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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Overture, the madeleine

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

• Combray, Aunt Léonie

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

• 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.

• 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.