Reading Proust: The Guermantes Way
Book three of In Search of Lost Time is the longest of the novel, weighing in at 819 pages in the Enright edition. The Guermantes Way picks up an undetermined amount of time after where Within a Budding Grove left off. The narrator is a bit older, around 20. The title serves as a kind of contrast to Swann’s Way. In the first book, that “way” was one of two walking paths near Combray, the other being called “the Guermantes Way.” The latter is only mentioned in passing in the first novel, as the narrator spends much more time along the way by Swann’s country estate.
Here the “way” is not near Combray, however. It refers to the way of life of Parisian high society in the form of the Guermantes family’s aristocratic manner and social being. The book begins with the narrator’s family moving into “a flat forming part of the Hotel de Guermantes” seeking improved conditions for the narrator’s grandmother, who has taken ill. The book is divided into two parts of near equal length. Several interesting things happen in Part One.
The narrator is impressed with his new quarters within this world of the wealthy class. He attends another performance of Berma where he spends most of the time voyeuring the women of the Guermantes family in their fancy private box. He experiences Berma again; this time within the context of his meeting Elster at Balbec. Unlike the first time he saw Berma, when he applauded simply because others did, this time he applauds with a new personal aesthetic for her work. But, he doesn’t remain aloft in that experience of art for long.
He becomes obsessively infatuated with the Duchess Oriane Guermantes, a completely inaccessible married young woman of minor royalty. Over time, he makes a comic fool of himself inventing reasons of be out on the street exactly when the Duchess takes her morning walk; always walking by and saying “hello” to the Duchess, who happens to be the aunt of our narrator’s new friend Robert de Saint-Loup. A plot is hatched to visit Robert and convince him to secure an invitation for the narrator to meet his aunt under the pretense that there are a couple of Elster paintings in their magnificent section of the Hotel.
So the reader is taken to the military camp at Doncieres, where the narrator spends a period of several weeks as the guest of Robert, an infantry officer. This is a big moment for the narrator because it marks the first time he has been away for an extended period from his mother and grandmother. During this time military history is examined with several famous battles mentioned. The military art is a big theme over dozens of pages. Also, the Dreyfus Affair is introduced, a controversy that split France at the time Proust wrote the novel. Robert is a Dreyfusian, supporting the defendant. But most in the military and upper class are anti-Dreyfusian, believing the defendant is guilty of treason. Robert vaguely agrees to mention the narrator’s interests in the paintings to his aunt.
In Search of Lost Time takes place while the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane were all invented and became widely available. From Doncieres he engages in a telephone conversation with his grandmother, a new experience. “And because that voice…reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps indeed it had never been so sweet as it was now, for my grandmother, thinking of me as being far away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an outpouring of tenderness which, in accordance with the principles of upbringing, she usually restrained and kept hidden.
“Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from.” (page 176)
The narrator returns to Paris immediately to be with his grandmother. Robert soon joins him, on leave from Doncieres. Robert has a mistress in Paris, which turns out to be Rachel, a young woman the narrator met the time Bloch first showed him a brothel. The three of them hang out and have lunch together. Robert is enraged at Rachel for various reasons that make him jealous. (For Proust, love seems impossible without jealousy.) At one point, Robert, who is described as very attractive in his uniform, beats up a guy for propositioning him while walking the street.
The remainder of Part One, some 180 pages, is devoted primarily to a single afternoon party held at Mme de Villeparisis’s home. Although on the social decline, she can still draw the likes of Mme de Guermantes. Robert is invited and asks the narrator to come along. Here the reader is exposed to the nature of snobby afternoon parties in Paris at the time when the telephone was first invented. They are filled with conversations about art and politics. The Dreyfus Affair is prominent again throughout this section. Beyond all this, there is plenty of humor and gossip.
Circumstances result in Mme de Guermantes sitting down beside the narrator at one point during the party. After hundreds of pages of trying to have a conversation with this woman, humorously, the two of them initially sit in silence. At length she is the one who speaks first. But the conversation is brief and is soon overtaken as Mme de Guermantes gossips with others at the party.
