Time Regained VI pp 33-40

 p 33 | Lettres à Mademoiselle de Volland by Denis Diderot

 p 33 | Nymphenburg was established in 1747 as Europe’s sole maker of high-quality porcelain. 

 p 34 |Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904):French painter & lithographer, known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists & writers.

 

p 35 | Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634–93), known as Madame de La Fayette, was a French author who wrote La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature.  

 p 35 | Henrietta of England (1644 –70) was the youngest daughter of King Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France.  

p 39 |  Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) is a collection of poetry by Victor Hugo, published in 1856. It consists of 156 poems in six books. Most of the poems were written between 1841 and 1855, though the oldest date from 1830. Memory plays an important role in the collection, as Hugo was experimenting with the genre of autobiography in verse. (wiki)

p 39 |  A geometer is a mathematician whose area of study is geometry.

p 40 | On November 8, 1895, German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen stumbled on X-rays while experimenting with Lenard tubes and Crookes tubes.

p 37 |  Napoleon Bonaparte’s Licorice Obsession: Apparently, Cottard was right!

p 37 | The Barberini Palace is a 17th-century palace in Rome, facing the Piazza Barberini in Rione Trevi.

p 37 | Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer, best known for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses.  

Stevenson by Sargent

Time Regained VI pp 27-32

 

Edmond & Jules (by Nadar)

 p. 27 | The Goncourt brothers offer an intimate view into late 19th century French literary society:

 p. 27 | Eugène Fromentin (1820–76) was a French painter and writer. Madeleine is a character in his novel Dominique (1862), known for its psychological depiction of characters content with second best in life and love. In the novel, Dominique falls in love with the unattainable Madeleine, a friend’s married cousin. To overcome his disappointment, he throws himself into a Paris literary career, only to realize that his work is mediocre. 

p. 27 | Charles Blanc  (1813-82) was a French art critic.  Paul Bins, comte de Saint-Victor  (1827-81), known as Paul de Saint-Victor, was a French author and critic. Charles Sainte-Beuve (1804-69) wrote novels and poetry, but was primarily known as a French literary critic. Proust disagreed with his belief that in order to understand an artist and his work, it was necessary to understand that artist's biography and refuted it in his collection of essays Contre Sainte-Beuve ("Against Sainte-Beuve"). Philippe Burty (1830-90) was a French art critic who supported the Impressionsts, Japonism, and the revival of etching.

p. 27 | Eugène Gautier (1822-78) was a French classical violinist and composer. 

p. 27 | Les Maîtres d'autrefois ("The Masters of Past Time", 1876), art criticism by Fromentin, was an influential appreciation of early Dutch & Belgian painting, including Rubens & Rembrandt. He also contextualizes the art by noting that the Dutch Golden Age painting develops shortly after Holland won its independence. 

p. 27 | ... towers of the Trocadéro...

 

p. 27 | Verdurins' Quai Conti neighborhood...

 

p. 27 | Les Maîtres d'autrefois ("The Masters of Past Time", 1876), art criticism by Fromentin, was an influential appreciation of early Dutch & Belgian painting, including Rubens & Rembrandt. He also contextualizes the art by noting that the Dutch Golden Age painting develops shortly after Holland won its independence. 

  

p. 28 |... a well-head... an above-ground top of a well...

p. 28 | Coronation of the Virgin...., for example (not of Sansovino): 

 p. 28 | Jacopo d'Antonio Sansovino (1486–1570): Italian sculptor and architect, best known for his works around the Piazza San Marco in Venice, crucial in Venetian Renaissance architecture.

p. 28 | ... The Salute in Guardi's pictures....

