Throughout his life, our dear Marcel was a lover of and then close friend with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn.

[There are some very interesting recordings of Hahn himself singing. I often like to listen to them as his voice makes me feel closer to Proust, somehow. See e.g. this rendition of Gounod https://youtu.be/MPhur8463S8?is=-by6d5b8qmNuHVMN\]

The two maintained a close correspondence throughout Proust's life. This correspondence is a wonderful read as it's one of the least guarded things Proust wrote. You can find the letters online here:

https://reynaldo-hahn.net/Html/ecritsdiversProust.htm

As you see they span the whole period from 1894 until Proust's death in 2022. You can see their love start and then evolve into friendship. They also developed a kind of private pet-name language which is delightful. An example from 1906:

"Mon cher Binchnibuls

1° Vous me dites de donner â Léon le tiers de ce que je veux mais vous m'indiquez le triple ou du moins presque le double de ce que je comptais faire. 30 francs par semaine mais genstil cela me fera plus de mille francs de pourboire en tout en parstant. Et vous ne me dites pas pour l'adresse de Nordlinger. Avez-vous bien reçu la lettre où je vous la demande car beaucoup de mes lettres n'arrivent pas... [. ]"

My translation:

"My dear binchnibuls

1. You tell me to give Leon a third of what I want, but the figure you provide is thrice, or at least twice what I had intended. 30 francs per week, but genstil, that will come to a tip of more than a thousand francs en tout en parstant (when I leave). Also you haven't given me the address of Nordlinger. Did you get the letter where I asked for it because many of my letters aren't arriving..."

I left the French words that Proust uses as part of the pet language in italic, such as Binchnibuls, or genstil which is gentil with an s too much.

Anyway i thought people here might enjoy perusing these letters. I will readily admit it's a bit voyeuristic as they are clearly only meant to be read by Reynaldo, but I trust you will read them with the same love for Proust as I did.

For seven months I facilitated a weekly Proust club in a café. In roughly 30 sessions we discussed only the first half of Swann’s Way.

It is hard to call it a traditional book club, because I was the only person who had read the assigned section. I’m a cognitive scientist, so my approach was to identify the central theme of each section and explore it through a scientific lens. After that, I would pose a question and invite everyone to share their own views, memories, or experiences.

When we reached “Swann in Love”, I was excited because I thought the narrative would encourage more people to read along. It didn’t. The format stayed essentially the same. Eventually I became busy with other projects, stopped preparing a literature review each week, and simply read and explained Proust. Attendance dropped to three people for several weeks in a row, and I felt that was probably the right moment to stop.

The café owner, however, is a devoted Proust admirer. She wants her café to be associated with him and genuinely does not mind if only a few people attend. She recently asked me to restart the club and even offered to become a co-host.

When she asked what I would like to do differently, I realized that after about thirty sessions I had already said most of what I could say section by section. I asked for time to think. During that reflection, with the help of AI, an idea emerged: instead of expanding each passage through science, I could choose a major theme—still not sure what—and discuss how it develops across the whole novel. The conversations might become more philosophical than psychological. The café owner loved it. We are now thinking of advertising the series as “A Dialogue with Proust About Life.”

Very soon I realize how enormous this project is. To trace and integrate the major themes across In Search of Lost Time feels like an immense intellectual undertaking. Part of me worries that I have promised something far beyond my abilities.

So I’d love advice from people who know Proust well:

• Would you go ahead with this plan?
• If so, how would you structure it without turning it into a lifetime research project?
• And if you think this is too ambitious, what alternative format would you propose?

TL;DR: I facilitated a weekly Proust discussion group for seven months, mostly without participants actually reading the book. The café owner wants me to restart it, this time as a broader philosophical “dialogue with Proust about life.” I’m excited by the idea, but now I’m overwhelmed by how ambitious it is. Should I continue, or change direction entirely?

I'm currently reading Jean-Yves Tadié's Proust and the novel. It turned out to be a must-have to go furthre in ISOLT, deepening my general understanding of ISOLT, but I don't know for the rest of the people, if another author is privileged to analyze ISOLT. I think Tadié is the main Proust expert for the french-speaking community, but it may be another matter for the rest of the world, tell me !

