In Search of Lost Time (70 page)

62
. ‘
sonata-snake
': the Marquise Diane de Saint-Paul, a brilliant pianist and a scandalmonger, was known in Proust's circleas the ‘
serpentà sonates
', or ‘sonata-snake'. The nickname is a play on the word for rattlesnake,
serpent à sonnettes
.

63
.
Gustave Moreau
: French painter (1826–98), whose subjects were products of imagination and fantasy and whose refined and sensual aestheticism interested Proust.

64
.
the Île des Cygnes
: ‘Island of the Swans', an island in the larger of the two lakes in the Bois de Boulogne.

65
.
the Primavera
: painting by Botticelli which hangs in the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

66
.
Moses pour water into a trough
: Botticelli depicted the child Jesus playing with a pomegranate in his
Madonna della Melagrana
; in the Sistine Chapel, one of the scenes from Botticelli's
Trials of Moses
shows the prophet drawing water for the flocks of the daughters of Jethro.

67
.
Chatou
: a village on the banks of the Seine sixteen kilometres from Paris, a popular spot, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with fishermen, boaters and Impressionist painters.

68
.
Labiche comedy
: Eugène Labiche (1815–88) was a French dramatist and author of comedies of manners and vaudevilles.

69
.
Bossuet
: Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), theologian, moralist and one of the great orators of French history.

70
.
Dante's last circle
: the last book of
The Divine Comedy
places the greatest sinners in the ninth circle of Hell.

71
.
Noli me tangere
: ‘Do not touch me' – words attributed by John to Jesus Christ addressing Mary Magdalen.

72
.
Une Nuit de Cléopatre
: ‘A Night with Cleopatra', a work by Victor Massé (1822–84), composer of
La Reine Topaze
and
Paul et Virginie. Une Nuit de Cléopatre
was first performed in 1885.

73
.
the tombs at Dreux… the Château de Pierrefonds
: the royal chapel of Dreux contains the tombs of the princes of Orléans. The château of Pierrefonds, at the edge of the forest of Compiègne, was originally built by Louis d'Orléans in the fifteenth century, fell into ruins, was bought by Napoleon I, and was eventually entrusted to the care of Viollet-le-Duc by Napoleon III in 1857. Restoration work was completed in 1884.

74
.
Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud
: the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre de Beauvais, built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is famous for its Gothic choir. The Roman church of Saint-Loup-de-Naud, in the département of Seine-et-Marne, is one of the oldest in France.

75
.
the Map of Love
: an allegorical map devised by the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) and introduced in her novel
Clélie
(1654–60). The Map of Love shows three different roads leading to true love.

76
.
the church at Brou
: the church at Brou, near Bourg-en-Bresse, was built by the order of Margaret of Austria in memory of her husband Philibert le Beau (1480–1504), Duke of Savoie.

77
.
Lapérouse
: this restaurant lies outside Odette's ‘smart' territory, on the quai des Grands-Augustins quite close to the quai d'Orléans where Swann lives.

78
.
Bal des Incohérents
: ‘Ball of the Incoherents'. The Incoherents were artists who mocked the official salons and organized highly successful exhibitions of their own starting in 1882. They celebrated the opening day with a costume ball.

79
.
my love
: in English in the original.

80
.
the season at Bayreuth
: inaugurated in 1876, the Festspielhaus, Wagner's model theatre at Bayreuth, became the international centre of the cult of Wagner beginning in 1882. The five castles of Louis II of Bavaria (1845–86) were inspired by Versailles or by the German legends that Wagner used in his operas.

81
.
Clapisson
: Antonin-Louis Clapisson (1808–66), whose music had already gone out of fashion in 1880, was a French composer of comic operas.

82
.
Mme de Maintenon's daily life
: Françoise d'Aubigné (1635–1719) de Maintenon secretly married Louis XIV in 1684. Saint-Simon entitled one section of his
Mémoires
, ‘Mechanics, private life and conduct of Mme de Maintenon', and detailed the items of her table.

83
.
Lully
: Jean Baptiste Lully (1632–87), Italian-born French composer.

84
.
Septennate
: seven-year term of a French president. The term Proust is most probably referring to is that of Edmé Patrice, Comte de MacMahon, which began in 1873 and ended with his resignation in 1879.

85
.
Botticelli's Primavera, bella Vanna or Venus
: Primavera, the goddess of spring, is depicted in Botticelli's
Spring
; the ‘bella Vanna' in
Giovanna Tornabuoni and the Three Graces
; and Venus in
The Birth of Venus
.

86
.
Balzac's ‘tigers'
: in both French and English a ‘tiger' was a gentleman's groom, either a boy or a small man. In his pastiche of Balzac (in
Pastiches et mélanges
), Proust refers to ‘Paddy, the famous tiger of the late Baudenord'.

87
.
paintings by Mantegna
: Mantegna, an Italian painter and engraver (
c.
1430– 1506), was part of a team that decorated the Church of the Erimitani at Padua between 1449 and 1456. In the Ovetari chapel of that church are the
Scenes from the Life of Saint John and Saint Christopher
. In
The Martyrdom of Saint John
a warrior meditates, leaning on his shield. Mantegna painted the
Altarpiece of San Zeno
, at Verona, between 1456 and 1459.

88
.
some Albrecht Dürer Saxon
: Dürer (1471–1528) was influenced by Mantegna, whose engravings he copied.

