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By Root 5673 0

outsider whose mysterious connections to powerful and fashionable people seem also to make him very much an `insider; falls in love with Odette de Crecy. Everything about their prolonged love affair is presented in a kind of enigmatic twilight. The two characters are observed almost wholly from the outside. We know remarkably little about them. When Swann first meets Odette at a salon, he does not think she is his type. He then falls in love, and woos her. After the episode where he rearranges some orchids, `cattleyas, on her dress (this detail was originally inspired by Proust seeing the Countess Greffuhle, the leading Parisian society beauty of the 1890s, festooned in these orchids at some grand occasion), it is suggested that the couple for the first time make love. But Swann then finds her becoming strangely elusive. Has she another lover (Forcheville)? Can he really trust her? Has he not caught her out in telling lies about where she has been, and whom she has been with? Is she in fact a cocotte, taking many lovers? Enmired in this growing morass of suspicion and distrust, Swann begins to wonder whether he really loves Odette after all. After wavering in one direction, then another, he finally decides that he doesn't. She is not for him. He never wishes to see her again. We then astonishingly discover, many pages later and for reasons which are never explained, that Swann and Odette did eventually get married after all, and now have a young daughter, Gilberte.

What is interesting is that this is the one really substantial episode in the book not centred on the narrator himself and seen through his eyes. But in significant respects it is like a precursor to the book's other two main love affairs, each of which do involve the narrator, and in each of which we see him, like Swann, perpetually tortured by uncertainties. During Swann's wooing of Odette she slips away from him as a classic `elusive anima' figure, just as the narrator's own two girlfriends are to do later. The difference is that Swann's love affair does ultimately, albeit for reasons unexplained, reach a happy conclusion, when we see that he and Odette have married. It is as if, in creating the character of Swann, Proust was somehow imagining the elusive masculine part of himself eventually achieving a successful union with a woman. Certainly Swann is certainly a stronger, more masculine figure than the narrator ever manages to be, despite the merry dance his elusive anima leads him during their courtship. But when in the next volume, `Within a Budding Grove', Proust moves on to imagine `Marcel' himself falling in love with members of the opposite sex, there can be no such happy resolution.

The narrator's first love, whom he sees playing in the Champs Elysees when he is a teenager, is a lively girl with reddish hair whom he discovers is Gilberte Swann. He develops a powerful teenage crush on her, much as Proust had done for her original, Marie Bernardaky. He tries to join her street games as often as he can, hoping against hope that she will like him (much as Proust had done with his teenage schoolfriends). Gradually they develop a closer friendship and the young narrator becomes a regular visitor to her grand home, where Gilberte's parents receive the polite young boy kindly, imagining he might be a good influence on their daughter. But, in terms of love, the relationship is wholly one-sided, existing entirely in the narrator's mind. He is tortured by Gilberte's casual treatment of him, as he waits for letters which never come and rarely finds her at home when he calls (significantly he seems to spend more time with her mother Odette than with Gilberte herself). He tries to convince himself that he must forget her, his infatuation eventually fades and she drops out of his life (although years later they become friends and talk about the now long-distant past).

Much more substantial, in that it lasts on and off through 2000 pages of the novel, is the love which begins when the narrator, now a young man, takes a holiday with his grandmother and the faithful