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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Marcel Proust's monumental work, 'In Search of Lost Time,' explores the intricacies of memory, time, and human experience across its seven-volume collection. Written in a distinctive, introspective style characterized by lengthy and intricately structured sentences, Proust immerses readers in the narrative tapestry of his characters' lives. The work encapsulates the essence of the modernist literary movement, delving into themes of self-reflection, social dynamics, and the often elusive nature of happiness, all set against the backdrop of early 20th-century French society. Each volume intricately layers Proust's rich prose with philosophical inquiries, creating a profound exploration of consciousness and the passage of time. Marcel Proust (1871-1922), a French author and critic, was deeply influenced by his own experiences with love, loss, and the social stratifications of his time. Proust's bourgeois upbringing, coupled with his keen observation of the Parisian elite, informs the depth and authenticity of the novel's characters and settings. His multifaceted exploration of these themes reflects his own struggles with illness and the fleeting nature of personal reflections, prompting his desire to encapsulate fleeting moments and memories through literature. 'In Search of Lost Time' is a literary odyssey that transcends mere storytelling; it invites readers into the depths of human consciousness. Ideal for those who appreciate profound literary exploration or wish to gain insight into the complexities of memory and identity, this complete collection stands as one of the most significant achievements in literary history. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME - Complete 7 Book Collection (Modern Classics Series)
Table of Contents
Introduction
In Search of Lost Time is presented here in its complete seven-volume design, bringing together Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, and Time Regained. Conceived as a single vast novel, the sequence follows a first-person narrator who reconstructs a life through memory and reflection. First published in French between 1913 and 1927, it remains one of the central achievements of twentieth-century literature. This collection gathers the entire arc in one place to preserve its intended continuity, patterns of recurrence, and cumulative revelations as characters, images, and ideas evolve across volumes. Bringing all volumes together facilitates the sustained attention the work demands and rewards.
Although a single novel, the work contains multiple modes: narrative episodes, social comedy, psychological analysis, and extended essayistic meditations on art, memory, and perception. Its prose often pauses for critical reflection, treating painting, music, and literature with the rigor of an aesthetic essay while remaining rooted in the unfolding story of a consciousness. The result is fiction that integrates the inwardness of autobiography without becoming memoir, and the diagnostic sharpness of criticism without leaving narrative behind. Readers thus encounter a unified artistic project that refashions the novel to accommodate philosophical inquiry, sensory detail, and the slow movement of thought.
Time and memory form the organizing principles of the sequence. The narrator seeks to recover the texture of past experience, not by chronology alone but through the unpredictable return of impressions stored in the senses. The premise is simple yet inexhaustible: a life is recollected in order to understand what was lived and what was overlooked. Through this search the work examines habit and surprise, forgetting and sudden recognition, the identities we assume in society and the ones that emerge when memory returns. The drama is intellectual and emotional at once, as recollection gradually reorders feelings, loyalties, and ambitions.
Proust’s style is marked by long, sinuous sentences that accommodate nuance, hesitation, and revision, mirroring the mind as it thinks. He employs intricate metaphors and recurrent motifs, allowing an image or musical phrase to gather significance through repetition and variation. Scenes unfold with patient attention to the smallest detail—gestures, décor, weather—while irony and wit keep the analysis of manners alive. The architecture is cyclical as much as linear: distant elements answer one another across volumes, and moments are expanded to reveal their layered meanings. This stylistic audacity serves the underlying vision that perception is never simple or immediate.
Across the seven books, the narrator moves among varied social worlds: a provincial household, middle-class salons, aristocratic drawing rooms, and fashionable resorts. The observation of these milieus is exact without moralizing, sensitive to codes of behavior, status signals, and the ways conversation shapes power. The work follows shifting hierarchies and allegiances in a France recognizable as that of the Third Republic, focusing less on public events than on social performance and the subtle pressures of belonging. Through dinner parties, visits, and promenades, it records how communities are formed and undone by taste, gossip, and the ever-changing value of names.
