47 pages • 1 hour read
Marcel ProustSwann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume One
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1913A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Place-Names: The Name”
Part 4 Summary
Marcel leaves Swann’s story and returns to narrating his life. He is an adult but still suffers from the insomnia that plagued him as a child. As he lies in the darkness, he recalls the bedrooms of his earlier life. He remembers a trip to Balbec inspired by his friend Legrandin praising the French town. Legrandin praises the geography, the weather, and the architecture of Balbec for being unique.
Marcel remembers his youth in Paris. As a schoolboy, he wanted to travel to places like Balbec and Venice. To this day, he only needs to say the names of these places to be transported to them in his mind. His father agreed to send him to Italy, allowing him to visit Venice and Florence. Just as Marcel is beginning to feel excited, however, he is struck down by a fever so severe that the doctor forbids him from traveling for at least a year. Instead, Marcel walks through Paris with Françoise the maid. They walk through the Champs-Elysée park, where they run into Gilberte, the daughter of Odette and Swann. From then on, Marcel’s life begins revolving around Gilberte’s beauty. He obsesses over her, searching for her every day in the same park. Some days, he sees her. She is always accompanied by a very elegant servant. The elegance of Gilbert’s maid makes Marcel feel self-conscious about Françoise’s drab appearance.
Gilberte and Marcel become friends. She invites him to play games with her friends. During one day together in the park, Gilberte seeks Marcel’s advice about buying an agate marble. He picks one that is the same color as her eyes and then, after buying it, Gilberte gives it to Marcel to remind him of her. Some days, Gilberte does not appear in the park. Marcel knows Swann through his parents. He looks up to Swann and wants to grow up to be like him.
During one of their walks, Gilberte tells Marcel that she and her family are going away for Christmas. She is excited about the trip, though she will not see Marcel for many weeks. She goes into detail about her plans for the trip. Though Marcel is pleased that Gilberte is excited, he wonders whether her excitement means that she does not love him as intensely as he loves her. He takes time to understand her indifference to him, much like her father needed time to realize that Odette was indifferent to him.
Searching for some form of consolation, Marcel prompts his parents to talk about Swann. He wants his parents to invite Swann to their house in Paris, just as they used to host him for dinner during their trips to Combray. He hopes that Gilberte will write to him while she is away. He hopes that this “letter of [his] invention” (288) may also include a declaration of her love for him. While he waits, he examines the gifts given to him by Gilberte. These gifts include the agate marble and a book by Bergotte. Examining the gifts, Marcel realizes that Gilberte is indifferent to him. Rather than wait for her letter, he decides to write. In the letter, he will tell her that he now regards them as friends and terminate any potential romantic love between them. Nevertheless, his thoughts linger with Gilberte, Odette, and Swann for some time. On these days, Marcel takes Françoise to the Bois de Boulogne. Since he cannot see Gilberte, he hopes that Odette will be there. Marcel admires Gilberte’s mother. She fascinates him almost as much as her daughter does. Marcel is not alone in his fascination. He notices that other people stare at Odette. These people also gossip about her, spreading rumors about her scandalous past.
Marcel turns his attention to the present. Though he is a mature man now, he still pines for his past. He knows that the people, the events, and the places of his past are gone. The world has changed; the fashions have changed and the women he once loved or admired are gone. They have been replaced by their older selves, who seem like ghosts compared to their younger selves. Despite the changes, despite the passage of time, Marcel still loves the way certain place names can be so evocative and magical. They are, he says, “as fugitive, alas, as the years” (301).
Part 4 Analysis
After telling the story of Swann and Odette, Marcel returns to his youth. He tells the audience how he fell in love with Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette. This childhood romance is a youthful version, almost a parody, of Swann’s story. Marcel and Gilberte are schoolchildren; they are still escorted by maids and governesses, and they have no agency over where or when they travel. Marcel is desperate to experience the intense emotions that he read about in fiction and heard about from his parents. He mimics Swann but not in the way that might be expected. Marcel believes that he is following Swann by falling deeply in love with a woman. In fact, he falls in love with an idealized version of a woman he hardly knows. When Marcel first meets Gilberte, he convinces himself that her eyes are another color than they are. Similarly, when they meet in the park, he infuses her actions and words with a sense of romance that is pure projection. He attaches emotional weight to gestures that may be unthinking and instinctive. The effect is to show that Swann and Marcel are similar in their capacity to fall in love with the idea of love, rather than a real person. The romance with Gilberte is doomed from the outset, not because they are young but because Marcel cannot see who she is.
Marcel does not win Gilberte’s love. The story is seemingly inconsequential and anticlimactic. However, Marcel presents the story of his youthful naivety to illustrate the complicated way in which identity is formed. The overwhelming nature of memory means that Marcel cannot limit himself to only those experiences that end happily. Every interaction, every conversation, and every doomed romance is a formative experience. Each one of these builds his character and identity; by exploring these memories, Marcel shows the audience the depth and profundity of even mundane human experiences.
Marcel frames the past in almost physical terms, as though it is a province to which he can never return. He can visit occasionally through his memory, and he can evaluate the infinitely complex ways in which these events have shaped his sense of self, but he can never return to the past. The people and places of the past are gone. So much has happened that these people and places have become something else entirely. Marcel, too, is no longer the young, naïve man who features in these memories. The wry, knowing tone with which Marcel speaks about his life illustrates how young Marcel is almost an entirely different character. The young Marcel, like Swann and Combray, is now in the past. His name and his memories endure as foundations for the future, constructing new characters and new experiences which, in time, will eventually become memories in their own right. Marcel, like everyone else, is trapped in this cycle of sense, sentimentality, and growth.
