For she had died at last

If the weather was bad all morning, my parents would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had come to Combray to settle my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at last, vindicating at one and the same time those who had insisted that her debilitating regimen would ultimately kill her and those who had always maintained that she suffered from a disease that was not imaginary but organic...

At once one of the novel's characteristic achievements and its primary source of confusion is its slippery relationship with time. This may have been simultaneously intentional and unconscious. The novel is after all called In Search of Lost Time. But I'm not sure that Proust plotted out his narrative stream to describe events in time with quite the amount of befuddling fluidity as his natural writing style gravitates toward. This segment of a paragraph illustrates the enchanting craziness rather well. He begins in a way that speaks of how things generally were during childhood summers spent in Combray; the second sentence refers to somewhat more specific "later on"--namely, that one autumn when his family had to come to Combray after his aunt died. But this still exists in a vague, unspecified way--he is older than he was from his earlier Combray memories, but we don't know how old, and he is still not recalling specific events as much as general inclinations. The next number of pages he is now recalling that specific autumn in Combray but still, most often, in generalities. Even when he gets to one moment of specific memory, a few pages later, it is a memory of a particular awareness, completely having to do with internal feelings and recognitions, almost nothing to do with the actual concrete moment in time when he had the awareness.

Slippery stuff, but I think one's reading of the book is enhanced by trying to notice the way he slides in and around time and memories. That's really what he's up to here, not any kind of traditional narrative.

Derived not from books

The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, as precisely as Françoise in her kitchen was wont to hold forth about St. Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents whom she considered less "righteous." One could see that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, distorted, unrecognizable, and alive.

The narrator, in his elusive way, manages to put us inside a country church as he was just a moment earlier remembering a certain walk he and his family would take in the environs of Combray. We end up inside the church because he is remembering how they might take shelter there if it had begun raining while out on the walk. And there we are, both smoothly and abruptly, present with his memories about the church's interior. He recalls in particular the carved stone depictions of ancient saints and kings. The leaps he makes here are wonderful, and quite funny. Do not underestimate Proust's sense of humor.

We also see here one of the book's abiding, if subtle, themes: the disappearance of the remnants of feudal Europe, once and for all. Proust was on the scene as the ancient gave way to the modern, and noticed it, meditated on it, and commented on it. Maybe others were making similar comments at the time, but his are the ones with which we have largely been left.