The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [70]
Françoise’s cousins made millions as café proprietors before taking retirement; when their nephew dies in the war, leaving behind his own café to run and a young widow, they come out of retirement, getting up at dawn for three years to work through the day for no other reward than seeing their niece kept afloat. When this anecdote is related, Proust’s voice intrudes:
In this book where there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise, in which everything has been invented by me in accordance with the requirements of my theme, I owe it to the credit of my country to say that only the millionaire cousins of Françoise who came out of retirement to help their niece …, only they are real people who exist. (TR, 191; 2246)
Society might have its share of ‘vile shirkers’ like the arrogant man at Jupien’s hotel (we might equally think of croissant-munching Mme Verdurin) but ‘they are redeemed’, the Narrator argues, by the ‘innumerable throng’ of selfless, compassionate people like Françoise’s cousins the Larivières whom he puts on a par with the soldiers defending their country (TR, 191–2; 2246). This unexpected authorial intercession draws attention to the novel’s fictional status and warns readers off interpreting it as a roman à clefs; it might, moreover, be seen as an effort from the author to emphasize his support for the national cause in the wake of criticisms he received as a non-combatant when Within a Budding Grove won the Goncourt prize in 1919.
The Narrator retires to another sanatorium and ‘many years’ pass before he returns to post-war Paris by train (TR, 202; 2253), a journey we might see as closing the loop begun with the first exultant trip to Balbec that saw him dashing back and forth, trying ‘to obtain … a continuous picture’ of the shifting skies at sunrise (BG, 268; JF, 521). His return to Paris, however, is without such promise; from the train he gazes on a sunlit stand of trees but derives no pleasure from their beauty: ‘if ever I thought of myself as a poet,’ he glumly comments, ‘I know now that I am not one’ (TR, 202; 2253). He is convinced his life has been for nought. The name of the Princesse de Guermantes on an invitation to a matinée, however, reignites for him memories and associations of past times, which convince him to emerge from his seclusion.
Against the void of his recent experiences, on the way to the reception he suddenly feels himself soaring ‘towards the silent heights of memory’: threading the Paris streets he took with Françoise on his way to the Champs-Élysées as a boy, his carriage seems to be transporting him through various layers of his past (TR, 206–7; 2255–6). Stopping en route he meets Charlus, white-haired, physically diminished but still lucid. Charlus’s listing of contemporaries who have died underscores a key theme of the novel’s closing movement: ‘every time he uttered it, the word “dead” seemed to fall upon his departed friends like a spadeful of earth each heavier than the last’ (TR, 212; 2259). Death sinks us into the earth, inanimate, whilst memory permits us to soar to vertiginous heights; the turbulence we experience between these positions is explored by Proust in the remaining pages of the novel.
Stepping aside to let a carriage pass in the Princesse de Guermantes’ courtyard the Narrator stumbles on some uneven paving stones. This physical sensation disperses his discouragement and gloom, fills him with the same, sudden pulse of happiness provoked by the bell towers at Martinville, the taste of the madeleine, the experience of hearing Vinteuil’s septet. He soon recalls having the sensation before in St Mark’s Square in Venice, the memories of which flood back just as had those of Combray with the madeleine. In the pages that follow,