Swann's Way

‘Combray I’ plunges us into the Narrator's reflections, looking back at his life, on sleep and consciousness, time, memory and identity. Then the focus shifts to the narrow segment of his childhood he can voluntarily recall, the period when his only consolation during the trauma of going to bed was his mother's kiss, often denied him when his parents had guests. Many years later, tasting a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, the memory of the rest of his childhood in provincial Combray is suddenly restored to him. ‘Combray II’ tells of this life: we learn about the Narrator's family, their servant Françoise, their friend Charles Swann; we also glimpse the aristocratic Guermantes family and the Narrator's first indications of wanting to become an artist. ‘Swann in Love’, an interpolated tale told in the third person, moves back beyond the Narrator's childhood to recount Swann's troubled love affair with Odette de Crécy, one of the little clan of ‘faithfuls’ at the home of the Verdurins, a socially ambitious bourgeois couple. Swann also moves in the highest circles of society and we encounter some of the prominent figures at a soirée he attends, held by the Marquise de Sainte-Euverte. The final section, ‘Place-names: The Name’, begins with a discussion of the evocative power of place-names, before turning back to the time when the Narrator would play in the ‘Champs-Élysées’ with Swann's daughter Gilberte (first met in Combray). The Narrator loves Gilberte but soon she disappears, leaving him bereft.