Time Regained - finis
"“The Princesse de Guermantes had died and the present wife of the Prince, who had been ruined by the collapse of Germany, was the former Mme Verdurin. “That can’t be right, I looked in this year’s Gotha,” Bloch naïvely confessed to me, “and I found the Prince de Guermantes, living at this address where we are now and married to someone of the utmost grandeur, let me try to remember, yes, married to Sidonie, Duchesse de Duras, née des Baux.” This was correct. Mme Verdurin, shortly after the death of her husband, had married the aged and impoverished Duc de Duras, who had made her a cousin of the Prince de Guermantes and had died after two years of marriage. He had served as a useful transition for Mme Verdurin, who now, by a third marriage, had become Princesse de Guermantes and occupied in the Faubourg Saint-Germain a lofty position”"
Sarah Bernhardt at 20 in 1864. She was 27 when Proust was born in 1871. Below 46 years later, in 1910, Sarah Bernhardt at 66.
At this point in Vol VI "Berma" has died. However, Sarah Bernhardt outlived Proust by a year.
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| L'Origine du monde ("The Origin of the World") Gustave Courbet - 1866 |
During her time at the Odeon, she continued to see her old lovers, as well as new ones including French marshals François-Certain Canrobert and Achille Bazaine, a commander of the French army in the Crimean War and in Mexico; and Prince Napoleon, son of Joseph Bonaparte and cousin of French Emperor Louis-Napoleon. She also had a two-year-long affair with Charles Haas, son of a banker and one of the most celebrated Paris dandies in the Empire, the model for the character of Swann in the novels by Marcel Proust.
Inevitably, Proust was drawn into Bernhardt's sphere. One of her many lovers was reported to be Charles Hass whom Proust used as a model for Swann, a central character in the early volumes.
In Time Regained we visit Marcel as he describes this weaving together of these threads:
* Victor Hugo
Another reference to the poem is found in Sodom & Gomorrah (partially copied here from a previous post). Hugo seemed to be writing about the fact that nature, the stage on which we appear, renews itself and remains beautiful, whereas we, on the other hand, don't.
"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”
A wall closes the fountain where, by the hour heated,
She was a sportswoman, drinking from the woods;
She was taking water in her hand, sweet fairy,
And let pearls fall from her fingers!
We paved the road rough and flattened,
Where, in the pure sand drawing so well,
And his small spreading irony,
Her (?) charming foot seemed to laugh next to mine!
The milestone of the road, which lives countless days,
Where once to wait for me she loved to sit,
Has worn herself strikingly, when the road is dark,
The great wailing floats returning in the evening.
The forest here is missing and there has grown.
Of all that was us almost nothing is alive;
And, like a pile of ashes quenched and cooled,
The heap of memories is dispersed to any wind!
Do not we exist then? Have we had our time?
Will nothing render it to our superfluous cries?
The air plays with the branch as I cry;
My house looks at me and does not know me anymore.
Un mur clôt la fontaine où, par l'heure échauffée,
Folâtre, elle buvait en descendant des bois ;
Elle prenait de l'eau dans sa main, douce fée,
Et laissait retomber des perles de ses doigts !
On a pavé la route âpre et mal aplanie,
Où, dans le sable pur se dessinant si bien,
Et de sa petitesse étalant l'ironie,
Son pied charmant semblait rire à côté du mien !
La borne du chemin, qui vit des jours sans nombre,
Où jadis pour m'attendre elle aimait à s'asseoir,
S'est usée en heurtant, lorsque la route est sombre,
Les grands chars gémissants qui reviennent le soir.
La forêt ici manque et là s'est agrandie.
De tout ce qui fut nous presque rien n'est vivant ;
Et, comme un tas de cendre éteinte et refroidie,
L'amas des souvenirs se disperse à tout vent !
N'existons-nous donc plus ? Avons-nous eu notre heure ?
Rien ne la rendra-t-il à nos cris superflus ?
L'air joue avec la branche au moment où je pleure ;
Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus.
VH
"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”
A wall closes the fountain where, by the hour heated,
She was a sportswoman, drinking from the woods;
She was taking water in her hand, sweet fairy,
And let pearls fall from her fingers!
