Dear Readers,
Every Sunday, A Page of Proust offers you an extract from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu in French) that everyone, connoisseur or not, can appreciate.
Many people talk about Proust or write about him, but fewer of us have actually read him.
Perhaps because we don't have enough time. Perhaps because the work intimidates us. And maybe because we don't know how funny and incredibly human Proust is: he focuses on describing emotions that we all have or will experience, wherever we come from.
My aim is to sculpt and share ideal pages of Proust, ones that will make everyone want to read or re-read Proust.
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As the Princess de Nassau tries to slip away quietly from a reception, the narrator observes her eagerness to appear sorry to leave. He understands that she no longer remembers him, for as she greets him with her eyes, she seems to wonder she ever had a relationship with him:
A lady went out for she had other afternoon receptions to go to and she was to take tea with two queens. She was the society courtesan I formerly knew, the Princesse de Nassau. Apart from her figure having shrunk — which gave her head the appearance of being lower than it was formerly, of having what is called “one foot in the grave”— one would have said that she had hardly aged. She remained, with her Austrian nose and delightful mien a Marie-Antoinette preserved, embalmed, thanks to a thousand cunningly combined cosmetics which gave her face the hue of lilac. Her face wore that regretful soft expression of being compelled to go with a sweet half-promise to return, of inconspicuous withdrawal because of numerous exclusive invitations. Born almost on the steps of a throne, married three times, protected long and luxuriously by great bankers, the confused memories of her innumerable pasts, not to speak of the caprices she had indulged, weighed on her as lightly as her beautiful round eyes, her painted face and her mauve dress. As, taking French leave, she passed me, I bowed and she, taking my hand, fixed her round violet orbs upon me as if to say: “How long since we met, do let us talk of it next time.” She pressed my hand, not quite sure whether there had or had not been a passage between us that evening she drove me from the Duchesse de Guermantes’. She merely took a chance by seeming to suggest something that had never been, which was not difficult for she looked tender over a strawberry-tart and assumed, about her compulsion to leave before the music was over, an attitude of despairing yet reassuring abandonment. Moreover, in her uncertainty about the incident with me, her furtive pressure did not detain her long and she did not say a word. She only looked at me in a way that said: “How long! How long!” as there passed across her vision her husbands, the different men who had kept her, two wars — and her star-like eyes, like astronomic dials carved in opal, registered in quick succession all those solemn hours of a far-away past she conjured back each time she uttered a greeting which was always an excuse. She left me and floated to the door so as not to disturb me, to show me that if she did not stop and talk to me it was because she had to make up the time she had lost pressing my hand so as not to keep the Queen of Spain waiting.