Getting ready for Balbec

Full text of Place-Names: the Place (at the end of Swann's Way)

Departure for Balbec  according to Waggish

Place-names on the way to Bal­bec-Plage (326).

[p303] Gare Saint-Lazare : Important Parisian railway station


 ..."certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by ..."Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Paolo Veronese (1528–88): 

(above)  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626-96)  [p305]; one of her many letters (right)
[p308] "... not the enraptured traveller Ruskin speaks of..."
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an English art critic and social thinker, also remembered as a poet and artist. His essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He was also a great traveller and travel writer; see this Times article.
[p309] Chardin or Whistler 
[p310] Marcus Atilius Regulus: Roman general and consul; not sure what text his mother is quoting. 

[p311] Villa Montretout

[p314] Mme de Simiane: "Mme de Sévigné corresponded with her daughter for nearly thirty years. A clandestine edition, containing twenty-eight letters or portions of letters, was published in 1725, followed by two others the next year. Pauline de Simiane, Mme de Sévigné's granddaughter, decided to officially publish her grandmother's correspondence." (wiki)
[p322] Trocadéro museum, changed from Proust's time, now contains the Musée national des Monuments Français, which is where M. saw the casts of the statues of the church.
[p324] Quimperlé ; Pont-Aven

Place Names (v I) Pages for March 2011

3/3: Cruel memories (278). Gilberte’s strange laugh, evoked in a dream (281; cf. 217). Fewer visits to Mme Swann (283). Exchange of tender letters, progress of indifference (286). 

3/10: Exchange of tender letters and progress of indifference (286). Approach of spring: Mme Swann’s ermine and the guilder-roses in her drawing-room; nostalgia for Combray (288). Odette and the “Down-and-outs Club” (290). An intermediate social class (295).

3/17:  NEW BOOK! Part 2 PLACE-NAMES:  THE PLACE (searchable text online)

Departure for Balbec (299). Subjectiveness of love (300). Contradictory effects of habit (301). Railway stations (303). Françoise’s simple and infallible taste (309).  Alcoholic euphoria (312). Mme de Sévigné and Dostoyevski (315). Sunrise from the train (316); the milk-girl (317). Balbec church (322). “The tyranny of the Particular” (324).

3/24: Place-names on the way to Bal­bec-Plage (326). Arrival at Balbec-Plage (327). The manager of the Grand Hotel (327, 332). My room at the top of the hotel (333; cf. I 8). Attention and habit (333, 339). My grandmother’s kindness (334). 

About Roger Shattuck

Includes bibliography

Radio Proust has been updated

Have a look at the Radio Proust website at Bard.  Many updates, videos, new photographs, and links to information and courses.

Within a Budding Grove (vol II pp 241-51) Notes for February 2011

p 242 | Grebe:  a diving bird without webbed feet. Really nice photo of a French grebe is here; look at the large size to see feather details. 

p 242 | Cockade : a badge on a hat; more pictures here. 

p 243 | 1928 lithograph advertising Maitre Fleurs Naturelles, an important Parisian florist of the day. 

p 244 | LACHAUME was -- and still is -- one of the important florists in Paris. Probably as expensive as Odette said... [

p 246 | Lohengrin is an opera by Richard Wagner (wiki). Here's a synopsis of Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera House website. 

Mariano Fortuny

Thanks to VA for finding this terrific page highlighting one gorgeous Fortuny gown, as well as the video that follows. We'll read more about him later in the book, but it's interesting that this sale page quotes Proust.  Wonder what it sold for...

And here's a video from Otis Fashion College showing more of his gorgeous clothes:



UPDATE 5/9/11: Thanks to un home sobrer in Barcelona for sending this link to a Fortuny exhibition held there some time ago. He points out that Mariano Fortuny Madrazo (Granada 1871 - Venice 1949) was the son of Catalan painter Marià Fortuny i Marsal,  who died all too soon in Rome in 1874. This kind of international cultural sharing is quite amazing!

