Swann's Way

Summary

Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913. Moncrieff's English version (1922), the library text, divides it into four sections: Overture, Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-Names: The Name. In the Overture an unnamed narrator recalls nights of waking in the dark, unsure where he is, and the childhood drama of bedtime at his great-aunt's house in Combray: on evenings when the family's neighbour Charles Swann came to dinner, his mother could not come upstairs to give him a good-night kiss. One night, after he waits up in anguish, his father unexpectedly tells his mother to spend the night in the boy's room, and she reads him George Sand. For years that bedtime scene was all of Combray he could recall, until one winter day his mother gives him tea and a small cake called a petite madeleine; the taste brings back his aunt Léonie's room on Sunday mornings, and with it the whole town. Combray then unfolds: Aunt Léonie, an invalid who never leaves her room and watches the street from her window; the devoted, sometimes ruthless Françoise; the snobbish engineer Legrandin; the school friend Bloch; the novelist Bergotte, whom the boy reveres; the church of Saint-Hilaire; and the two walks the family takes, the Méséglise way, past Swann's park at Tansonville, and the Guermantes way along the river Vivonne. On the Méséglise way the boy first sees Swann's daughter Gilberte through a hedge of hawthorns; near the end he glimpses the Duchesse de Guermantes in church and, writing about the steeples of Martinville seen from a carriage, feels his first stirring as a writer. At Montjouvain he also witnesses, through a window, Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend profaning the photograph of her dead father, the composer. Swann in Love goes back to the years before the narrator's birth. Swann, a man of fashion, is drawn by Odette de Crécy into the bourgeois salon of the Verdurins, whose little nucleus of faithful includes the punning Dr Cottard and the painter Biche. A little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata for piano and violin becomes the anthem of his love, and he persuades himself of Odette's beauty by seeing in her Botticelli's Zipporah. When the Verdurins favour Forcheville and shut him out, Swann falls into jealousy, spies, interrogates, receives an anonymous letter, and suffers for years. At the end, freed, he exclaims that he has wasted years on a woman who was not his type; he will nonetheless marry her. Place-Names: The Name returns to the narrator's boyhood in Paris: his dreams of Balbec, Venice and Florence, his games and infatuation with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, and his adoration of Madame Swann in the Bois de Boulogne. The book closes years later in the Bois, as he finds the past he sought no longer there.

Plot or Argument

• Overture: sleep, the good-night kiss and the madeleine

  The narrator describes waking in the dark among rooms he has slept in, the anguish of bedtime at Combray when Swann's visits keep his mother downstairs, the night she stays with him, and the madeleine dipped in tea that later releases the memory of Combray.

• Combray: Aunt Léonie's house and the town

  Aunt Léonie's sickroom, Françoise's kitchen, the Saturday lunches, the church of Saint-Hilaire with its steeple, Legrandin's snobbery, Bloch's affectations and the boy's reading of Bergotte.

• Combray: the two ways

  On the Méséglise way the boy sees Gilberte by the hawthorns at Tansonville and later, at Montjouvain, the scene between Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend. On the Guermantes way he dreams of the Guermantes family, sees the duchess in church and composes his page on the steeples of Martinville.

• Swann in Love: the Verdurins and the little phrase

  Swann meets Odette, enters the Verdurins' little nucleus, hears the little phrase of Vinteuil's sonata and comes to love Odette through art, comparing her with Botticelli's Zipporah.

• Swann in Love: jealousy

  Displaced by Forcheville and banished by Madame Verdurin, Swann suffers jealousy that Proust describes as an illness, questions Odette about her past, reads an anonymous letter, and at the Saint-Euverte soirée hears the sonata again as a lament for his lost happiness.

• Swann in Love: release

  After a dream in which Odette and Forcheville leave him, Swann finds that his love has faded, and wonders that he wasted years on a woman who did not please him.

• Place-Names: The Name

  The boy's longing for Balbec and Italy, an illness that prevents the journey, his play with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysées, his worship of Madame Swann in the Bois, and the closing return to the Bois years later, where remembrance proves to be regret for a moment.