Equally central is the anatomy of desire. The narrator studies infatuation, jealousy, and the restless appetite for reassurance that intimacy rarely supplies. Love here is both revelation and misreading, magnifying the beloved while obscuring their independence. The work tracks the interpretive labor of lovers—reading tones, tracking absences, building hypotheses—until feeling becomes a discipline of attention and self-deception. This exploration never reduces characters to symbols; it records the ordinary coercions of longing and the ways imagination intensifies both happiness and pain. The theme recurs with new inflections in each volume, deepening the inquiry into freedom, dependence, and the volatility of attachment.
Art is not an adornment but a method. The narrator considers how paintings teach us to see, how music organizes emotion, and how literature can transform scattered impressions into form. The book often pauses to test critical judgments against lived experience, asking what makes a work durable and how taste is educated. This concern culminates in reflections on vocation: how a writer might convert the raw material of time into a composition that does justice to change and recurrence. Throughout, the sequence argues that style is a moral attention to reality, an ethics of noticing capable of redeeming experience.
Swann’s Way establishes the method and the milieu, presenting a childhood shaped by longing for affection and by the discovery that memory carries meanings the present conceals. It introduces the social circles whose intrigues will radiate through later volumes, and it portrays a love affair observed with the detached intensity that becomes the book’s signature. Within a Budding Grove turns to adolescence, first friendships, and the education of desire against the backdrop of a seaside resort, where observation widens and the narrator’s sensibility acquires its distinctive precision. The Guermantes Way follows entry into aristocratic society, with its rituals, ideals, and illusions.
Cities of the Plain examines the hidden structures of desire and the public codes that attempt to regulate or disguise them, revealing how secrecy becomes a social language. It widens the panorama of manners while deepening the analysis of perception and misunderstanding. The Captive narrows the focus to the pressures of cohabitation and the paradoxes of possession, observing how surveillance and tenderness interweave. In each case the narrative remains faithful to interior experience, charting the minute shifts of confidence and doubt. Across these volumes, the search is less for events than for the meanings assigned to them by feeling.
The Sweet Cheat Gone turns from possession to absence, studying how memory reconstructs what intimacy could not secure and how loss reshapes both story and self. Time Regained surveys a changed society and traces the narrator’s recognition that the materials for art have been gathering all along in the forms of memory and attention. Without prescribing a doctrine, the closing movement proposes that understanding time is inseparable from giving it form. The sequence ends by returning to its beginnings, revealing connective patterns whose force depends on the continuity preserved by reading the whole design as a single, sustained composition.
The lasting significance of this work lies in its redefinition of what a novel can encompass. It joins the ambitions of modernism—experiments with time, consciousness, and voice—to the classical virtues of comedy of manners and moral reflection. Its influence can be traced in later fiction that treats inner life with similar patience, yet its achievement remains singular: a comprehensive account of perception that neither abandons narrative pleasure nor simplifies the ambiguity of experience. By devoting such attention to the tiny hinges of thought and feeling, it offers readers a method of noticing that outlives its historical setting.
Presented as a complete collection, these seven books retain their designed symmetries, recurring images, and slowly accumulating insights. Reading them together allows motifs to develop with their intended resonance and ensures that revelations arrive as recognitions rather than surprises out of context. The Modern Classics Series gathers the whole arc so that readers may experience the cadence of return that is the work’s deepest structure. The sequence rewards immersion: its patience clarifies, its analysis consoles, and its form teaches how to attend to time. Taken as one, the volumes become a single instrument tuned to the discoveries of memory.
Author Biography
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist whose seven-volume cycle In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu) stands as a landmark of modern literature. Composed between the Belle Epoque and the aftermath of World War I, the work unites meticulous social observation with a profound inquiry into memory, time, and artistic vocation. The sequence comprises Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, and Time Regained. Proust's long, sinuous sentences and analytical precision reshaped narrative possibilities, making interior experience and the transformations of recollection central subjects of the novel.
Educated in Paris, Proust studied at the Lycee Condorcet and later pursued law and literature at the University of Paris while attending lectures in political science. Chronic asthma, documented from childhood, shaped his routines and fostered a reflective, often nocturnal life. He moved in salons where conversations about music, painting, and books widened his horizons. John Ruskin's aesthetics deeply influenced him; Proust translated Ruskin into French, refining his views on art and architecture. He published early essays and pastiches, as well as the collection Les Plaisirs et les Jours. During the Dreyfus Affair he publicly supported Alfred Dreyfus, sharpening his awareness of prejudice and social structures.