89
.
cadogan
: hairstyle in which a bunch of hair is folded twice at the back of the head and tied with a ribbon.

90
.
Goya
: Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), Spanish painter several of whose paintings hung in the Louvre in Proust's day, though it is unclear which painting Proust has in mind here.

91
.
Benvenuto Cellini
: Florentine goldsmith, sculptor and writer (1500–1571). It is not clear which work by Cellini Proust has in mind here.

92
.
Orphée
:
Orphée et Eurydice
(1762) by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), a German-born composer whose music is considered French. The
flute solo occurs in act II, as Orpheus is searching the Elysian Fields in the Underworld for his lost beloved, Eurydice.

93
.
Liszt
: Franz Liszt (1811–86), Hungarian pianist and composer who lived in Paris for some years (
c.
1840). One of the two
Légendes
he wrote for piano solo is titled
St François prédicant aux oiseaux
.

94
.
Princesse Mathilde
: daughter of Jérôme Bonaparte, Princesse Mathilde (1820–1904) entertained the most brilliant members of the artistic and literary world. Among her guests were Taine, Renan, the Goncourts and Flaubert.

95
.
baignoire
: literally, ‘bathtub' – a ground-floor theatre box, projecting and rounded like a bathtub.

96
.
Mérimée
: Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), widely travelled French writer noted for his exoticism.

97
.
Meilhac and Halévy
: Henri Meilhac (1831–97) was a French author of drawing-room comedies and opera libretti; Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), French composer, most notably of
La Juive
, was his collaborator.

98
. ‘
guests from Belloir's
': Belloir's, in the rue de la Victoire in Paris, rented supplies for dances and parties.

99
. ‘
Empire
': the style of furniture which became popular during the Empire (1804–15) favoured mahogany and was cubic and massive, with gilded or antique green and bronze trim and dark marble tops. Common decorative devices were sphinxes, laurel wreaths, Winged Victories, sheaves and cornucopias. Napoleon's symbol, the bee, replaced the royal
fleur de lys
.

100
.
most astonishing name
: the joke here, on the name Cambremer, sees it as being made up of abbreviations of
Cambronne
and
merde
(shit).
Le mot de Cambronne
(said to have been uttered by Cambronne, a general at Waterloo) is the traditional euphemism for
merde
.

101
.
the Hôtel Vouillemont
: the Hôtel Vouillemont was in the rue Boissy d'Anglas. In an 1863 guide to Paris it was described as a quiet first-class hotel.

102
.
La Princesse de Clèves or of René: La Princesse de Clèves
(1678), a novel by Mme de La Fayette, told the tragic story of the frustrated love of a young married noblewoman for a gallant young duke;
René
(1805) was a tale by Chateaubriand recounting the passion between a brother and sister.

103
.
Tristan: Tristan and Isolde
(1865), an opera by Richard Wagner.

104
.
of a Lavoisier, of an Ampère
: Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–94), a French chemist, one of the fathers of modern chemistry, to which he contributed the law of conservation of matter; André Marie Ampère (1775–1836), French mathematician and physicist who propounded the theory of electromagnetism.

105
.
Nicolas Maes… Vermeer
: Nicolas Maes (
c.
1634–93), Dutch painter. It
is unclear who painted
Diana with Her Companions
and Maes was once considered as a possible candidate.

106
.
You're never as unhappy as you think
: the allusion here is the forty-ninth maxim of François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), French moralist and author of
Maximes
(1665): ‘One is never either as happy or as unhappy as one imagines.'

107
.
Les Filles de Marbre by Théodore Barrière
: the play (literally, ‘Girls of Marble') (1853) is about courtesans who are cold and unfeeling.

108
.
to call her ‘tu'
: in French, the distinction is still made between the formal ‘you', ‘
vous
', and the informal ‘
tu
'; and in the period in which this novel is set, the formal ‘you' was far more prevalent even among children and within families.

109
.
Journal d'un Poète by Alfred de Vigny
: a journal written by Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), French poet, novelist and dramatist. The passage quoted is dated 22 April 1833, and is an exact quotation.

110
.
the Desolation of Nineveh
: an allusion to Ruskin's
The Bible of Amiens
, which appeared in Proust's translation in 1904. Ruskin points out the beasts of Nineveh on the façade of the cathedral of Amiens crawling ‘among the tottering walls and peeping out of their rents and crannies'.

111
.
the three travellers
: four, actually.

112
.
the Mirlitons
: an annual art show held each February by the Cercle de l'Union Artistique, a club created by the merger of the Cercle des Champs-Élysées and Les Mirlitons.

113
.
Machard
: Jules-Louis Machard (1839–1900) first showed in the Salon of 1863. He was a fashionable portrait-painter for many years.

114
.
Leloir
: probably Jean-Baptiste-Auguste Leloir (1809–92), a French academic historical and religious painter who also did occasional portraits.

1
. ‘
modern style
': in English in the original.

2
.
Exposition
: these illuminated fountains were installed on the Champs-de-Mars for the Exposition of 1889.

3
.
at Finistère itself
: département at the western extreme of Brittany; the name derives from the Latin,
finis terrae
, ‘land's end.'

4
.
the Great Bear
: name of the constellation also called the Plough or the Big Dipper.

5
.
Saint-Mary-of-the-Flowers
: Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral of Florence which Proust refers to by its French name, ‘Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs'.