Characters

• The narrator, narrator

  Unnamed, sensitive, sickly boy of Combray and Paris who looks back on his childhood as an adult.

• Charles Swann, protagonist of Swann in Love

  Wealthy, cultivated friend of princes and of the narrator's family, whose love for Odette consumes years of his life.

• Odette de Crécy, Swann's beloved

  Elegant woman of uncertain reputation in the Verdurin circle, later Madame Swann.

• Madame Verdurin, hostess

  Domineering bourgeois hostess of the little nucleus of faithful who first welcomes and then expels Swann.

• Aunt Léonie, aunt

  Invalid who keeps to her room in Combray, follows the town's news from her window and gives the boy madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea.

• Françoise, servant

  Aunt Léonie's cook, loyal to the family, fierce toward other servants.

• Gilberte Swann, Swann's daughter

  Red-haired girl first seen by the hawthorns, later the narrator's playmate in the Champs-Elysées.

• Vinteuil, composer

  Retiring piano teacher of Combray, grieved by his daughter's conduct, whose sonata becomes the music of Swann's love.

• Mademoiselle Vinteuil, the composer's daughter

  Seen by the narrator at Montjouvain with her friend after her father's death.

• Dr Cottard, physician

  Awkward young doctor of the Verdurin circle, anxious to catch every figure of speech.

• Forcheville, rival

  Coarse nobleman whom the Verdurins promote as Swann's rival for Odette.

• Legrandin, neighbour

  Engineer and man of letters in Combray who denounces snobbery while practising it.

• Bergotte, novelist

  Writer whose style enchants the boy and whom Gilberte knows.

Lessons

• Memory that the will cannot command

  The narrator says that the efforts of the intellect to recapture the past are vain; only a chance sensation, the taste of the madeleine in tea, gives back Combray. Proust distinguishes this involuntary memory from the dry, voluntary kind and builds a whole novel on it.

  • What did the narrator remember of Combray before the madeleine, and what does he remember after?
  • Why does the taste work when seeing the madeleine did not?
  • What sensation brings back a part of your own past most strongly?

• Love made from art and imagination

  Swann does not find Odette beautiful at first. He comes to love her through the little phrase of Vinteuil's sonata and through her likeness to Botticelli's Zipporah, and his love grows strongest when she withdraws. Proust shows how much of love can be the lover's own creation.

  • How does Swann persuade himself that Odette is beautiful?
  • Why does the little phrase seem to belong to their love?
  • What does Swann's final exclamation reveal about what he had loved?

• Jealousy as a sickness

  In Swann in Love jealousy is described with the vocabulary of disease: a malady that becomes part of the patient, a case past operation. Swann's intelligence, which makes him a fine judge of art, serves only to multiply his suspicions.

  • What does Swann do when he suspects Odette, and what does he learn?
  • Why does Proust compare Swann's love to an illness a surgeon would not dare remove?
  • Can knowledge cure jealousy, or does it feed it?

• The social comedy of Combray and Paris

  From Legrandin's snobbery to Madame Verdurin's clan, Proust watches how people rank one another and how a man like Swann, received by princes, is misjudged by the narrator's own family. Social life is drawn with the patience of a naturalist and a humour often overlooked.

  • What does the narrator's family fail to know about Swann's social standing?
  • How does Madame Verdurin keep her faithful in line?
  • Is Legrandin's snobbery comic, sad or both?

Context

Proust's Combray is a small town of the Third Republic modelled on Illiers, near Chartres, where he spent childhood holidays; the town was officially renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971. Swann in Love takes place in the Paris of the 1880s, with its aristocratic salons, rising bourgeois hostesses and the art of Botticelli, Wagner and the new music. The novel's concern with time and memory belongs to the same years as Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, though Proust distinguished his own idea of involuntary memory from Bergson's.