Santa Maria della Salute

Guardi

p. 28 | Francesco Lazzaro Guardi (1712–93) was an Italian painter, one of the last practitioners of the classic Venetian school of painting.

p. 28 | Rue du Bac owes its name to a ferry (bac) established around 1550 on what is now the quai Voltaire, to transport stone blocks for the construction of the Palais des Tuileries. It crossed the Seine at the site of today's Pont Royal, bridge constructed under the reign of Louis XIV to replace the Pont Rouge built in 1632 by the financier Barbier. Originally, the street was named Grand Chemin du Bac, then Ruelle du Bac and Grande Rue du Bac. (wiki)

p. 28 | ... my aunt de Courmont = Nephtalie Le Bas de Courmont (née Lefebvre de Béhaine, 1802-44), who encouraged the brothers to become art collectors.

p. 28 | Miramiones: Nuns of the order of S. Genevieve, named after they combined with another order of which Mme. de Miramion was the founder in 1665, for education & nursing (A Glossary of Ecclesiastical Terms, ed. Shipley).

p. 28 | Little Dunkirk, a retail shop near the Pont-Neuf that sold "... French and foreign merchandise..." (Birnie, An Economic History of Europe, 1760-1930)

p. 28 | Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-80) was a French draftsman, printmaker, etcher and painter. His enchanted genre scenes are often imbued with sweetness and elegance; their refined colors create a poetic mood. He often tempered his works with a moral tone, alluding to fleeting time and the vanity of worldly pleasures. Saint-Aubin is best known for his illustrations and tiny drawings in the margins of sales catalogues and his own Salon livrets, or guidebooks. He could capture a scene in few strokes and seldom forgot the humor in life.

p. 29 | Fermiers Généraux (publishers): a fictitious edition, referring to the 18th-century edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers, which the Goncourts admired as an unparalleled example of book production (Patterson's notes).

The Oyster and the Pleaders

The Oyster and the Litigants by Jean de La Fontaine. 

p. 29 | Polish sculptor Viradobetski.... we know him as "Ski," but someone thinks they are related... 

p. 29 | Japanese chrysanthemums: The chrysanthemum, or "kiku" in Japanese, was first introduced to Japan from China in the 5th century. Because they used the flower’s image on official seals & the throne, the imperial family was called "chrysanthemum throne;" it remains the symbol of the Japanese emperor today. In Japan, a white mum is the proper flower for a funeral, and a red chrysanthemum is a symbol of love. (wiki)

p. 29 | Archduke Rudolf of Austria (1858-89): apparent suicide. 

p. 29 | Charlemagne was revered as a saint in the Holy Roman Empire and some other locations after the 12th century. The Apostolic See did not recognise his invalid canonisation by Antipope Paschal III and it annulled all of Paschal's ordinances at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. He is not enumerated among the 28 saints named "Charles" in the Roman Martyrology. His beatification has been acknowledged as cultus confirmed and is celebrated on 28 January.

p. 29 | La Faustin: Edmond Goncourt novel (1882), exploring the life of a Parisian actress.

p. 30 | Yung-cheng plate... 

the du Barry

p. 30 | "...the du Barry...": Jeanne Bécu, Comtesse du Barry (1743–93) was the last mistress of Louis XV.

p. 30 | Château de Jean d'Heurs: a former abbey in Meuse where the Goncourt cousins, who kept an excellent kitchen, lived.  

p. 31 | Léoville: Wine from Château Léoville Barton.

p. 31 | The brill (Scophthalmus rhombus) is a species of flatfish in the turbot family. 

p. 32 | Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830): major English portrait painter, 4th President of the Royal Academy.  

p. 32 | Pierre Gouthière (1732–1813), great French bronze chaser and gilder who worked for Louis XV and Louis XVI. 

On the Goncourt section:

Comments & an essay at The Cork Lined Room

More from the Cork-Lined Room

Time Regained VI pp 1-27

p 1-4 | the two ways (in French, with photos; translation to come); also here.

p 7: Chinese porcelain bowl

 

 

 

 

 

 p 7 | ... Léa dressed as a man... (cross-dressing)

p 8 |... Pascal's gulf.... From a poem titled "Le Gouffre"  ("The Gulf"), the opening lines of Baudelaire:

"Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.
— Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,"

"Pascal had his abyss that moved along with him.
— Alas! all is abysmal, — action, desire, dream,"

p 12 | Marienbad: Mariánské Lázně, a spa town in the Czech Republic. Most of its buildings are from its Golden Era in the second half of the 19th century, when celebrities & European rulers came to enjoy the curative carbon dioxide springs.

