He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu ( Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.īorn in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. And if she starts in the middle, at the part where our two hearts come together, where we talk of existing each only for the other, we know this tune well enough that we can at once join our partner in the passage where she awaits us. As we possess its song, engraved on our heart in its entirety, we need only for a woman to provide the opening strands, filled with the admiration we feel at recognizing another's beauty, and we know what comes next. In recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall, we recreate the others. We come to its aid calling on our memories, yielding to suggestion, we act it out. At this stage in our life we have been touched by love more than once it no longer evolves on its own, following its unknown, fatal laws before our passive and astonished hearts. So at an age where it would seem – for in love we search above all for a subjective pleasure – that the part played by our tastes in assessing another's beauty would have become the determining factor in our love, a love can be born, a love of the most physical kind even, without there having been any initial foundation of desire. At an earlier age, one dreamt of possessing the heart of the woman he loves later in life, feeling he has already come to possess one's heart could be enough to inspire his love.

The newest translation of the classic of French literatureīut at the age Swann was approaching, where one is already a little disillusioned and where he knows to be content at being in love simply for the pleasure of it, without demanding too much in return, this coming together of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's youth, the goal that love, by necessity, tends towards, it has nevertheless stayed tied to one's love by such a strong association of ideas that if it presents itself first it can itself become the cause.

Swann in love book