Composition

Proust began a novel in 1908-1909 that grew out of an essay against the critic Sainte-Beuve. When Fasquelle, Ollendorff and the Nouvelle Revue Française declined Swann's Way, Grasset published it in November 1913 at the author's expense. The First World War delayed later volumes, which Gallimard published from 1919. C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of Swann's Way appeared in 1922 in London and New York under the general title Remembrance of Things Past, a phrase from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30; Moncrieff split the first part, Combray, into Overture and Combray.

Reception

Early reviews were mixed, and André Gide, who had advised the Nouvelle Revue Française to decline the manuscript, later wrote to Proust regretting it. The second volume's Prix Goncourt in 1919 brought fame. Proust's long, branching sentences and his treatment of memory, time and consciousness made the novel a touchstone of modernist fiction alongside Joyce and Woolf, and the madeleine became a proverbial image. Moncrieff's translation was praised for its style and criticized for liberties; it was revised by Terence Kilmartin (1981) and D. J. Enright (1992), and Lydia Davis made a new translation of Swann's Way in 2002.

Comparisons

• woolf-to-the-lighthouse

  Woolf admired Proust and, like him, builds a novel from a family's summer house, memory and the passing of years; her Time Passes section compresses what Proust expands.

• mrs-dalloway

  Clarissa's day in London is shaped by sudden memories of Bourton, a smaller-scale version of Proust's involuntary recall.

• confessions

  Augustine's Book X on the vast halls of memory and Book XI on time are the great ancestors of Proust's meditation, though Augustine seeks God where Proust seeks lost time.

• rousseaus-confessions

  Rousseau's memories of childhood at Bossey and his periwinkle recalled thirty years later anticipate the madeleine's power to restore the past.

• the-great-gatsby

  Gatsby, like Swann, builds an image of a woman from imagination and tries to repeat the past; both stories are told by an observer who learned from them.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The bedtime drama in the Overture and why one night's victory over his parents seemed to the narrator a defeat.
• The madeleine episode and the image of the Japanese paper flowers unfolding in water.
• The two walks, the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way, and what the boy sees on each.
• The little phrase of Vinteuil's sonata each time Swann hears it, especially at the Saint-Euverte soirée.
• The last pages in the Bois de Boulogne and their claim about places and years.

Key terms and names

Involuntary memory

Memory released by chance through a sensation, like the taste of the madeleine, as opposed to deliberate recollection by the intellect.

Combray

The small country town where the narrator spent Easter and summer holidays at his aunt Léonie's house.

The little phrase

A passage in Vinteuil's sonata for piano and violin that becomes for Swann the anthem of his love for Odette.

The little nucleus

Madame Verdurin's circle of faithful guests, from which she excludes anyone who has other loyalties.

The Méséglise way and the Guermantes way

The two directions of the family's walks from Combray, one past Swann's estate, the other toward the aristocratic Guermantes; they come to stand for two worlds.

Remembrance of Things Past

Moncrieff's English title for the whole novel, taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30; the French title means In Search of Lost Time.

Content note

The book treats adult love affairs frankly, and at Montjouvain the boy secretly watches an intimate scene between Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her friend; teachers may assign Combray and the Overture alone.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why can't the narrator's mother come up to kiss him on the nights Swann visits, and what happens on the night he waits up for her?
2. Comprehension What does the narrator remember after tasting the madeleine, and from whom had he received it as a child?
3. Comprehension How does Swann's place among the Verdurins change, and why?
4. Interpretation Why does Proust give so many pages to Swann's love before the narrator was born, in a book about the narrator's own memories?
5. Interpretation What role do works of art, the sonata and the Botticelli fresco, play in Swann's love for Odette?
6. Interpretation What does the narrator discover in writing about the steeples of Martinville?
7. Big Question Is the past truly lost, or does it survive somewhere, and what would it mean to recover it?

Faith Connections

• Augustine, Confessions X.8-17 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine marvels at the fields and vast palaces of memory and finds God sought within them; Proust's narrator explores the same territory and seeks a different kind of recovery.

• Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (Scripture)

  The Preacher says there is no remembrance of former things; Proust's closing pages on places as fugitive as the years share his sense of passing, and his book is an attempt to answer it.

