#odette de crecy

[fancyemmabovary]

Proust's heroines from "In search of lost time":

⚜ Odette de Crecy - a cocotte who marries Charles Swann, an art collector, member of the exclusive Jockey Club; after his death she marries again and becomes Mme. de Forcheville

⚜ Gilberte Swann - the narrator, Marcel, falls in love with her, but her mother, Odette, encourages her to go out with another boy

⚜ Oriane de Guermantes - duchess, beautiful, elegant, intelligent, sarcastic; her husband has numerous mistresses; the narrator is fascinated by her and stalks her before becoming friends

⚜ Albertine Simonet - a young orphan of average intelligenge and beauty, liar, vicious; Marcel is not sure if he really loves her, but jealous of her lesbian affairs, he grows more and more irrational in his attempts to control her, keeping her prisoner in his parent's apartment and buying her expensive things like dresses from Fortuny, silver tea sets, furs, a vanity bag from Cartier; he promises her a yacht and a Rolls Royce

[melindacopp]

I wrote about one of the most controversial marriages in literature in this month's newsletter. Odette de Crecy is known for wrecking Charles Swann's life, but did she really?

[fawnvelveteen]

Photo: © Orion/Courtesy Everett Collection

Onella Muti as Odette de Crecy in Swann in Love, 1984

[sigurism]

Jeremy Irons & Ornela Muti Un amour de Swann Dir: Volker Schlöndorff

[obligatorymadeleinereference]

A (Late) Recap for the Week of January 16, 2017

In summary:

-Belle Époque lesbians

-Gilberte Swann showed up for the first time.

-So many fuckin’ flowers.

-We appear to have ditched the Narrator in order to hang out with Swann and Odette. 

-My thoughts on Odette and Swann are mixed, to say the least, but they’re very interesting characters. 

[galleryofunknowns]

Federico Carlos de Madrazo y Ochoa (b.1875 - d.1934), 'Portrait of a Lady, identified as Laure Hayman (b.1851 - d.1932 or 1939)', oil on canvas, no date (1800s/1900s?), Spanish (possibly painted in Paris), sold at Sala de Ventas, October 2017; Barcelona, Spain.

This fascinating (and bold!) portrait was recently researched by - and fantastic artist might I add - Stephen O’Donnell of Gods and Foolish Grandeur, and attributed to the courtesan Laure Hayman - lover of many of the nobility, sitter in many grand and beautiful portraits, inspiration for the character Odette de Crecy in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and an accomplished sculptor herself. The painter was also the son of another famous painter, Raimundo de Madrazo y Kuntz.

Please read the full article - with many more stunning pictures of Laure - here!

[canesenzafissadimora]

Chissà perché le pessime idee hanno sorrisi bellissimi. 

Odette de Crecy.

[stellardrift]

The Captive

I’ve read lately that astrology is the perception of cycles, the perception of motifs that play out intermittently, such as the sonata in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that seemed to just permeate the entire novel, though I am not sure whether it was really there all along or whether it had made such an impression that it stayed with me until the end. Proust describes Charles Swann, a man earthy in his desires, drawn to voluptuous women rather than those of his own class, and rewarded by the capture and seduction of women that satisfy his passions. 

He is able to perform as an aristocrat, even to the extent that he is one of the most well received, and well spoken of, even if he regards this class of people superficially, as a means to an end, and through which to pursue indulgently his physical desires. He is one afternoon brought into the company of a woman he barely regards with attraction at all, Odette de Crecy, and in poor company, of those who look either to mimic others in order to impress or climb social ladders, with self absorption, blinkered to the real feelings that they might express, or those of others. 

He is in her company and everything is flat, plain, unremarkable, until a pianist performs a little sonata that so transfixes Swann that he is brought out of himself, enraptured by the feelings of which he did not know he was capable, which rest upon de Crecy, whose austere, barren sensuality somehow becomes so alive that Swann, not knowing where else to let his new desires fall, rests them with this women, whom he pursues frantically afterward. In his incapacity to let his feelings simply be, caught in a quiet despair that perhaps they will be lost unless they are centred on a person, his love is invested into a woman for which he has little desire, and even less in respect. 