Later at the same party he meets Baron Charlus, the man who he had a brief, strange, almost wordless encounter with at Balbec as he was swimming in the ocean. He discovers that M de Charlus is the brother of the Duc de Guermantes and, therefore, the brother-in-law of the Duchess. Charlus now takes a greater interest in him and offers to be his mentor. Charlus states “I shall need you every day, and to receive from you guarantees of loyalty and discretion which, I must admit, you do seem to offer.” (page 401)
Part One ends rather abruptly. Though ill, his grandmother is still able to take walks along the Champs-Elysees. The narrator is accompanying her when she suffers a slight stroke. This length of the novel contains very little of Proustian lyrical writing. His philosophical musings are also subdued. For this reason, even though a great deal of importance happens, I find this section more difficult to connect with than the rest of the novel.
One passage, however, is dense with lyrical/philosophical prose. It is tinged with nostalgia and examines everyone’s ultimate separation from everyone else as well as how the effects of our actions are beyond our control. “Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium of permeability of which is infinitely variable and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned from experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated has at once, often because of our very anxiety, been hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word which we ourselves have forgotten, which may not even have been uttered by us but formed along its way by the imperfect refraction of a different word, could be transported, without even being halted in its progress, infinite distances and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods! What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed that we ever did say, flies to provoke hilarity on another planet…” (page 368)
Part Two is translated as one whole by Kilmartin. Enright chooses to divide it into two chapters, the first of which is, at 46 pages, one of the shortest sections in the novel. It deals entirely with the gradual decline and death of his grandmother. Here we get a bit of lyricism. “I stood on the landing gazing at my grandmother who was doomed. Each of us is indeed alone. We set off homewards. The sun was sinking; it burnished an interminable wall along which our cab had to pass before reaching the street where we lived, a wall against which the shadow of horse and carriage cast by the setting sun stood out in black on a ruddy background, like a hearse on some Pompeian terra-cotta.” (page 432)
When her death finally comes he is deeply affected by her face. “As in the far-off days when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had features, delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a dream of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering over my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” (pp. 470-471)
Chapter Two contains another favorite part of the novel for me. In Proust’s philosophy of love often that which attracts the lover only becomes interested after the lover has become indifferent toward that person, after the attraction has become mute. Such is the case with the narrator at this point in the novel. He is corresponding with Gilberte, who he used to love. His hopes for relations with Mme de Guermantes have dwindled. He is pursuing another young woman with whom he has planned a fancy dinner date on a river island restaurant. His attraction is even stronger because this same girl was indifferent toward him at Balbec. Accepting his dinner invitation will allow him to at last be with someone with whom he is falling in love. But that doesn’t work out for him, of course. She reneges and declines the invitation at the last minute.
And just when he has become indifferent toward Albertine, she reenters his life. He sees her differently. “There were other more attractive novelties about her; I sensed, in this same pretty girl who had just sat down by my bed, something that was different; and in those lines which, in the look and the features of the face, express a person’s habitual volition, a change of front, a partial conversion, as though something had happened to break down those resistances I had come up against in Balbec one long-ago evening when we formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of our present arrangement, for then it had been she who was lying down and I by her beside. Wishing and not daring to ascertain whether she would now let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to stay a little longer.” (pp. 482 – 483)
This eventually leads to him convincing Albertine to try tickling him, that he isn’t the least bit ticklish. She moves toward him on the bed. At that exact moment, Francoise, the family’s principle house help, barges into the room to offer a lamp for light. After a moment of panic, finally through 18 pages, the two kiss following a rather humorous discourse on how our faces are ill suited for kissing with our eyes and noses always in the wrong places. In fact, although it is not described in the narrative, they apparently “indulged” in “brief relations” enjoying “the kisses we had exchanged.” (page 506) So there was more than a kiss on the cheek involved here.