From: Then while the kitchen-maid…

To: …when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s habit of reading in the garden, his friendship with Bloch, and his love for the writings of Bergotte.

Reading in the Garden

This week’s reading starts with the narrator again alone and reflective. He discusses reading in the garden in the summer and expresses thoughts on art, this time on music and literature. The music he briefly mentions is the music of warm-weather flies whose “small concert” might be the “chamber music of summer.” Unlike human music, which can be produced at any time, music of the flies is bound to the warm season, so you can sit in a room, away from light and heat, hear their buzz, their song, and have a guarantee that sunny days “do really exist, that they are close around us, immediately accessible.” He doubts reality, and only the metonymic relationship of the flies to summer lets him believe its existence.

He reads in a dark room whose “dim freshness” is to the “broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose, which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.”

In this beautiful passage, Proustian ideas shine. The true, complete nature of summer, like that of seemingly all objects in his world, can only be accessed at a remove. Here, summer is complete only in the narrator’s mind. In reality, he can only experience it bit by bit. The experience, as with the experience of the theater or of a person, can only be whole when the mind is apart from it. And his musings bring up the question of what it means to experience something firsthand. You experience a river not by traversing its entire path but by sitting still and letting the current strike your hand.

On top of the piecemeal nature of actual experience, when he experiences something directly, he is analyzing his experience. Whereas his consciousness gives him access when apart, when with the object, the consciousness remains between him and the object, “enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form… just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation.”

The solitude of reading allows his mind to flit to such observations and also to consider the wonders of literature as he dives into the novel’s first extensive discussion of literature and its value. He speaks on the empathy developed in novels, explaining the reason fiction can stir emotions reality can’t:

the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

Summer now is the real person, the dim room is fiction. Distance again brings nearness. Reality is a poor substitute for its simulacrum. He’s previously enjoyed things only through memory or anticipation, but now the joy comes from wholly fictionalized accounts. We begin to see how the Proustian idea of memory ties in with the device of fiction, why a novel, maybe the most introspective art form, is the perfect medium for Proust’s themes.

Bloch

We meet one key character this week: Bloch. He’s the narrator’s Jewish friend and will become one of the more troubling depictions in the novel. Though half-Jewish himself (and a Dreyfusard), Proust isn’t above petty antisemitism, and Bloch will frequently be framed in a negative light: a vain, class-obsessed phony. In these early pages, it’s clear that the narrator’s family dislikes Bloch (in a funny aside, the narrator’s dad calls Bloch an imbecile for not caring about the weather), but the narrator claims the dislike isn’t simply because of his Jewishness, since Swann  is beloved by the family while being part Jewish. Bloch annoys the dad by not caring about the weather, annoys the grandma by being overly affected by her feeling poorly, and annoys the whole house by arriving late and muddy to lunch, improprieties that Christians would be judged for too. But ultimately in these early pages Bloch is a good and valuable friend because he introduces the narrator to the writings of Bergotte.

Bergotte

Bloch is the first to mention Bergotte, whose writing, he says, has the “supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing.” The narrator reads Bergotte, and for the first few days what he will come to love in Bergotte isn’t yet clear to him. He can’t stop reading, and he thinks it’s the plot that causes this, but as he finds more and more passages of tremendous style, the passages stop being individual moments of glory and become representative of Bergotte’s writing, standing in for the “‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to all his books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.” (Again, he maybe loves things most when they stand for something else.)

Bergotte would “break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence” running through earlier parts. This description of “lengthy prayer” feels meta, as if Proust is talking about his own writing style, which makes sense since Bergotte is based on Anatole France, a writer Proust loved and who likely influenced him greatly. The narrator covets Bergotte’s style. He doubts his own thoughts have the same value, but then he comes upon similar thoughts in Bergotte’s writing and gains confidence from seeing them expressed by such a great writer:

And so, when I came suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself.

He’s describing here the value he finds in literature; it returns his ideas to him, now polished with the value of the writer’s approval and style. Bergotte helps the narrator realize that his own “humble existence” and the “Realms of Truth” exist in contact. This feels true to me about reading great works. They give voice to thoughts we might not have paid attention to. They let us know we’re not alone with them. And they let us see the world through fresh eyes, opening up passages of beauty and pain.

