Hi fellow Proust devotees,

I'm about halfway through La Prisonnière in the recent translation into my language. So far the translation has ranged from good to formidable. It was done by a team of translators under the guidance of a comitee.

Unfortunately, the translator responsible for La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue sucks to the point where he can't be trusted, and even when he can - i.e. actually translating what's written in French, his choices are consistently problematic and off.

I read French (and I will re-read the Recherche in French, but I'm not ready yet), and I constantly find myself cross-checking the French text, making reading this an excruciatingly slow process.

The worst thing is not trusting in what I'm reading. I read Proust in a concentrated yet open and receptive state, and it doesn't work when I can't trust the translator.

So I’m jumping ship for these two volumes and switching to an English (or German) translation. I know some of the older English versions have their issues - are there newer translations that you could recommed, specifically for La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue?

(Fortunately, Le Temps retrouvé is back in the hands of the very competent translator who did Guermantes and Sodome et Gomorrhe!)

On a side not - why are these so volumes so often maligned and considered boring and even superfluous?
So far I have found The Prisonner to be a very concnetrated and important unfolding of all those crucial themes and motives that have been seeded and developed from clear back in the earliest days in Combray. Love it so far!

I want to repost this here to see if anyone has thoughts to offer about connections between Proust and McCarthy. Just hopefully without spoilers.

Forgive me for some coarse terminology while I share some thoughts here, the fancy pants nature of the characters has been a bit of a turn off but I wonder if that has to do with my having just finished Beloved by Toni Morrison before jumping headlong into Remembrance. However, the nuggets of reflection on the human experience have been tantilizing. I come to McCarthy for the same thing. I hope to access more of that through my time with Remembrance. At times a passage from Proust stands off the page as though he's talking to me directly as the reader. A sort of "you've felt this too haven't you?" kind of writing.

Have any non-native and even non-fluent French speakers attempted to read it in the original language? I'd love to hear your stories.

From: And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at Montjouvain, some years later,

To: …whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

Summary

The narrator witnesses sadism for the first time. He’s walking near M. Vinteuil’s house and peers in to find a remarkable scene between Vinteuil’s daughter and her lover.

Mlle. Vinteuil is alone, mourning the recent death of her father, which the narrator’s family partly blames on the daughter’s immoral lifestyle. The narrator reflects on the little pieces of music that were mostly not written down, “recorded only in his memory,” ones the family believes were “of little or no real value in themselves.”

She moves a small photograph of her father from the mantelpiece to a little table by the couch. Then her friend arrives, and the sadism begins. The daughter has inherited scruples and restraints from her father, so she tries to close the window shutters, but her friend tells her to leave them open. The daughter says people will see them, and she makes a joke about how people will see them “reading.”

The friend kisses Mlle. Vinteuil, and they chase each other around the room. Mlle. Vinteuil collapses on the sofa and pretends to notice the picture of her dad for the first time: “Oh! there’s my father’s picture looking at us; I can’t think who can have put it there; I’m sure I’ve told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it.”

The friend responds with the first indisputable moment of sadism: “Let him stay there. He can’t trouble us any longer. D’you think he’d start whining, d’you think he’d pack you out of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?”

Mlle. Vinteuil pretends to beg her friend to be nice, but this is all part of their performance. She not-so-secretly loves her friend’s cruelty and how it contrasts with the kindness she shows Mlle. Vinteuil. The friend says she would like to spit on his photograph, and Mlle. Vinteuil continues the performance.

The narrator reflects on how the daughter’s sadism is mixed with the sense that she’s doing something wrong and that this sense is what brings the thrill. He makes a convincing argument that the thrill stems from the fact that “even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved for the wicked…it was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.”

He ends by noting that the “one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty” is the indifference many people share toward strangers’ suffering, and that her pleasure at the cruelty is only possible because of her moral compass.

Reflection

It’s appropriate that the first scene with real sexual tension is witnessed, not experienced. For much of the novel, most clearly in the “Swann in Love” section, the narrator is a voyeur.

Here, he’s peeking in on something he doesn’t fully understand, which is another common occurrence in the early parts of the novel. He hasn’t experienced sexual passion yet, and he might not fully understand what homosexual love can look like. He’s not just watching; he’s decoding. The future narrator, the one writing this account, will have theories on sadism, but in the moment, he’s no more than a young Peeping Tom, thrilled at the girls’ behavior; their worldliness highlights his innocence.