Empress Theodora

p 17 | Empress Theodora: (c.497-548 AD), powerful Byzantine empress, wife of Justinian I, said to have been a low-born actress.

p 21 | ...battle of Ulm...: on 16–19 October 1805 was a series of skirmishes that allowed Napoleon I to trap an entire Austrian army under the command of Karl Freiherr Mack von Leiberich with minimal losses and to force its surrender near Ulm in the Electorate of Bavaria  (wiki).  The Battle of Lule Burgas (1912) was here in the First Balkan War. (Sidenote: its emperor was Theodosius I. We see the fictional Theodosius II visit Paris twice during the novel.)

p 23 | La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes): 1835 novel by Balzac, part of La Comédie humaine.

p 25 | Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) was a French mathematician and physicist known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series & their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law are also named in his honor; also generally credited with discovering the greenhouse effect.

p 25 | Tobolsk is a town in Tyumen Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers. Founded in 1590, Tobolsk is the second oldest Russian settlement east of the Ural Mountains in Asian Russia, and is a historic capital of the Siberia region. In the early 1900s, it was famous as the administrative center of Grigori Rasputin's home province, and is located close to his birthplace.
 
p 26 | the Goncourt Brothers produced the Goncourt Journal together from 1850-1870, then by Edmond alone till 1896. It was a candid chronicle of the literary and artistic Parisian world in which they lived. Proust paid the Journal a tribute by including a pastiche* of it in Time Regained. Some say the Journal's obsessive chronicling of the most minute details of its authors' social lives and rendering of them into literary art anticipates Proust's novel.  (wiki) 

* A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates. (wiki)

Sodom and Gomorrah Table of Contents Enright Under Construction

Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 1-21
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 22-28
 

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 162-77
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 177-95; Sturrock, 141-43
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 195-203
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 203-245; Sturrock, 154-79
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 245-305

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 323-42

Sodom and Gomorrah Table of Contents (Enright)

Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 1-21
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 22-28
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 28-44
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 44-52
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 55-66
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 70-77
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 78-90
Sodom and Gomorrah IV p 91-95
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 95-99
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 99-108

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 108-117
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 119-23
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 123-42
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 142-62

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 162-77
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 177-95 (Sturrock, 141-43)

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 195-203
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 203-245 (Sturrock, 154-79)
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 245-305

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 305-323
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 323-42
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 342-357
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 357-72
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 372-97

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 397-446
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 447-55
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 456-70
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 471-83
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 484-89

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 492-514
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 515-42
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 542-62
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 563-593

Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 593-611
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 611-625
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 625-639
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 639-662
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 662-691
Sodom and Gomorrah IV pp 692-

The Captive and The Fugitive Table of Contents (Enright; incomplete)

The Captive V 1-27
The Captive V 27-46
The Captive V 47-64
The Captive V 64-83
The Captive V 84-109
The Captive V 109-32
The Captive V 133-47
The Captive V 147-56
The Captive V 156-68
The Captive V 169-210
The Captive V 210-30
The Captive V 231-61
The Captive V 261-72
The Captive V 272-89
The Captive V 289-310
The Captive V 310-51
The Captive V 351-69
The Captive V 369-91
The Captive V 391-403
The Captive V 403-408
The Captive V 408-44
The Captive V 444-501
The Captive V 501-11
The Captive V 511-31
The Captive V 531-59

*    *     *

The Fugitive V 563-614
The Fugitive V 654-95
The Fugitive V 695-712
The Fugitive V 712-32
The Fugitive V 732-52
The Fugitive V 752-82

