The narrator and his work. M’s first efforts to express himself in writing; the impact of Bergotte: I 132–34. His desire to translate his sensations and impressions: 218–19. His wish to be a writer; despair at his lack of talent and the “nullity” of his intellect; renounces literature for ever: 243–45, 251–52. The steeples of Martinville inspire him to composition: 253–57. Norpois advocates a literary career for M: II 13, but in such terms as to make him doubly determined to renounce the idea: 31–33; his “prose poem” fails to impress Norpois: 35, who sees in it the malign influence of Bergotte: 60–63 (cf. III 298–99). Bergotte restores his confidence: 196–97. Inability to settle down to work; writing and social life: 209–12, 530; M is distracted from work by the “unknown beauties” who throng the streets of Paris: III 70–71, and by his pursuit of Mme de Guermantes: 82–83. “If only I had been able to start writing!”: 196. He sends an article to Le Figaro: 474, 544. “The invisible vocation of which this book is the history”: 544. Trees near Balbec seem to warn him to set to work before it is too late: IV 560. He scans Le Figaro in vain for his article: V 6, 151. Continued procrastination; changes in the weather an excuse for not working: 100–2. Musings on art and literature while listening to Wagner; is there in art a more profound reality than in life, or is great art merely the result of superior craftsmanship?: 204–10, 259–60. Vinteuil’s septet restores his faith in art and in his vocation: 347–51 (cf. 503–5, 513–14). Appearance of his article in Le Figaro at last; a boost to his self-confidence as a writer; the pleasure of writing incompatible with social pleasures: 766–72. Renewed discouragement during a visit to Tansonville: VI 344, and after reading an unpublished passage from the Goncourt Journal which convinces him not only of his own lack of talent but of the vanity and falsehood of literature: 26, 38 (cf. 239, 254). Renunciation, for several long years, of his project for writing: 46. Salvation at last; the uneven paving-stones; M’s doubts suddenly dissipated; involuntary memory the key: 255–60. Reflexions on the work he has now decided to undertake: 262–336, 505–31; deciphering “the inner book of unknown symbols”: 274; “this most wonderful of all days”: 287; the work of art “the only means of rediscovering Lost Time;” the materials for his work stored up inside him: 304; “my whole life … might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation”: 304; Albertine, by causing him to suffer, more valuable to him than a secretary to arrange his “paperies”: 320 (cf. 511); Swann the inspiration for his book: 328; his discovery of the destructive action of Time at the very moment of conceiving the ambition to intellectualise extra-temporal realities in a work of art: 351, 355; his duty to his work more important than that of being polite or even kind: 435–36; the readers of his book will be the readers of their own selves: 508; a church or a druid monument?: 520; his indifference to criticism: 521; the Arabian Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age?: 524–25; the dimension of Time: 526–32 (cf. 505–12). “In this book … there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise … everything has been invented by me in accordance with the requirements of my theme”: VI 345.
LOVE. Prerequisite of love, that it should win us admission to an unknown life: I 139. Love may come into being without any foundation in desire: 277. Modes of production of love; “the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively”: 327. The illusion that love exists outside ourselves: 569–70. Love creates “a supplementary person”: II 54. “No peace of mind in love;” “a permanent strain of suffering”: 213–14. Love “radiates towards the loved one,” then returns to its starting-point, oneself: 252–53. “Not like war”: 275. Effects of absence and the passage of time; sufferers from love’s sickness are “their own physicians”: 279–83. Effects of Habit: 301 (cf. V 478–79, 577; VI 346). “Those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same”: 304. Features of our first love attach themselves to those that follow: 561–62 (cf. 647–18; V 921; VI 347). “The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else”: 563. The women we love are “a negative of our sensibility”: 647. “Loving helps us to discern, to discriminate”: 666. Silence is “a terrible strength in the hands of those who are loved”: III 157–58. The illusion on which the pains of love are based: 210–11. Mme Leroi on love: “I make it often but I never talk about it”: 260. “A charming law of nature,” that we live in ignorance of those we love: 382. Memories are accompaniments to carnal desire: 493–95. “The moment preceding pleasure” restores to Albertine’s features “the innocence of earliest childhood”: 501. Self-deception and subjectivity of love: 507. Role of costume in love: 529. Intimacy creates social ties which