Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

First published:À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–27 (English translation, 1922–31, 1981); includes Du côté de chez Swann, 1913 (Swann’s Way, 1922); À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919 (Within a Budding Grove, 1924); Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920-1921 (The Guermantes Way, 1925); Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1922 (Cities of the Plain, 1927); La Prisonnière, 1925 (The Captive, 1929); Albertine disparue, 1925 (The Sweet Cheat Gone, 1930); Le Temps retrouvé, 1927 (Time Regained, 1931)

Type of work: Novels

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: France

Principal Characters

• Marcel, the narrator
• Marcel’s Grandmother, a kind and wise old woman
• Monsieur Swann, a wealthy broker and aesthete
• Madame Swann, formerly a cocotte, Odette de Crecy
• Gilberte, their daughter and later Madame de Saint-Loup
• Madame de Villeparisis, friend of Marcel’s grandmother
• Robert de Saint-Loup, her nephew and Marcel’s friend
• Baron de Charlus, another nephew and a Gomorrite
• Madame Verdurin, a vulgar social climber
• Prince and Princess de Guermantes and Duke and Duchess de Guermantes, members of the old aristocracy

The Story

All of his life Marcel finds it difficult to go to sleep at night. After he blows out the light, he lies quietly in the darkness and thinks of the book he had been reading, of an event in history, of some memory from the past. Sometimes he thinks of all the places in which he has slept—as a child in his great-aunt’s house in the provincial town of Combray; in Balbec on a holiday with his grandmother; in the military town where his friend, Robert de Saint-Loup, had been stationed; in Paris; and in Venice during a visit there with his mother.

He remembers always one night at Combray when he was a child: Monsieur Swann, a family friend, has come to dinner. Marcel is sent to bed early, and he lays awake for hours, nervous and unhappy until at last he hears Monsieur Swann leave. Then his mother comes upstairs to comfort him. For a long time, the memory of this night remains his chief recollection of Combray, where he spent a part of every summer with his grandparents and aunts. Years later, while drinking tea with his mother, the taste of a madeleine, or small sweet cake, suddenly brings back all the impressions of his old days at Combray.

Marcel remembers the two roads. One is Swann’s way, a path that runs beside Monsieur Swann’s park, where lilacs and hawthorns bloom. The other is the Guermantes way, along the river and past the château of the duke and duchess de Guermantes, the great family of Combray. He remembers the people he sees on his walks. There are familiar figures such as the doctor and the priest. There is Monsieur Vinteuil, an old composer who died brokenhearted and shamed because of his daughter’s friendship with a woman of bad reputation. There are the neighbors and friends of his grandparents. Most of all, he remembers Monsieur Swann, whose story he pieces together slowly from family conversations and village gossip.

Monsieur Swann is a wealthy Jew, accepted in rich and fashionable society. His wife is not received, however, for she is his former mistress, Odette de Crecy, a prostitute with the fair, haunting beauty of a Sandro Botticelli painting. Odette had first introduced Swann to the Verdurins, a common family that pretends to despise the polite world of the Guermantes. At an evening party given by Madame Verdurin, Swann hears a movement of Vinteuil’s sonata and identifies his hopeless passion for Odette with that lovely music.

Swann’s love is an unhappy affair. Tortured by jealousy, aware of the commonness and pettiness of the Verdurins, determined to forget his unfaithful mistress, he goes to Madame de Saint-Euverte’s reception. There he hears Vinteuil’s music again. Under its influence he decides, at whatever price, to marry Odette.

After their marriage, Swann drifts more and more into the bourgeois circle of the Verdurins. He travels alone to see his old friends in Combray and in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Many people think Marcel is both ridiculous and tragic. On his walks, Marcel sometimes sees Madame Swann and her daughter, Gilberte, in the park at Combray. Later, in Paris, he meets the little girl and becomes her playmate. That friendship, as they grow older, becomes an innocent love affair. Filled also with a schoolboyish passion for Madame Swann, Marcel goes to Swann’s house as much to be in her company as in Gilberte’s, but after a time, his pampered habits and brooding and neurasthenic nature begin to bore Gilberte. His pride hurt, he refuses to see her for many years.

Marcel’s family begins to treat him as sickly. With his grandmother, he travels to Balbec, a seaside resort. There he meets Albertine, a girl to whom he is immediately attracted. He also meets Madame de Villeparisis, an old friend of his grandmother and a connection of the Guermantes family. Madame de Villeparisis introduces him to her two nephews, Robert de Saint-Loup and Baron de Charlus. Saint-Loup and Marcel become close friends. While visiting Saint-Loup in a nearby garrison town, Marcel meets his friend’s mistress, a young Jewish actor named Rachel. Marcel is both fascinated and repelled by Baron de Charlus; he will not understand until later the baron’s corrupt and depraved nature.

Through his friendship with Madame de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup, Marcel is introduced into the smart world of the Guermantes when he returns to Paris. One day, while he is walking with his grandmother, she suffers a stroke. The illness and death of that good and unselfish old woman makes him realize for the first time the empty worldliness of his smart and wealthy friends. For comfort he turns to Albertine, who stays with him in Paris while his family is away. Nevertheless, his desire to be humored and indulged in all of his whims, his suspicions of Albertine, and his petty jealousy finally force her to leave him and go back to Balbec. With her, he has been unhappy; without her, he is wretched. Then he learns that she has been accidentally killed in a fall from her horse. Later he receives a letter, written before her death, in which she promises to return to him.

More miserable than ever, Marcel tries to find diversion among his old friends. They are changing with the times. Swann is ill and soon to die. Gilberte had married Robert de Saint-Loup. Madame Verdurin, who had inherited a fortune, now entertains the old nobility. At one of her parties, Marcel hears a Vinteuil composition played by a musician named Morel, the nephew of a former servant and now a protégé of the notorious Baron de Charlus.

His health breaking down at last, Marcel spends the war years in a sanatorium. When he returns to Paris, he finds still greater changes. Robert de Saint-Loup had been killed in the war. Rachel, Saint-Loup’s mistress, had become a famous actor. Swann also is dead, and his widow has remarried and is now a fashionable host who receives the Duchess de Guermantes. Prince de Guermantes, his fortune lost and his first wife dead, has married Madame Verdurin for her money. Baron de Charlus has grown senile.

Marcel goes to one last reception at the Princess de Guermantes’ lavish house. There he meets the daughter of Gilberte de Saint-Loup; he realizes how time has passed, how old he has grown. In the Guermantes library, he happens to take down the novel by George Sand that his mother had read to him that remembered night in Combray, years before. Suddenly, in memory, he hears again the ringing of the bell that announces Monsieur Swann’s departure and knows that it will echo in his mind forever. He sees then that everything in his own futile, wasted life dates from that long ago night in his childhood, and in that moment of self-revelation he sees also the ravages of time among all the people he had ever known.

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