The publishing house Éditions Tourgueneff published a book by Armen Zakharyan “Conversations about Marcel Proust’s novel ‘In Search of Lost Time'” – On the 155th anniversary of the French classic. Zakharyan is a literary blogger, author of the project “Armen and Fedor”, critic and philologist. In his book, he introduces readers (including those who have never turned to Proust, but have long wanted to) into the world of his major work, In Search of Lost Time. With the permission of the publishing house, Meduza publishes a section about the city of Elias, where little Marcel spends his days, including the best ones – Saturdays.
Chapter Two. street
The prototype was the town in which Proust spent his holidays as a child – just like his hero; There he looked at a small train station and the ruins of an old castle, and walked along the Loire River, which became Vivonne in the novel.
A rural French town not far from Chartres – small, no yacht club or football club, but certainly a café – and a good blancmange, where, having said that, the young Proust watched in admiration while his mother’s attention was fixed on a fork or knife for a long time.
Well, let’s take a walk around this city, especially since today is Saturday – and if you don’t know what that means, the locals, and above all Marcel’s family, will consider you a barbarian. Saturday is a special holiday, when the fixed routine of life is broken for one hour; But how refreshing this hour is the air of the city. This seems to be all: lunch on Saturday starts one hour earlier – but such a change gives Saturday a special, innocuous expression. And if on another day you have to wait another full hour for lunch, today a premature Brussels salad, a discounted omelet, and an undeserved steak will appear on the table in just a few seconds.
Saturday in Combray is one of those small indoor events that connect all the locals with invisible ties and become the subject of jokes and conversations. So the nicest thing you can do on Saturday is to remind someone that today is theirs. And if suddenly you meet someone absent-mindedly mentioning at half past ten that there is an hour and a half left before lunch, then, filled with the joy of Saturday Combray, you can happily object: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I forgot that today is Saturday!” Then have a good time for another quarter of an hour and discuss who will get up to tell about the funny mistake.
Before we get to the church, let’s try this rule on someone – at least on the gentleman, who is now walking along Pticchaya Street next to the old hotel “Perseed Bird”. Tall, with a long blond moustache, with a depressed, blue-eyed look, exquisitely gentle and combining two forms – engineer and architect of human souls – the writer Legrandin, one of the many representatives of the wonderful second line of Proust’s heroes.
Young Marcel and his father meet Legrandin on the street, which happens in one of the funniest episodes of the first volume. Contrary to the common misconception that Proust is a serious and ponderous read, behind the obvious sharpness of his text, there is always a half-smile of the creator. Be sure to come back to that short episode where Marcel’s father – who knows full well that Legrandine’s sister lives near the seaside town of Balbec, where they plan to send the boy – asks if he has any acquaintances in those parts… or perhaps relatives?
This is a true story from the 19th century, in which M. Legrandin, who has just flown like a hawk across Combray, begins to wriggle like a snake. When asked directly if he knows anyone in Balbec, Legrandin gracefully flips over an imaginary pan and says: “There, as elsewhere: I know everyone and I know no one, I know a lot, but I know a few people.” This parody match lasts only a few pages, but ends in a very effective draw. The narrator will humorously sum it up: “If only we had persevered more, [Легранден] In the end he would build a whole ethos of the landscape and celestial geography of Lower Normandy, just so as not to admit to us that his sister lives two kilometers from Balbec, and not to present us with a letter of recommendation.
In this episode, as in The Meeting of Aunt Leonie, aspects of Proust’s talent are revealed: elegant humor built on the delicate interweaving of complex human relationships, observation and action not in pure colors, but with shadows and halftones. We often stop here and there in the text for such episodes – the pearls of Proust’s novel; But now let us leave M. Legrandin to continue his replica duel with Marcel’s father and head towards the Rue Saint-Hilary. We can use it to get to church.
Chapter Three. church
We approach the church from the north gate—it appears sandwiched between M. Rabin’s pharmacy and Madame Loiseau’s house, like a simple citizen of Combray. When you look at the church from here, it seems that it could have its own number, like the other houses in the street, and that the postman could look into it in the morning, delivering letters.
From this perspective, the church looks very modest: you cannot say that it is, in essence, a Combray church. That from afar, the whole city comes to her, and appears in the train window with her appearance. The church speaks for and on behalf of the city, and as you draw closer, “you can see how, towards the edge of its dark cloak rising, in an open field, clustered in the wind, like sheep around a shepherdess, clustered the woolly gray backs of houses, here and there flanked by the remains of a perfectly round medieval fortress wall, just like a town from an old picture.”
Nabokov rightly noted that “intense poetic suspense” permeates the entire passage dedicated to the church, and that its pink tower “rises above the heap of roofs, like an arrow pointing to a chain of memories, like an exclamation point to a sensitive memory.”
This tower – the bell tower of St. Hilary – gave any activity, at any time of the day, any urban landscape in Combray a special expression, a certain completeness, an authenticity. And when, after Mass, Marcel and his parents came to Theodore’s for pastries, the bell tower rose with its sharp tip to the blue sky – golden and crunchy, like huge sacred bread with a crunchy crust and a sticky sun glare. This bell tower will remain with Marseille forever. Much later, having lost his way somewhere in a provincial French town or an unfamiliar neighborhood of Paris – and discovering that a passerby was pointing to the monastery’s bell tower as a landmark, Marcel could freeze for a long time, looking not only in the present, but also in the past, in his soul, in Combray.
The most curious thing about this bell tower – at least that is what Combray said – is the view from which it opens. The most wonderful thing about the view is not that you need to climb the entire ninety-seven steps and wrap yourself well, because there is always a terrible wind – no, the priest explained. The most wonderful thing is the view from the bell tower, which at the same time allows you to see what you can only see separately: the Vivonne Path, the fortifications of Saint-Assize-de-Combray, and the Jouy-le-Vicomte canals. An amazing view and unique overview.
The interior of the church turns out to be no less charming than the exterior. It exists as if in four dimensions, the fourth of which is time. As you walk along it, and make your way to your chair, it seems that you are in the valley of the fairies and the nave, extending inch after inch, chapel after chapel, overcomes entire ages.
Please take a closer look at one of the stained glass windows: long, divided into a hundred small rectangular pieces of mostly blue glass – resembling a deck of playing cards like the ones King Charles VI used to enjoy. “But then,” writes Proust, “either a ray flashed through it, or my sight, slipping, stirred this mobile and precious fire, which blazed and faded in the glass,—and after a moment it shimmered and sparkled like a peacock’s tail, and then it trembled and waved like a wonderful glowing rain, oozing from the height of the dark rock vault, along the damp walls, as if following my father, and carrying the prayer-books with them, I walked into the depths of some grotto, decorated With a rainbow of winding stalactites.
For Marcel, the church becomes a primitive grotto – the cave in which Christ was born; A place where many things happen for the first time. Here the young narrator first surrenders to the special magic of the hawthorn branches thrown on the altar during the service of the Virgin Mary, which are inseparable from the sacraments, as if they were participants in the service. The hawthorn, which will become a metaphor for Marcel throughout the entire Combray summer, because it is where Marcel will come to his bushes to say goodbye before leaving.
It also goes well with hawthorn. We’ll really get to know her later, but here the first encounter takes place, the first fascination with this name: Guermantes – as if invested in the mystery of time. However, if you stay here for a long time, the incense and beauty of the church can give you a headache. So let’s take a break and visit the next reference point in Combray – the park near Marcel’s house.