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Hi everyone, I thought we could maybe divide Swann in Love up into two pieces.
So this thread would start at the beginning of "Swann in Love", and end roughly in the middle, at the Moonlight Sonata bit with the following text:

“Why, I should hope not!�� cried Mme. Verdurin. “May the Lord preserve us from him, he is deadly dull, stupid, and ill-mannered.��
At these words Cottard showed surprise and submission at the same time, as though confronted with a truth contrary to everything he had believed up to then, but irresistibly obvious; and, lowering his nose nervously and timidly into his plate, confined himself to answering: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!,�� traversing along a descending scale, in his forced but orderly retreat into the depths of himself, the entire register of his voice.

En français:
�� Mais j’espère bien que non ! s’écria MmeVerdurin, Dieu nous en préserve, il est assommant, bête et mal élevé.
Cottard à ces mots manifesta en même temps son étonnement et sa soumission, comme devant une vérité contraire à tout ce qu’il avait cru jusque-là, mais d’une évidence irrésistible ; et, baissant d’un air ému et peureux son nez dans son assiette, il se contenta de répondre : « Ah ! ah ! ah ! ah ! ah ! » en traversant à reculons, dans sa retraite repliée en bon ordre jusqu’au fond de lui-même, le long d’une gamme descendante, tout le registre de sa voix .

Just a note on the Rubinstein mentioned here: According to the notes, it is Anton Grigorievitch Rubinstein (1829-94) who was, along with Liszt, the most illustrious pianist of his time. Though I must say that I have a beef with that note ignoring Frédéric Chopin, (1 March 1810 �� 17 October 1849), who was not a shabby virtuoso either. In any case, so it’s not the illustrious Arthur Rubinstein (Artur Rubinstein; 28 January 1887 �� 20 December 1982) that most of us are probably better acquainted with.

Btw, it’s a bit strange to me to hear of a pianist playing Wagner of all people. Why would one dilute pieces from the opera to be played by piano, I can’t help wondering, (especially these two pieces which really don’t translate well to piano �� the prelude would sound much better on violin because of the abundance of sostenuto, for one thing) when at the time in question, there was so much beautiful music composed especially for the pianoforte virtuoso. I suppose it was either that, if you loved these pieces, or go to the actual opera, unless you had it reworked for chamber orchestra. ��.- hmm, might this be part of Proust's subtle humor? Hence the bit about Madame Verdurin getting migraines if she has to listen to these renderings - I have an idea that they would give me a migraine as well!


I’m going to assume that everyone assembled here to read Proust will be aware of the French custom of having “salons��, but just in case, here is a link which expands on it a bit:
However, the little soirées that the Verdurin’s hold, don’t quite seem up to the standard, do they?

Demimonde:
A demimondaine was, in 19th-century France a class of women considered to be of doubtful social standing and morality, a sort of less, er.. specialised version of a geisha �� the latter which was a highly qualified trained entertainer. Demimondaine became a synonym for a courtesan or a prostitute who moved in the circles of the Demimonde or “half-world�� (see more about it here: ) —or for a woman of social standing with the power to thumb her nose at convention and throw herself into the hedonistic nightlife. A woman who made that choice would soon find her social status lost, as she became "déclassée".



I’m afraid I don’t quite catch Proust’s little proverb:
“Just as it is not by another man of intelligence that an intelligent man will be afraid of being thought stupid, so it is not by a great lord but by a country bumpkin that a man of fashion will be afraid of seeing his elegance go unappreciated.�� It sounds counter-intuitive to me.

“��..And though Swann was unaffected and casual with a duchess, he trembled at being scorned by a chamber-maid, and posed in front of her.�� I find that very strange.

It looks like I might be going through Swann in Love on my own, for the time being, so if anybody is reading this, I would appreciate some company, even if you post long after I did.

In the meantime, I'll use these threads for notes, or perhaps I'll just keep them in Word form until someone does decide to post here. :)

Hmm, since nobody is posting anything, let me post a few more notes since my notes are becoming rather voluminous:

Where it worked for Combray, I'm finding that now that we're on to more " societal action", Proust’s sentences are feeling too long and tangential, as if his writing has no discipline. Also, it feels annoying that the narrator doesn’t have a distinct name. It would have worked far better if Proust had written Swann in Love as an omniscient third-person narrator, since the narrator purports to be able to read minds, and claims to know things that ordinary humans could not possibly know.

On the Verdurin group: Dr Cottard a fence-sitter. The group's reception of Swann implies that “fashionable�� society is the antithesis of being intellectual.

Note: Swann is a mean person, likes to poke fun at the weak.

The gathering at the Verdurins reminds me of the reality show featuring the Kardashians and other similar reality shows. (The accident involving Mme Verdurin’s jaw, case in point)

Note: The two English translations talk of “confirmed invalid, where Proust talks about “valétudinaires�� Translated, the latter is “valetudinarians��, and a valetudinarian is : a person who is unduly anxious about their health. Synonyms are: hypochondriac, neurotic . From: French: valetudinary: malade imaginaire

Vinteuil Sonata:
There is to this day no consensus as to which musical work Proust alludes to which contains the phrases which so enchant him, and which becomes the leitmotif for Swann and Odette’s love affair. Here are a few attempts to lay claim on the Vinteuil sonata :
and
and


Swann's “love�� of Odette seems to be pretty superficial. It's not even based on physical attraction, let alone character or personality. Swann finds Odette physically unattractive at first, but Odette literally making a doormat of herself to win him over.

