Odette in Drag

Chernowitz identifies some inspirations for Miss Sacripant:

Miss Sacripant, Elstir’s portrait of an actress disguised as a young man–who is really Odette de Crécy–of a beautiful but peculiar type, is also a composite. Like Whistler’s Miss Alexander, she is holding a broad-brimmed hat level with her knee, but is probably only in part a Whistler.

 Whistler – Miss Alexander

The costume disguising her sex recall the work of Manet, who painted so many portraits of this kind, where he would us the same model, Victorine Meurend, who posed in men’s attire in Le Toréador, Le Fifre, Mlle V. en costume d’Espagnol, Jeune femme couchée en costume en costume d’ Espagnol, and others. Besides, Proust himself refers to Miss Sacripant specifically as “contemporain d’un des nombreux portraits que Manet ou Whistler ont peints.” (115)

Manet Le Toreador

Manet Le Fifre

 Manet Jeune Fille couchee

Contrasts in Forgetting

Marcel is gradually forgetting Albertine. Time is the agent. He has a finite set of memories and as they fade they are not replaced, while he himself changes into another person.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection of them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. Albertine had no cause to reproach her friend. The man who was usurping his name was merely his heir. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the stories it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her lovable, it loved her; but it was only a love at second hand. (V,805)

Swann is also being forgotten, but by a quite different process. Gilberte has been adopted by her step-father, de Forcheville, and wishes him to be known as her true father. She has inherited Swann’s tact and intelligence and Odette’s morality.

But when, to this daughter of his, he used from time to time to say, taking her in his arms and kissing her: “How comforting it is, my darling, to have a daughter like you; one day when I’m no longer here, if people still mention your poor papa, it will be only to you and because of you,” Swann, in thus pinning  a timorous and anxious hope of survival on his daughter after his death, was as mistaken as an old banker who, having made a will in favour of a little dancer whom he is keeping and who has very nice manners, tells himself that though her he is not more than a great friend, she will remain faithful to his memory. She had very nice manners while her feet under the table sought the feet of those of the old banker’s friends who attracted her, but all this very discreetly, behind an altogether respectable exterior. (V,800)

Gilberte’s presence in a drawing-room, instead of being an occasion for people to speak of her father from time to time, was an obstacle in the way of their seizing the opportunities that might still have remained for them to do so, and that were becoming more and more rare. Even in connexion with the things he had said, the presents he had given, people acquired the habit of not mentioning him, and she who ought to have kept his memory young, if not perpetuated it, found herself hastening and completing the work of death and oblivion. (V,800)

Blame Odette

The narrator sums up the Charlus-Jupien encounter as a thing of beauty.

M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see whether the bumble-bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long been waiting to receive, and had my chance of receiving save by an accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle. But it was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same order and no less marvellous. As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty. (IV,38)

Cottard has planted the idea that Albertine is sexually aroused by Andree (and maybe Gisele). Contrast Marcel’s reflexion above with his thoughts on female homosexuality.

I finally made bold to tell her what had been reported to me about her way of life, and said that notwithstanding the profound disgust I felt for women tainted with that vice, I had not given it a thought until I had been told the name of her accomplice, and that she could readily understand, loving Andrée as I did, the pain that this had caused me. (IV,313-314)

Where does this disgust come from? Perhaps it is Odette’s fault. Marcel recalls Odette’s prostitute origins, her lesbianism, her infidelities and conflates them all.

I thought then of all that I had been told about Swann’s love for Odette, of the way in which Swann had been tricked all his life. Indeed, when I come to think of it, the hypothesis that made me gradually build up the whole of Albertine’s character and give a painful interpretation to every moment of a life that I could not control in its entirety, was the memory, the rooted idea of Mme Swann’s character, as it had been described to me. These accounts contributed towards the fact that, in the future, my imagination played with the idea that Albertine might, instead of being the good girl that she was, have had the same immorality, the same capacity for deceit as a former prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me if I had happened to love her. (IV,275-276)

He tries to convince himself of the error in equating the two women.

Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished. Hence the comfort brought me by Albertine’s affirmations came near to being jeopardized for a moment because I remembered the story of Odette….Was there not a vast gulf between Albertine, a girl of good middle-class parentage, and Odette, a whore sold by her mother in her childhood? There could be no comparison of their respective credibility. Besides, Albertine had in no sense the same interest in lying to me that Odette had had in lying to Swann. And in any case to him Odette had admitted what Albertine had just denied. I should therefore have been guilty of an error of reasoning… (IV,316)

But the damage has been done.

