Having given up his vocation 🤷🏻♂️, the narrator attends a matinee at the Princess of Guermantes’s house.
Translated from French.
Having given up his vocation 🤷🏻♂️, the narrator attends a matinee at the Princess of Guermantes’s house. The guests all seem to him to be dressed up as if for a masquerade ball: for Time has taken its toll on them, just as it has on him.
Among the portraits he painted at that time, the one of Odette 🌺 stands out in particular:
🖋️ “We start from the assumption that people have remained the same, and then we find them old. But once we start from the assumption that they are old, when we meet them again, we don’t find them so bad after all. For Odette, it wasn’t just that; her appearance, once you knew her age and were expecting an old woman, seemed a more miraculous defiance of the laws of time than the preservation of radium defies those of nature. If I did not recognise her at first, it was not because she had changed, but because she had not. Having spent the last hour realising what time adds anew to people and that one must subtract this to find them as I had known them, I now quickly made this calculation and, adding to the Odette of old the number of years that had passed over her, the result I found was a person who seemed to me impossible to be the one before my eyes, precisely because she was just as she had been in the past. How much of it was down to make-up and dye? Beneath her flat, golden hair — somewhat like the tousled bun of a large mechanical doll on a face that was equally astonished and unchanging, like a doll’s — over which was perched a similarly flat straw hat from the 1878 Exhibition (at which she would certainly have been, back then—and especially if she’d been the same age as she is today—the most fantastical marvel) coming to recite her verse in an end-of-year revue, but from the 1878 Exhibition, represented by a woman who was still young.” 👵🏻👩🏻🦳👩🏼
— Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, 1927
Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), vol. III, p. 948
A second passage completes the picture, two pages further on: I’ll include it in the commentary. ⏬️
#MarcelProust #LeTempsretrouvé #proustagram #OdettedeCrécy #OdetteSwann #OdettedeForcheville #Swann #Guermantes #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu
“For Madame de Forcheville, on the other hand, it was so miraculous that one could not even say she had grown younger, but rather that, with all her rosy cheeks and freckles, she had blossomed anew. Even more so than the embodiment of the 1878 World’s Fair, she would have been the curiosity and the centrepiece of a modern-day botanical exhibition. As for me, incidentally, she did not seem to be saying:
“I am the 1878 Exhibition”, but rather: “I am the Avenue of the Acacias from 1892”. It seemed as though she might still have been there. Moreover, precisely because she hadn’t changed, she hardly seemed to be alive. She looked like a sterilised rose.”
Pléiade 1954, Vol. III, p. 950