Even though the island restaurant date never materialized, Proust’s use of Mme de Stermaria as an object of desire serves to reveal more of the erotic nature of the narrator. “What I wanted was to possess Mme Stremaria: for several days my desires had been actively and incessantly preparing my imagination for this pleasure, and this pleasure alone; any other pleasure (pleasure with another woman) would not have been ready, pleasure being but the realization of a prior craving which is not always the same but changes according to the endless variations of one’s fancies, the accidents of one’s memory, the state on one’s sexual disposition, the order of availability of one’s desires, the most recently assuaged of which lie dormant until the disillusion of their fulfillment has been to some extent forgotten.” (page 525)
By this point in the novel, the once vague sexual experiences of the narrator are crystallized into those of a 20 year-old. His eroticism becomes more pronounced, as it was back in Part One when Proust writes: “I proceeded my way, and often, down a dark alley that ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Meseglise, the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger.” (page 123)
Reflecting on his time at Doncieres: “The lamp went out during dinner and the serving-girl lighted a couple of candles. Pretending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate while she helped me to potatos, I took he bare forearm in my hand, as though to guide her, without saying a word, pulled her towards me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some money. For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to require, to be properly enjoyed, not only this serving-girl but the timbered dining room, so remote and isolated.” (page 542 – 543)
And when he first learns of the declination for dinner at the island restaurant: “I should have made an appointment for later that same evening with Albertine, in order to forget, during an hour of purely sensual pleasure, holding in my arms a body of which my curiosity had once computed, weighed up all the possible charms in which in now abounded, the emotions and perhaps the regrets of this burgeoning love for Mme de Stermaria.” (page 531)
“When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three had loved. I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist’s studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is too old, it may happen that we return to it and make a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we originally planned.” (pp. 533 – 534)
Finally, he gets to attend dinner with Mme de Guermantes. He finds the two Elsters that he wanted to see and, humorously and inadvertently, holds up everyone else – ignorant of the fact that a dinner can only begin once everyone is at his or her seat. The dinner proceeds for about 180 pages with a lot more banal gossip, political discussions and snobbery by which the narrator gets introduced to dining in the highest society style.
At the end, he returns home with Baron Charlus, who immediately and inexplicably treats him badly again, becoming so critical that an argument ensues and the narrator walks out – only to return at Charlus’ pleas that he truly likes the narrator and can’t believe that he initially thought of him as “insignificant.” Two months pass and Charlus arranges for the narrator to receive an invite to dine with the Princess de Guermantes. The narrator’s climb up the Parisian social ladder continues.
After a long absence, Swann reappears near the end of book three. The narrator discusses the Dreyfus case with him. Part of the Dreyfus controversy revolved around the defendant being Jewish, like Swann. Anti-Semitism is touched upon. The Duke and Duchess are preparing to leave for yet another dinner invitation as Swann meets them. Swann abruptly tells them that he only has a few months to live.
Just then the Duke notices that the Duchess’ black shoes are inappropriate with her red dress and asks her to change them to a matching red. The book concludes with them gathering their things to enter their carriage. Being aristocrats they deflect Swann’s plight by simply disbelieving him so as to not bog down their exit. The doctors are never right about these things, Swann is told. “You’ll bury us all!” the Duke shouts as the carriage pulls away.
I am 2,153 pages into the novel. About halfway with four books to go.
Here the “way” is not near Combray, however. It refers to the way of life of Parisian high society in the form of the Guermantes family’s aristocratic manner and social being. The book begins with the narrator’s family moving into “a flat forming part of the Hotel de Guermantes” seeking improved conditions for the narrator’s grandmother, who has taken ill. The book is divided into two parts of near equal length. Several interesting things happen in Part One.
The narrator is impressed with his new quarters within this world of the wealthy class. He attends another performance of Berma where he spends most of the time voyeuring the women of the Guermantes family in their fancy private box. He experiences Berma again; this time within the context of his meeting Elster at Balbec. Unlike the first time he saw Berma, when he applauded simply because others did, this time he applauds with a new personal aesthetic for her work. But, he doesn’t remain aloft in that experience of art for long.
He becomes obsessively infatuated with the Duchess Oriane Guermantes, a completely inaccessible married young woman of minor royalty. Over time, he makes a comic fool of himself inventing reasons of be out on the street exactly when the Duchess takes her morning walk; always walking by and saying “hello” to the Duchess, who happens to be the aunt of our narrator’s new friend Robert de Saint-Loup. A plot is hatched to visit Robert and convince him to secure an invitation for the narrator to meet his aunt under the pretense that there are a couple of Elster paintings in their magnificent section of the Hotel.
So the reader is taken to the military camp at Doncieres, where the narrator spends a period of several weeks as the guest of Robert, an infantry officer. This is a big moment for the narrator because it marks the first time he has been away for an extended period from his mother and grandmother. During this time military history is examined with several famous battles mentioned. The military art is a big theme over dozens of pages. Also, the Dreyfus Affair is introduced, a controversy that split France at the time Proust wrote the novel. Robert is a Dreyfusian, supporting the defendant. But most in the military and upper class are anti-Dreyfusian, believing the defendant is guilty of treason. Robert vaguely agrees to mention the narrator’s interests in the paintings to his aunt.