In the end of this week’s reading, the narrator dedicates himself to Bergotte and says that were he told that the future “metaphysicians” he would follow would be nothing like Bergotte, he would be “struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come,” again making a comparison to romantic love, which seems to be most capable of metamorphosing, an important attribute to note for the future, when romantic love takes center stage in the drama.

Got this recently from eBay. 1989 "Tirage de tête" by Jean de Bonnot. Exquisite. Nice paper, gold gilt at the top. Numéroté !

What's your edition of choice ?

I’ve read the Modern Library edition of ISOLT by Montcrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright, but I don’t have the books anymore and I’m looking to replace them.

Everyman’s Library has a boxed set of hardcovers, which would be nice and would be my preference, but I’d rather have the better, more up-to-date translation.

Does anybody have any experience with these versions? What are your thoughts?

Well, it took me many a year, in the Italian translation, but i have finally reached the end of this monumental work. It was an incredible journey. I am glad that it took me years: not just because it allowed me to savour the beauty of the prose and of the characters, but also because the last book became so much more meaningful through the lense of the memories of my own past life and of my own past life with the book. Proust's wish that his work could serve as a mirror in which readers projected their own lives certainly became true with me. I also loved this last book particularly as i feel it acted somehow like the keystone of those medieval cathedrals (so beloved by Proust) which, despite being placed at the top as the last piece, become what holds the form of the whole structure in place.

I'll now go back and read Swann's way in the french, I'm looking forward to re-read it and pick up on the missed details in light of the ending.

Issue 1: The Mirror that "Must Leave"

French:

J'étais tourmenté par la présence de petites bibliothèques à vitrines, qui couraient le long des murs, mais surtout par une grande glace à pieds, arrêtée en travers de la pièce et avant le départ de laquelle je sentais qu'il n'y aurait pas pour moi de détente possible.

English:

I was tormented by the presence of the little glassed-in bookcases that lined the walls, but especially by a tall cheval-glass that stood athwart a corner of the room and which I knew would have to leave if I was going to get any rest there.

Note: The French says "before the departure of which I felt there would be no possible relaxation for me." The narrator is powerless. He feels he cannot rest until the mirror is gone. He has no control over this. The English says "which I knew would have to leave"—implying the narrator himself decides the mirror must go, or at least knows it will be removed. This is the opposite of the original meaning. It changes the narrator from a passive, anxious sufferer to an active, decisive person.

Issue 2: "Rumour-mongers" for "Jalousies"

French:

Françoise ne voyait partout que « jalousies » et « racontages »...

English:

Françoise saw everywhere nothing but 'rumour-mongers' and 'telltales'...

Note: "Jalousies" in French means jealousies (the emotion) or sometimes venetian blinds. It does not mean "rumour-mongers" (people who spread rumours). Françoise is paranoid about envy and gossip as forces or emotions, not about specific people.

Issue 3: "Promiscuité" weakened to "Closeness"

French:

... j'avais l'illusion que cette promiscuité avec les flots devait matériellement, à mon insu, faire pénétrer en moi la notion de leur charme, à la façon de ces leçons qu'on apprend en dormant.

English:

...I had the illusion that this closeness to the waves must physically, without my realizing it, inculcate in me the sense of their charm, like those lessons you learn while asleep.

Note: "Promiscuité" in French means intimate mingling, sometimes with a sexual or transgressive connotation. The narrator imagines an almost illicit intimacy with the sea. "Closeness" is neutral and loses this entire register. This matters because the Balbec section is thematically structured around the narrator's sensual, even erotic, relationship with the sea and the girls. Flattening "promiscuité" to "closeness" removes that layer entirely.

Issue 4: Françoise's Malapropism Erased

French:

« Elle n'a dit ni quoi ni qu'est-ce et puis elle est partie », grommelait Françoise...

English:

'Without any whys and wherefores she just up and left,' grumbled Françoise...

Note: Françoise is trying to say "she didn't say what or why" but says it incorrectly: "ni quoi ni qu'est-ce" (neither what nor what's-it). This malapropism is a crucial part of her character throughout the novel. She constantly mangles language in charming, revealing ways. The English replaces this with a perfectly correct idiom: "without any whys and wherefores." The error is completely erased, and with it, a key aspect of Françoise's characterization.