Articles about Proust

From LitHub:
 How the French Reread Proust. There Are Three Types of People, and All of Them Reread Proust By Laure Murat 7/16

When Marcel Proust Was an Anxious Debut Novelist. On the Launch of In Search of Lost Time By William Carter 7/16

Six Writers on the Genius of Marcel Proust: Siri Hustvedt, Edmund White, Andre Aciman, Francine Prose, Aleksandar Hemon, and Daniel Mendelsohn  7/16

Literary Frenemies: Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust By Claude Arnaud 10/16

On the Boyhood Classmates Who Drove Proust to Write.   First He Was Transfixed, Then He Was... Disappointed.   By Caroline Weber  5/18

On the horribly awkward night James Joyce met Marcel Proust. By Jonny Diamond 5/20

Really, Here’s Why You Should Read Proust. His Biographer Makes the Case.  By William C. Carter 7/16  

Two Never-Before-Published Letters from Marcel Proust to His Neighbor.   Lydia Davis Translates a Couple of Requests for Quiet 8/17  

The Polish Army Officer Who Conjured Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp: On Józef Czapski's Wartime Lectures  By Eric Karpeles  11/18

•  Articles about Proust in The Guardian.

•  Articles about Proust in The New York Times

Interesting Random Links to the Man & the Novel

• In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust by Wm Friedkin, 5/15/17 NYTimes:  an essay with photos of Proust’s Illiers-Combray

• Art & Proust & Eric Karpeles's book 

• French archives & seminars & papers on Proust

• Dutch Proust Association (in Dutch & French)

• Chris Taylor's Marcel Proust Chris Taylor's Excellent Ephemera Site (still active in 2019)

• Marcel Proust : Writing and the Arts

• The Enduring Romance with Proust, an essay by Dan Shewan (2012)

• Did Proust invent "air guitar"? It's related to a poem entitled "The Mortal Coil" by Billy Collins, page 106 in this book. (2.21.13)

• ArtCritical: review of The World of Proust as seen by Paul Nadar. 

  ArtCritical: review of Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to “In Search of Lost Time” by Eric Karpeles

   How To Dress The Guermantes Way: “Proust’s Muse” at FIT (2016-17)

• Someone asked The Paris Review which translation of Proust to read and their answer is "Start with Davis, then switch to Montcrieff/Enright.

• From Paul La Farge’s Favorite Reads from 2011: "...And finally, the award for Most Shocking Rhythm Change near the End of a Long Novel goes to Marcel Proust for Le Côté de Guermantes, in which the narrator, having done more or less nothing for many hundreds of pages, finally, in a fit of rage, stomps on the Baron de Charlus’s hat." (12/15/11)

• Lorin Stein, new editor of the Paris Review, on Jewish writers...  "...The other writers, the ones who are our age—for them it’s a fact of life that doesn’t need to be celebrated particularly. It almost sounds odd to call Lipsyte a Jewish writer. We call Proust a Jewish writer, I think, because he wrote so much about being Jewish. (Plus—if you can claim Proust, you claim Proust.) ..." (6/2/11)

• What happened when Proust met Joyce at the Schiffs' party...

• Colm Tóibín on The Sweet Troubles of Proust , Proust & Swann’s Way: 100th Anniversary on view at The Morgan Library (2013)

• Essay/Review of the last three Penguin novels (2005) in Slate (Mar. 3, 2005)

•  Literary Fallout from André Aciman's review of the Penguin UK edition (2005) (Apr. 6, 2006) in the NY Review of Books.

•   "...Through his eyes we see what actuates the dandy and the lover and the grandee and the hypocrite and the poseur, with a transparency unexampled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot. And this ability, so piercing and at times even alarming, is not mere knowingness. It is not, in other words, the product of cynicism. To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust. It is also why one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment."      From The Acutest Ear in Paris : Christopher Hitchens examines the Davis translation in The Atlantic Monthly, Jan 2004 

• One-minute video of Alain de Botton telling why he wrote his self-help book, How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life. See many other videos by searching on "Marcel Proust."
  