In Search of Lost Time takes place while the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane were all invented and became widely available. From Doncieres he engages in a telephone conversation with his grandmother, a new experience. “And because that voice…reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps indeed it had never been so sweet as it was now, for my grandmother, thinking of me as being far away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an outpouring of tenderness which, in accordance with the principles of upbringing, she usually restrained and kept hidden.
“Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from.” (page 176)
The narrator returns to Paris immediately to be with his grandmother. Robert soon joins him, on leave from Doncieres. Robert has a mistress in Paris, which turns out to be Rachel, a young woman the narrator met the time Bloch first showed him a brothel. The three of them hang out and have lunch together. Robert is enraged at Rachel for various reasons that make him jealous. (For Proust, love seems impossible without jealousy.) At one point, Robert, who is described as very attractive in his uniform, beats up a guy for propositioning him while walking the street.
The remainder of Part One, some 180 pages, is devoted primarily to a single afternoon party held at Mme de Villeparisis’s home. Although on the social decline, she can still draw the likes of Mme de Guermantes. Robert is invited and asks the narrator to come along. Here the reader is exposed to the nature of snobby afternoon parties in Paris at the time when the telephone was first invented. They are filled with conversations about art and politics. The Dreyfus Affair is prominent again throughout this section. Beyond all this, there is plenty of humor and gossip.
Circumstances result in Mme de Guermantes sitting down beside the narrator at one point during the party. After hundreds of pages of trying to have a conversation with this woman, humorously, the two of them initially sit in silence. At length she is the one who speaks first. But the conversation is brief and is soon overtaken as Mme de Guermantes gossips with others at the party.
Later at the same party he meets Baron Charlus, the man who he had a brief, strange, almost wordless encounter with at Balbec as he was swimming in the ocean. He discovers that M de Charlus is the brother of the Duc de Guermantes and, therefore, the brother-in-law of the Duchess. Charlus now takes a greater interest in him and offers to be his mentor. Charlus states “I shall need you every day, and to receive from you guarantees of loyalty and discretion which, I must admit, you do seem to offer.” (page 401)
Part One ends rather abruptly. Though ill, his grandmother is still able to take walks along the Champs-Elysees. The narrator is accompanying her when she suffers a slight stroke. This length of the novel contains very little of Proustian lyrical writing. His philosophical musings are also subdued. For this reason, even though a great deal of importance happens, I find this section more difficult to connect with than the rest of the novel.
One passage, however, is dense with lyrical/philosophical prose. It is tinged with nostalgia and examines everyone’s ultimate separation from everyone else as well as how the effects of our actions are beyond our control. “Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium of permeability of which is infinitely variable and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned from experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated has at once, often because of our very anxiety, been hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word which we ourselves have forgotten, which may not even have been uttered by us but formed along its way by the imperfect refraction of a different word, could be transported, without even being halted in its progress, infinite distances and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods! What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed that we ever did say, flies to provoke hilarity on another planet…” (page 368)
Part Two is translated as one whole by Kilmartin. Enright chooses to divide it into two chapters, the first of which is, at 46 pages, one of the shortest sections in the novel. It deals entirely with the gradual decline and death of his grandmother. Here we get a bit of lyricism. “I stood on the landing gazing at my grandmother who was doomed. Each of us is indeed alone. We set off homewards. The sun was sinking; it burnished an interminable wall along which our cab had to pass before reaching the street where we lived, a wall against which the shadow of horse and carriage cast by the setting sun stood out in black on a ruddy background, like a hearse on some Pompeian terra-cotta.” (page 432)
When her death finally comes he is deeply affected by her face. “As in the far-off days when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had features, delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a dream of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering over my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.” (pp. 470-471)
Chapter Two contains another favorite part of the novel for me. In Proust’s philosophy of love often that which attracts the lover only becomes interested after the lover has become indifferent toward that person, after the attraction has become mute. Such is the case with the narrator at this point in the novel. He is corresponding with Gilberte, who he used to love. His hopes for relations with Mme de Guermantes have dwindled. He is pursuing another young woman with whom he has planned a fancy dinner date on a river island restaurant. His attraction is even stronger because this same girl was indifferent toward him at Balbec. Accepting his dinner invitation will allow him to at last be with someone with whom he is falling in love. But that doesn’t work out for him, of course. She reneges and declines the invitation at the last minute.
