In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way

542 Pages·1993·2.51 MB·English

by  Marcel Proust

IN SEARCH OF
LOST TIME
VOLUME III
THE GUERMANTES WAY
MARCEL PROUST
T
RANSLATED BY
C.K. S M T K
COTT ONCRIEFF AND ERENCE ILMARTIN
R D.J. E
EVISED BY NRIGHT
T H E M O D E R N L I B R A R Y
N E W Y O R K
1993 Modern Library Edition
Copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
This edition was originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus,
London, in 1992.
This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of The
Guermantes Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in
the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto &
Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.
The Guermantes Way first appeared in The Modern Library in 1933.
Jacket portrait courtesy of The Bettmann Archive.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922.
[Côté de Guermantes. English]
The Guermantes way/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p. cm.—(In search of lost time; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN 0-679-64180-7
v1.0
I. Title. II. Series: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. A la recherche du
temps perdu. English; v. 3.
PQ2631.R63C7413 1993 92-33975
843'.912—dc20
Contents
PART I
PART II
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Notes
Addenda
Synopsis
Numerals in the text refer the reader to the explanatary notes, which follow the text.
About The Modern Library
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life
for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers
Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald
Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random
House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade,
providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of
literature and thought. For the Modern Library’s seventy-fifth anniversary,
Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings,
and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern
Library continues to provide the world’s best books, at the best prices.
About the Book
“There has never been anyone else with Proust’s ability to show us things;
Proust’s pointing finger is unequaled.”
—W B
ALTER ENJAMIN
“The Guermantes way” is the path that runs past the chateau belonging to
the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. It also represents the path into “the social
kaleidoscope” traveled by Proust’s narrator, which culminates in his introduction
to the Paris salon of the Guermantes. The rich cast of characters in this third
volume of In Search of Lost Time includes Robert de Saint-Loup, who is
obsessed with the prostitute Rachel, and Baron de Charlus, a public womanizer
and secret homosexual.
The final volume of a new, definitive text of À la recherche du temps perdu
was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989. For this authoritative
English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s
acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account
the new French editions.
IN SEARCH OF
LOST TIME
MARCEL PROUST
Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871.
His father, Adrien Proust, was a doctor celebrated for his work in epidemiology;
his mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker’s daughter of Jewish descent. He
lived as a child in the family home on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, but spent
vacations with his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers near Chartres, where the
Prousts had lived for generations and which became the model for the Combray
of his great novel. (In recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.)
Sickly from birth, Marcel was subject from the age of nine to violent attacks of
asthma, and although he did a year of military service as a young man and
studied law and political science, his invalidism disqualified him from an active
professional life.
During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le Figaro and to a short-
lived magazine, Le Banquet, founded by some of his school friends in 1892.
Pleasures and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems, was
published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active social life, penetrating the
highest circles of wealth and aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his
influences included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the philosophy of
Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and the fiction of Anatole France (on
whom he modeled his character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the
composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the beginning of Proust’s often
anguished acknowledgment of his homosexuality. Following the publication of
Emile Zola’s letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust became “the
first Dreyfusard,” as he later phrased it. By the time Dreyfus was finally
vindicated of charges of treason, Proust’s social circles had been torn apart by
the anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.
Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her death in 1905 he spent
some time in a sanatorium. His health worsened progressively, and he withdrew
almost completely from society and devoted himself to writing. Proust’s early
work had done nothing to establish his reputation as a major writer. In an
unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (not published until 1952), he laid some of the
groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against Sainte-Beuve, written in
1908-09, he stated as his aesthetic credo: “A book is the product of a different
self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean
to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to
reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” He appears to have begun
work on his long masterpiece sometime around 1908, and the first volume,
Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a
Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous
fame. Two subsequent sections—The Guermantes Way (1920-21) and Sodom
and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. (Of the depiction of
homosexuality in the latter, his friend André Gide complained: “Will you never
portray this form of Eros for us in the aspect of youth and beauty?”) The
remaining volumes were published following Proust’s death on November 18,
1922: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.
À L D
EON AUDET
l’auteur
du Voyage de Shakespeare
du Partage de l’Enfant
de L’Astre Noir
de Fantômes et Vivants
du Monde des Images
de tant de chefs-d’œuvre
À l’incomparable ami,
en témoignage de reconnaissance
et d’admiration
M. P.
THE
GUERMANTES WAY