Proust Moment, April 19, 2003

Bathilde, His Grandmother, Who Loves Marcel and Dislikes Symmetry and Irony

Dreams and memories intermix throughout the "Overture": dreaming, waking, and the way this kind of drownsiness -- "'tween a sleep and wake," as the bastard Edmund puts it in King Lear -- can blur reality, imagination and memory. Marcel's memories come and go, but when they come they rush in like a flood tide: emotional, florid, aromatic. The memory now is of a domestic scene: Marcel, after fleeing Genevieve and Golo for a dinner of stewed beef, is soon sent back up to his room but his stern but actually spineless father and complaisant mother, both overly concerned with their boy's delicate constitution.

His defender is his grandmother, whom Marcel recalls with loving, sad delicacy. She goes for walks in the rain, "in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Francoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, `At last one can breathe!' and would run up and down the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my fatherhad been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair."

He recalls, too, her impotence in the face of Marcel's great-aunt, who deliberately torments the grandmother by getting Marcel's grandfather to drink liquers, which he has been forbidden to do. Marcel watches her face through the prism of memory, recalling both his youthful sense of injustice and the onset of his mature, thoroughly adult insensitivity:

"My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a. happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her `Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!' in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear."

--"Overture," Swann's Way