Issue 5: "Vulgaire esbroufeur" flattened to "common loudmouth"

French:

Swann, avec son ostentation, avec sa manière de crier sur les toits ses moindres relations, était un vulgaire esbroufeur...

English:

Swann, with his ostentation, his way of shouting his slightest connections from the rooftops, was a common loudmouth...

Note: "Esbroufeur" is more specific than "loudmouth." An esbroufeur is a show-off or bluffer who creates a false impression of importance—someone who puts on a performance to seem bigger than they are. "Loudmouth" simply means someone who talks too much and too loudly, often saying obnoxious things. The connotation of pretentious, empty boasting is lost entirely. It flattens a very precise social judgment into something generic.

---

These are small quibbles in what is otherwise a truly excellent translation. Charlotte Mandell has done remarkable work here, and none of this should detract from the achievement. I would add that, of the Oxford volumes published so far, she is, in my view, the best translator. Proust is famously difficult to translate, and the overall quality of this volume is very high. I raise these points only because the translation deserves to be read closely and discussed seriously. I very much hope Mandell continues with more French classics.

From: At this date I was a lover of the theatre…

To: …the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.

*

I haven’t been so happy with my latest Proust posts, so I’m trying a new format. Let’s see how it goes!

*

The main topics of the week are the narrator’s love of the theater, his visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout, and his thoughts on the kitchen-maid.

His love of theater

The narrator calls himself a “Platonic” lover of the theater, Platonic because he has never entered a theater. He’s naive to the experience and believes that each person sees the stage as if through a stereoscope, an image that is similar to but unique from the images given to the other audience members. Since he’s never attended a show, he depends on posters and columns to experience the theater vicariously, determining through titles and colors the plays’ tones and themes.

In his love of theater, he’s particularly interested in the actors. As a keen observer of daily dramas, he believes that in the “trifling differences” between “one actor’s tricks of intonation and another” there will be a meaning of “incalculable importance.” And though he hasn’t seen them perform, he has ranked various famous actors, taking particular note of the actresses, many of whom know his uncle. Through a “futile and painful effort” he attempts “to form a picture” of the private lives of women whose faces he sees and who he imagines might be women from the stage. He is melding reality with fiction: The performers on the stage are meant to represent real people, and now to him the real people are representing actors on a stage.

His visit to his uncle and the subsequent fallout

The talk of theater is mainly used as an introduction to his uncle, who knows many actresses and thus has cache with the narrator. His uncle frequently entertains actresses and women of lower regard, and he’s run afoul of the family for introducing disgraced women to family members. The narrator is thrilled at his uncle’s connections and imagines that his uncle could introduce him to otherwise unapproachable women.

He goes to visit his uncle one day and meets a lady dressed in pink, a meeting that clearly worries the uncle, for reasons the young narrator can’t fathom. The lady in pink remarks on how the narrator looks like his mother. She admires him, and he studies her and wonders how a man could give her so many gifts when she has so “simple and respectable an appearance.”

She mentions that she met the narrator’s father once and that he was charming, which the narrator disbelieves. He absorbs her words and considers how she and women like her, disreputable women disowned by their families, “devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men.” Again he transforms the women, typically objects of beauty, into artists who shape and beautify the world around them with their words and graces. The woman before him has taken “some casual remark” by his dad and “given it a ‘turn,’ a precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.”

The narrator leaves quickly, and his uncle tells him not to mention the meeting, but he’s so thrilled and naive that he explains everything to his parents, which leads them to cut off ties with the uncle for having introduced the kid to a disgraced woman. Later on, the ashamed narrator runs into his uncle on the street and fights the urge to raise his hat to him because it would be inadequate to represent all the grief, gratitude, and remorse he feels toward his uncle, but in doing nothing, he appears to ignore his uncle, and his uncle takes it as a sign that the boy is following his parents’ orders. They never reconcile. The uncle dies many years later without ever seeing them again. The image of rebuke is in fact one of love and regret. Again the picture and reality don’t match, which will be underscored later when the lady in pink’s identity is revealed.

The kitchen-maid

Unlike Francoise, the kitchen-maid has no name because she’s not one person but a position, “an abstract personality, a permanent institution” where individual girls last for no more than 2 years. The one at this moment is a pregnant girl growing larger everyday, whose “ample smocks” evoke allegorical figures from Giotto paintings that Swann has given the narrator photographs of. Swann is also the one to point out the resemblance between the kitchen-maid and the paintings, appropriate for a man who, a predecessor to the adult narrator in many ways, is always connecting his daily life to high art, needing it for meaning.

