which he ‘corrects’ to ‘d’Éporcheville’, the young woman of high birth who Saint-Loup had informed him frequented houses of assignation. To confirm he has the right name, he sends a telegram to Saint-Loup, only to receive, after a spell of frantic anticipation, the deflating news that the woman they had spoken of was ‘Mlle d’Orgeville’, at present out of the country: his excitement has been for nought. A little later, chez Guermantes, the girl who had caught his gaze asks to be re-introduced to the Narrator. The mistaken name was de Forcheville, that of Odette’s second husband, Swann’s old rival, now adopted by Gilberte. The girl whose allure he had keenly felt but who he had not recognized is his childhood friend, now ‘one of the richest heiresses in France’. ‘Our mistake’, states the Narrator, reflecting on the sequence of events and echoing lessons learnt long ago from Elstir’s paintings in Balbec, ‘lies in supposing that things present themselves as they really are, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable notion of them’ (F, 656; AD, 2036).

Between Saint-Loup’s telegram and the discovery of the alluring stranger’s identity there intervenes an episode which is a key step on the Narrator’s path towards becoming an artist. His article (the piece on the Martinville bell towers we read in SW, 217–18; 149–50) appears in a newspaper, Le Figaro. Suddenly we enter an extended, detailed consideration of artistic production and consumption. The Narrator seeks to read it as if he were not the author (an impossible task but not one we are surprised to find