At the start of “Finding Time Again” 🕰️, Marcel accepts Gilberte’s invitation and stays with her in Tansonville…

At the beginning of “Finding Time Again” 🕰️, Marcel accepts Gilberte’s invitation and stays with her in Tansonville, just as, in “Swann's Way”, Charlus had once been asked by Swann to look after Odette. 👀

Gilberte Swann (née de Forcheville) married Robert de Saint-Loup and would later become (as the narrator mentions several times in “The Fugitive”) the Duchess of Guermantes. Robert is away, probably busy with Charlie Morel… 🎻 Gilberte accompanies Marcel on walks around Combray, on those late, twilight autumn afternoons:

🖋️ “I was saddened to realise how little I was reliving my past years. I found the Vivonne looking thin and unattractive by the towpath. Not that I could point to any major factual inaccuracies in my memories. But, separated from the places I happened to pass through again by a whole different life, there was no longer that closeness between them and me from which springs, before one has even realised it, the immediate, delightful and total explosion of memory. No doubt because I did not fully understand its nature, I felt saddened by the thought that my capacity for feeling and imagination must have diminished, since I no longer derived any pleasure from these walks. Gilberte herself, who understood me even less well than I understood myself, added to my sadness by sharing my astonishment. “What do you mean,” she would say to me, “that you feel nothing at all when you take that little steep slope you used to climb?” And she herself had changed so much that I no longer found her beautiful; she was no longer beautiful at all.” 🥀

— Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, 1927
Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), vol. III, p. 692

Gilberte spends the afternoon painting in the chapel of the old Swann castle. She is pregnant 🤰🏼, and the narrator reveals that she and Robert will have several children. Gilberte and Robert’s daughter, at the end of the volume, will be this Mademoiselle de Saint-Loup 👸🏼✨ who, in a way, embodies the years the narrator lost before he began writing his great novel. 🖋️📚

#MarcelProust #LeTempsretrouvé #RTP #GilberteSwann #Tansonville #Combray #proustagram