The scene is also an apt introduction to sexuality because it doesn’t occur as a pure joy. The narrator worries he might get caught watching, and, more pressingly, Mlle. Vinteuil mixes her sexual joy with shame and sadism. Importantly, the shame is tied in with the fact that she’s sleeping with another girl. That’s the original evil that led to her dad’s pain. The sadism present here after his death—playing with the picture, threatening to spit on it, calling him “an old monkey”—isn’t the original sin in her eyes. It’s downstream of a profound evil that many 21st century readers barely think about: same-sex love.

All of this—the voyeurism, sadism, and homosexuality—join to make this scene a fantastic intro to sex. In ISOLT, sex is never simple. It brings agony and ecstasy, changes characters, and alters social standing. It determines identities.

Proust uses Mlle. Vinteuil and her companion’s psychology to subvert expectations. He points out the irony in the fact that the pleasure the daughter gains from the cruelty can arise only because she’s not completely cruel, so she can see it as something foreign and exciting. Wickedness is a costume for her, and this aspect is what makes it so enticing. It makes sense for her to confuse wickedness with pleasure in a homophobic and prude society. The taboo must become part of the allure.

He ends on a strong note by pointing out that the only true cruelty is indifference, which reminds me of his indifference to his aunt’s death and also his desire to be cruel to Francoise. The idea presented here is overly simple; there are other types of cruelty. But indifference is an underdiscussed type. Would it be any better if she completely forgot her father? Is it better if your last lover forgot your name? I think many of us, the narrator and Proust included, would prefer the sadism of a past lover’s thoughts than the lack of thoughts altogether.

As always, more posts are in my substack, absolutely for free

I don't know what to tell you. I was falling asleep while reading The Fugitive last month when it popped in my head. Hoping this is the one sub that might appreciate.

I've been making my way through the Modern Library editions and generally like Enright, but I understand the OWC editions are a little different in diction and decided to read the OWC version side-by-side with Enright for a few pages. There's some strange inconsistencies that I'm not sure about...

(orange is Enright and blue is Bush in the screenshots below)

Here is Enright, with "the smiles and greetings which he bestows on strangers"...

Which in Bush is rendered as "the smiles and greetings she directs at strangers"....

A little further on, M. de Charlus delivers this little speech including a line about the 'bather' and espadrilles...

Which are two details entirely missing from the equivalent passage in Bush...

A little later, the narrator in Enright has no idea about the torrent of rage he is about to unleash...

But in the equivalent passage in Bush, he is well aware...

This is the result of just a few minutes of side-by-side reading, which I found rather unsettling given the inconsistencies. I'm not sure whether to read this as a problem with the Bush or a broader issue with translations of Proust, and I'm questioning which edition to move forward with.

Advice and thoughts welcome!

Hello everybody.

I will embarc on this adventure soon, and i would like your input on translations.

Hardcover is nice, more expensive, but nicer because of the size, just to mark, underline and comment, a better feel overall.

There are many versions, but here in Denmark, not many available in english except for the international o local online libraries.

Any recomendations?

I am only nineteen, an age when I have supposedly experienced almost nothing, yet I have fallen deeply in love with this book. When I read about the narrator’s grandmother’s death—good heavens—the words portrayed my poor grandfather perfectly. Like the narrator, I kept tormenting myself with agonizing memories all the time, using this pain as my most profound way of mourning him. Following the narrator’s romance with Albertine, I grow dizzy with bliss as if trapped inside that love myself, yet my heart aches and twists over her actions. I love In Search of Lost Time profoundly. Nothing but death can tear us apart.

I've been lucky to talk about Proust in a cafe in more than 30 gatherings. I arranged this new season around 12 Proustian questions. I want more people to join the discussion, so I started recording myself and put some pieces on YouTube. But unfortunately, there's a language barrier here. I speak Persian, and the auto-generated translation is really awful, especially when it comes to Proust quotes.

I could synchronize those passages with an existing published English translation, but do you think it's worth the effort? Take a look at the video and let me know: would you be interested in watching more close readings like this?

Kissing Albertine's cheeks

Here, I talk about the only pleasurable moment in the cycle of desire: the brief moment just before attainment.

It's really sad that we have so few Proust fans relative to the Earth's population.

I took the plunge and ordered the Everyman’s Library set. I have been thinking about reading this grand novel for years and have finally found the space in my life to accommodate it.

