100 YEARS

Proustians Around NYC this month...

On Reading Proust

New York Review of Books has this article in the latest issue: On Reading Proust:  Stephen Breyer, interviewed by Ioanna Kohler

The following interview with Justice Stephen Breyer was conducted in French by Ioanna Kohler and was initially published in La Revue des Deux Mondes in Paris as part of a special issue entitled “Proust vu d’Amérique.” It appears here in translation.

Surprisingly good.

The Guermantes Way III p 476-98

p 476 | Persian church in the mist...  flowers on the Ponte Vecchio
p 481 | ... collections of old quizzing glasses...
p 484 | Herculaneum (wiki), an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcano in 79 A.D.
p 485 | Fontainbleau golf club (a place, not a stick)
p 491 | In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. Tacitus (c. AD 56–117) was a senator & historian of the Roman Empire, who wrote concisely.
p 492 | Sir Henry Irving (English actor, 1838–1905) and Frédérick Lemaître  (French actor, 1800–76).
p 494 | Jade grapes

p 498 | Piazzetta: Doge's Palace and piazzetta, Venice, Italy, 1890s, showing 2 columns.-->  

 p 498 | Dome of the Salute: Santa Maria della Salute is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica in Venice.

Santa Maria della Salute

The Guermantes Way III p 431-59

p 431 | Armand Fallières (President of the Republic 1906–13) 

p 444 | Paul Claudel (poet & diplomat, 1868–1955)

          |Aristide Briand (1862–1932) was a French statesman who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic and was a co-laureate of the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.

by Fromentin

p 445 | Eugène Fromentin (1820-76), French writer & painter. <<-- font="">

p 445 | Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style.-->>

p 446 | Who was the new writer?

p 448-9 | Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourg (1817–1905) was the first monarch of Luxembourg from the House of Nassau-Weilburg.

p 459 | Dr. Paul Georges Dieulafoy

 

The Guermantes Way III p 404-431

From George Painter's 2-volume biography of Proust, p. 330-31, (v.1, 1978 pb edition):

"Dr. Proust's dining-room was also an ideally situated strategic point for observing the natural history of doctors, and in particular the originals of Cottard, Du Boulbon, Dieulafoy and Professor E—. 

"Dr.Eugène-Louis Doyen (1859-1916), a surgeon of sensationally original technique, with greying blond hair, astonished blue eyes and an athletic figure, was a model for many qualities of Cottard: his icy brutality, naivete, inspired tactlessness, fury when contradicted by a patient, and total, incurable ignorance in cultural and social matters. "With all her gifts," he flabbergasted Proust by announcing, "Mme Greffuhle hasn't managed to make her salon anything like as brilliant as Mme de Caillavet's!" Dr. Doyen regarded himself as Potain's* superior— "Potain's an old fool," he would say—an opinion shared by Mme Verdurin. The dates of his life fit those of Dr. Cottard, who is young in the 1880s and dies during the war.

"Professor Guyon, the urologist and teacher of Robert Proust, was a tall, thin man with white whiskers, from whose inexhaustible puns and cliches Proust collected a store of hints for Cottard; and Auguste Broca was another surgeon who, like Cottard, kept his students in fits of laughter with puns, chestnuts and oaths. As we have seen, Cottard, as a foundation-member of Mme Verdurin's “little nucleus” and an unfaithful husband, was Dr. Pozzi at Mme Aubernon's; his pince-nez and involuntary wink were those of Proust's professor, Albert Vandal; but his name was taken from Dr. Proust's fellow-student Cotard and Dr. [Jules] Cottet at Évian.

"The model for Dr. du Boulbon was the favourite physician of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Dr. Le Reboulet; but a guest of Dr. Proust, the warty-faced Dr.Laboulbène, contributed to his name.

"Dr. Dieulafoy, with his 'charmingly supple figure and face too handsome in itself,’ who is sent for simply to certify the grandmother's last agony and, says the Narrator at the time of writing, ‘is now no longer with us’, was a real person, Professor Georges Dieulafoy (1839-1911). He was Princesse Mathilda's doctor and guest, and Proust's friend Gabriel Astruc took him, no doubt with some good reason, for an original of Cottard.

Dr. Brissaud

"Professor E—, who automatically quotes poetry before examining the Narrator's grandmother, is Dr. Edouard Brissaud, author of Hygiene for Asthmatics, 'our dear médecin malgré lui on whom one almost has to use physical force to get him to talk medicine,' wrote Proust after consulting him in 1905.**

"Another friend of the Proust family and guest of Mme Aubernon was Dr. Albert Robin, who told Proust: "I might be able to get rid of your asthma, but I wouldn't advise it; in your case it acts as an outlet, and saves you from having other diseases.”

* Pierre Potain (1825 - 1901) was a French cardiologist.

