The Proust Summarizing Group*

* Matt Holdreith (d.3/21/2009), lecturer in Literature at Amherst College, tennis player, tea-drinking husband of Lakshmi Desari, and leader of our 1984-1985 Proust reading with Sean McKenna (1941-2016), coined this amusing phrase to refer to our own "little Clan".

Sodom & Gomorrah (volume 2)

Assignment for Jan 15, 2017 Chez Michos (My thoughts and impressions while reading this section.)


My assignment to follow; but first the narrator's first encounter with an aeroplane:

"Suddenly, my horse gave a start; he had heard a strange sound; it was all I could do to hold him and remain in the saddle, then I raised in the direction from which the sound seemed to come my eyes filled with tears and saw, not two hundred feet above my head, against the sun, between two great wings of flashing metal which were carrying him on, a creature whose barely visible face appeared to me to resemble that of a man. I was as deeply moved as a Greek upon seeing for the first time a demigod. I cried also, for I was ready to cry the moment I realised that the sound came from above my head—aeroplanes were still rare in those days—at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. Then, just as when in a newspaper one feels that one is coming to a moving passage, the mere sight of the machine was enough to make me burst into tears. Meanwhile the airman seemed to be uncertain of his course; I felt that there lay open before him—before me, had not habit made me a prisoner—all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments, over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction the reverse of gravity, as though returning to his native element, with a slight movement of his golden wings, rose sheer into the sky."

In David McCullough's bio: "The Wright Brothers"  one learns that Wilbur with astounding success and crowds of thousands completed hundreds of experimental flights southwest of Paris at Le Mans and later in Pau near the border of Spain. No mention is made of flights in or around Cabourg or Incarville north of Paris near the Normandy coast where the action here takes place. Marcel, dressed for dinner, Dr and Mme Cottard, the young violinist Morel, Ski (the sculptor), Albertine and M. de Charlus will take the train to La Raspeliere, the Verdurin summer home rented from the Cambremers, where the "little clan" will meet for dinner.

The train ride reveals the narrator's disguised (to all but his readers) but mocking contempt for Baron Charlus, a Guermantes, member of the Jockey Club, and brother of the Prince. We find a complicated character: passionate above all, a self-deluded flagrant invert (Proust used to indicate homosexual), and an old man in the stratosphere of French society. Charlus's predilection for young men, Morel's confounding inconsistencies, Cottard's humor all are fodder for MP's pen. 

Proust himself was known by those close to him as homosexual, but he never publicly announced his preference. Wisely because it was illegal in France at the time.  

_La Manche (the sleeve):  English Channel__

Opening text: From page 417-8 (Penguin version, translated by John Sturrock 2002), “What greatly surprised me when we left to go out was that, on that particular day, Morel…….”

The "wordcloud" displays text beginning the assignment; the image ending the post employs text from the last few pages. My comments use this font/colors "lines of these volumes, thus.".

wordcloud site to create your own (click to open in a new tab)

"At the word coming from the Greek with which M. de Charlus, in speaking of Balzac, had followed the allusion to the “Tristesse d’Olympio” in Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans"

http://www.victor-hugo.info/poemes/147.html

(click above...your browser will translate this poem. If you have a smattering of French you will hear the music in it. While it is found in the middle of this section, I place it first as it speaks to the entire work.)

from “Tristesse d’Olympio”

"Do we not exist then? Have we had our time?
Nothing will restore it to our superfluous cries?
The air plays with the branch when I cry;
My house looks at me and no longer knows me."                                                              VH

This most beautiful poem, sad beyond belief, and long, is picked up by Proust with references to Balzac in both his Pere Goriot and Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans Carlos Herrera (Vautrin), Rastignac, etc..

Proust tips his hat to Balzac (Balbec) in naming his Normandy coastal resort town where he spent the summers living in Cabourg (Balbec) 1907-1914. His character Baron Charlus supplants Balzac's Vautrin who was until then the most egregious homosexual in all French literature. Some LGTB supporters consider Proust to he harsh in his judgment of homosexuals and lesbians.