We paved the road rough and flattened,
Where, in the pure sand drawing so well,
And his small spreading irony,
Her (?) charming foot seemed to laugh next to mine!
The milestone of the road, which lives countless days,
Where once to wait for me she loved to sit,
Has worn herself strikingly, when the road is dark,
The great wailing floats returning in the evening.
The forest here is missing and there has grown.
Of all that was us almost nothing is alive;
And, like a pile of ashes quenched and cooled,
The heap of memories is dispersed to any wind!
Do not we exist then? Have we had our time?
Will nothing render it to our superfluous cries?
The air plays with the branch as I cry;
My house looks at me and does not know me anymore.
Un mur clôt la fontaine où, par l'heure échauffée,
Folâtre, elle buvait en descendant des bois ;
Elle prenait de l'eau dans sa main, douce fée,
Et laissait retomber des perles de ses doigts !
On a pavé la route âpre et mal aplanie,
Où, dans le sable pur se dessinant si bien,
Et de sa petitesse étalant l'ironie,
Son pied charmant semblait rire à côté du mien !
La borne du chemin, qui vit des jours sans nombre,
Où jadis pour m'attendre elle aimait à s'asseoir,
S'est usée en heurtant, lorsque la route est sombre,
Les grands chars gémissants qui reviennent le soir.
La forêt ici manque et là s'est agrandie.
De tout ce qui fut nous presque rien n'est vivant ;
Et, comme un tas de cendre éteinte et refroidie,
L'amas des souvenirs se disperse à tout vent !
N'existons-nous donc plus ? Avons-nous eu notre heure ?
Rien ne la rendra-t-il à nos cris superflus ?
L'air joue avec la branche au moment où je pleure ;
Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus.
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.."
“Victor Hugo says:
Grass must grow and children must die.
To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe."
======================================================
The Duc de Guermantes had taken Odette as his mistress and jealously guards her as did Swann years ago. Marcel did the same with Albertine. A description of the Duke reveals Marcel's contempt for the old man.
"He was no more than a ruin now, a magnificent ruin—or perhaps not even a ruin but a beautiful and romantic natural object, a rock in a tempest. Lashed on all sides by the surrounding waves—waves of suffering, of wrath at being made to suffer, of the rising tide of death—his face, like a crumbling block of marble, preserved the style and the poise which I had always admired; it might have been one of those fine antique heads, eaten away and hopelessly damaged, which you are proud nevertheless to have as an ornament for your study. In one respect only was it changed: it seemed to belong to a more ancient epoch than formerly, not simply because of the now rough and rugged surfaces of what had once been a more brilliant material, but also because to an expression of keen and humorous enjoyment had succeeded one, involuntary and unconscious, built up by illness, by the struggle against death, by passive resistance, by the difficulty of remaining alive. The arteries had lost all suppleness and gave to the once expansive countenance a hard and sculptural quality. And though the Duke had no suspicion of this, there were aspects of his appearance, of his neck and cheeks and forehead, which suggested to the observer that the vital spirit within, compelled to clutch desperately at every passing minute, was buffeted by a great tragic gale, while the white wisps of his still magnificent but less luxuriant hair lashed with their foam the half submerged promontory of his face."
The party moves on.
“Victor Hugo says:
Grass must grow and children must die.
To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe."
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| Le Déjeuner Sur L'herbe - Manet - Louvre, Paris |
======================================================
The Duc de Guermantes had taken Odette as his mistress and jealously guards her as did Swann years ago. Marcel did the same with Albertine. A description of the Duke reveals Marcel's contempt for the old man.
"He was no more than a ruin now, a magnificent ruin—or perhaps not even a ruin but a beautiful and romantic natural object, a rock in a tempest. Lashed on all sides by the surrounding waves—waves of suffering, of wrath at being made to suffer, of the rising tide of death—his face, like a crumbling block of marble, preserved the style and the poise which I had always admired; it might have been one of those fine antique heads, eaten away and hopelessly damaged, which you are proud nevertheless to have as an ornament for your study. In one respect only was it changed: it seemed to belong to a more ancient epoch than formerly, not simply because of the now rough and rugged surfaces of what had once been a more brilliant material, but also because to an expression of keen and humorous enjoyment had succeeded one, involuntary and unconscious, built up by illness, by the struggle against death, by passive resistance, by the difficulty of remaining alive. The arteries had lost all suppleness and gave to the once expansive countenance a hard and sculptural quality. And though the Duke had no suspicion of this, there were aspects of his appearance, of his neck and cheeks and forehead, which suggested to the observer that the vital spirit within, compelled to clutch desperately at every passing minute, was buffeted by a great tragic gale, while the white wisps of his still magnificent but less luxuriant hair lashed with their foam the half submerged promontory of his face."
