MARCEL PROUST
A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

TOME VIII
LE TEMPS RETROUVÉ

  • CHAPITRE I (entier) TANSONVILLE

    CHAPITRE II
    M. DE CHARLUS PENDANT LA GUERRE; SES OPINIONS, SES PLAISIRS.

  • II – première tranche
  • II – deuxième tranche
  • II – troisième tranche

    CHAPITRE III
    MATINÉE CHEZ LA PRINCESSE DE GUERMANTES.

  • III – première tranche
  • III – deuxième tranche
  • III – troisième tranche
  • III – quatrième tranche
  • III – cinquième tranche
          Marcel Proust was the first of two sons born to a well-to-do Parisian family in 1871. His father was a prominent doctor and professor of medicine from a Catholic family, and his mother was a highly educated, sensitive woman whose family was Jewish.
          Proust developed asthma as a child and spent holidays at the seaside for his health. He became a great student. After graduating with honors from high school, he attended the Ecole des Science Politiques. Despite his asthma, he was able to perform his required year of military service in Orleans.
          Back in Paris, Proust associated with many young writers and artists, and his social connections landed him invitations to most of Paris' most exclusive literary and artistic salons. He published a collection of stories called Les Plaisirs et les jours in 1898. He became an active supporter of unjustly imprisoned Jewish soldier Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair (1897-1899).
          Proust's asthma became more severe in the early 1900s, about the same time that both his parents died. He moved into a pollen-proof, cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard de Haussman in Paris, where he lived for the next 13 years, rarely emerging except for late-night dinner parties with friends. There, he began writing his masterpiece, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, in 1909. The first volume, Du Côté de Chez Swann, was finished in 1912, but was rejected not only by magazines for excerpt, but also by publishers. Proust published it at his own expense in 1913. The book was a success, but World War I postponed the publication of the novel's further volumes. In 1919, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was published, followed by Le Côté de Guermantes in 1921 and Sodome et Gomorrhe in 1922. The remaining three volumes, La Prisonnière (1923), Albertine disparue (1925), and Le Temps retrouvé (1927), were published after Proust's death in Paris in 1922. Together, the books present an elaborate psychological study of time and identity, and deeply influenced the works of later European novelists.
         À la recherche du temps perdu is the story of Proust's own life, told as an allegorical search for truth. At first, the only childhood memory available to the middle-aged narrator is the evening of a visit from the family friend, Swann, when the child forced his mother to give him the goodnight kiss that she had refused. But, through the accidental tasting of tea and a madeleine cake, the narrator retrieves from his unconscious memory the landscape and people of his boyhood holidays in the village of Combray. In an ominous digression on love and jealousy, the reader learns of the unhappy passion of Swann (a Jewish dilettante received in high society) for the courtesan Odette, whom he had met in the bourgeois salon of the Verdurins during the years before the narrator's birth. As an adolescent the narrator falls in love with Gilberte (the daughter of Swann and Odette) in the Champs-Élysées. During a seaside holiday at Balbec, he meets the handsome young nobleman Saint-Loup, Saint-Loup's strange uncle the Baron de Charlus, and a band of young girls led by Albertine. He falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes but, after an autumnal visit to Saint-Loup's garrison-town Doncières, is cured when he meets her in society. As he travels through the Guermantes's world, its apparent poetry and intelligence is dispersed and its real vanity and sterility revealed. Charlus is discovered to be homosexual, pursuing the elderly tailor Jupien and the young violinist Morel, and the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah henceforth proliferate through the novel. On a second visit to Balbec the narrator suspects Albertine of loving women, carries her back to Paris, and keeps her captive. He witnesses the tragic betrayal of Charlus by the Verdurins and Morel; his own jealous passion is only intensified by the flight and death of Albertine. When he attains oblivion of his love, time is lost; beauty and meaning have faded from all he ever pursued and won; and he renounces the book he has always hoped to write. A long absence in a sanatorium is interrupted by a wartime visit to Paris, bombarded like Pompeii or Sodom from the skies. Charlus, disintegrated by his vice, is seen in Jupien's infernal brothel, and Saint-Loup, married to Gilberte and turned homosexual, dies heroically in battle. After the war, at the Princesse de Guermantes's afternoon reception, the narrator becomes aware, through a series of incidents of unconscious memory, that all the beauty he has experienced in the past is eternally alive. Time is regained, and he sets to work, racing against death, to write the very novel the reader has just experienced.
          Proust's novel has a circular construction and must be considered in the light of the revelation with which it ends. The author reinstates the extratemporal values of time regained, his subject being salvation. Other patterns of redemption are shown in counterpoint to the main theme: the narrator's parents are saved by their natural goodness, great artists (the novelist Bergotte, the painter Elstir, the composer Vinteuil) through the vision of their art, Swann through suffering in love, and even Charlus through the Lear-like grandeur of his fall. Proust's novel is, ultimately, both optimistic and set in the context of human religious experience. "I realized that the materials of my work consisted of my own past," says the narrator at the moment of time regained. An important quality in the understanding of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu lies in its meaning for Proust himself as the allegorical story of his own life, from which its events, places, and characters are taken. In his quest for time lost, he invented nothing but altered everything, selecting, fusing, and transmuting the facts so that their underlying unity and universal significance should be revealed, working inward to himself and outward to every aspect of the human condition.
          Proust projected his own homosexuality upon his characters, treating this, as well as snobbism, vanity, and cruelty, as a major symbol of original sin. His insight into women and the love of men for women (which he himself experienced for the many female originals of his heroines) remained unimpaired, and he is among the greatest novelists in the fields of both heterosexual and homosexual love.
          Taking as raw material the author's past life, À la recherche du temps perdu is ostensibly about the irrecoverability of time lost, about the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the emptiness of love and friendship, the vanity of human endeavour, and the triumph of sin and despair; but Proust's conclusion is that the life of every day is supremely important, full of moral joy and beauty, which, though man may lose them through faults inherent in human nature, are indestructible and recoverable. Proust's style is one of the most original in all literature and is unique in its union of speed and protraction, precision and iridescence, force and enchantment, classicism and symbolism.

         Citations de À la recherche du temps perdu http://perso.wanadoo.fr/proust/proust/tout.htm

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