Hadn’t Marcel made the same observation earlier, adding that the Verdurins allowed the beauty of the place to “wash passively over them rather than making it the object of their concerns”? I was misreading the novel in order to find something to redeem these social climbers. Verdurin’s life was so great that those who saw him only in Paris… could scarcely comprehend the idea he had formed of his own life, and the importance that his pleasures lent it in his own eyes. The part that the flowers at La Raspelière, the roads along by the sea, the old houses and the unknown churches played in M. How intelligently they had learned to know the locality, taking their guests on excursions as ‘original’ as the music to which they made them listen. Verdurin’s interest in the sights and landscape around their rented chateau, La Raspelière? Their main business there, observes Marcel, “was to live agreeably, to go on excursions, to eat well, to talk, to entertain agreeable friends whom they made play amusing games of billiards, have good meals and cheerful tea-parties.” Yet he would discover later
The gathering of the clan on the train created a touching portrait of the group, even if they expelled those who made the mistake of coming into their railway compartment. It was easy to condemn the Verdurins and their “little clan.” Yet I noticed moments in which Proust tempered his view of them. What was the point? How did the large middle section of the novel fit in with the rest of In Search of Lost Time? Our reading had begun to acquire a tinge of drudgery. As our Proust reading class made its way through Sodom and Gomorrah, the group asked, “Why are we reading this?” More to the point, “Why did Proust write more than one hundred pages on the Verdurin salon?” While the Verdurins’ missteps and faux pas in Swann’s Way made us laugh, their mean spirited, self-serving attempt to establish themselves in high society did not amuse us now.
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