How Proust Can Change Your Life

PROBLEM: Like Madame Verdurin, Andrée’s mother is concerned with rising in the social world; she wishes to be invited for dinner by the right people, and isn’t. When her teenage daughter brings Albertine home, the girl innocently mentions that she has spent many holidays with the family of one of the governors of the Bank of France. This is striking news for Andrée’s mother, who has never been graced with an invitation to their large house, and would love to have been.

RESPONSE TO PROBLEM:

Every evening at the dinner-table, while assuming an air of indifference and disdain, [Andrée’s mother] was fascinated

by Albertine’s accounts of everything that had happened at the big house while she was staying there, and the names of the other guests, almost all of them people whom she knew by sight or by name. Even the thought that she knew them only in this indirect fashion … gave Andrée’s mother a touch of melancholy while she plied Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone, with pursed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to reassure herself to return safely to the “realities of life,” by saying to the butler, “Please tell the chef that his peas aren’t soft enough.” She then recovered her serenity

.

The chef responsible for this serenity and these peas makes even less of an appearance in the novel than his boss. Should we call him Gerard or Joel? Is he from Brittany or the Languedoc, did he train as sous-chef at the Tour d’Argent or at the Café Voltaire? But, of course, the critical issue is why it had to become this man’s problem that the governor of the Bank of France failed to invite his boss on holiday. Why did a bowl of his innocent peas have to carry the blame for the lack of an invitation to the governor’s large house?

The Duchesse de Guermantes finds serenity in a similarly unfair and unenlightening way. The Duchesse has an unfaithful husband and a cold marriage. She also has a footman called Poullein, who is much in love with a young woman. Because this woman works as a servant in another household and her days off rarely coincide with Poullein’s, the two lovers seldom meet. Shortly before one such longed-for meeting, a Monsieur de Grouchy comes for dinner at the Duchesse’s. During the meal, de Grouchy, a keen hunter, offers to send the Duchesse six brace of pheasants that he has shot on his country estate. The Duchesse thanks him, but insists that the gift is generous enough as it is, and that she will therefore send her own footman, Poullein, to pick up the pheasants, rather than further inconvenience Monsieur de Grouchy and his staff. The fellow dinner guests are much impressed by the Duchesse’s thoughtfulness. What they cannot know is that she has acted “generously” for one reason only: so that Poullein will be unable to keep his appointment with his beloved, and so that the Duchesse will therefore be a little less troubled by evidence of romantic happiness which she has been denied in her own relationship.

A BETTER SOLUTION: To spare the messenger, the cook, the footman, the peas.

PATIENT NO 5: Charles Swann, the man invited to lunch with the President, a friend of the Prince of Wales and an habitué of the most elegant salons. He is handsome, wealthy, witty, a little naïve, and very much in love.

PROBLEM: Swann receives an anonymous letter saying that his lover, Odette, has in the past been the mistress of numerous men, and has often frequented brothels. A distraught Swann wonders who could possibly have sent him a letter with such hurtful revelations, and moreover notes that it contains details that only a personal acquaintance of his would know.