Would appreciate any tips you might have for a first-time reader.

Good day!

If this is your favorite magical book, what do you think is a great way to approach, enjoy and live in this book? If there is not much plot, then what is really going on? And the setting and time is a bit distant, isn't it? I mean it is still 20th century, but hey I have not lived there and then. So should I know about France at that time beforehand? If the sentences are difficult to understand, won't that be an obstacle? And why would Proust write in such a daunting way? and such a long book as well? It seems like he is posing a challenge or an obstacle on purpose to read his work?

What do you think? Just starting a dialog here.

I'm rereading Woolf's memoirs – unfinished sketches written in late 30s – where she describes the liberating atmosphere of Bloomsbury meetings and intellectual conversations, but also notes that something was missing huh, it's such a brilliantly Proustian fragment. Unusually for Woolf it's rather straightforwardly autobiographic, but I also can't help the feeling that she did understand it through Proust a little:

True, we still had Thursday evenings as before. But they were always strained and often ended in dismal failure. Adrian stalked off to his room, I to mine, in complete silence. But there was more in it than that. What it was I was not altogether certain. I knew theoretically, from books, much more than I knew practically from life. I knew that there were buggers in Plato’s Greece; I suspected – it was not a question one could just ask Thoby – that there were buggers in Dr Butler’s Trinity [College], Cambridge; but it never occurred to me that there were buggers even now in the Stephens’ sitting room at Gordon Square. It never struck me that the abstractness, the simplicity which had been so great a relief after Hyde Park Gate were largely due to the fact that the majority of the young men who came there were not attracted by young women. I did not realise that love, far from being a thing they never mentioned, was in fact a thing which they seldom ceased to discuss. 

Now I had begun to be puzzled. Those long sittings, those long silences, those long arguments – they still went on in Fitzroy Square as they had done in Gordon Square. But now I found them of the most perplexing nature. They still excited me much more than any men I met with in the outer world of dinners and dance – and yet I was, dared I say it or think it even? – intolerably bored. Why, I asked, had we nothing to say to each other? Why were the most gifted of people also the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously – as you will have guessed – that there was no physical attraction between us.

The society of buggers has many advantages – if you are a woman. It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one’s ease. But it has this drawback – with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. It is significant of what I had come to desire that I went straight – on almost the next page of my diary indeed – from the dim and discreet rooms of James Strachey at Cambridge to dine with Lady Ottoline Morrell at Bedford Square. Her rooms, I noted without drawing any inferences, seemed to me instantly full of “lustre and illusion”.

I'm a cognitive science graduate and I'm blown away by how close Proust has gotten to predictive processing theory.

I hate how people only know him for madeleine and the sense of smell - which, in the case of the madeleine, was actually taste - when they wanna talk about him and neuroscience. But look how far his phenomenology could go:

> It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves — were it only the taste of a fruit — that no sooner is the impression received than we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we actually felt.

Within a Budding Grove

PP suggests that our perceptions don't get shaped solely by the sensory inputs, they originate within us and get corrected by those inputs; something Anil Seth has called a controlled hallucination.

I'm sure that his discovery of PP broke Proust's heart. It would stand between him and his true desire, which is knowing and possessing the essence of reality. And even more dangerous for the Proustian worldview is this: PP not only threatens authenticity of the perception but also taints our emotional response to art as the work of neuroscientists such as Barrett suggests.

From: Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added an alternative feeling…

To: …novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.

Summary

On his walks in Combray, the narrator is alone and exhilarated but also longs to see a peasant girl. Her imagined beauty heightens his joy. He wants a peasant-girl from Méséglise, or a fisher girl from Balbec, just as he wants those places themselves, but if he meets one of these girls in Paris it would be like receiving a shell he’d never seen on the beach or a fern he’d never found in the woods, bare and “stripped from the pleasure which she was about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped her.”

Wandering the woods without this dream girl, he’s shut out of their secrets, which would only open to him after a kiss from her. He wanders and hopes to meet this girl, but he has no luck. His unsatisfied longings frustrate him, and he sees this imagined girl and his desire as now separate from nature, “with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.”

