Notre-Dame de Paris is mentioned only a handful of times in “In Search of Lost Time”, and is not…
Translated from French.
Notre-Dame de Paris is mentioned only a handful of times in “In Search of Lost Time”, and is not really at the heart of the narrator’s aesthetic (or spiritual) fantasies. 🤷🏻♂️
Firstly, because he prefers more modest buildings: the church at Combray, where he admires the Guermantes’ ancestors depicted in the stained-glass windows; the church at Balbec, which Swann had led him to believe was battered by the waves and built in the Persian style; the fictional church of Saint-André-des-Champs, whose 13th-century bas-reliefs he praises, recalling his reading of Émile Mâle. 📘
Secondly, because he isn’t really keen on the work of Viollet-le-Duc (who designed the spire, a 19th-century structure restored in 2024). 🫣
Notre-Dame, and Paris more broadly, is not a realm of fantasy for the narrator, unlike Normandy and Brittany (they are not the same thing, but Proust constantly blurs the lines between them to create, precisely, a fictional and fantasised region), or Tuscany and Venice. If you’re in any doubt, take another look at the story “Parisian Geography” in the featured stories! 📺☝🏻
Nevertheless, on 15 April 2024, exactly five years to the day after the fire 💔, I came across this beautiful passage which speaks precisely to the ‘absurdities’ of human nature, somewhere between dream and fantasy:
🖋️ “Even in its aberrations, human nature (just as it does in our love affairs and in our travels) still betrays the need for belief through its demands for truth. Françoise, when I spoke to her of a church in Milan — a city she would probably never visit — or of Reims Cathedral — or even that of Arras! — which she could not see as they were more or less destroyed — she would envy the wealthy who can afford to behold such treasures, and would exclaim with nostalgic regret: “Ah! How beautiful it must have been!”, she who, having lived in Paris for so many years, had never been curious enough to go and see Notre-Dame.” 🤭
⏬️ The rest of the quote is in the comments ⏬️
#MarcelProust #ÀlaRechercheduTempsPerdu #proustagram #NotreDamedeParis #LeTempsretrouvé #1927
“The fact is that Notre-Dame was an integral part of Paris, the city where Françoise’s daily life unfolded and where, consequently, it was difficult for our old servant—as it would have been for me had the study of architecture not, in certain respects, corrected the instincts I’d developed in Combray—to pinpoint the objects of her daydreams. In the people we love, there is, inherent in them, a certain dream that we do not always know how to discern but which we pursue. It was my belief in Bergotte, in Swann, that had made me love Gilberte; my belief in Gilbert the Wicked that had made me love Madame de Guermantes. And what a vast expanse of the sea had been set aside in my love—even the most painful, the most jealous, the most individual, it would seem—for Albertine. Moreover, precisely because of this individuality that we cling to so fiercely, love for other people is already, to some extent, an aberration.”
— “Time Regained”, Chapter II: ‘Monsieur de Charlus during the war; his views, his pleasures’