• Sven Birkerts writes "Master of Reveries: Why Proust? And why now?" in The Atlantic Online, 9/7/2000. It promotes Shattuck's book, Proust's Way (reviewed in NYTimes1 and NYTimes2).  And here is Chapter 1.
  

• An excerpt from Madame Proust by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, a biography of Jeanne Weil Proust. For Mother's Day!

• Man Ray took the last photo of Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust is mentioned in this review of a Man Ray exhibit.

• Want to buy a lightly-revised galley proof of Combray? Someone did.

• Stephane Heuet's series of graphic-novel versions of RTP. Amazing books. NPR interviewed (4 minutes) Heuet when the combined & re-translated English edition came out in 2016 to mixed reivews.

• Proust mugs & tote bags for sale, celebrating the end of a year of reading at the Cork-Lined Room blog. Oh, and laptop sleeves, and more over at Society6, books, art, and trinkets on Etsy.

• In case you wonder how it looked in Victorian Paris...

• 1-hour video of Professor Carter talking about his biography of Proust on Book-TV

• Full text of something called The Women of the French Salons.

• Adam Gopnik on Moncrieff's translation.

• Guardian's movie reviews of Proust on film.

• The Desert of After Proust... and how would he use his smartphone? Here are the entire archives of Hannah Gersen's Proust blog at The Millions site.

=======================

Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies, is reading Proust.

Angel: What are you reading? Murray: I’m reading Within a Budding Grove. Proust.

Angel: Is In Search of Lost Time a book you’ve meant to read for a long time and finally got around to reading?  Murray: Well, actually I was pretty daunted by it, so I’d set it by for my retirement. But the book I’m working on now has a French narrator so I thought I should bone up on French culture. I’m reading it in English, but I thought that this was a key text and it is the key text. I’m realizing while I’m reading it that it is so influential. 

Angel: Which translation are you reading? Murray: I’m reading the Scott Moncrieff translation.  

Angel: How many hours a day do you devote to that? Murray: Nabokov wrote an essay about the first volume in which he says, “In Search of Lost Time makes up 4,000 pages which are about a month’s reading.” That’s Nabokov. It took me a month to read the first volume. The sentences are so convoluted you have to read almost every single one twice. The first time round you’re just looking for the verb, then you go back and work out what he’s talking about. So it’s slow going. And I’m reading other stuff, too. {....}

The starting eight.... And then there were four...

Congratulations on regaining time.... 
Lynn, Monica, Terri & Renée 

Le Mystérieux Correspondant published in October 2019

Update: 08/08/2019:  Lost Proust stories of homosexual love published as Le Mystérieux Correspondant (The Mysterious Correspondent).

====================================================
Paris (AFP) 05/08/2019 - 19:40

"Fans of Marcel Proust will soon have the chance to read nine novellas from early in his career that were only unearthed last year, the Fallois publishing house said Monday. It will issue the collection on October 9 under the title The Mysterious Correspondent and Other Unpublished Novellas.

The nine texts were originally to be part of his first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures and Days), a collection of poems and short stories published in 1896.  But Proust, who was still in his 20s, later decided not to include them.

They were uncovered by Bernard de Fallois, a noted Proust specialist who died last year, and founder of the Fallois publishing house. Bernard de Fallois had previously discovered a Proust novel that went unpublished in his lifetime, Jean Santeuil, as well as an unfinished text called Contre Sainte-Beuve. Both were eventually published in the 1950s.

The newfound texts show a young writer dabbling in new narrative techniques while exploring such risqué themes for the era as physical love and homosexuality. "Because of their audacity, he probably thought they would offend a social milieu dominated by traditional moral forces," the publisher said. The 180-page collection will include facsimiles of the original texts as well as analysis and critiques.

Proust, who died in 1922 at the age of 51, has been hugely influential for subsequent generations of authors, in particular for the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, also called Remembrance of Things Past.

© 2019 AFP