Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]: (Book Center) (The Greatest Writers of All Time)

by Marcel Proust

I felt that the people of to-day exaggerated the vices of those fabulous times, like the Greeks who created Icarus, Theseus, Heracles out of men who had been but little different from those who long afterwards deified them.

Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room.

Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room.

What happens is that since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them.

idealism, even subjective idealism, did not prevent great philosophers from still having hearty appetites or from presenting themselves with untiring perseverance for election to the Academy.

Mme.

"তুমি ত তেমন গৌরী নও"

Later on, when

** when she had ceased to interest me **

she had ceased to interest me,

it was indeed she who was designated for all the world by the title Duchesse de Guermantes: the inconceivable life which that name signified, this body did indeed contain; it had just introduced that life into a crowd of different creatures, in this room which enclosed it on every side and on which it produced so violent a reaction that I thought I could see, where the extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence outline its frontiers: round the circumference of the circle traced on the carpet by the balloon of her blue pekin skirt, and in the bright eyes of the Duchess at the point of intersection of the preoccupations, the memories, the incomprehensible, scornful, amused and curious thoughts which filled them from within and the outside images that were reflected on their surface.

Mme. de Guermantes wore a boating-hat trimmed with cornflowers, and what they recalled to me was not, among the tilled fields round Combray where I had so often gathered those flowers, on the slope adjoining the Tansonville hedge, the suns of bygone years;

by intelligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by the sun, impregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed,

But he suddenly remembered that he had not slept for the last six nights, whereupon a crushing weariness, born of his mind, paralysed his limbs, made him bow his shoulders, and his melancholy face began to droop like an old man’s.

Bloch got up to go.

a tragic actress ‘with pure eyes, fair as Hera,’ who would recite lyrical prose with a sense of plastic beauty. But on hearing this lady’s name Mme. de Villeparisis had declined, for it was that of Saint-Loup’s mistress.

The fact was that Sir Rufus Israels, who seemed to Bloch and his father an almost royal personage before whom Saint-Loup ought to tremble, was in the eyes of the Guermantes world a foreign upstart, tolerated in society,

feeling that two people whom she knew had no reason not to be friends with each other.

The human mind, hovering perpetually between the two planes of experience and imagination,

“When one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup,”

one

which makes us express ourselves like others of our mental category and not of our caste.

another

is that, from time to time, as there appear and then vanish diseases of which nothing more is ever heard,

I am not feudal like him. I would go about with a Negro if he was a friend of mine, and I shouldn’t care two straws what anybody thought;

“There; he is a Dreyfusard, there’s not the least doubt of it,” thought Bloch.

“No; evidently he’s an anti-Dreyfusard; it’s quite obvious,” said Bloch to himself.

politics could be approximately reconstructed by the most luminous minds, but he imagined, like the man in the street, that it resided permanently, beyond the reach of argument and in a material form,

simply one piece of material for study,

to be combined with a number of others,

the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one.

such women, melancholy, pure, victimised, venerated like the ideal forms of saints in church windows, had flowered from the same genealogical stem as brothers brutal, debauched and vile.

the old romances, where all the virtues and graces are combined in the sister of wild and lawless brothers.

Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent, playing at simplicity. It is a pastime which costs an extremely high price, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know that you are not bound to live simply, that is to say that you are very rich.

true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognise it as beauty. I

Whenever the Duke had been too openly unfaithful to his wife, Mme. de Marsantes had always taken up the cudgels against her own brother on her sister-in-law’s behalf.

Anna Karenina

come!

Looks like here the theme is 'waiting ' as a reader i was eaiting for Robert to vome in -- juzt as now I'm expecting or waiting for Mrs. Swann

he affected a studied ignorance of everything to do with society.

he added, in an undertone, with a scandalised smile, almost aside, as in a scene on the stage, casting at the Prince a rapid, sidelong glance from his blue eyes, like a veteran actor studying the effect on his audience.

Often one has to come down to ‘kept’ persons, male or female, before one finds the hidden spring of actions or words apparently of the most innocent nature in self-interest, in the bare necessity to keep alive. What man does not know that when a woman whom he is going to pay says to him: “Don’t let’s talk about money,” the speech must be regarded as what is called in music ‘a silent beat’ and that if, later on, she declares: “You are far too much trouble; you are always keeping things from me; I’ve done with you,” he must interpret this as: “Some one else has been offering me more.”

And yet this is only the language of a lady of easy virtue, not so far removed from the ladies in society.

Mme. Swann,

Mrs.Swann enters

the opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk, are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

kept almost continuously on show a smile without any definite direction or particular object, which, pre-existing before the greetings of new arrivals, found itself, when these entered its zone, devoid of any indication of friendliness towards them.

Robert’s eyes seemed every minute to reach a depth from which it rose at once like a diver who has touched bottom.

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves;

What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbour; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behaviour is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature which we behold merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice.

I had not succeeded in identifying Mme. Swann with the lady in pink of my childhood.

I spoke of the woman who was on my mind at the moment.

go and live with her altogether. In one case Saint-Loup would have regarded me as a false friend, in the other his family would have called me his evil genius. Yet I was the same man, at an interval of a few hours.

M. de Charlus.

an occasional foreigner.” I replied that Bloch was French. “Indeed,” said M. de Charlus, “I took him to be a Jew.”

I pay no attention to the newspapers, I read them as I wash my hands, without finding that it is worth my while to take any interest in what I am doing.