The Guermantes Way

After a second volume less exciting, where the exceptional becomes a habit, a short break allowed me to read the third volume with new eyes. Everything always changes in this search for lost time.

The narrator becomes older, and in this third stage of his life a third flame is born: the Duchess of Guermantes. His maturity, however, has still not reached a peak. Excessively encouraged by a little greeting, he arranges to run into the beautiful duchess every morning, as if by chance, during his morning walk. The duchess becomes exasperated with seeing every day the little stratagem of the transient young man. But once again, the narrator's love eventually disappears. It is then that the duchess shows affection for him and invites him to dinner. He will then have access to the famous Guermantes' evenings, which were once part of his wildest dreams and which now appear to him banally mundane, while attracting him like an old bond impossible to untie.

Of course, I'm skipping over a lot of other elements of the story, the illness and death of his grandmother, the mistress of his friend Saint-Loup, etc. That's because for me all that is only the framework of the main story, which is the story of the narrator's love affairs. It is these that best demonstrate his state of mind and maturity, it is what sets everything else in his life in motion.

His love for the Duchess of Guermantes will lead to a series of encounters and very sharp observations on the social dinners that lose all their mystique. He then shows a double face: although he is more and more part of this aristocratic society and still admires the beauty of the "names", noble and ancient names that make him dream, he also places himself as a cruel and ironic observer, exposing all the hypocrisy, the flaws and the stupidities of the participants with an intelligence and finesse that it is impossible not to appreciate.

The story takes place right during the Dreyfus Affair. Even though I knew a little about it, I quickly realized that I needed to learn more about it, because I was missing all sorts of subtleties that demonstrate the ignorance of some characters and the obtuse mind of others, and all the anti-Semitism that reigned at the time. I highly recommend this 10-minute video that will free you from your ignorance forever:

So I proudly confirm that I have finished the third volume, and even that I still want to continue.