Human Aquarium

Marcel survives his first night away from home and eagerly observes his new environment. The hotel is a favorite of the rich, whether from the provinces or Paris. One rather reserved old lady, who we will learn is Mme de Villeparisis, attracts the attention of the other ladies.

Whenever the wives of the notary and the judge saw her in the dining-room at the meal-times, they put up their lorgnettes and gave her an insolent scrutiny, as meticulous and distrustful as if she had been some dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance which, after the adverse result of a systematic study, is sent away with a lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust. (II,348)

…the suppression of all desire for, of all curiosity about, ways of life which are unfamiliar, of all hope of endearing oneself to new people, for which, in these women, had been substituted a feigned contempt, a spurious jubilation, had the disagreeable effect of obliging them to label their discontent satisfaction and to lie everlastingly to themselves, two reasons why they were unhappy. (II,349)

Marcel imagines looking into the hotel dining area from the boardwalk.

Meanwhile, perhaps, amid the dumbfounded stationary crowd out there in the dark, there may have been some writer, some student of human ichthyology, who, as he watched the jaws of old feminine monstrosities close over a mouthful of submerged food, was amusing himself by classifying them by race, by innate characteristic, as well as by those acquired characteristics which bring it about that an old Serbian lady whose buccal appendage is that of a great sea-fish, because from her earliest years she has moved in the fresh waters of the Faubourg Saint-
Germain, eats her salad for all the world like a La Rochefoucauld. (II,354)

 

Intermittences of the Heart

Proust cast about for titles to the his novel and an early favorite was Intermittences of the Heart. This is a good term to describe the state Marcel is in after the intensity of his love for Gilberte has subsided but not disappeared. All it takes to again feel the pain of the lost love is an association that returns him to that former state of love. At Balbec Marcel overhears a name that Gilberte had mentioned.

At the time, however, of my departure for Balbec, and during the earlier apart of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent…. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because if was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the crisp crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which , when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. (II,299-300)

But, removed from the settings where he had love her, this flare of love was only an intermittency.

The change of habit, that is to say the temporary cessation of Habit, completed habit’s work when I set out for Balbec. It weakens, but it stabilises; it leads to disintegration but it makes the scattered elements last indefinitely. Day after day, for year past, I had modelled my state of mind as best I could upon that of the day before. A Balbec a strange bed, to the side of which a tray was brought in the morning that differed from my Paris breakfast tray, could no longer sustain the thoughts upon which my love for Gilberte had fed: there are cases (fairly rare, it is true) where, one’s days being paralysed by a sedentary life, the best way to gain time is to change one’s place of residence. My journey to Balbec was like the first outing of a convalescent who needed only that to convince him that he was cured. (II,301)

Time and habit erode an overwhelming passion into fading glimpses of the former self who was so in love.

 

Idolatry of Words

The young Marcel wants to write but cannot, at least until he can overcome his idealization, worship actually, of language.  Much of the chapter Place-Names in Swann’s Way is taken up with this theme.

The narrator starts the chapter as he began the volume, with the setting of sleepless nights:

Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray…than my room in the Grand Hotel de la Plage, at Balbec… (I,545).

This is recalled from his childhood visits to Balbec. But his first contact with the town was an invention of his imagination:

And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Francoise, as she took me to the Champs-Elysees, would advise me not to walk too close to the walls or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would recount to me, with many a groan, the terrible disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper.  (I,546)

And from Legrandin:

And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, the heirs of all the fishermen who have lived since the world’s beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night. (I,547)

And from Swann:

Yes indeed I know Balbec! The church there, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half Romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman Gothic, and so singular that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration. (I,547)

Thus did the name Balbec evoke storms and exotic Persian styled churches:

Thereafter, on delightful, stormy February nights, the wind–breathing into my ear, which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to Balbec–blended in me the desire for Gothic architecture as well as for a storm upon the sea…I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. (I, 548-550)

The narrator hints at what we will later see; by associating such ideal images with these place names, Marcel will inevitably become unable, at least for a time, to appreciate the actual places:

But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. (I,550)

These images were false for another reason also–namely, that they were necessarily much simplified. Doubtless whatever it was that my imagination aspired to, that my senses took in only incompletely and without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names; doubtless, because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them two or three of the principal “curiosities” of the town…(I,553)

This theme is renewed in the scenes where Marcel meets Gilberte. He hears one of her playmates call her name:

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close to me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the  proximity of its target–carrying it its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed…(I,560)

It will be only in the final volume that Marcel will know Gilberte directly, unmediated by the powerful associations connected to her name.

In the following volumes Marcel will face other idealisations that he must overcome before he will be able to write about them, most notably the French aristocracy.