Reflection

In Search of Lost Time is full of romantic trouble. It’s often the novel’s great drama. In the narrator’s fantasies about peasant girls, we can see the seeds for trouble. With his overactive imagination, he rarely sees another person as solely themselves. They’re connected to places and people, societies and culture. There’s something sweet about this. Typically the trouble is you see a person only through a few superficial details. The narrator goes beyond the superficial, through the deepest depths, and arrives at the whole world, or part of the whole world, held in this one person. He sees the many facets that make up the person, and also the many connections at each facet, a bundle of nodes in a face. But this complicated imagining leads too often to the narrator viewing other people, especially women, as means to an end.

In other realities, probably ours, the end is often sex, but the narrator is more idiosyncratic, his desires more abstract. His goal is to connect to certain parts of the world that only a certain hypothetical girl can offer him, hence his interest in the exotic peasant girls. They come from a different world than his, so they can connect him to foreign parts. If he dated someone from his own class, he’d access nothing new. Their love wouldn’t unlock a mystery. To the narrator, a woman is a “necessary and natural product of the soil,” so by knowing the woman, he can know the soil, the land, and the history.

Without a connection to their origins and the broader world, the women lose their allure. For him, to meet a “fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Méséglise” in Paris would be like “receiving the present of a shell which I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped her.” The girl, like the uniformed soldier from before, is an emblem for so much outside herself.

This partially explains his future romances. Gilberte is from his class, more or less, but because of her infamous mother, Gilberte is in a fallen state and thus distant enough from the narrator for him to find her romantic. The same will occur with Albertine. It has already happened, though we don’t know it yet, with Swann and Odette. In fact, many of the novel’s romances have a class disparity that is bridged through love and sex. It’s possible that the romance takes place because of the disparity, not despite it.

This reminds me of a passage in Confession of a Mask, another queer text, when the narrator discusses the “savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.” Both Mishima and Proust’s novels underscore the mystique of difference. ISOLT will show this love of difference can occur in both homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and how they will serve to unify bloodlines, torture lovers, and upend hierarchies. For the narrator, love is an exploration, but the ceaseless seeking will cause him ceaseless pain. The foreign girl offers him so much to learn, but he will never stop searching for more and never stop doubting his understanding of her, a person whom he first loved because he didn’t understand her.

I mean, obviously.

Hello! I’m here once more to announce that our (virtual) Proust book club is accepting new members. We formed in January (2026), with the goal of reading (slowly and closely) all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time. We are wrapping up Volume 3 and on October 25, we will start reading Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah. We aim to finish the entire series by September 2027.

STRUCTURE: We read at a pace of 50-60 pages a week. Discussions are conducted via a private Substack. Each week 1-2 group members are assigned to write a post, and 1-2 members are assigned to comment on that week’s post(s). Additionally, we host a virtual meeting at the end of each volume.

OUR GROUP: We have a wonderful group comprised of smart, collegial folks from around the world, reading ISOLT in multiple languages/translations/editions, and regularly engaging in discussion. Though we are quite diverse in terms of our geographic locations, life experiences, and professions, we are united by our passion for literature and desire to connect with others who share this passion. While many are re-reading the series for the second/third/fourth times, the group was designed to support those reading ISOLT for the first time. One nice inadvertent symmetry in our group composition: a third of our members joined at the start of Volume 1, a third at the start of Volume 2, and a third at Volume 3!

HOW TO JOIN: If this sounds like something you wish to be a part of, please send me a DM with your name, city, and email address, and I will share full details via email. The schedule for Volume 4 will be finalized on October 20, so if you wish to join us, we would need you to CONFIRM by that date. We would especially love to welcome folks who come from outside of the US.

Please note that I may not be able to respond to your messages until the weekend, but if you follow the above instructions, you will hear from me.

Thank you and happy reading!

Some of you may remember my Albertine rant, I am finally out of the woods or the hole that is that nightmare. Just starting the chapter on Venice has made me remember why I took up this journey in the first place. When Proust is talking about places, art and people that inhabit those places, his writing ascends to a new level.

Good riddance to Albertine.

I'm happy with this week's piece. Proust has so much to dig in too!

From: Since the ‘Méséglise way’ was the shorter of the two that we used to take for our walks round Combray,

To: …and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung myself upon them with a kiss.

Summary

The narrator talks about rainy walks along the paths and the “game” the rain plays with them. He also describes the church statues, including one that looks like Theodore, a young man in town whom Francoise solicits to help with Aunt Léonie when a stronger pair of arms is needed to adjust her. The narrator continues to talk about what they would do on days with bad weather, and then he casually mentions returning one autumn to Combray “to settle the division of my aunt Léonie’s estate; for she had died at last.”