Now to the story:

Leaving the Grand Hotel to catch the train to La Raspeliere

Charlus lies to the folks at the train that Mme. Verdurin had been ill so that he and Morel would have the entire La Raspeliere to them selves "to make music" or whatever.

 "For now the Baron Charlus was THE faithful of the faithfuls, a second Princess Sherbatoff. "

Train from Balbec to La Raspeliere

The Narrator, talks at length with Mme. de Villeparisis, the friend of his sainted grandmother.  She has just boarded the train and she very well knows the Russian Princess Sherbatoff who is sitting next to Marcel. Without deserting Princess Sherbatoff and out of remorse he chats it up with the ancient dame who leaves the train at the next stop and refuses an introduction to Princess Sherbatoff who is ensconced in her  Revue des deux monde. (French journal from early 19th C.)

The Princess:

"...did little more than move her lips in answer to my questions, and finally told me that I was giving her a migraine. I had no inkling of what my crime was. When I said goodbye to the Princess, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since."


Marcel asks Mme. Verdurin whether he should advance some "polite gesture" to Princess Sherbatoff? No No No! She does not like courtesies, Mme Verdurin responds. 

"...Princess Sherbatoff had managed to make Verdurin believe that she was indifferent to niceties, a soul impervious to the vanities of this world."

"One needs to know from what unrequited passions, what snobbish rebuffs, the seeming haughtiness, the universally acknowledged antisnobbery of the Princess Sherbatoff had been formed, to understand that the rule among humankind--which allows exceptions--is that the hard are the weak whom no one has wanted, and that the strong alone, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have that gentleness that the crowd mistakes for weakness."

"Brilliant men, having come to Balbec without their wives, which made things easier, put out feelers toward La Raspeliere..."

Prince de Guermantes arrives. To parade the Prince, and engineer her ascendancy in society, Mme.Verdurin asks Charlus to accompany his brother to watch sailors reenact a ship setting sail.

The Boardwalk at Trouville - Monet

"They are not to be standing about, like mussels... but you have a better idea than I do, M. de Charlus, how to get young sailors going."

She hands Charlus a book entitled "Among Men".

"Mme Verdurin had gone on in annoyance. I'm asking you whether they go together. Ah, madame, that sort of thing's very hard to find out."

Photo 1910 Cabourg (Balbec) 

"...no one was so mean-spirited as to repeat to M. de Charlus the witticisms spoken in his absence, or the à peu près about Morel."

Why be surprised, then, that, the Verdurins, on whose affection and kindness he (Charlus) had no right to rely,:

La Raspelière

"...the remarks they made when far away from him (and it was not only remarks, as we shall see) should have been so unlike what he imagined them to be, that is the simple echo of those that he heard when he was there?  ...he had come there to relax from his cares, he never re-emerged without a smile."

Pisciculturalist

"Thus M. de Charlus lived deluded, like the fish that believes that the water in which he is swimming extends beyond the glass of his tank, which offers him his reflection, whereas he does not see beside him, in the shadows, the amused passerby who is following his antics, or,"

"...the all powerful pisciculturalist who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment, deferred in this moment in the case of the Baron (for whom the pisciculturalist, in Paris, will be Mme Verdurin), will pull him ruthlessly out from the medium in which he had liked living, to toss him into another one."

"Whole nations, what is more, insofar as they are simply collections of individuals, can provide examples, vaster yet identical in each of their parts, of this profound, obstinate, and disconcerting blindness."

Discussion ensues on Balzac "gobbledygook" in Illusions Perdues, (Lost Illusions - Balzac) and the death of Lucien de Rubempre in Splendeurs et miseries whereupon the Baron exclaims to the witty intellectual Brichot...

"You know nothing of life."

Morel gets on the train at Doncieres.

