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The Guermantes Way

Chapter 1: THE GUERMANTES WAY
By Marcel Proust
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About This Book

A reflective first-person narrative traces the narrator’s immersion in elite social circles, punctuated by visits, receptions, and a household move that heighten feelings of belonging and estrangement. The slow illness and passing of an elder provoke meditations on memory, time, and mortality, while close observation of manners, gossip, and artistic life reveals social hierarchies and personal anxieties. Long associative passages connect sensory impressions to recovered recollections, and episodic scenes alternate with interior digressions to show how past experiences and perceptions continually reshape the narrator’s sense of self and of society.

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Title: The Guermantes Way

Author: Marcel Proust

Translator: C. K. Scott-Moncrieff

Release date: April 19, 2024 [eBook #73425]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Random House, 1925

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, KD Weeks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUERMANTES WAY ***
Transcriber’s Note:

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

Any corrections are indicated using an underline highlight. Placing the cursor over the correction will produce the original text in a small popup.

Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the corrections table in the note at the end of the text.

THE MODERN LIBRARY
OF THE WORLD’S BEST BOOKS
THE GUERMANTES WAY

The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LIBRARY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged editions, and at an unusually low price.

THE
GUERMANTES
WAY

BY MARCEL PROUST
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
THE MODERN LIBRARY · NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THOMAS SELTZER





Random House IS THE PUBLISHER OF
THE MODERN LIBRARY
BENNETT A. CERF · DONALD S. KLOPFER · ROBERT K. HAAS
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Parkway Printing Company      Bound by H. Wolff
MARCEL PROUST
(1871-1922)
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR OF “À LA RECHERCHE
DU TEMPS PERDU”

“I don’t think there ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power of analysis, and I feel safe in saying that there will never be another.”—Joseph Conrad.

The world of fashion in which Marcel Proust spent his youth and early manhood saw nothing of him during the last thirteen years of his life. A victim of chronic illness, he barricaded himself in his apartment, swathed himself like an Egyptian mummy, drew his shutters and curtains to exclude the light, and there recorded his chronicle of things past. Son of a distinguished physician and an heiress of a rich Jewish family, Proust had his first training under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. An association in the 1890’s with some of the aesthetes of that period resulted in the publication of a review, to which Proust contributed some juvenile prose and verse. Thereafter the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain became his sphere, and it was there, among the illustrious and well-born, that he assimilated those fragments of gossip and family history which were later transmuted into a world in itself—the world of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS (with a preface by Anatole France (1896))

DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN (1918) (SWANN’S WAY (1923))

À L’OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEURS (1918) (WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE (1924))

LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES I (1920) LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES II (1921) (THE GUERMANTES WAY (1925))

SODOME ET GOMORRHE I (1921) SODOME ET GOMORRHE II (1922) (CITIES OF THE PLAIN (1928))

LA PRISONNIÈRE (1923) (THE CAPTIVE (1929))

ALBERTINE DISPARUE (1926) (THE SWEET CHEAT GONE (1930))

LE TEMPS RETROUVÉ (1928) (THE PAST RECAPTURED (1932))