Around 1908 he began the sustained project that became In Search of Lost Time. He forged a method that blends autobiographical observation with fiction, using a reflective first-person narrator and interlacing motifs to follow consciousness over years. Increasingly reclusive because of illness, he organized life around night work, silence, and exhaustive revision; a cork-lined bedroom helped control noise. He amassed notebooks, drafts, and pasted inserts that allowed scenes to grow by accretion. The emerging architecture let images and themes recur across volumes, so that the mechanics of recollection became both subject and structure, converting scattered impressions into a comprehensive, articulate vision.
Swann's Way (Du Cote de chez Swann), published in 1913 after rejections from leading houses, appeared at Grasset with financial support from Proust himself. Critics soon recognized its originality, including the exploration of involuntary memory and the interpenetration of social observation with inner life. Its three parts introduce the narrator's sensibility, a society in transition, and an analytical portrait of a love affair that models the novel's method. Proust refined his style across the book: periodic sentences, metaphoric density, and careful irony. Despite initial skepticism, the volume attracted readers attuned to its new narrative possibilities and prepared the ground for subsequent installments.
After wartime interruption, Within a Budding Grove (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs) won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, consolidating Proust's reputation. The Guermantes Way (Le Cote de Guermantes) extended his analysis of Parisian salons and aristocratic milieus, juxtaposing their rituals with the narrator's evolving artistic vocation. Across these volumes, Proust probes perception, desire, and social performance, showing how status and memory shape identity and judgment. He continued to revise proofs extensively, expanding scenes and sharpening connections across the cycle. Their serial appearance let readers sense the growing architecture while anticipating the work's eventual resolution without compromising the complexity of its design.
Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe) deepened the inquiry into secrecy, sexuality, and the codes governing reputation. The Captive (La Prisonniere) and The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine Disparue) pursued the psychology of jealousy and possession, testing the narrator's understanding of love and freedom. Proust published some installments during his lifetime while preparing further revisions; others appeared posthumously from drafts and corrected proofs. Throughout, he balanced social comedy with metaphysical questioning, insisting that truth emerges through the distortions of memory and desire. The later volumes display intricate patterning of motifs across time, amplifying echoes that connect early perceptions with later recognitions.
Proust's final years were marked by declining health and unwavering labor on the sequence, culminating in Time Regained (Le Temps retrouve), published after his death in 1922. That concluding volume articulates the work's vision of art as a means to transform lived time, drawing formal threads together without reducing them to simple closure. He died in Paris, leaving a manuscript record that editors shaped from drafts and proofs into the concluding books. His legacy endures as a cornerstone of literary modernism, demonstrating that the novel can encompass social history, philosophy, and minute calibrations of consciousness. New translations and scholarship sustain his relevance.
Historical Context
Marcel Proust wrote In Search of Lost Time across the consolidation and crisis of France’s Third Republic, from the late Belle Époque through the First World War and its aftermath. Born in 1871 and dying in 1922, Proust composed a sequence that moves between the 1870s–90s and the wartime 1910s, framing private memory against public transformation. The publication history itself spans 1913–1927: Swann’s Way appeared in 1913; Within a Budding Grove in 1919; The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah (Cities of the Plain) in 1920–1922; The Captive in 1923; The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine Disparue) in 1925; and Time Regained in 1927, the last volumes posthumous.
The novels unfold beneath the political architecture of the Third Republic (proclaimed 1870), a parliamentary regime marked by republican consolidation, anticlerical reforms, and recurring crises. Its social theater included aristocratic salons, bourgeois drawing rooms, ministries, and chambers of deputies. The Guermantes Way reflects the symbolic capital of the Faubourg Saint‑Germain and the proximity of high society to political influence, without reducing either to caricature. In this world, parliamentary debates echo in private soirées; reputations depend on newspapers and rumor; and the Republic’s rhetoric of citizenship coexists with inherited privilege, courtly manners, and the careful management of visibility in elite Parisian spaces.