Without Rancor

The narrator does try to be understanding of Bloch.

 I did not believe what he was saying, but I bore him no ill-will on that account, for I had inherited from my mother and grandmother their incapacity for rancour even against the worst offenders, and their habit of never condemning anyone. Besides, Bloch was not altogether a bad fellow: he was capable of being extremely nice. (II, 445)

But he tires of the effort. Bloch is at Balbec with his tribe.

Personally, I was not particularly anxious that Bloch should come to the hotel. He was at Balbec, not by himself, unfortunately, but with his sisters, and they in turn had innumerable relatives and friends staying there. Now this Jewish colony was more picturesque than pleasing….they formed a solid troop, homogenous within itself, and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go by and found them there again every year without ever exchanging a word or a greeting…(II,434)

Marcel and Robert are invited to dinner with Bloch and his family and witness scene after scene of vulgar behavior. Here is Bloch’s father scrimping on the wine and theater seats.

However, if the failing of his son, that is to say the failing which his son believed to be invisible to other people, was coarseness, the father’s was avarice. And so it was in a decanter that we were served, under the name of champagne, with a light sparkling wine, while under that of orchestra stalls he had taken three in the pit, which cost half as much, miraculously persuaded by the divine intervention of his failing that neither at table nor in the theatre (where the boxes were all empty) would the difference be noticed. (II,487)

And in the unkindest cut of all, Bloch is revealed to have had sex with Odette in a railway car.

“I picked her up a few days before that on the Zone railway, where, speaking of zones, she was so kind as to undo hers for the benefit of your humble servant….I was hoping ,” he said, “thanks to you,  to learn her address, so as to go there several times a week to taste  in her arms the delights of Eros, dear to the gods; but I do not insist since you seem pledged to discretion with respect to a professional who gave herself to me three times running, and in the most rarefied manner, between Paris and Point-du-Jour. I’m bound to see her again some night.” (II,489)

 

 

 

 

 

Odette’s New Look

Since her marriage, Odette has lost some of her fragile beauty but gained a youthfulness as her added weight fills out her face. Swann still prefers the Botticelli version of Odette.

And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angle holds out to her, before writing upon the sacred page on which is already traced the word “Magnificat.” But he added: “Whatever you do, don’t say anything about it to her; if she knew she was doing it, she would change her pose at once.” (II,265

 

Swann himself doesn’t get his picture taken so often.

…I should have wished them to understand what an inestimable present I had just received and, to show their gratitude to that generous and courteous Swann who had offered it to me, or to them rather, without seeming any more conscious of its value than the charming Mage with the arched brow and fair hair in Luini’s fresco, to whom, it was said, Swann had at one time  been thought to bear a striking resemblance. (II,201)

Swann at Home

Swann is, of course, a character to judged on the terms presented in the novel. But I cannot help but think he’s another of Proust’s alter egos. He’s clever, knows  a huge amount about art, has exquisite taste and is a great conversationalist comfortable in high society. He’s also a cautionary figure, someone who seems destined to be an artist but squanders those abilities out of a kind of laziness.  So how’s married life for Swann and Odette? Marcel gets a look when visiting with their daughter Gilberte. Swann continues to collect art.

 He would show me his latest acquisitions and explain to me the interesting points about them, but my emotion, added to the unfamiliarity of being still unfed at this hour, stirred my mind while leaving it void, so that while I was capable of speech I was incapable of hearing. (II,137)

And he has found another aesthetic, but indolent, enjoyment, pairing the people in his and Odette’s circle for comic effect.

But Swann was not content with seeking in society and fastening on the names which the past has inscribed on its roll and which are still to be read there, a single artistic and literary pleasure, he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogenous elements, by bringing together people taken at random here, there and everywhere. These amusing (to Swann) sociological experiments did not always provoke an identical reaction from all his wife’s friends….She [Mme Bontemps] inwardly cursed the depraved taste which caused Swann, in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, to destroy at one swoop the dazzling impression she had made on the Cottards when she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. (II,128)

Otherwise, he has simply resumed his pre-Odette life.