Within a Budding Grove (vol II pp 229-49) Notes for February 2011

• Gift books of P.-J. Stahl [229]: P.-J. Stahl was the adapter of Little Women and Hans Brinker and is the pen-name of M. Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of the magazine Magasin d'éducation et de récréation ("Education and Entertainment Magazine") and longtime editor of Jules Verne. Reproduction here. More about Hertzel & Verne here.  "Molly remembered the quality of illustration in her children's books 'The pictures in our books were well drawn, but colour was very rare and highly prized' she recalled (A London Child, p. 51). She had a copy of P. J. Stahl Little Rosy's Voyage Round the World (1869) in English, it was a 'prime favourite' because each adventure was accompanied by a full-page illustration by Lorenz Frolich.

Battle of Grathe Heath by Lorenz Frolich

Louis XVI  drawing rooms (1643-1715); includes voyeuse chairs, with padded backs, so men could sit astride & rest their arms on them, perhaps to watch gambling. History of furniture link here.

Japanese Iris

Mlle Lili, heroine of the story
two intaglios cut into a topaz [230]
Parma violets [231]
Lespinasse [232]
du Deffand [232]

Henry Gréville (October 12, 1842, Paris - 1902), pen name for Mrs. Alice Durand, born Fleury, was a French writer.  This gown was an illustration in one of her books. [233]


Louis XV silk [233]

Empire Samovar

A samovar is a heated metal container traditionally used to heat and boil water in and around Russia, as well as in other Central, South-Eastern, Eastern European countries, and in the Middle-East. Since the heated water is usually used for making tea, many samovars have an attachment on the tops of their lids to hold and heat a teapot filled with tea concentrate..  Though traditionally heated with coal or charcoal, many newer samovars use electricity and heat water in a similar manner as an electric water boiler. Antique samovars are often displayed for their beautiful workmanship. [233]

Jockey Club [234]

Vatel 

Scullion, male counterpart to Scullery maid, servant who performed menial kitchen jobs (washing, cleaning, etc.) in large households during Middle Ages and Renaissance. [237]

Redfern fashion,  c. 1913... [238]

Fecit? (made it, created it)

Raudnitz [238]

Proust Literary Tour

Information on touring all the fun Proust sites in France.

Within a Budding Grove (vol II) Pages for February 2011

2/3:  Odette’s “winter-garden” (228): splendor of the chrysan­themums and poverty of the conversation: Mme Cottard (234); Mme Bontemps (234); her sassy niece Albertine (237); the Prince d’Agrigente (239);

2/10:  Mme Verdurin visits Mme Swann (239-42). Mmes Cottard & Bontemps, flowers, hats, invitations (242-50)

2/17:  Painful New Year’s Day (251). “Suicide of that self which loved Gilberte” (255). Clumsy interventions (256). Letters to Gilberte: “one speaks for oneself alone” (259). Odette’s drawing-room: retreat of the Far East & invasion of the 18th century (261-65).

2/24: New hair-styles and silhouettes (265; cf. I 278).  A sudden impulse interrupts the cure of detachment (271); Aunt Léonie’s Chinese vase (272). Two walkers in the Elysian twilight (273). Impossibility of happiness (274). The opposing forces of memory and imagination (276). Because of Gilberte, Marcel declines a dinner-party invitation where he would have met Albertine (277).

Random Proust Sightings

February 15, 2011 Posted by Vicky Raab

When I started “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore,” I began to have worrisome Proustian flashbacks of being a chimp in a weird but normal family of very cute chimps in very cute outfits who lived in my house and ate coveted breakfast cereals with me—Wheat Chex, Corn Chex, and Rice Chex—who are maybe on “The Ed Sullivan Show” around the time of the Beatles?  Read more New Yorker Book Bench blog

Published there in 2005 and discovered in a Paris book shop by FSG editor Lorin Stein (who commissioned an English translation, appearing in paperback this month), 03 is a single paragraph that runs for 85 pages, a young man's simultaneously punkish and Proustian meditations on his attraction toward a mentally disabled girl at a bus stop. The Daily Beast