The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) was the Republic’s defining rupture, dividing France into Dreyfusards and anti‑Dreyfusards, pitting nationalism and antisemitism against liberal legalism. Proust publicly supported Alfred Dreyfus and in 1898 signed a petition backing Émile Zola’s intervention. Across volumes—especially in The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah—drawing rooms become microcosms of this conflict, where social allegiances, newspaper loyalties, and anxieties about the army’s honor are tested. The Affair sharpened questions about justice, expertise, and the credibility of institutions, and it reconfigured sociability: invitations, introductions, and exclusions reveal how political crises penetrate the mechanisms of prestige.
The Belle Époque’s cultural life—opera, theater, ballet, and art exhibitions—furnished Proust with the vocabulary of taste and distinction. Wagnerism, cultivated salons, and celebrity performers shaped debates about what counted as high culture. Swann’s Way stages the authority of connoisseurship through music and painting, showing how critical discourse circulates as social currency. Across the sequence, references to concert halls, private recitals, and repertoires evoke a city where performance schedules were tracked in the press and reputations rose or fell with reviews. Taste becomes historically legible: to admire, to adopt, or to reject a fashion situates the admirer within a specific cultural economy.
Paris itself had been reshaped by earlier Haussmannization (1850s–70s), and the novels exploit its wide boulevards, grand perspectives, and new rhythms of circulation. By the fin de siècle, department stores, cafés, and clubs structured leisure and display, while discreet courtyards and porters regulated access. Domestic service and the etiquette of visits remained fundamental to social life. The Captive translates modern urban interiors—heated rooms, heavy curtains, and regimented routines—into instruments of social control and self‑presentation. The Guermantes quarter, government ministries, and the Left Bank’s literary addresses turn geography into social map, tracking how proximity organizes status in the modern city.
Technological change altered perception and communication. The growth of railways and timetables, the telegraph, and the arriving telephone reorganized distance. Photography circulated portraits; postcards and the press sped gossip; gramophones and pianos diffused music beyond the opera. Proust registers these devices throughout the series: train journeys structure excursions; telephone calls, heard through a receiver, reshape intimacy; photographs promise—but cannot guarantee—presence. Such media belonged to a broader modernization that included electrical lighting and elevators in grand hotels and apartment buildings. Timekeeping itself became stricter and more public, while the novels counterpose this clock time to memory’s irregular, involuntary returns.
Within a Budding Grove turns to seaside modernity. Fin‑de‑siècle France cultivated resort culture on the Normandy coast, facilitated by rail links from Paris. Grand hotels, promenades, bathing regulations, casinos, and photography studios formed seasonal societies where provincial, Parisian, and foreign elites mingled. Balbec, modeled on such resorts, captures this world’s spatial choreography: dining rooms as stages, terraces as galleries, uniforms and costumes articulating rank. Tourism, increasingly commercial and international, tested codes learned in Paris, while coastal weather and ocean light supplied a different perceptual regime. Leisure, advertised and scheduled, became a laboratory for new forms of sociability.
Across the sequence, Proust records the recalibration of the aristocracy under capitalist modernity. Inherited titles persisted, but the line between nobility and wealthy bourgeois narrowed through marriages, financial partnerships, and philanthropy. The Guermantes Way details the etiquette by which old houses curated their public images while accommodating bankers, industrialists, and journalists. Sodom and Gomorrah extends this sociology, showing how patronage, gossip, and seating arrangements respond to market forces and media visibility. The series does not declare a sudden “fall” of nobility; rather, it documents a gradual reconfiguration in which cultural authority is renegotiated in symbiosis with money and print.
Women’s roles in elite and middle‑class spheres were both central and constrained. Salonnières shaped literary and political reputations by controlling guest lists and conversation, while legal and civic rights remained limited; French women did not gain national suffrage until 1944. The Ferry laws of 1881–1882 expanded secular primary education, including for girls, with long‑term effects on literacy and social mobility. Within a Budding Grove registers the cultural training of jeunes filles through chaperoned outings and reading; later volumes show hostesses curating influence with considerable skill. The series captures how authority could be exercised informally by women even as formal power remained gendered.
Antisemitism, intensified in the late nineteenth century, provides a crucial historical background. Edouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886) popularized stereotypes that spilled into journalism and everyday talk. Proust, whose mother Jeanne Weil was Jewish, observed how salons and clubs negotiated inclusion and exclusion through coded language, invitations, and allusions. Swann’s Way and subsequent volumes stage such mechanisms without reducing characters to case studies. The Dreyfus Affair amplified these dynamics, crystallizing how newspaper campaigns and trials could mobilize prejudice. The sequence treats antisemitism as a social force embedded in institutions and manners, rather than only explicit political slogans.