The party moves on.
With this Marcel has come to terms with death "which now was a fact and one which left me quite unmoved."
Footnote on Manet:
Though not a suicide (Manet probably died of a combination of syphilis and gangrene 11 days after a left foot amputation in 1883), his painting, "Le Suicidé by Édouard Manet, 1881" hangs in the Louvre directly below Le Déjeuner Sur L'herbe as presented here.
Manet's The Suicide (c.1871)
Every Painter Paints Himself
"================================================================"
The Book
"One of my selves, the one which in the past had been in the habit of going to those barbarian festivals that we call dinner-parties, at which, for the men in white shirt-fronts and the half-naked women beneath feathered plumes, values have been so reversed that a man who does not turn up after having accepted the invitation—or merely arrives after the roast has been served—is deemed to have committed an act more culpable than any of those immoral actions which, along with the latest deaths, are so lightly discussed at this feast which nothing but death or a serious illness is an acceptable excuse for failing to attend—and then only provided that one has given notice in good time of one’s intention to die, so that there may be no danger for the other guests of sitting down thirteen to table—this one of my selves had retained its scruples and lost its memory. The other self, the one which had had a glimpse of the task that lay before it, on the contrary still remembered."
(While Marcel frets, anxious and worried, about beginning his book, I am, a day before our meeting at which I will serve dinner and report on these final few pages, concerned that I may not finish it.)
Unlike Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain who "simply laughed amiably at the idea and gave not a moment's thought to a life of eccentricity and starving for art", Proust writes,
"Before very long I was able to show a few sketches. No one understood anything of them. (..... But instead of working I had lived a life of idleness, of pleasures and distractions, of ill health and cosseting and eccentricities, and I was embarking upon my labour of construction almost at the point of death, without knowing anything of my trade.
(..... The best minds of posterity might think what they chose, their opinions mattered to me no more than those of my contemporaries.
(....., but perhaps simply because the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same, perpetually in process of becoming."
A Proustian nod to Hegel? (above)
"When a lady wrote to me: "I have been very surprised not to receive an answer to my letter," I must, it seemed, to judge from the sensation of movement in my lips, have twisted an infinitesimal corner of my mouth into a little smile."
To Proust death is a constant companion (below)
"The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I loved death, I abhorred it. But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self. And, on that day on which I had become a half-dead man, I do not think that it was the accidents characterising this condition—my inability to walk downstairs, to remember a name, to get up from a chair—that had, even by an unconscious train of thought, given rise to this idea of death, this conviction that I was already almost dead; it seems to me rather that the idea had come simultaneously with the symptoms, that inevitably the mind, great mirror that it is, reflected a new reality."
Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin - self portrait Louvre.
Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city. He lived on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre.
"...you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it."
"True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them."
"And I had to ask myself not only: "Is there still time?" but also: "Am I well enough?"
"Many errors, it is true, there are, as the reader will have seen that various episodes in this story had proved to me, by which our senses falsify for us the real nature of the world."
Sounds, perspective, faces, emotions "love and habit which for 30 years can conceal the changes brought about by age"
Time is a Bishop on stilts, "...living stilts which never cease to grow until they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall."
"So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time."
Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city. He lived on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV granted him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre.
"...you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it."
"True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them."
"And I had to ask myself not only: "Is there still time?" but also: "Am I well enough?"
"Many errors, it is true, there are, as the reader will have seen that various episodes in this story had proved to me, by which our senses falsify for us the real nature of the world."
Sounds, perspective, faces, emotions "love and habit which for 30 years can conceal the changes brought about by age"
Time is a Bishop on stilts, "...living stilts which never cease to grow until they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall."
"So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time."
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| La Comtesse Greffulhe model for Mme Guermantes |
finis
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