In “The Guermantes Way”, the young narrator visits his friend Robert de Saint-Loup 🤵🏼‍♂️, who is…

In “The Guermantes Way”, the young narrator visits his friend Robert de Saint-Loup 🤵🏼‍♂️, who is doing his military service in Doncières 🐎. As fatigue set in, one morning upon waking he found himself experiencing familiar sensations linked to other mornings, from his childhood in Combray:

🖋️ “Poets claim that, for a moment, we rediscover who we once were when we return to a particular house or garden where we spent our youth 🏡. These are highly uncertain pilgrimages, which result in as many disappointments as successes. Fixed places, contemporaries of different years—it is within ourselves that we are better off finding them. This is what, to a certain extent, deep fatigue followed by a good night’s sleep can serve to do for us. 🛌 These, to carry us down into the deepest underground galleries of sleep, where no reflection of the previous day, no glimmer of memory, any longer illuminates the inner monologue—if indeed it does not cease there altogether— they turn over the soil and the tuff of our bodies so thoroughly that they lead us back, to where our muscles plunge and twist their tendrils and draw in new life, to the garden where we were children 🌿👦🏻. There’s no need to travel to see it again; you simply have to go down to find it.” 👷🏻‍♂️🕵🏻‍♂️

Marcel Proust,
The Guermantes Way
Pléiade edition, 1954 (Clarac and Ferré), vol. II, pp. 91–92
@la_nrf @editions_gallimard

Doncières in the novel is partly inspired by Orléans, where Proust did his military service in 1889–90. Pictured above is the young Proust in Parc Monceau, accompanied by Antoinette Faure, daughter of the future President of the Republic, Félix Faure, around 1880.

#MarcelProust #LeCôtédeGuermantes #RTP #proustagram #Mémoireinvolontaire #HenriBergson #Mémoire #Proust #RobertdeSaintLoup