** Proust told Lucien Daudet in 1921 that there was 'something of Brissaud's type of doctor, more a sceptic and a clever talker than a clinician, in Du Boulbon'. But it was [Proust's] habit not only to create a single character from several originals, but to distribute elements of a single real person over several characters.

Modern-day neurologists are still discussing the model for Dr. Cottard here. 

Denis Abrams' take on this scene  and the following one

p 431 | Uraemia:  the illness accompanying kidney failure (renal failure).
p 440 | Ciborium: liturgical vessel   

The Guermantes Way III p 366-409

p 371 | ...Voisenon or a Crébillon fils: 18th novelists of licentious fiction; flowers of Fantin-Latour ...

p 372 | Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), German Romanticist, critic, philologist, and translator; Broglie (a commune in the Eure department in Haute-Normandie in northern France); Marshall Boniface de Castellane; Pierre-Antoine Lebrun (French poet, 1785–1873); Narcisse Achille, Comte de Salvandy ( French writer & politician, 1795–1856); Ximénès Doudan (French journalist, 1800-72); phaeton (carriage);Albertine, Duchesse de Broglie (Mme de Staël’s daughter, 1797-1838)

p 375 | ducal coronet;

p 385 | The statue of Zeus at Olympia by Phidias; 
p 388 |Jules Michelet (French historian, 1798–1874), who first used & defined the word "Renaissance." 
p 389 | Franz-Josef I (Emperor of Austria-Hungary, 1830–1916); Henri V (Comte de Chambord; Pretender to the French throne, 1820–83)
p 391 | Saint-Cyr: convent school near Versailles, founded by Madame de Maintenon in 1686 for young ladies from impoverished noble families. Several of Racine's works were performed there by the pupils.
p 393 |  Édouard Drumont (1844-1917), pamphleteer & journalist, who disseminated anti-Semitic & xenophobic ideas, leading a campaign against Dreyfus based on prejudicial arguments.
p 399 | Condé family in France
p 400 | rent boy: a boy or young man who has sex with other men for money 






From Treharne's footnotes:
p 402 | Droits de l'Homme (Rights of Man): this second league was founded in February 1898 and represented Dreyfusard intellectuals.
p 402 | Jean-Baptiste Billot (1828-1907) was minister of war from 1896 to 1898. 
p 402 | Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) came to the political forefront thanks to the Dreyfus Affair. Proust is being fanciful about Reinach's influence in these two cases.
p 405 | Fernand Widal (1862-1929), French doctor and bacteriologist
p 407 | The oracular serpent Python was killed by Apollo.

Charcot

p 408 | Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) was the founder of modern neurology.  Freud was his most famous pupil. 
p 409 |"People said... go out": an incomplete quotation from Mme de Sévigné's letter to the Comtess de Guitaut, June 3, 1693.

The Guermantes Way III p 354-65

Leroy-Beaulieu

p 355 | Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1842–1912) was a French publicist and historian, Academy member, who specialized in Russian history.
 
p 356 | Minerva:Roman goddess of wisdom, sponsor of arts, trade, and defense. She was born from the godhead of Jupiter with weapons. The Romans later equated her with the Greek goddess Athena. She was the virgin goddess of music, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, weaving, crafts, magic; Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716): German mathematician & philosopher, with periwig; Marivaux (French playwright & novelist,1688–1763); Samuel Bernard (French financier, 1651–1739); the kobold is a sprite in Germanic mythology.

kobold

p 359 | Achille de Vaulabelle





 p361|frock-coat: a man's coat characterised by knee-length skirts all around the base, popular during the Victorian & Edwardian periods. The double-breasted style is sometimes called a Prince Albert. It is a fitted, long-sleeved coat with a center vent in back.

p 365 | Charlus was based primarily on poet Robert de Montesquieu.

Montesquieu

 

The Guermantes Way III p 343-53

p 345 | Louis, Comte de VERMANDOIS (1667–83). His elder sister was Marie Anne de Bourbon. Both were legitimized children of Louis XIV & his mistress Mlle Louise de la Vallière. There were half-sisters as well, but none are named Mme de Saint-Ferréol, who seems to be a created character.

p 347 | Franconian Knights;  Rhinegrave: A German count whose hereditary lands are in the Rheingau area north of the Rhine river; Electoral Palitinate; Martin Luther (German religious reformer, 1483–1546); Louis the German (son of Louis I; grandson of Charlemagne, 804?–76); Charron motor-cars; 

photo:Stefan Didam - Schmallenberg

p 347-9| Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (Looks like members of the Académie are French, but there are also foreign associate members.... which is what the Prince wanted to be. 
p 349 | Order of St. Andrew
p 351 | Kurgarten = spa garden;  Théâtre du Gymnase

Théâtre du Gymnase

p 352 | A silent bar
p 353 | Yellow Book, a quarterly literary periodical published in London (1894-97), associated by color with illicit French novels.