And just when he has become indifferent toward Albertine, she reenters his life. He sees her differently. “There were other more attractive novelties about her; I sensed, in this same pretty girl who had just sat down by my bed, something that was different; and in those lines which, in the look and the features of the face, express a person’s habitual volition, a change of front, a partial conversion, as though something had happened to break down those resistances I had come up against in Balbec one long-ago evening when we formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of our present arrangement, for then it had been she who was lying down and I by her beside. Wishing and not daring to ascertain whether she would now let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to stay a little longer.” (pp. 482 – 483)
This eventually leads to him convincing Albertine to try tickling him, that he isn’t the least bit ticklish. She moves toward him on the bed. At that exact moment, Francoise, the family’s principle house help, barges into the room to offer a lamp for light. After a moment of panic, finally through 18 pages, the two kiss following a rather humorous discourse on how our faces are ill suited for kissing with our eyes and noses always in the wrong places. In fact, although it is not described in the narrative, they apparently “indulged” in “brief relations” enjoying “the kisses we had exchanged.” (page 506) So there was more than a kiss on the cheek involved here.
Even though the island restaurant date never materialized, Proust’s use of Mme de Stermaria as an object of desire serves to reveal more of the erotic nature of the narrator. “What I wanted was to possess Mme Stremaria: for several days my desires had been actively and incessantly preparing my imagination for this pleasure, and this pleasure alone; any other pleasure (pleasure with another woman) would not have been ready, pleasure being but the realization of a prior craving which is not always the same but changes according to the endless variations of one’s fancies, the accidents of one’s memory, the state on one’s sexual disposition, the order of availability of one’s desires, the most recently assuaged of which lie dormant until the disillusion of their fulfillment has been to some extent forgotten.” (page 525)
By this point in the novel, the once vague sexual experiences of the narrator are crystallized into those of a 20 year-old. His eroticism becomes more pronounced, as it was back in Part One when Proust writes: “I proceeded my way, and often, down a dark alley that ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Meseglise, the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger.” (page 123)
Reflecting on his time at Doncieres: “The lamp went out during dinner and the serving-girl lighted a couple of candles. Pretending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate while she helped me to potatos, I took he bare forearm in my hand, as though to guide her, without saying a word, pulled her towards me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some money. For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to require, to be properly enjoyed, not only this serving-girl but the timbered dining room, so remote and isolated.” (page 542 – 543)
And when he first learns of the declination for dinner at the island restaurant: “I should have made an appointment for later that same evening with Albertine, in order to forget, during an hour of purely sensual pleasure, holding in my arms a body of which my curiosity had once computed, weighed up all the possible charms in which in now abounded, the emotions and perhaps the regrets of this burgeoning love for Mme de Stermaria.” (page 531)
“When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three had loved. I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist’s studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is too old, it may happen that we return to it and make a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we originally planned.” (pp. 533 – 534)
Finally, he gets to attend dinner with Mme de Guermantes. He finds the two Elsters that he wanted to see and, humorously and inadvertently, holds up everyone else – ignorant of the fact that a dinner can only begin once everyone is at his or her seat. The dinner proceeds for about 180 pages with a lot more banal gossip, political discussions and snobbery by which the narrator gets introduced to dining in the highest society style.
At the end, he returns home with Baron Charlus, who immediately and inexplicably treats him badly again, becoming so critical that an argument ensues and the narrator walks out – only to return at Charlus’ pleas that he truly likes the narrator and can’t believe that he initially thought of him as “insignificant.” Two months pass and Charlus arranges for the narrator to receive an invite to dine with the Princess de Guermantes. The narrator’s climb up the Parisian social ladder continues.
After a long absence, Swann reappears near the end of book three. The narrator discusses the Dreyfus case with him. Part of the Dreyfus controversy revolved around the defendant being Jewish, like Swann. Anti-Semitism is touched upon. The Duke and Duchess are preparing to leave for yet another dinner invitation as Swann meets them. Swann abruptly tells them that he only has a few months to live.
Just then the Duke notices that the Duchess’ black shoes are inappropriate with her red dress and asks her to change them to a matching red. The book concludes with them gathering their things to enter their carriage. Being aristocrats they deflect Swann’s plight by simply disbelieving him so as to not bog down their exit. The doctors are never right about these things, Swann is told. “You’ll bury us all!” the Duke shouts as the carriage pulls away.
I am 2,153 pages into the novel. About halfway with four books to go.
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