À la Recherche du temps perdu, book 3/7

Le Côté de Guermantes is the third volume of À la Recherche du temps perdu, published in 1920. Guermantes’ way is first of all a walk that the narrator took as a child during his vacations at the family home in Combray. This "side" becomes, in his biographical story and his imagination, the sign of his snobbish character, his worldly aspirations and his attraction to aristocracy.

The hero is a young adult fascinated by the Duchess Oriane de Guermantes, whom he imagines as a fairy-like creature, the offspring from a bird and a goddess. He is soon introduced into the privileged circle of Parisian high society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and its gallery of characters who are as many pretexts for the narrator to sharpen his sense of psychological analysis. This is the Balzacian moment of La Recherche but if the literary vocation is forgotten, the narrator perceives more and more that time is quickly lost in worldliness. It is also the tome of disenchantment: all these personalities that he has idealized so much are, in the end, only human beings with qualities and flaws.

From the Hôtel de Guermantes to the Doncières military camp where the narrator joins his friend Saint-Loup, the book continues with the long matinée at the Marquise de Villeparisis' house and then the reception at the Guermantes'. It is the announcement of Swann's death that closes the volume in a pathetic scene where he is abandoned on the sidewalk. As always in La Recherche, an initiation that is at work, made of trials and realizations about love and friendship, art and death, and also, inevitably, about time.

We read this book in the winter and in the spring of 2021.