outlast love: 530–31. “This terrible need of a person”: IV 179–80. Role of pity in love: the human need to “repair the wrongs” we do to the loved one: 313. Love makes us “at once more distrustful and more credulous”: 315. Those who love us and whom we do not love seem insufferable: 431. The “invisible forces” within the woman we love to which we address ourselves “as to obscure deities”: 718–19. “The possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself: V 58. Apostrophe to girls—to define them we need to cease to be sexually interested in them: 77–80. “O mighty attitudes of Man and Woman”: 97. “Beneath any carnal attraction that goes at all deep, there is the permanent possibility of danger”: 100. “Love is an incurable malady”: 105. More than any others, “fugitive beings” inspire love: 113–17. The object of our love is “the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy”: 125; the “revolving searchlights of jealousy”: 129; love is “kept in existence only by painful anxiety,” “we love only what we do not wholly possess”: 133. Love is “reciprocal torture”: 137. “To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!”: 139. All love “evolves rapidly towards a farewell”: 474–75. “In love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit”: 519. “Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart”: 519. The unknown element in Albertine “formed the core” of M’s love: 580–81 (cf. 669–70). “There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer”: 669 (cf. 834–36; VI 348). “One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves”: 670. Natural to love “a certain type of woman;” “unique, we suppose? She is legion”: 677–82. “Death does not make any great difference”: 705–6. “We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder”: 715. Love is “a striking example of how little reality means to us”: 764. “A mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one”: 825–26. Reasons for love remaining platonic: VI 349. Love is “a portion of our mind more durable than the various selves which successively die within us,” a portion of the mind which gives the understanding of this love “to the universal spirit”: 301. Value of love and grief to the writer; “ideas come to us as the substitutes for grief”; “had we not been happy … the unhappinesses that befall us would be without cruelty and therefore without fruit;” the painful dilemmas consequent on love “reveal to us, layer after layer, the material of which we are made”: 311–19.
LYING. Odette’s lies; fragment of truth that gives her away: I 394–96; signs of distress that accompany her lying: 398–99, 413–14, 421. Nissim Bernard’s perpetual lying: II 485–86. Andrée’s lying; people who lie once will lie again: 636–37. Albertine’s polymorphous lies prompted by a desire to please everybody: 706–8. Unconscious mendacity: III 80. A complete lie more easily believed than a half-lie: IV 156. Albertine’s lies; the Infreville story: 268–70 (cf. V 137); how she gives herself away when lying: 677–78; how to decipher her lies; jealousy multiplies the tendency to lie in the person loved: V 72–74, 111–12; a liar by nature: 122–23; her contradictory lies; we fail to notice our mistress’s first lies: 186–98; her aptitude for lying; her “charming skill in lying naturally”: 232–36,
246–52. A lie “the most necessary means of self-preservation”: 221–22. “Impenetrable solidarity” of the little band as liars: 233–34. Lovers’ lies to a third person: 277–79. Value of lies and liars to literary men; “the perfect lie … is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown”: 281–82. Disparity between the truth which a lying woman has travestied and the idea which the lover has formed of that truth: 448–49. Perseverance in falsehood of those who deceive us: 517. Lying formulas that turn out to have been prophetic truths: 621–22, 684–85. “Lying is essential to humanity;” we lie to protect our pleasure or our honour; “one lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one”: 823–25 (cf. 943). Lying is a trait of character as well as a natural defence: 834–37. “One ruins oneself, makes oneself ill, kills oneself all for lies”—a lode from which one can extract a little truth: VI 350.
MARRIAGE. Swann’s marriage: II 1–2, 50–58, 126–34. “Ignominious marriages are the most estimable of all”: 56. The “subservience of refinement to vulgarity” the rule in many marriages: 126. Marital schemes of the Prince de Foix and his friends: III 553–54. Skin-deep Christianity of the Guermantes set invariably leads to “a colossally mercenary marriage”: 560. Happy marriages arranged by inverts for their nieces: IV 129. Reflexions on the marriage of Gilberte to Saint-Loup and of Jupien’s niece to young Cambremer: V 891–905; effects of these marriages: 905–20. An “unfortunate” marriage may be the only poetical action in a man’s life: 923. Advantage for a young husband of having kept a mistress: 925–26. Homosexuals make good husbands: 929–30; VI 351.