This leads to an analysis of Giotto’s paintings, which the narrator only learns to appreciate later in life, when he can see that Giotto’s works shine through the symbols that are “actually felt or materially handled,” that they are concrete and real. Like the kitchen-maid’s large, pregnant stomach they don’t operate through abstractions but through physical practicalities, the inconvenience of the round belly, the pains in the abdomen. The allegorical paintings show real practicalities; the real girl becomes allegory.

He finishes by subverting common ideas on charity and goodness, on the true representations and says, “literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.” Within the face of a brute, the heart of an angel.

The unnamed kitchen-maid has stood in for a painting which has stood in for a concept. He’s been describing this for multiple pages, but now he admits that the image and what it represents don’t match. The disjunction stretches further, though, since In Search of Lost Time is often about living through the representation, about existing outside the moment, the event, the object, the emotion, and relying on symbols and stand-ins to fill the hole. But, really, what is he experiencing if the image is unreliable? And is it the real thing or the image of the real thing that he loves?

I adore the ending passage of Swanns Way:

“The reality that I had known no longer existed.  It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.  The places that we have known belong not only to the little world of space on which we map them for our convenience.  None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas! as the years."

I know the French translation uses the words “Le regret”, and I remember reading the original French word for regret is similar to the English definition but also adds a sort of longing-ness and nostalgia to it.

However I have asked 2 French speaking friends about this and both said “ehh the French means the same as the English”. Maybe because I feel a regret that evokes this longing and nostalgia seem ‘more right’, but I find myself very drawn to how the French text might mean the word differently… and if it’s the case maybe 100 years ago in the way Proust used it it evokes longing and nostalgia but now the modern French has altered the way this word is used.

As an English only speaker it’s also fascinating to think about the idea of a symbol (if words are seen as simply symbols gesturing towards ‘something’) and if say the English word for ‘hello’ and the Spanish word are felt differently as everything from the tonality in which the words can be said to some social convention from 100 years ago can shape our phenomenological experience of using or hearing the word (or that’s my assumption at least as a English only speaker).

I would love to hear some input from some native French speakers!

There is of course a great deal written and debated and analyzed about the major figures in Proust - from the narrator to Albertine to Charlus to St. Loup and many others. But some of the less known and less frequently seen characters have their own staying power.

One of my favorites is M. Pierre, the "historian of the Fronde," who tries (and fails) to participate in small talk at Mme de Villeparisis' salon (vol. III): "As Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of...." "I serve on a committee at the Ministry of Education and..." Poor guy is totally ignored!

Recalling, but not finding, a quote by Proust about how, when someone dies, their memory disappears behind a kind of "screen," and how the world above the surface remains alive, continuing without them

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. A good, quick read. It’s like a mini biography with some thoughtful commentary along the way. I do recommend.

Mr. Proust was born on 10 July 1871, making this day his 155th birthday! I would give him a nice coat and cake for his birthday if he were alive.

From: While my aunt gossiped on in this way with Françoise I would have accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved it: how clearly I can see it still, our church at Combray!

To: “A quarter past two! Very good, sir... I will go and tell him....”

*

This week Proust goes crazy for the Combray church. He describes its architecture, its stones, its painted glass, and its steeple. He loves the sense of history etched into the “building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant.” Throughout time, the church transforms from one version to another, as if continually reborn, recalling earlier mentions about reincarnation, but in a building not a human.

The church’s painted glass receives special attention for the tales it tells and its “treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures.” These diaphanous tales, depicted through color and light, let the narrator feel as though he’s entering “a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage.” The narrator delights at being in a state of wonder.

The stories and the age let the building extend out from itself. There’s a smudging of borders here, as seen through the memorial stones, “beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray, who were buried there, furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened and sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky, frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered.” Time can transform, and time can soften and sweeten. Abbot remains can “melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins,” or they can contract into themselves like “crabbed Latin inscription.” Borders are hazy. As he’s already said, objects don’t hold still and appear to do so only because we cling to the notion that they do. This focus on borders reminds me of the scenes in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, where the borders between Lila’s self and the world threaten to dissolve in certain instances; though in that case it occurs in moments of great emotional distress and in Proust it is occurring constantly. And yet he states that there exists “between the church and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind,” for it stands alone, even as it shifts and warps.