A literary argument follows and even Socrates is put down; all women are deemed neurotic by Dr. Cottard.

"What are you talking about?, asks Albertine."

"About Balzac, the Baron hastened to reply, and this evening you're wearing the exact outfit of the Princesse de Cadignan, not the first one, the one at the dinner, but the second."

  

The discussion returns to Paris and the Boulevard Malesherbes (where Proust lived and wrote much of his Search). Charlus carries on about Cadignan who as a woman with a bad reputation she wishes to hide parallels Charlus's own situation later on. His identification with Balzac's characters is confirmed. He returns to Paris accompanied by Morel having lured the boy violinist with the promise of luxury and connections.










Proust's genius is revealed in his character analysis.




Now back in Paris Charlus sets up Morel in a garret and leaves him to his own devices so as not to make "Charlie" grow "bored" with him. However, 

"Morel does not always appear submissive as the Baron would have liked but instead wore an irritated expression."

 And, soon he began to torture Charlus playing on his jealousies. The Baron's heart was pierced "by all these arrows".

"and these everchanging forms of suffering posed once again for M. de Charlus the problem of happiness, forced him not only to demand more, but to long for something other, the previous arrangement finding itself vitiated by an awful memory."

"it has to be acknowledged that, in the early stages, the genius of the French man of the people traced for Morel, caused him to be clothed in, charming forms of simplicity, of apparent candor, of an independent pride even that seemed inspired by disinterestedness. This was false, but the advantage of such an attitude lay all the more with Morel, inasmuch as, while the one who loves is forever obliged to return the charge, to raise the bidding, it is, on the contrary, easy for the one who does not love to follow a straight line, at once inflexible and graceful."

One suspects that many a husband grown tired of wifely chicanery can find peace by adopting such a straight line to preserve those useful aspects of co-habitation.


finally,

"...when the Baron was returning with Charlie and myself from a lunch at the Verdurin's, and expecting to spend the late afternoon and evening with the violinist in Doncieres, the latter's taking leave of him the moment we left the train, with, "No, I've got things to do," caused so keen a disappointment in M de Charlus that, although he may have tried to put a brave face on it, I saw tears melting the makeup on his eyelashes, as he stood bewildered before the train."

The Baron and Marcel go off to a bar for a beer where Charlus concocts an 8 page letter, then charges Marcel to quickly deliver it to Morel who must be changing clothes in his garret. Marcel lets Morel read the letter. 

"Oh my god, he exclaimed, that's all it needed. But where can I find him? God knows where he is now."

Charlus's invented letter reported to Morel that two of the regimental officers had slandered him in connection with the violinist, and that he, Charlus, had sent his seconds to them demanding satisfaction.

When Morel returns submissive and obsequious, Charlus is delighted but proceeds to tightens the screws claiming that his seconds are already at to barracks, and you have... 

"behaved toward me like a young imbecile..."

Restored Church at Colleville, Normandy coast

What follows to the end of this assignment is the elaborate story of Charlus captured by a fantasy of "taking the field" to defend his honor.

"M. de Charlus spoke with sincerity, not only out of love for Morel, but because a taste for combat that he innocently believed he had got from his forefathers put him in such good heart at the thought of fighting that he would now have felt regret at giving up this duel, originally contrived only in order to get Morel to come. He had never had an affair of honor without at once seeing himself as valorous and identifying himself with the celebrated Connétable de Guermantes."

We know that Morel generally likes his nights free which distressed Charlus no end. One night Morel has encountered the Prince de Guermantes at the station and contracted with him to spend a night together next week at the Maineville house of prostitution. Morel likes the idea since he knows numerous bare-breasted girls wander the place.

"Somehow or other, M. de Charlus had an idea of what had transpired, but not of the seducer. Frantic with jealousy, and to know who the latter was, he telegraphed Jupien, who arrived two days later, and when, at the beginning of the following week, Morel announced that he would again be absent, the Baron asked Jupien if he would undertake to bribe the madam of the establishment and arrange that Jupien and he be hidden in order to witness the scene."