The Guermantes Way III p 328-43

p 328 | "The Learned Sisters" (in French, "les Doctes Soeurs," i.e., The Muses

p 329 | Rue Royal Club: This imposing group portrait commissioned from Tissot at the end of the Second Empire invites us to access the intimacy of the Circle of the Rue Royale, a male club founded in 1852. Painted in 1868. Charles Haas, one of the models for Swann, is on the far right. By the mid-1800s, maybe they were admitting "every Tom, Dick and Harry" as Bloch imagines, but not when this painting was done.

p 330 |  Devil's Island:  French penal colony off the coast of South America.
p 330 |  From Traharne:  "Caudine Forks ... company": this alludes to a conference in September 1898, presided over by the newspaper editor Gerault-Richard, in which the Socialists were to discuss the Dreyfus Affair and at which Jaurès was to speak. The Caudine Forks were the narrow pass where the Roman army was trapped by the Samnites in 321 B.C. and made to pass under the yoke.
p 330 | Praetorian Guard, Latin Cohors Praetoria, household troops of the Roman emperors. Here, I think, Norpois means to refer to a private army.

Pike | medieval weapon consisting of a spearhead attached to a long pole or pikestaff; superseded by the bayonet.
p 331 | the Spree: German / Czech river which also runs through Berlin
p 331 | ultima ratio: The last resort. Short for the metaphor "The Last Resort of Kings and Common Men" referring to the act of declaring war; used in the names the French sniper rifle PGM Ultima Ratio. Louis XIV of France had Ultima Ratio Regum ("last argument of kings") cast on the cannons of his armies; motto of the 1st Battalion 11th Marines.
p 332 | Col. Émile Driant (1855–1916) was a French nationalist writer, politician, and army officer.
p 332 | Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) was a French statesman who led the nation to victory in WWI. On 1/13/1898, Clemenceau, as owner/editor of the Paris daily L'Aurore, published Émile Zola's "J'accuse" on the front page. He decided to run the controversial article, which became a famous part of the Dreyfus Affair, in the form of an open letter to the President, Félix Faure.
p 334 | Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type (Biol). In social science, atavism is a cultural tendency, e.g., people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking & acting of a former time. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus. An atavus is a great-great-great-grandfather or, more generally, an ancestor. In this case, the duc is dropping his modern political position & adopting one associated more with an older (titled) relative (anti-Dreyfusard).
p 334 | Japhetics: the descendants of Japheth, the third son of Noah and father of the white race (i.e., Europeans). So this may be an ethnic slur, which could have caused Bloch's surprised response.
p 335 | As editor, M. Judet maintained a conservative, Nationalist position in this newspaper. Zola later sued him, with the result shown in this headline from the New York Times:  

Zola's Defamers Convicted; French Novelist Wins His Suit Against Le Petit Journal -- Crowd Cheers His Enemies. PARIS, Aug. 3. -- The libel action of M. Emile Zola against Le Petit Journal has resulted in a fine of 2,000f. upon M. Judet, the editor, and of 500f. upon each of his two assistants. The three were mulcted in 5,000f. each as damages. 

p 337 | Vicomte Raymond de Borelli's (1827-1906) play in verse Alain Chartier (1889) shocked some theater-goers.
p 338 | Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906), French critic. Taught at the École Normale Supérieure & was director of the Revue des deux mondes.
p 338 | surah: soft twilled silk
p 340 | suzerainty: A relation between states in which a subservient nation has its own government, but is unable to take international action independent of the superior state.
p 342 | pun in French: "parle de Saint-Loup" and "parle de loup" ("speak of the devil")

The Guermantes Way: III p 319-28

p 320 | Cercle Artistique et Littéraire de la Rue Volney. One of the largest clubs in Paris. Wide membership but members must be voted in. Concerts & dramatic soirées were held there, often written by the members. From Dictionary of Paris by Charles Dickens, Jr., 1862.
p 320 | Traharne notes: Émile Ollivier (1825-1913), minister of justice under Napoleon III, a somewhat discredited figure after his support for war in 1870.
p 325 | Paty de Clam: in charge of the first Dreyfus inquiry, and one of the witnesses in the Zola trial.
p 326 | Cavaignac & Cuignet: Godefroy Cavaignac (1853-1905), war minister in 1898, continued to see Dreyfus as guilty and to oppose retrial, even after Cuignet, who was attached to his department in the War Ministry, had communicated Henry's forgery to him and Henry had been found guilty.
p 326 | Joseph Reinach (1856-1921) was a fervent supporter of rettrial and author of a monumental study of the Dreyfus Affair.
p 326 | in petto: "deep down": inter pocula: "in his cups", i.e., to a close circle of friends.
p 327 | Prince Henri d'Orléans: great-grandson of Louis-Philippe who publicly congratulated Esterhazy after his acquittal in February 1898.
p 327 | The Duc de Chartres was father of the Prince d'Orléans.
p 328 | Princesse Clémentine d'Orléans, daughter of Louis-Philippe and mother to Ferdinand de Bulgarie.