• 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (Scripture)

  Paul's description of love that is not jealous and seeks not its own offers a measure for Swann's possessive, suspicious love.

• Pascal, Pensées (on diversion and the self) (Great Conversation)

  Pascal argued that people pursue distractions to avoid facing themselves; the Verdurins' evenings and Swann's social round can be read in that light.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The intellect cannot recapture the past; the past survives hidden in sensations; therefore chance encounters with those sensations, not deliberate effort, restore lost time, and art that preserves such moments is the way to keep it.

Rhetorical device: extended simile. In the madeleine passage the smell and taste of things are likened to souls waiting amid ruins, bearing the vast structure of recollection, and the town of Combray rises from the cup like Japanese paper flowers opening in water.

Debate: Resolved: that Swann's love for Odette was a real love and not merely his own creation.

Memory Work

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Compare the narrator's longing for his mother's kiss in the Overture with Swann's longing for Odette in Swann in Love. What does Proust suggest about desire that grows stronger when it is denied?

Comparison with Confessions: Compare Augustine's reflections on memory in Confessions Book X with the madeleine passage: what does each think memory holds, and what is each seeking in it?

Medical Lens

Proust was the son of the hygienist Adrien Proust and brother of the surgeon Robert Proust, and suffered from asthma from childhood; medicine and illness run through the novel. Swann's Way opens with an exact phenomenology of falling asleep and waking disoriented, and its account of involuntary memory triggered by taste and smell is often cited in the psychology of autobiographical and odour-evoked memory; the link is a later reading, not Proust's claim. Aunt Léonie is a comic portrait of the invalid who organizes her life around her ailments, pepsin and Vichy water, and Dr Cottard begins his long career in the novel as a socially awkward but, in later volumes, gifted clinician. Swann's jealousy is narrated in medical metaphors of malady and operation. The father's verdict that the boy's bedtime tears are a matter of nerves, which the narrator says turned a fault into an officially recognised nervous condition, reflects the late 19th-century language of nervous weakness; retrospective diagnosis of the narrator or of Proust should be offered only as interpretation.

• Overture, opening pages

  The narrator's states between sleep and waking, in which he loses track of time and place and reconstructs the room around him.

  Sleep Insomnia
• Overture, bedtime scenes

  The child's anguish when his mother cannot come up to kiss him, and his father's decision to let her stay the night.

  Neurosis Anxiety
• Overture, the madeleine

  The taste of madeleine in lime-flower tea brings back Combray after intellectual effort fails.

  Dementia Memory Psychology Unconscious
• Combray, Aunt Léonie

  Léonie's sickroom regimen, her pepsin and Vichy water, and her conversations with Françoise and Eulalie about her health.

  Hypochondria
• Swann in Love

  Swann's jealousy described as a malady so bound up with his life that surgeons would call it past operation; Dr Cottard among the Verdurins.

  Obsession Monomania Physicians Doctors
• Place-Names: The Name

  Excitement at the planned spring journey to Florence and Venice brings on a persistent fever, and the doctor forbids travel for a year and anything liable to excite the boy.

  Fever Infection Neurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Explain the difference between voluntary and involuntary memory as the Overture presents it, and judge whether the madeleine episode persuades you.

• Fiction

  Write a page in which a single taste, smell or sound brings back a forgotten place from your childhood, following Proust's movement from sensation to recognition to the whole scene.

• Classroom

  Map Combray: the house, the church of Saint-Hilaire, the Méséglise way to Tansonville and the Guermantes way along the Vivonne, marking what the boy sees on each.

Further Reading

• Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust

  The second volume, winner of the 1919 Prix Goncourt, continuing the narrator's story at Balbec.

• Marcel Proust: A Life, William C. Carter

  Full modern biography in English.

• Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze

  Philosophical reading of the novel as an apprenticeship to signs.

• Proust, Samuel Beckett

  Beckett's 1931 essay on habit, memory and time in Proust.

• How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton

  Light, popular introduction to Proust's ideas.