"It is hard to credit the extent to which his anxiety had disturbed, and by the same token even momentarily enriched, M. de Charlus's mind. Love causes these veritable geological upheavals in our thoughts."

The night of Morel's absence arrives. At the crowded and noisy establishment Charlus finds Mlle Noemie who was to hide him together with Jupien but Noemie has been summoned saying to help them pass the time "an intelligent little lady" would be sent in. Champagne was brought up. During this time unbeknownst to either Charlus or Jupien the Prince was in another room with Morel. Someone betrayed Charlus and the story ends when they are led around to find Morel stone drunk attended by three girls.

Colleville church D-Day Normandy

The church is mentioned as having a sacrilegious inscription carved on its porch. The Greek god Ares is pictured as I wondered whether the wartime destruction of this church could have been the act of a vengeful god in view of the sacrilegious tale and the seemingly endless human failing to go to war.

To Page 466: "...had a clear view of the Baron."

The Captive - MP Volume 3

Velasques Infanta:

DAVID'S BOOKCLUB

Proust: The Captive

DAVID FRUM

11.04.12 6:00 AM ET

The Captive is the most disturbing of all the volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It weirded me out when I first read it as a teenager, and it weirds me out even more now.

The Captive describes a morbidly possessive love affair. Consumed by jealousy, the narrator entices his mistress, Albertine, to live with him, then keeps her almost as a prisoner, spying on her and relentlessly cross-examining her. He catches her in lie after lie, but he cannot give her up.

The cause of the narrator's jealousy is his fear that his mistress is attracted to women - that she is ready at any moment to slip away to a fleeting, anonymous sexual encounter. He imagines Albertine as a

fugitive, cautious, cunning creature, whose presence was enlarged by the thought of all those assignations which she was skilled in concealing, which made one love her because they made one suffer, in whom, beneath her coldness to other people and her casual answers, one could feel yesterday's assignation and to-morrow's …

These assignations could occur anywhere: in the back of a carriage, in a restroom, in a darkened street corner. The narrator fears to allow Albertine to go unaccompanied to a department store:

Allow Albertine to go by herself into a big shop crowded with people
perpetually rubbing against one, furnished with so many doors that a woman can always say that when she came out she could not find the carriage which was waiting farther along the street; I was quite
determined never to consent to such a thing, but the thought of it
made me extremely unhappy.

To control Albertine's (imagined) compulsive and anonymous promiscuity, the narrator entices her to come live with him in his parents' large apartment. Albertine, comparatively poor and in the habit of living on the hospitality of rich friends, agrees. To hold her, the wealthy narrator dandles a promise of marriage - even though he insists he does not really love her, has tired of her.

The idea that will occur to most readers is that women don't as a rule hanker for promiscuous sex with anonymous strangers in public places. Read Proust's biography and you learn, no surprise, that the original of Albertine was a man. The literary price of Proust's sexual transmogrification is a persistent inability to enter into the minds of his erotically interesting female characters. Let the woman be an old servant or a grand lady of high society, and Proust can depict her like Rembrandt. Let her even be a former courtesan now retired from the game, like Mme Swann, and he can make her live. But Albertine is unreal: a woman without affections or passions, treacherous and deceitful, voraciously lustful, cheerfully ready to sell herself for trinkets, without any interest in romance or marriage except as it might enhance her social standing.

If ... she is affectionate, what joy for a moment; but when we see that little tongue outstretched as though in invitation, we think of those people to whom that invitation has so often been addressed, and that perhaps even here at home, even although Albertine was not thinking of them, it has remained, by force of long habit, an automatic signal. Then the feeling that we are bored with each other returns. But suddenly this pain is reduced to nothing when we think of the unknown evil element in her life, of the places impossible to identify where she has been, where she still goes perhaps at the hours when we are not with her, if indeed she is not planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is parted from us, does not belong to us, is happier than when she is with us. Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.