Sexuality, while decriminalized for consenting adults in France since 1791, remained stigmatized and surveilled through public‑morality regulations and social sanction. Fin‑de‑siècle medical discourse—shaped by works like Richard von Krafft‑Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) and later sexological studies—framed desire in diagnostic terms. Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe) engages this historical context by depicting clandestine networks, codes of recognition, and the coexistence of discretion and exposure in hotels, parks, and private rooms. The treatment is neither pamphleteering nor clinical; it records how a modern urban milieu fosters both concealment and sudden visibility amid gossip and policing.
Proust’s aesthetics intersected with contemporary arts. The fictional painter Elstir and composer Vinteuil synthesize tendencies associated with Impressionism, Symbolism, and post‑Wagnerian music, without equating them to single real figures. Exhibitions, salons, and concert seasons—reported by mass‑circulation newspapers—provided a matrix for value. Earlier, Proust had translated John Ruskin (The Bible of Amiens, 1904; Sesame and Lilies, 1906), absorbing a vocabulary of attention to art, architecture, and moralized seeing. The sequence thus dialogues with debates about the artwork’s autonomy, the education of perception, and the critic’s authority in an age increasingly governed by reproductions and publicity.
Scientific and medical modernity also inflect the novels. Germ theory, bacteriology, and public‑health reforms shaped everyday routines and anxieties. Proust’s father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent hygienist and epidemiologist who wrote on cholera and international sanitary measures; such concerns echo in the attention the sequence pays to air, crowds, and cleanliness. Therapeutic regimes recommended seaside climates and rest cures, aligning with the coastal settings of Within a Budding Grove. Proust’s own chronic asthma and nocturnal habits, including writing in a cork‑lined bedroom, are well documented and inform the work’s sensory precision, yet the novels convert such constraints into reflections on environment, routine, and perception.
The First World War (1914–1918) reshaped the Republic’s social and moral landscape. Mobilization emptied drawing rooms; inflation and shortages changed domestic economies; casualty lists altered every network of acquaintance. Paris experienced air raids and long‑range bombardment, including the 1918 “Paris Gun” shelling. Time Regained incorporates wartime and immediate postwar scenes: uniforms, hospitals, rationing, and the disorientation of returning soldiers appear alongside shifts in tone in salons and streets. The war also accelerated technological and cultural changes—motor transport, bureaucratic paperwork, propaganda—that recalibrated how individuals navigated institutions and memory, leaving traces in both the narrative’s content and its reflective tempo.
Postwar France confronted mourning, commemoration, and social reorganization. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles signaled a new diplomatic order; demobilization and reconstruction reshaped labor and class relations. Automobiles, taxis, and urban transit became more visible; fashion and consumer culture adjusted to austerity and then to cautious display. For Proust, the war years were years of intense composition and revision amid ill health; he died in 1922. The Captive (1923) and The Sweet Cheat Gone (1925) appeared posthumously, as did Time Regained (1927), reflecting editorial work on drafts. The sequence thus bridges prewar elegance and postwar introspection within a single sustained project.
The publication history mirrors contemporary literary institutions. Swann’s Way was issued in 1913 by Grasset at the author’s expense after rejections, including by the Nouvelle Revue Française. With Within a Budding Grove, Proust won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, and Gallimard (NRF) became the principal publisher. The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah followed in 1920–1922, with the final volumes edited after Proust’s death by his brother Robert and collaborators. Early Anglophone reception was shaped by C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation (from 1922), titled Remembrance of Things Past, later revised and retitled In Search of Lost Time, sustaining international readership.
