Proust Moment, April 18, 2003

Genevieve, Golo and Marcel

Marcel’s magic lantern yields the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo, which a web-search informs me is a tale of some antiquity, as well as being the source of an opera by Schumann and a score by Satie. (Another Proustian connection of sorts: Erik Satie is one of the four major players – Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Appolinaire and Henri Rousseau are the others – in Proust authority Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, a superb history of the French avant-gardists who paved the way for Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, et al.)

Genevieve’s story is covered in a pop-up heavy website devoted to “the 1911 encyclopedia,” although just what kind we are not told. I reprint it here, sans references, in hopes of reducing your annoyance level. I am venturing a guess that “Gob” was transferred into “Golo” in subsequent versions. Proustians are invited to correct me.

GENEVIEVE, GENOVEVA or GENOVEFA, OF BRABANT --

heroine of medieval legend. Her story is a typical example of the widespread tale of the chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated, generally on the word of a rejected suitor. Genovefa of Brabant was said to be the wife of the palatine Siegfried of Treves, and was falsely accused by the majordomo Gob. Sentenced to death she was spared by the executioner, and lived for six years with her son in a cave in the Ardennes nourished by a roe. Siegfried, who had meanwhile found out Gob’s treachery, was chasing the roe when he discovere,d her hiding-place, and reinstated her in her former honour. Her story is said to rest on the history of Marie of Brabant, wife of Louis II., duke of Bavaria, and count-palatine of the Rhine, who was tried by her husband and beheaded on the 18th of January 1256, for supposed infidelity, a crime for which Louis afterwards had to do penance. The change in name may have been due to the cult of St Genevieve, patroness of Paris. The tale first obtained wide popularity in L’Innocence reconnue, ou vie de Sainle Genevieve de Brabant (pr. 1638) by the Jesuit René de Cérisier (1603—1662), and was a frequent subject for dramatic representation in Germany. With Genovefa’s history may be compared the Scandinavian ballads of Raven gaard og Memering, which exist in many recensions. These deal with the history of Gunild, who married Henry, duke of Brunswick and Schleswig. When Duke Henry went to the wars he left his wife in charge of Ravengaard, who accused her of infidelity. Gunild is cleared by the victory of her champion Memering, the “smallest of Christian men.” The Scottish ballad of Sir Aldingar is a version of the same story. The heroine Gunhilda is said to have been the daughter of Canute the Great and Emma. She married in 1036 King Henry, afterwards the emperor Henry III., and there was nothing in her domestic history to warrant the legend, which is given as authentic history by William of Malmesbury (De gestis regum Anglorum, lib.ii.~i88). She was called Cunigund after her marriage, and perhaps was confused with St Cunigund, the wife of the emperor Henry II. In the Karlamagnus-saga the innocent wife is Oliva, sister of Charlemagne and wife of King Hugo, and in the French Carolingian cycle the emperor’s wife Sibille (La Reine Sibille) or Blanchefleur (Macaire). Other forms of the legend are to be found in the story of Doolin’s mother in Doon deMayence, the English romance of Sir Triamour, in the story of the mother o~ Octavian in Octavian the Emperor, in the German folk book Historic von der geduldigen KOni gin Crescentia, based on a 12th century poem to be found in the Kaiserchronik; and the English Er! of Toulouse (c. 1400). In the last-named romance it has been suggested that the story gives the relations between Bernard I. count of Toulouse, son of the Guillaume d’Orange of the Carolingian romances, and the empress Judith, second wife of Louis the Pieus.

In the passage that follows, Marcel’s magic lantern casts the images of the story on the walls of his bedroom, altering the view and dispossessing Marcel’s memories from his grasp. The story of Genevieve and Golo also reminds him of the kiss he’s still missing from his mother; casting him, rather than her, in the role of the spurned suitor.

“Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of poor Genevieve de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Genevieve stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all material obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.

“And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a
Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Genevieve de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience."

--"Overture," Swann's Way