He reveals this with no preamble and quickly moves to discuss the two theories about Léonie and her illness. One believes her lifestyle enfeebled her and led to her death. The other believes that the death confirms just how sick she really was.

He doesn’t grieve his aunt, but Francoise does; she doesn’t leave her body until it’s buried. While his family deals with the affairs of the estate, he takes walks alone along Swann’s way. Francoise is upset that the family doesn’t mourn and that the narrator can be so content as to occasionally hum a tune. He has an impulse to be mean to Francoise, and he says things that he knows he’d find “fatuous” if he read them in a book. He mocks her for her inability to express herself.

He goes on his exhilarating walks. On the Meseglise/Swann way he is struck by the “lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression,” because he delivers joyful “blows and shouts” on the landscape that are “no more than expressions of confused ideas… which, not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.” He feels duty-bound to find and explicate the source of his pleasure.

He speaks kindly to a passing strangers, receives no joy in return and learns that “identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men simultaneously, by a pre-established order.” He recounts other times people’s moods don’t match his, small moments like when he’s talkative and a friend isn’t.

Reflection

Grief and loss recur in ISOLT. He loses time and love and youth and friends, and in one light the novel is an effort to retrieve them. Loss has already been alluded to multiple times, and this week we get the death of Aunt Léonie. The reactions to the deaths lead to a contemplation on the contrast between an individual’s emotion and the rest of the world, an investigation into the desire for and failure of pathetic fallacy.

It’s odd how few words are dedicated to Aunt Léonie’s death. We get no details on the actual event. Francoise’s overwhelming grief contrasts with the family’s detachment, especially against the narrator who’s so happy on his little strolls. The narrator dedicates more words to the weather on his walks than to her death. He never seemed too attached to his aunt, but you could have predicted that he’d at least use it as an excuse to meditate on death and mortality. I prefer the route he takes. We’ll get plenty of meditations on death and mortality and loss for later deaths. Here, Léonie’s death highlights the disparity between a person’s inner reality and the broader world. In such times of extreme emotion, we want the pathetic fallacy to be true; like Francoise, we want our pain to exist outside ourselves, for it to make and shape the world. Francoise’s grief is genuinely moving, but it can’t alter the world around it; it doesn’t even get the narrator’s sympathies. It’s continuously belittled by the family’s joy, by the narrator’s cruelty, by the world’s continued normalcy.

The narrator doesn’t directly make the connection, but he suffers an inversion of Francoise’s predicament when he’s joyful on his walks and runs into the stranger uninterested in speaking. She is sad and wants everyone to be sad with her. He is happy and wants everyone to share in his joy.

Proust takes the idea one step beyond the trouble of pathetic fallacy. There’s a fault in a person’s own outward expression of their interior emotions. Forget about the rest of the world matching your insides. Can you get your face to match your insides? Can you do so with your words? Can you express the emotion that only you know? And if you can’t, why would you expect the rest of the world to match something you yourself can’t match? The narrator can’t articulate his joy. Francoise might not be fully articulating her grief. His “blows and shouts” of happiness are little more than whimpers, like a baby’s muddled wails. We can’t interpret the emotions and can only relieve ourselves of them through crude expressions. To me, it suggests that even a well articulated expression, even a whole essay on an emotion (or an epic novel), could still be a rough shadow of the real emotion beneath. In their essence, emotions are private things, and even when we are spellbound by the most powerful of them, the rest of the world turns on. We can’t blame it for spinning when we can’t even put our insides out.

https://twofoldtwilight.substack.com/p/swanns-way-reading-16-a-death-and

Images are AI-generated (NK).

Next week I'm gonna launch the fourth season of my Proustian hangouts at a cafe. This time, heavily AI-assisted. Instead of following Proust’s footsteps and being limited to the perspective presented at each point in the story, I’m gonna discuss some of the novel’s deepest questions from different angles, side by side. AI is gonna help me find the scenes and quotes relevant to each question.

You can see the twelve questions I picked for this event below:

- The Fate of Desire

Does having what we want kill the wanting?

- The Dilemma of Habit

Habit protects us, and deadens us. Which one do you prefer?

- The Desire to Know the Beloved

Would you want the whole truth about the person you love?

- Knowing the Beloved

Can we really know the people we love?

- Fighting Impermanence

Does wanting somebody not to change count as loving them?