As for Swann himself, he still often called on some of his former acquaintances, who, of course, belonged to the very highest society. And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been to see I noticed that among those whom he had known in the old days, the choice that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly artistic, partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And remarking that is was often some Bohemian noblewoman who interested him because she had been the mistress of Liszt or because on of Balzac’s novels dedicated to her grandmother…(II,127)

 And he continues (like Odette) to sleep with whom he pleases.

For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether Odette had been, or was being, unfaithful to him….Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who gave him no grounds for jealousy but none the less made him jealous, because he was no longer capable of altering his mode of loving, and it was the mode he had employed with Odette that must serve him now for another. (II,132-133)

 And this was how a person of the highest potential lived out his life.

Swann Dive

Marcel’s parents are planning a dinner party for M. de Norpois and are considering the invitation list. Swann is quickly dismissed as a candidate.

Now this attitude on my father’s part may be felt to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no doubt, remember…a Swann of by whom modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to the utmost refinement of delicacy. (II,1)

Since marrying Odette Swann has become “a different man.” The narrator considers various explanations for this change for the worse. First, he allows Odette to set the standards.

…it would have been understandable if, in order to gauge the social importance of these new acquaintances and thereby the degree of self-esteem that might be derived from entertaining them, he had used, as a standard of comparison, not the brilliant society in which he himself had moved before his marriage, but former connections of Odette’s. But, even when one knew that it was with uncouth functionaries and tainted women, the ornaments of ministerial ball-rooms, that he now wished to associate, it was still astonishing to hear him…proclaim with quite unnecessary emphasis that the wife of some junior minister had returned Mme Swann’s call. (II,2)

Second, there is the “Bloch effect;” the rootless Jew who mirrors society for his own advantage.

…like certain other Jews, my parents’ old friend had contrived to illustrate in turn all the successive stages through which those of his race had passed, from the most naive snobbery and the crudest caddishness to the most exquisite good manners. (II,2)

Finally the narrator settles on a rather simpler explanation, the laziness of associating virtues with particular actions and environments rather than the application of principled standards.

But the chief reason–and one that is applicable to humanity as a whole–was that our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjuction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues. (II,2)

This latter might be another case of destructive habit: acting virtuously out of habit rather than out of conviction.

Swann in Love: Epilogue

Odette’s life has appeared to me a trajectory from forced childhood prostitution to more and more upscale liasons, culminating in her marriage to Swann, who does his best to get her accepted in society and to populate her salon with the best people. That is all true enough, though there are indications that she remains a courtesan at heart. Foremost of these is the “lady in pink” episode, preceded by the false lead at Combray, where she is seen at Tansonville with a mysterious man (Charlus). And there is the suggestion by Norpois that her home is a popular destination for men. Bloch claims to have had her three times on a train ride. But the bulk of the narrative shows Odette demurely hosting her salon and walking in the Bois.

In Time Regained, the narrator resolves all ambiguity. She’s a tramp all the way down. Odette is now the mistress of the Duc de Guermantes. The narrator misses no opportunity to call her the lady in pink.

…Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself but people would have gone there…(VI,52)

…Mme Swann in a pink dress in my great-uncles study.. (VI,413)

…just as, beginning with the lady in pink, there had existed several Mme Swanns, separated by the colorless ether of the years…(VI,442)

…and the other with the lady in pink because a well-informed man within me assured me that this was so…(VI,443)

…she was tending under pressure of new circumstances to become once more, the lady in pink (VI,481)

…this Second Empire courtesan swathed in one of the wraps which he liked, the lady in pink would interrupt him with a sprightly sally… So for a moment the Duke glared at the audacious lady in pink. (VI,486)

The morals of Swann while married to Odette, by the way, were apparently no better.

…Swann, when he was no longer in love with Mme Swann but with a waitress at the same Colombin’s where at one time Mme Swann had though it smart to go and drink tea…(VI,403)

The narrator finally has had enough of her:

It must be added that Odette was unfaithful to M. de Guermantes in the same fashion that she looked after him, that to say without charm and without dignity. She was commonplace in this role as she had been in all her others. Not that life had not frequently given her good parts; it had, but she not known how to play them. (VI,488) 

Proust’s Humor

 

France is at war and Parisian society does its part by adapting to the new circumstances. Proust here unleashes his full comic powers, which resemble Jane Austen’s irony in the delightful gap between what is said and what is meant. A few examples follow.

