Charles Swann arrives; an elegant member of the upper bourgeoisie, and something of a mentor to the narrator, he has managed by his intelligence, charm, sensitivity and artistic connoisseurship to gain access to the ranks of the aristocracy in spite of the fact that he is Jewish (we are in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair and the text refers several times to the way this has split French society). The narrator is shocked to see how ill Swann looks. Eventually, the Duchesse appears in an elegant red dress for the evening’s outing; Swann and the narrator share their admiration for her beauty.
After some further chit-chat about artistic matters, as the Duc is starting to show his impatience to head off to dinner, the Duchesse tells Swann of a planned spring holiday in Italy and Sicily: how wonderful it would be if he could accompany them as an artistic guide! Swann demurs, the Duchesse insists; eventually, with the greatest reluctance, Swann tells the Duchesse that the reason he can’t go with them is that he will by then be dead – the doctors have told him he has only a few months to live, and may indeed die at any minute. The Duchesse gazes at him with her melancholy blue eyes.
Just as the Duc shrugs off the imminent demise of his cousin, lest it interrupt his pleasures, so the Duchesse, with slightly more compunction, simply doesn’t know how to cope with the stark alternative of showing pity for the dying Swann or being late for dinner. She hesitates. The Duc gets irritated and claims that their hostess, Mme de Sainte-Euverte, hates people to be late: the Duchesse, continuing to dither, starts to climb into the waiting carriage, whereupon the Duc notices that she is still wearing her black shoes, which clash with that gorgeous red dress.
Completely ignoring what he has just said about the need for punctuality, he insists that she go upstairs and fetch her red shoes – what does it matter if they are late! And then, sensing that his fussing over the shoes might seem rather ill judged, he hurries Swann and the narrator away, again resorting to bland denial of the inconvenient facts of impending mortality as he cheerfully tells Swann not to listen to the doctors, who are donkeys. “You’re as strong as the Pont-Neuf! You’ll bury the lot of us!”
All the preoccupations of this passage can be traced back to Pleasures and Days. The narrator’s musings over the roofs of Paris, his love of floral metaphor, his interest in reading art (especially Dutch art) into life (hence the “picturesque” qualities of his description), the tendency to a kind of prose poetry, are already evident in the Pleasures, especially in the sequence called ‘Nostalgia’.
The discovery he makes while waiting in the staircase involves – as we will read at the beginning of the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah – the revelation of the whole underworld of homosexuality that is to play an increasingly important part in the Search; and while the theme of sexual inversion is only briefly alluded to in Pleasures and Days (the apparently lesbian advance in ‘Violante’, for instance), sexuality itself – insistent, hothoused, nervy, obsessive – is everywhere: in ‘The Confession of a Young Woman’, the heroine’s wayward desires lead to her mother’s death and her own protracted suicide (the mise-en-scène is quite clumsy and melodramatic, but Proust is already struggling to express an idea onto which the Search would train its spotlights: that the peculiar guilt attendant on sexuality is linked, in his view, with the profanation of the mother). Throughout Pleasures and Days there is no love that is not pathological, not least because of the paranoid intensity of the characters’ jealousy.
It is not so much that people are jealous because they are in love: they are in love because they are jealous (they only realize that they are in love, really and truly and catastrophically, when jealousy’s little green claws start to dig into their hearts) – love is an epiphenomenon of a deeper possessiveness: this is the painful lesson learnt by Baldassare Silvande, and Françoise de Breyves, and Honoré in ‘The End of Jealousy’. The passage I have described from The Guermantes Way is not specifically concerned with this most Proustian of emotions, but it does hold up to unremitting examination what might be called social jealousy – otherwise known as snobbery.
The Duc de Guermantes is obsessed by matters of aristocratic precedence that can have only the most trivial impact in the “real” world of modernity, but there is hardly a character in Proust who is not touched by this vice, and Pleasures and Days is already mercilessly analysing the hold of snobbery over the lives of its characters, most notably in the vignettes (often inspired by those observers of life at the Court of Louis XIV, La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld) of ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’. It is true that the Pleasures often focus on these themes (lyrical evocation, sexuality, jealousy, snobbery) one at a time, whereas the Search shows how interrelated they are.
But already some of the earlier texts display the dynamic interplay between and within them, just as they demonstrate a dialectical appreciation of the way that characters often have the strengths of their weaknesses, and learn what virtues they may have through vice. Thus, while jealousy in some ways binds us to a life of suffering, the lessons it teaches may begin to offer us secret (and painfully acquired) strategies of detachment. Conversely, while many of the epigrams to the Pleasures, from The Imitation of Christ and other edifying texts, admonish us to seek precisely this detachment, to flee world, flesh and devil, the texts themselves suggest again that it may be attachment taken to its paroxysm that can best start to emancipate us from those very same temptations.
There can be no songs of authentic innocence without experience. None of the characters in the Pleasures succeed in heeding the voice of conscience, the summons to an authentic solitude – all long country walks and fireside meditations; each of them succumb to “mondanité”, the worldliness of social existence. But through this worldliness (the gossip, the malice, the jaded cynicism) they learn things that no amount of Emersonian self-reliance would have taught them.
Proust’s early text proclaims a detachment and autonomy that have to be learnt the hard way, by living life to the full, undergoing experiences in the world that might seem to be pleasurable but have their own strange ascesis (from the deserts of love to the ordinary rituals of everyday social life: at the end of the extract from the Search I mentioned above, the Duchesse reflects that sometimes she’d rather just die than have to go out to dinner – and one can see why).
Again, snobbery is dreadful, but what is worse is to try and pretend that you are not a snob (a denial that, again, almost all of Proust’s characters make at one time or another – it is a guilty secret on a par with homosexuality). Furthermore, as the ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’ show, people labour to achieve their snobbish ends with the same resourcefulness as an artist, and they learn as much about the world through their often comic endeavours as the jealous person does through being brought face to face with the radical unknowability of the loved one. The world comes alive (in a perverse way, no doubt, but still very intensely) when you are a snob: like the artist and the jealous lover, the snob lives for details – for a pair of red shoes, in the case of the Duchesse.
And not only the Duchesse. The young Proust begins and ends his Pleasures with stories that, although uncertain in tone, still manage to be searing depictions of the loneliness of death (‘Baldassare Silvande’ has been compared with Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, though it does not have – does anything? – the pity and awe of the great Russian story); the mature Proust, amid the social ballet of the end of The Guermantes Way, shows how ineptly his characters cope with (or simply ignore) impending mortality. How crassly selfish are the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in the way they brush off Swann’s announcement of his imminent death!
And yet, here again, the text is more dialectical than it seems, and the Search is more consistently nuanced in its “lessons” (lessons that, despite a tendency to theorizing, to the essayistic, work best when seen as inseparable from the moment and mode of their discovery and the needs and limitations of their discoverer) than Pleasures and Days, which have an occasional tendency to the didactic, to the unsituated aphorism or maxim, or the wagging of a moralistic finger (but then, Proust was still only a