It's claustrophobic to be with Albertine, and annoying to listen to the narrator (without any hint of irony in the author) fulminate against her and praise himself as someone whom people are always delighted to see. It's a strange fact that throughout the whole span of this vast book, we never meet anyone - other than an unfaithful mistress - who is not delighted to meet the narrator, who does not respect his opinions, who does not light up with joy when he accepts an invitation to their party. The conceit of the volume -that a Parisian girl of middle-class origins and high-society ambitions would consent in the years before the First World War to live for months and months in a young man's apartment as a kept woman in full public view - is so improbable that even a willing reader will have trouble getting past it.

But even this irritating volume is worth the trouble, because it also contains some of Proust's most clear and interesting statements of his ideas about art and literature.

Here, for example, is his critique of a certain kind of Impressionist art, and his explication of post-Impressionists like Cezanne. The "Elstir" referred to is a great painter who becomes an admired friend of the narrator's; the "you" addressed is Albertine:

[Y]ou remember the church at Marcouville l'Orgueilleuse which Elstir disliked because it was new. Isn't it rather a denial of his own impressionism when he subtracts such buildings from the general impression in which they are contained to bring them out of the light in which they are dissolved and scrutinise like an archaeologist their intrinsic merit? When he begins to paint, have not a hospital, a school, a poster upon a hoarding the same value as a priceless cathedral which stands by their side in a single indivisible image? Remember how the façade was baked by the sun, how that carved frieze of saints swam upon the sea of light.

What does it matter that a building is new, if it appears to be old, or even if it does not. All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for rich tradesmen, in the new districts, where the stone is all freshly cut and still quite white, don't they seem to rend the torrid air of noon in July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to luncheon in the suburbs, with a cry as harsh as the odour of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests project a multicoloured fire as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?"

It's a profound thought, one that has influenced the way I've looked at art through all my subsequent life - and no less profound because Proust the author is ass enough to follow this explication with this reply from Albertine: ""How wonderful you are! If I ever do become clever, it will be entirely
owing to you."

Read David's remarks on Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV and Volume VI of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

Maria Callas sings 

O malheureuse Iphigénie
from Act II of the French opera Iphigénie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald Gluck
Libretto: Guillard François


Role: Iphigénie, Priestess of Diana
Voice Part: soprano
Setting:
Synopsis: Two Greek soldiers arrive in Tauride, one of whom is Orestes. Brother and sister do not recognize each other or reveal their identities. When Iphigénie asks about the royal family in Mycena, Orestes tells her everyone is dead, including himself, and she mourns the loss of her kin.
Translations/Aria Texts:
Translation into English by Miriam Ellis (added 2011-06-19)O malheureuse Iphigénie, Iphigénie's aria from Iphigénie en Tauride O malheureuse Iphigénie, Oh, miserable Iphigenia, ta famille est anéantie! your family has been destroyed. Vous n'avez plus de rois; You, my people, have no more kings; je n'ai plus de parents. and I have no more kin. Mêlez vos cris plaintiffs Mingle your plaintive cries à mes gémissements. with my endless lament. Vous n'avez plus de rois You have no more kings; Je n'ai plus de parents. and I have no more kin.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlFfkqIjnUw

 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Choderlos_de_Laclos
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos produced "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" in an effort to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on this earth after his death." He did just that. First published in 1782 in four volumes, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" was an immediate success, and has since inspired a large number of literary commentaries, plays, and films. The novel is an epistolary piece, written as letters between members of the French noble class. An egotistical battle for control ensues between the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, with the promise of sexual gratification to the victor. The primary victims are Cecile, a naïve but pretty young girl, her admirer, the Chavelier Danceny, and Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous (and married) young woman. This scandalous web of sexual desire, intrigue, infidelity, the struggle for power, and the corruption of the French upper class is a masterpiece from one of the most subtle and skillful novelists of the 18th Century.