A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

The Guermantes Way is the third volume of the Modern Library's six-volume edition of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time series. It relates the narrator's involvement in the salons of the highest echelons of Parisian society and discusses to great and fascinating length the nature of the personalities present in the salons--most notably that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who the narrator was in love with until his mother disabused him of the silly notion that to loiter outside in hopes of catching the eye of the Duchesse was to make her love him eventually. While the interplay at the salons makes up the guts of the book, the story revolves in large part around the Dreyfus Affair and the divisions the debate between the Dreyfusards and the Anti-Dreyfusards created in Parisian society.

Much of the tendentiousness inherent in the play-by-play of the interactions between the royalty and aristocracy with whom the narrator spends his time is likely best excused as a way to convey to the reader the narrator's own disenchantment with the Guermantes and the high society he worked so hard to become a part of. The insensitivity and callousness of the salons are made clear in the Guermantes' reaction to Swann's revelation that he is dying and therefore cannot join the Guermantes on a journey they ask him to attend. Without a shred of sensitivity, the Guermantes announce that they simply do not believe that Swann is dying and that they will take up the matter with him after attending a party (a party that M. de Guermantes is eager to attend instead of standing vigil at the side of a dying friend). The narrator's examination of Parisian society is almost clinical and scientific in its scope, but as always, Proust is able to inject astonishing descriptive powers to his prose, and he makes clear that like Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, Proust can best be understood as a philosopher and psychologist. More than a writer, he is a natural examiner of the human condition and as with his previous volumes, The Guermantes Way oftentimes prompts nods of recognition from the reader in response to a particular passage or observation. So long as the reader is personally addressed in this manner, he or she will continue to remain engaged in the story and it is testament to Proust's skill and power that he is able to ensure the reader's engagement concerning a subject matter--the ins and outs of Parisian high society--whose tendentiousness will, in the hands of a lesser writer, utterly turn the reader off and cause him or her to give up on the writing altogether.