Each volume contributes historically specific commentary. Swann’s Way surveys the belle époque’s codes of taste; Within a Budding Grove catalogs leisure industries; The Guermantes Way dissects rank and political proximity; Cities of the Plain records clandestine sexual geographies; The Captive and The Sweet Cheat Gone explore the domesticization of modern urban life and the pressures of surveillance and rumor; Time Regained situates memory amid wartime rupture. Across them, newspapers, timetables, uniforms, and invitations serve as historical documents. The series is less a timeline than an archive of how modern France taught people to see, to recognize one another, and to record experience under changing conditions of publicity and power. Later readers have continuously reinterpreted the collection in light of new historical questions. Mid‑century critical editions, including Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, stabilized texts and chronology; subsequent genetic scholarship traced notebooks and drafts. Post‑war theorists of memory and narrative, historians of the Dreyfus Affair, and scholars of gender and sexuality reframed its social observations. New translations and annotated editions have recalibrated references to music, painting, and political events. For contemporary audiences, the sequence serves as both a testimony to Belle Époque and wartime France and a meditation on how individuals inhabit institutions that are themselves changing in time.
Synopsis (Selection)
SWANN'S WAY (Du Côté De Chez Swann)
Through the narrator's recollections of childhood and early impressions of society, this opening volume introduces the central engines of memory and desire. A sensory trigger unlocks the past, and a nested tale of an older man's infatuation mirrors patterns the narrator will later repeat. Lyrical yet piercing in its social observation, it establishes Proust's long, searching sentences and the interplay between perception, time, and self.
WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE (À L'ombre Des Jeunes Filles En Fleurs)
As adolescence unfolds at home and by the sea, the narrator encounters first loves, new friendships, and models of artistic seeing. His world widens from private reverie to public rituals, testing how taste, class, and desire are learned and performed. The tone is tender, exploratory, and ironic, tracing awakening feelings alongside the education of attention.
THE GUERMANTES WAY (Le Côté De Guermantes)
Drawn into aristocratic salons, the narrator confronts the distance between nobility's aura and its everyday pettiness. Social brilliance and public controversies expose the fragility of status and the pressures of conformity. Satirical and disenchanted, the volume sharpens Proust's analysis of language, reputation, and the illusions that society sustains.
CITIES OF THE PLAIN (Sodome Et Gomorrhe)
Turning more explicitly to the varieties of desire, the narrator observes hidden lives and the codes that shield or expose them. Scenes of pursuit, secrecy, and surveillance reveal how attraction reshapes perception and how social theatrics govern intimacy. The mood is analytical and at times caustic, expanding the novel's map of identity, shame, and performance.
THE CAPTIVE (La Prisonnière) & THE SWEET CHEAT GONE (Albertine Disparue)
In an intense domestic arrangement, love curdles into possessiveness as the narrator tries to master the unknowability of another person. When absence supplants proximity, memory and conjecture attempt to reconstruct what could never be contained in life. Claustrophobic then elegiac, these paired volumes probe jealousy, mourning, and the limits of knowledge in love.
TIME REGAINED (Le Temps Retrouvé)
Amid a transformed society and the marks of upheaval, the narrator recognizes patterns in scattered memories that suggest a way forward. Revelatory moments illuminate how time can be recovered through art without denying loss. Reflective and invigorating, the finale gathers the work's themes—time, habit, desire, and perception—into a clarified artistic resolve.
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME - Complete 7 Book Collection (Modern Classics Series)
SWANN'S WAY (Du Côté De Chez Swann)
"When the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past. . ."
TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION
To E. J. C.
Here, Summer lingering, loiter I When I, with Summer, should be gone . . . Where only London lights the sky I go, and with me journeys "Swann"
Whose pages' dull, laborious woof Covers a warp of working-times, Of firelit nights beneath your roof And sunlit days beneath your limes,
While, both at once or each in turn, Sharp-tongued but smooth, like buttered knives, We pared with studied unconcern The problems of our private lives;
Those tiny problems, dense yet clear, Like ivory balls by Chinese craft, Pierced (where each hole absorbed a tear And rounded (where the assembly laughed).
Did all our laughter muffle pain, Our candour simulate pretence? Fear not. I shall not come again To tease you with indifference.
Yet I may gaze for Oakham spire Where London suns set, watery-pale, And dream, while tides of crimson fire Sweep, smoking, over Catmos vale.
C. K. S. M. Michaelmas 1921
Table of Contents
Overture
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which was effectually dispelled on the day—the dawn of a new era to me—on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all material obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.
When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if (at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her: "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For, simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear.
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our 'guests' were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double peal—timid, oval, gilded—of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once exclaim "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.