MEDICINE. Mysterious flair of the diagnostician; “we realised that this imbecile [Cottard] was a great physician”: II 97. Bergotte’s views on the sort of doctor needed by an artist: 197–99. M’s grandmother’s illness—rival prescriptions of Cottard and du Boulbon: III 404–16; Professor E————’s diagnosis: 426–31 (cf. IV 55–57); Cottard has “something of the greatness of a general” when deciding on a course of treatment: 438; the specialist X————, nose expert: 441–42; Professor Dieulafoy: 466–67. Medicine is “a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners”: 405. “To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still”: 405. Doctors create illness by making patients believe they are ill (du Boulbon): 410–11. “A great part of what doctors know is taught them by the sick”: 411–12. Du Boulbon on nervous disorders: 410–16. “Doctors, like stockbrokers, employ the first person singular”: 559 (cf. IV 405). Innumerable mistakes of doctors; “medicine is not an exact science;” “medicine has made some slight advance in knowledge since Molière’s day, but none in its vocabulary”: IV 55–57. Cottard and his rivals at Balbec: 264–66. Toxic actions “a perilous innovation in medicine”: 265. Medicine “busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns”: 405. Cottard on sleeping draughts and on the digestion: 489–91. Medicine has developed the art of prolonging illnesses, but cannot cure the illnesses it creates: V 238. Bergotte and his doctors: 241–43.
MEMORY. The body’s memory more enduring than that of the mind: I 7–10 (cf. VI 352). Voluntary memory preserves nothing of the past itself: 59. The madeleine; taste and smell alone bear “the vast structure of recollection”: 60–64 (cf. VI 353. The three strata of memory: 262–64. The “terrible re-creative power” of memory: 523. A mistake to compare the images stored in one’s memory with reality: 606. Role of memory in our gradual assimilation of a new piece of music: II 140–42. Memory presents things to us in reverse: 208. Memory’s conflicting photographs: 621–22, 642 (cf. 678; V 644–45). Process of recapturing a line of verse: III 41–42 (cf. IV 521–23). Resurrection of the soul may be conceived as a phenomenon of memory: 111. Sleep and memory: 115–16 (cf. IV 521–23; V 154). Influence of the atmosphere in stimulating memory: 187 (cf. V 23, 645–62). Process of recapturing a name; advantages of an imperfect memory: IV 67–70. Arbitrariness of the images selected by memory: 205–6. M’s “complete and involuntary recollection” of his grandmother; “with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart;” restoration of the self that experienced the resuscitated sensations: 210–12. Soporifics and memory: 520–23. Poor memories of men and women of action: V 40–41. Resuscitation of memory after the amnesia of sleep; “the goddess Mnemotechnia”: 154–57. Memory “a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections”: 188. Microscope of the disinterested memory more powerful and less fragile than that of the heart: 233. “Translucent alabaster of our memories”: 379–81. Process of unravelling Albertine’s interrupted sentence: 454–58. Memory a sort of pharmacy or laboratory in which we find “a little of everything”: 526 (cf. 701–2). Memories of Albertine: 644–72 passim, 731–34; fortuitous memories more potent than deliberate ones: 732–33; “memory has no power of invention”: 748; the cruelty of memory: 753–54; “our legs and our arms are full of torpid memories”: VI 354. Apotheosis of involuntary memory; three analogous sensations (cf. I 60–64) and their significance: 256–74; examples from literature: 334–35. Vagaries in our memories of people; “the memories which two people preserve of each other, even in love, are not the same”: 406, 412–15, 419–21. Mutability of people and fixity of memory; “if our life is vagabond our memory is sedentary”: 438–43.
MONOCLES. Swann’s monocle, which delights Odette: I 348–49, and which he removes “like an importunate, worrying thought”: 493. Variety of monocles at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s party: 463–65. Saint-Loup’s fluttering monocle: II 421; III 87–89. The Duc de Guermantes’s “quizzical” monocle: 33; “gay flash” of his monocle: 62. M. de Palancy’s monocle, like a fragment of the glass wall of an aquarium: 48 (see I 465). Charlus’s monocle: 365. Bréauté’s: 590; IV 74; V 40 (see abo I 464–65). M. de Cambremer’s: IV 513–14. Bloch’s “formidable” monocle which alters “the significance of his physiognomy”: VI 355. Large monocle sported by the Princesse de Guermantes (Mme Verdurin): 433–34.