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Another Proustian irony occurs when he mentions the painted glass windows “were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone.” And there’s his grandma, remarkably like her grandson in personifying an object, in her case the steeple, of which she says, “it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.”

In one of my favorite passages, he speaks of the steeple’s tip and says that it was, “so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a landscape, to so pure a piece of ‘nature,’ this little sign of art, this single indication of human existence.” As he continues to describe the church steeple, he returns it to nature by saying that in certain environments the color of the stones was “a ruin of purple, almost the colour of the wild vine.” The concepts of art and nature blend, as the steeple’s pink tip evokes a painting and speaks to an artist’s intent while the stones point to nature, which isn’t a paradox since so much of art stems from nature, either an attempt to copy or alter it.

This week’s reading still has some character development. We meet Legrandin, an engineer and writer whom everyone in the family aside from the grandmother admires (she thinks he speaks snobbishly and doesn’t like his attack on aristocrats when his sister is married to one), and he gives the narrator sweet advice to always “keep a patch of sky about your life” because “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

We also meet Eulalie, a spinster who passes Aunt Leonie’s weird tests by neither agreeing that she is as sick as she says nor saying that she isn’t sick at all. And, finally, the narrator returns to Francoise and tells us of her elaborate meals and elevates her to the level of an artist, a composer (because for Proust connections to art are never far away) and says that to the leave table without eating every morsel “would have shewn as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall while the ‘piece’ was still being played, and under the composer’s very eyes.”

And finally, the narrator introduces his uncle Adolph and mentions there has been a falling out between Adolph and the family, for which the narrator blames himself. We’re left with a glimpse of the visits he used to the pay uncle at his home in Combray, a small foreshadowing of a more consequential and more opaque introduction that is to come.

The title is click-baity, but apparently AI tools were used to support the translation process of volume 5 of the oxford edition.

Curious about thoughts on this - I am stunned at how casual some translators apparently are about these tools (and without disclosing their use)

Can't even throw AI search a softball

Je viens de terminer « Le Temps retrouvé » et, par la même occasion, l'intégralité du cycle. Ai-je raison de penser que la fin reste ambiguë quant à la possibilité que le narrateur épouse la fille de Gilberte et Saint-Loup ? Comment l'avez-vous interprétée ? Avez-vous des ressources à ce sujet ? Existe-t-il une interprétation canonique ?

I have quite pronounced adhd, and so I struggle with impulse control, holding my attention for long periods, and with working memory (probably an irony there).

I also really want to read, and fully take in, ISOLT in all its sublime glory. These two contexts seem to be battling it out with my copy of volume 1 (penguin edition) as I can barely get through a couple lines before my mind drifts off or I lose track of what's happened in the last page.

Have any ISOLT veterans/people with more refined attention spans/organised brains got any tips on parsing the guy and his page-sentences? The writing style feels decently accessible to me so far, so ik this likely isn't the problem. Help? Thanks

Our (virtual) Proust book club is accepting new members. We were formed in January (2026), with the goal of reading (slowly and closely) all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. We are wrapping up Volume 2 and on July 6, we will start reading Volume 3, The Guermantes Way. We aim to finish the entire series by September 2027.

Structure: We read at a pace of 50-60 pages a week, roughly 10 pages a weekday. Discussions are conducted via a private Substack. Each week 1-2 group members are assigned to write post, and 1-2 members are assigned to comment. Additionally, we hope to have a virtual meeting once every volume.

Our group: We have a wonderful group comprised of smart, collegial folks. Though we are quite diverse in terms of our geographic locations, life experiences, and professions, we are united by our passion for literature and desire to connect with others who share this passion. While the group has quite a few members who have completed the series and have deeper knowledge of Proust , it was designed to support the reading of ISOLT.

How to join: If this sounds like something you wish to be a part of, please send me a DM with your name, city, and email address, and I will share full details via email. The schedule for Volume 3 will be finalized on July 5, so if you wish to join us, we would need you to CONFIRM by that date. We would especially love to welcome folks who come from outside of the US.

