To celebrate this 100th post 🥳 on @proutagram, I’m going to share a selection of quotes that I’ve…

To celebrate this 100th post 🥳 on @proutagram, I’m going to share a selection of quotes I jotted down whilst reading “In Search of Lost Time” in its entirety for the fourth time, in the spring of 2024. 📚🖋️✔️

For those who haven’t read it yet, or would like to read it again, this will be a way to (re)awaken your appetite to devour, savour and digest 😋🤤🤢 the seven volumes of the novel, one after the other. For those who have started or finished reading it and only vaguely remember it, these will be like ‘little madeleines’, reminding them of those special moments: the ones spent reading a book that nourishes the soul. 🫶🏻

My first extract is taken from “Swann in Love”, the second part of the first volume. After recounting his childhood in “Combray”, the life of his Aunt Léonie and the famous episode of the little madeleine dipped in tea, the first-person narrator steps back to tell us the love story between Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which took place twenty years earlier and partly foreshadows his future romantic relationship with Albertine. ❤️‍🔥💔❤️‍🩹

🖋️ “(…) he immersed himself in the most intoxicating of love stories, the railway timetable, which told him how to reach her – in the afternoon, in the evening, or even that very morning!”
(…) He spent his days poring over a map of the Compiègne Forest as if it were the Map of Tenderness (…) as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.”

Of course, the medical metaphor 🚑🩺 is no coincidence. The author’s father and brother were eminent doctors, and Marcel Proust was immersed in the medical world throughout his life, just like Flaubert before him. 💊🦠🔬

In this extract, Proust attributes to Swann an obsessive fondness for the railway timetable 🚂. He also slips in a literary allusion to the ‘Map of Tenderness’ 🗺️ devised by Madeleine de Scudéry in her novel “Clélie” (1654), one of the most iconic novels of the 17th century.

🗳️ Do you remember this bit?

#MarcelProust #proustagram #unamourdeswann #citations #CharlesSwann #OdettedeCrécy #laDameenrose #MissSacripant #DuCôtédechezSwann