![]() ![]() ![]() While the cast is larger than can be taken in at a single reading, its principal players are indelible: Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, whose wretched affair is described in “Swann’s Way” the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, whose circle the narrator works so hard to penetrate the Baron de Charlus, a refined but poisonous gargoyle whose sexual proclivities fascinate our hero the pretentious Verdurins the perplexing Albertine, an object of sinister fixation for several volumes. For a long time I used to go to bed early: possibly the most famous opening line in the French language and the first words of a masterly work whose author. Characters fall in and out of love, marry up, disgrace themselves, disappear for hundreds of pages, die. ![]() Intermittence, he observes, is a law not just of society but also of the soul. The last three parts of la recherche were published posthumously in an advanced but not final stage of revision: La Prisonnire (1923 The Captive ), Albertine disparue (1925 The Sweet Cheat Gone, originally called La Fugitive ), and Le Temps retrouv (1927 Time Regained, or Finding Time Again ). “Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn,” he writes, “society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern.” The chessboard movements of Proust’s actors are just one element of his grand design, however. Another Proustian axiom concerns social mobility. ![]()
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