Here are Count Greffulhe and his daughter Élaine aboard their carriage.

Here are Count Greffulhe and his daughter Élaine aboard their carriage. 🐎 Doesn’t this photograph, taken around 1900, remind you of the last page of “Swann's Way”?

🖋️ “How dreadful!” I thought to myself: “Can these motorcars really be as elegant as the old horse-drawn carriages were? I’m no doubt already too old – but I’m not cut out for a world where women constrain themselves in dresses that aren’t even made of fabric. (…) My consolation is to think of the women I have known, now that elegance is no more.
(…) The reality I had known no longer existed. It was enough for Mrs Swann not to arrive looking exactly the same at that very moment for the Avenue to be a different place. The places we have known do not belong solely to the physical world in which we situate them for convenience’s sake. They were but a slender slice amidst the contiguous impressions that made up our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is nothing but the longing for a particular moment; and houses, roads and avenues are, alas, as fleeting as the years.” 🕰️🍂

But straight away, I find myself thinking back to Proust’s first letter to Jacques Rivière 💌, dated early February 1914:

🖋️ “It is only at the end of the book, and once life’s lessons have been learnt, that my thoughts will be revealed. What I express at the end of the first volume, in that digression on the Bois de Boulogne which I inserted there merely as a screen to bring to a close a book that, for practical reasons, could not exceed five hundred pages, is the opposite of my conclusion. It is a step – seemingly subjective and amateurish – towards the most objective and devout of conclusions.” 🙌🏻

For indeed, thanks to involuntary memory, houses, roads and avenues are no longer fleeting: they can resurface at any moment ‘outside of time’, and ‘the immense edifice of memory’ is just waiting to gush forth from an artesian well, a river, or a bite of madeleine softened in tea. ❤️‍🩹

🗳️ Have you ever experienced a moment of involuntary memory?

#NRF #MarcelProust #proustagram #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #RTP #CorrProust #LeTempsretrouvé #DuCôtédeChezSwann