- Good and Cruel

Are there good people and bad people?

- Redemption

Can a cruelty be repaired by a service the victim never lives to see?

- The Impermanence of the Self

Has time changed who you are?

- The Real

Which part of your life do you consider real?

- Lost Time

Have you wasted your life?

- Remembering the Beloved

Do you prefer to forget or remember your beloved?

- Time Regained

Is the past lost, or preserved?

# What important question do you think is missing?

I'm putting Guermantes Way on hold to read Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez just because it's been sitting in my backlog for so long. So far, it's been quite a bizarre experience (in a serendipitous way) because Bomarzo literally feels like an alternate universe version of ISOLT, one where the narrator is obsessed with the grotesque instead of yearning for church spires. I can think of Against Nature by Huysmans and Rakes of the Old Court by Caragiale that channeled the same 'cozy' vibes as ISOLT. Has anyone else read Bomarzo? If so, did you like anything about the novel (apart from the dreamy and baroque prose)?

The idea is that you can view the text while listening making it easier to understand/take notes etc.

I’ve spent about a year developing the program that renders these videos, and more than 5 years improving it. Hope this helps someone!

From: It was along the ‘Méséglise way,’ at Montjouvain, a house built on the edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that M. Vinteuil lived…

To: …he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.

Summary:

This week introduces Monsieur Vinteuil, a music teacher who lives along the Méséglise way. He has a daughter whose best friend is an older girl with an “evil reputation.” People gossip about the man’s daughter and pity him for his blindness to her immoral ways. He doesn’t see that this girl and his daughter are sexually involved. Instead, he sees the girl’s musical talent.

Despite his blindness to their lasciviousness, he notices his and his daughter’s fall in social status, and this hurts his ego. He’s aging quickly, “gradually dying of a broken heart” from his daughter’s decline in society. The decline is so great that though he once would have spurned gestures of friendship from Swann—a man who’s made an unfortunate marriage—he’s now thrilled and overly grateful for Swann’s invitation, which is now “so precious a support for his cause that he felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.”

Vinteuil never takes Swann up on the offer, and Swann regrets this because he means to ask Vinteuil about someone of the same name, whom Swann assumes might be a relative of this old, unassuming man.

Reflection:

Vinteuil isn’t a main character in the epic, but he’s one of the more fascinating and memorable people to cross its pages. We see the living Vinteuil only in a few scenes for the entirety of the series, but he lives on through his daughter and his music.

Vinteuil’s music plays a key role in Swann’s life, but Swann can’t reconcile the humble family man with the genius he imagines must have written the music, so he believes it must be Vinteuil’s relation who wrote it. It’s a case of mistaken identity.

Much of this Vinteuil episode is about the trouble people have in seeing each other clearly and the ease with which we misidentify one another. Swann can’t identify Vinteuil as the musical genius he is (or once was). Vinteuil can’t see his daughter’s friend as a woman who loves women, and he can’t see his daughter as that either. He only sees the injury to their social status.

Proust takes Vinteuil’s situation and extracts a generalization from it:

Indeed it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.

This is one of the first direct discussions of sex in the novel. The phrasing is roundabout—“physical intercourse,” “bodily passion,”—and the idea is complicated. Proust claims that physical passion will make a person unselfish and generous, but he calls these people “victims” of love. The word suggests they can’t help, they’re not active participants, which is romantic, true, but also it suggests pain, it suggests a culprit and infliction. No one wants to be a victim, even of love. And in this case, love’s shine lets the two girls hoodwink the father. Vinteuil suffers because of his daughter’s actions, and later we’ll see a more clear sign of her selfishness.

Through this Vinteuil episode, the novel brings into question the disparity between the social and inner self. Vinteuil’s social self falls and rises easily, but his upstanding character remains. Can we say, however, that we see his full self if we never see him work at his music? Swann falls and rises for Vinteuil, first for his marriage and then for his graciousness. Here, again, character and identity morph. Finally, the young girls speak to our hidden parts. Their core self, if they have one, might be wrapped up in their passion for each other, but this prejudices people against them, so they refuse to see the girls’ virtues. The other true self, maybe, is the one the dad sees—two close friends, a beloved daughter—but he’s clearly blind to a key truth, and if he saw the truth he might be blind to their virtues. Their identity is shifty, as is Swann’s, as is Vinteuil’s, as are many of the characters’ identities in the novel.