MOON. Moonlight in a bedroom in summer: I 8. Moonlight in the garden at Combray: 43. Walks round Combray by moonlight: 159–60. Long ribbon of moonlight on the pond at Combray: 187. Moon in daylight (cf. II 690); images of the moon in books and paintings: 205–6. Bright moon on clear, cold nights which Swann compares to Odette’s face: 334, 338. Moonlight on one of Gabriel’s palaces: II 84. M reads a description of moonlight in Mme de Sévigné: 315. Moonlight on a village seen from the train: 317. Moon near Balbec inspires M to quote poetic descriptions of it; Mme de Villeparisis’s anecdote about Chateaubriand: 410–11. Opalescent moonlight in a fountain at Doncières: III 120–21. Charlus’s desire to look at the “blue light of the moon” in the Bois with M: 771–72. Crescent moon at twilight over Paris: IV 45 (cf. 568–69). Moon through the oaks at La Raspelière: 494–95, and over the valley: 507. Full moon over Paris: V 227–28. Albertine asleep by moonlight: 521. Moonrise over Paris; the moon in poetry: 550–51. Venetian campo by moonlight: 882. Effects of moonlight in war-time Paris: VI 356; “cruelly and mysteriously serene”: 162; “like a soft and steady magnesium flare”: 164; “narrow and curved like a sequin”: 172.
MOTOR-CARS. M hires a motor-car for Albertine: IV 536–39. Effect of the motor-car on our ideas of topography and perspective; difference between arrival by car and by train (cf. II 301–2); the charm of motoring: 546–50. A drive through Paris: V 216–28. M’s delight in the sound of motor-cars and the smell of petrol: 554–55. Albertine’s Rolls-Royce, her favourite car: 566, 613–14.
MUSIC. Vinteuil’s sonata; the ineffable character of a first musical impression; the “little phrase”: I 294–300. Insanity diagnosed in Vinteuil’s sonata: 302–3. The “little phrase” becomes the “national anthem” of Swann’s love for Odette: 308; its effect on Swann: 335–37, 374–75, 489–91, 493–501 (see also II 144–46). The music of the violin, “the sapient, quivering and enchanted box”: 494. Great m
usicians reveal to us a new world in the depths of the soul: 497. “Inexorably determined” language of music: 500. Role of memory in our gradual assimilation of a new composition; originality of Vinteuil’s sonata; “great works of art do not begin by giving us the best of themselves;” works such as Beethoven’s late quartets create their own posterity: II 140–46. M’s attempts to grasp the truths expressed by music: 378. Intoxicating and sensual effect of music enhanced by that of alcohol: 534–35. A great pianist is “a window opening upon a great work of art”: III 54–55. People feel justified in enjoying vulgar music if they find it in the work of a good composer (such as Richard Strauss): 614–15. Conversation about music with Mme de Cambremer; Debussy and Wagner; reflexions on theories, schools, fashions and tastes: IV 288–94. Music evoked by Paris street cries—Boris, Pelléas, Palestrina, Gregorian chant: V 146–51, 161–62, 176. Rhythms of sleep compared to those of music; it is the lengthening or shortening of the interval that creates beauty: 153–54, 160. Music helps M to “descend into himself” and discover new things; it also enables us to know the essential quality of another person’s sensations: 206. Vinteuil’s septet: 330–54. Tone colour: 337–39. Unique, unmistakable voice of a great composer is proof of “the irreducibly individual existence of the soul”: 340–42. “The transposition of creative profundity into terms of sound”: 342. Music “the unique example of what might have been … the means of communication between souls”: 344. Inferior compositions may prepare the way for later masterpieces: 350–51. Albertine at the pianola; M’s pleasure in elucidating the structure of musical compositions; “a piece of music the less in the world, perhaps, but a truth the more”: 501–2. Is music, which recomposes what we feel about life, truer than literature, which analyses it?: 503–4. Great music must correspond to some definite spiritual reality: 503–6; or is this an illusion?: 513–14. Visual images evoked by music: 514. Bird singing in the Lydian mode: 522. Melancholy refrain of pigeons compared to phrases in Vinteuil: 539–40. The “little phrase” and M’s love for Albertine: 755–56.