Mme Verdurin has by now ascended to the height of society and she now welcomes all to her salon, including the “bores” and not including all of the “faithful”:

Another noticeable change was that, as more and more smart people made advances to Mme. Verdurin, inversely the number of those whom she dubbed “bores” diminished. By a sort of magical transformation, every bore who had come to call on her and asked to be invited to her parties immediately became a charming and intelligent person. In  short, at the end of a year, the number of bores had dwindled to such an extent that “the fear and awfulness of being bored,” which had filled so large a place in the conversation and played so great a role in the life of Mme Verdurin, had almost entirely disappeared….And the terror of being bored would doubtless, for want of bores, have entirely abandoned Mme Verdurin had she not, in some slight degree, replaced the vanishing bores by others recruited from the ranks of the former faithful. (VI,56)

Wartime shortages have forced Mme Verdurin to move her salon to a large hotel, where everyone is absorbed in discussions of the war effort.

After dinner the guests went upstairs to the Mistress’s reception rooms, and then the telephoning began. But many large hotels were at this period peopled with spies, who duly noted the news announced over the telephone by Bontemps with an indiscretion which might have had serious consequences but for a fortunate lack of accuracy in his reports, which invariably were contradicted by events. (VI,63)

The Dreyfus case is now ancient history; everyone is a Dreyfusard now. Society adopts change in its own way.

In society (and this social phenomenon is merely a particular case of a much more general psychological law) novelties, whether blameworthy or not, excite horror only so long as they have not been assimilated and enveloped by reassuring elements. It was the same with Dreyfusism as with that marriage between Saint-Loup and the daughter of Odette which had at first produced such an outcry. Now that “everybody one knew” was seen at the parties given by the Saint-Loups, Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself but people would have “gone there” just the same and would have thought it quite right that she should disapprove like a dowager of any moral novelties that had not been assimilated. (VI,52)

 

Idolatry of Painting

Swann in Love fits in curiously with the remainder of Search.It has an omniscient narrator, an ‘as related to’ kind of voice, even though Proust adds a line to say he heard Swann’slove story later in life. It interrupts the unfolding of Marcel’s coming of age story, pushing the narrative back a generation to the time around Marcel’s birth. We do get introduced to some of the main characters in the following volumes, besides Swann himself: Mme Verdurin, Elstir, Princess des Laumes, etc. And the love story is a forecast of the Albertine affair (Albertine had not been envisaged when Proust wrote Swann’s Way;I wonder if she had been how he would have handled Swann.) The narrator, at the end ofCombray, says that Swann’s story, like the madeline, served as an aide memoire to his childhood:

Thus would I often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there, of other days besides, the memory of  which had been more recently restored to me by the taste–by what would have been called at Combray the “perfume”–of a cup of tea, and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born… (I, 262)

But the strongest claim for the inclusion of the Swann episode comes a little later, when the narrator injects his personal voice, “…when I began to take an interest in his character because of the similarities which, in wholly different respects, it offered to my own…” (I, 273). All this by way of introduction to my theme: Swann is Marcel’s spiritual alter ego in his understanding of art (and love). By looking at Swann’s view of painting, we see what Marcel must overcome. The following passages show how Swann’s vision and understanding become clouded in part because of his, to use Roger Shattuck’s term, art idolatry.

Swann is not initially attracted to Odette’s physical beauty, until one day he notices a similarity she has to a figure in Botticelli’s The Trials of Moses.

…she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescos. He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the old masters not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalization, the individual features of men and women when he knew…. He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette’s face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks and purely fleshy softness which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard a kiss, but regarded it rather as a skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unravelled…(I, 315)

Now hear Swann at the end of Swann in Love:

Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn feature, her tired eyes…”To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” (I, 543)

Swann’s idealization of art keeps him from living incitefully, with disastrous results. Marcel’s idealization of literature is a translation of this idea into literature; he cannot possible write the ethereal prose that he imagines literature requires.

On the other hand, Swann’s depiction of Odette as Zipporah is brilliant. Proust simply worked from Botticelli to create Odette’s face. I normally am hesitant to have a novelistic image locked into a single form by, as in this case, a painting or by a reading by an actor. But I concede here that the Botticelli image is much better than what I had imagined prior to seeing it in detail.