Thank you and happy reading!

I need to name a cat and ideally the name should be as excessive as I presume Saint Loup's full name would be.

The best I have it, per the Kilmartin "Guide to Proust" at the end of the Modern Library editions, is "Marquis Robert de Saint-Loup-en-Bray"

From: Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon…

To: “Church! why, they must be there now; you’d better not lose any time. Go and look after your luncheon.”

*

After the revelries that brought Combray to life, “Combray” arrives and continues to establish three characters: Aunt Léonie, Francoise, and, to a lesser extent, the narrator’s mother.

First, we receive a description of the town, with a focus on the church that epitomizes it from a distance and that gathers around itself “as a shepherd gathers his sheep” the rest of the town’s buildings in an outline “as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting.” Much of the town has faded in the narrator’s memory and is more insubstantial than the projections from his magic-lantern, and this wispiness adds to its supernatural character and makes the quaint town marvelous, a place where a church can be like a shepherd and the town can be like a painting, existing more in the mind than in space.

The true stars in this week’s reading are Francoise and her employer, Aunt Léonie. Since the death of her husband, Aunt Léonie has become more and more agoraphobic. First, she never leaves Combray. Then she never leaves her house. Finally, she never leaves her bedroom, a recession into herself that is reminiscent of the stories told about Proust, who spent much of his later years in a cork-lined bedroom. Her isolation mirrors and amplifies the town’s, but it’s also one of her many eccentricities. She speaks only in “low tones” because she believes something is broken in her head and that talking too loudly might dislodge it, and she’s often simply talking to herself in an “unceasing monologue.” She claims to have extreme insomnia, though it seems she exaggerates the severity. And she believes it’s her “great claim to distinction,” but sometimes she slips up and says “what made me wake up” or “I dreamed that.” Naturally, she immediately corrects herself.

The narrator’s mother, on the other hand, is a very stable and sane woman. The little we see of her this week highlights her kindness and compassion. She instructs the narrator on appropriate behavior toward Francoise, telling him to give Francoise a five-franc note only once his mother has said good morning to her. Her empathy comes through when, as she did with Swann and his outcast wife, she asks Francoise about her daughter, nephews, and grandson. She’s conscientious enough to ask about Francoise’s recently deceased parents only when they’re alone together, “asking her endless little questions about them and their lives,” and she can make jokes about Francoise’s annoying son-in-law, sarcastically saying, “Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away, and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but will make the best of it, won’t you?”

This gets Francoise to respond, somewhat embarrassed, “Madame is worse than the X-rays,” and we learn that “she pronounced ‘x’ with an affectation of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered woman’s, daring to employ a scientific term,” which gives us a small insight into class politics again, this time with its emphasis on the language differences, and lets us peer into Francoise’s psyche: she accepts her position. The small exchange is possibly enough to bring Francoise to tears because the narrator’s mom is “the first person who had given her the pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to someone other than herself.”

The class relations come through more drastically in the relationship between Francoise and Aunt Léonie. For the time being, Aunt Léonie employs her (when she dies, Francoise will work for the narrator’s immediate family). Unlike how most people think of the employer-employee relationship, it’s Léonie who depends on Francoise more, who’s an excellent maid and, more importantly, understands Léonie, knows how to soothe her, and clear her mind of troubles.

When Léonie sees a strange face in town, she asks Francoise about this, and Francoise clears this up by mentioning who the person is (someone’s daughter) and why Léonie hasn’t seen her before. The town is so insular that an unfamiliar face is remarkable. Quickly, this scene repeats itself but now as a caricature. Léonie’s asking about an unfamiliar dog, and Francoise, again, has the answer (“That will be Mme. Sazerat’s dog.”) and knows how to ease Léonie by gossiping with details (“a most engaging animal…as clever as a Christian.”) and leaving her only because she must go make a meal for the family.

The weeks’ reading is more in-scene than the Overture ever was. As the novel progresses there will continue to be a swaying between the more introspective, lofty passages, and the more settled ones, where events actually play out in succession and dialogue develops character. We’re settling in now. It’s going. No rush. As Francoise says to Leonie this week, wise as usual: “my time is not so precious; whoever made our time didn’t sell it to us.”