(Swann has hundreds of “very physical�� affairs, yet he never inhabited the world of dissipation. LOL, what a paradox. 😏 )

Swann decides that Odette is worthy of falling in love with, when he notices that she resembles a character (Zipporah) from a painting by Botticelli.

To be quite honest, the lady in the painting does not seem to me to have large eyes at all, but I suppose Proust is free to apply artistic licence as he wishes! Ahem.

Interesting term: “pis-aller��. The English Enright translation of Proust calls it "a stop-gap", and looking up the word, it could be “second-best�� or “less desirable course of action�� or “make-do��. (In regard to Odette’s resemblance to Zipporah) �� He told himself that in associating the thought of Odette with his dreams of ideal happiness he had not resigned himself to a stopgap as inadequate as he had hitherto supposed, since she satisfied his most refined predilections in matters of art.��

“He failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, since, as it happened, his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste.��
How incredibly snobbish and immature and shallow a character Swann has turned out to be! He’s also manipulative �� feigning emotion in his letters in order to engineer a specific response from her.

Proust’s world seems to be inhabited by manipulative people who play social games full of pretense as a matter of course.
However jaded we may be about women, however much we may regard the possession of the most divergent types as a repetitive and predictable experience, it none the less becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned are—or are thought by us to be—so difficult as to oblige us to make it spring from some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as had originally been for Swann the arrangement of the cattleyas.

“…people had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette, as of a tart, a kept woman, one of those women to whom he still attributed (having lived but little in their company) the wilful, fundamentally perverse character with which they had so long been endowed by the imagination of certain novelists. �� I wonder if Proust is here referring to Zola’s novel Nana?

The games with the cattleya’s are painfully childish�� as seems Swann and his entire attitude towards relationships. His approach seems like that of a 12 year old.

“…or, in literature any more than in music, to correct the manifold errors of her taste.�� So patronizing and supercilious, whereas Odette’s conclusion about poet’s hypocrisy seems rather sensible, given her experience of them as actual people:
“Poetry, you know—well, of course, there’d be nothing like it if it was all true, if the poets believed everything they say. But as often as not you’ll find there’s no one so calculating as those fellows. I know something about it: I had a friend, once, who was in love with a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love and the sky and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He did her out of more than three hundred thousand francs.��

Swann seems to conflate art with love �� if Odette became disillusioned with art, he presumes that she would also become disillusioned with love.

The pretentiousness in general is gob-smacking �� “Swann could judge by whom attended a party, the level of how chic it was�� Seriously, who cares? Only those in attendance and their immediate circle, I’m sure. These are obviously people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

Just a note, my English version translates “pschutt�� as “swell��, when it actually has more a meaning of “fashionable elite��:
It’s really just to be able to say you’ve been to Herbinger’s ball. You know what a braggart I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the people who tell you they were there are lying �� But I’m surprised you weren’t there, a regular ‘swell�� like you.�� Interestingly, apparently, according to a French dictionary I consulted, (In the late 19th century) , the word apparently was created from scratch by the Duke Savinien du Charnay, and it means: "What is in fashion". (Or that which is in fashion) So a better translation would have been: “A very trendy fashionable man��, and note that the French specifically says a pschutt MAN, (Mais ça m’étonne que toi, un homme si « pschutt », tu n’y étais pas) where the translation simply says a ‘swell�� . Weird.

Sorry, I didn’t know we had already started.

Paula wrote: "Sorry, I didn’t know we had already started."

No, that was last year's read that started on a flash decision and crashed for the participants for a variety of personal reasons.

Give me a few days, and I'll be making a brand-new folder with new threads for 2022 and with new participants. We're going to be starting right from the beginning again. (At Combray)

You are quite welcome to come and go as you please, Paula, but I would recommend that you wait just a tad until the new threads are set up before you give serious Recherche input.. I'm just dealing with visiting relatives in RL at the moment, so can't spend too much time online. Will make this one of my priorities though. :)

I’m not in any hurry at all. 🙂

Forgive me if I repeat anything already discussed but I’m new to the group. Swann’s relationship to Odette seems to cast a long shadow over the rest of the novel. Marcel seems to take it as a model for “how to love��. The idea of love as possession is common in 19th Century French literature. I’d like to think we have a healthier view of love in 2021 but I’m not so sure. Either way, Marcel’s concept of love is pretty dysfunctional, leading to his thoroughly unsavoury behaviour in The Captive. To what extent does this reflect Proust’s attitudes? Was he and/or Marcel/Narrator just a dead loss when it came to love? Presumably Swann in Love’s place in the novel, as the only stand alone section that deals with events prior to Marcel’s birth (where on earth did he get his information about Swann’s inner thoughts and intimate behaviour?) is so important because it informs Marcel’s thinking and later behaviour.