Swann's Way Read-along, Week 8

Part Three - Place-Names: the Name

Congratulations, friends, we have reached the end of the road at last!

To celebrate, you are cordially invited to a petite soirée chez moi next Sunday, September 14th at 3PM. I’ll be trying my hand at some homemade madeleines and am on the hunt for lime blossom tea—TBD! Might just crack open a bottle of French wine and call it a day.

If you’ve read any bit of Proust with me this summer, I’d love to see you there (yes, even if you haven’t finished). Please RSVP here!

Recap:

This final section saw the return of Marcel the narrator, who spends a lot of time thinking about the magical names of faraway places and the emotions they inspire in him. He falls ill before he can do any actual traveling, and instead takes daily visits to the Champs-Élysées with Françoise, where he again meets Gilberte Swann and becomes her playmate. If Gilberte isn’t there, he drags Françoise to the Bois de Boulogne, where he can admire her fashionable mother (Odette). At the end, Marcel writes from the perspective of a grown man, regretting the changes that the passage have time have wrought on the places and people that were once so special to him.

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