The reason I am so engaged with this particularly motif, of love as capture, or self effacement, or even self forgetting, is one of the most disastrous kinds, and Proust was particularly sensitive to it, perceptively noticing that in this sonata, so perfectly unfinished and without author, alluding to a place or sensation that could not be more perfect in its abstraction. In a word: unreal, or unobtainable. The kind of romantic love that is so toxic, such a poison to indulge in, is a vanity that strains us and makes us pitiful in the eyes of the other, who we have indulged with our trust and blind hope in their realness, in their authenticity to us. 

But it is more to the point, that the sort of man that Swann was before, sly, intelligent in soliciting for himself the real and physical, though ever so distant always as it was not part of his culture to be so profligate, as promiscuous as flowers themselves. The novel, in this little motif of the sonata, keeps telling us: it is just a fraction of the light that Swann will let in, and he would rather placate and restrain his other, more earthy desires, for an ideal which eclipses him. We all might be able to find our true, natural selves, as we dissolve the prejudices of society, and our own personal recrimination and judgement upon other people which may really simply disguise the real truth: that what we so desperately wish to hold captive, to train in our image, is not what we desire at all.

[soberdionysian-blog]

In Swann’s Way, Odette de Crecy is said to resemble this figure, Zipporah, from Botticelli’s Trials of Moses. Although she is presented as a ‘kept woman’, it’s hard not to sympathize with Odette. She’s a product of her (or Proust’s) time and her station in life.

[petitsreticules-blog]

Week 2: Initial Thoughts on “Swann in Love”

The following was written a week ago; I was so taken by this text that the only thing that could distract me from it was the inherent need to record how taken I was with it:

I have just finished reading the first 60 pages of “Swann in Love”; it only took about five pages before a little sob, an intake of breath that could just as easily been a cry of pleasure as one of pain, escaped my mouth, and a decent amount of tears followed in the next 50 pages. It should be noted that I’m a bleeding heart, a sucker for love, and a terrific crier. Every movie I go to see, sad or not, I’m more than likely bawling at some point—I don’t even know why; I don’t ever cry when watching movies at home (which I do most nights a week), but the second I get in the theater the flood lets loose. Still, I didn’t expect to be so affected. 

But a lot of my response to this, the most famed and well-known section of the novel, is highly personal in a way that won’t fade in a few days or a week. Because I read this thing when I was 20 years old, and then just two years later, I let myself fall into the same miserable trap that Swann does: Swann meets a woman who, while not necessarily attractive to him, is amenable to his desires; he spends time with her, while all the while entertaining other women and never thinking he could be attached to this one who holds so little charm for him; before long, habit has obliterated all he once identified himself as, and he plays the fool. It is a little startling to look back on my own experience, much the same, while rereading this section. It seems as impossible to me now that I should have fallen for it, as it would have seemed to Swann before he ever entered the household of the Verdurins.

I considered writing something about that relationship, my first serious one, in relation to my current reading experience, but the truth of it would come across as shit-talking. I’m not really bitter about it, and think of that person quite rarely. Suffice it to say that he did a number on me, and that his behavior was quite as crude as Odette de Crecy’s.

***

Since writing the above a week ago, I have read the majority of the rest of “Swann in Love”; I will complete it immediately after posting this—I would have finished sooner, but I have had some interesting developments in my life that I am trying to square. 

I wrote down one quote from this section: “How readily he would have sacrificed all his connections for no matter what person who was in the habit of seeing Odette, even if she were a manicurist or shop assistant! He would have put himself out for her, taken more trouble than he would have for a queen.”

Is this not the very definition of love? We can put it in lofty, lovely terms, but in the end, it is about effort, it is about obsession, it is about a degree of care that is reachable under only one circumstance. It is power and weakness at the same time. It is a show of force and a shying away. It is so easily taken advantage of. I am beginning to wonder what I hope to achieve with this project as I immerse myself again in this world; as I begin to remember that this theme of the deception and corruption of others’ most sincere emotions is a major theme of this work. But then, I recall the aspects of those “others” that were equally deplorable. Is this novel about the fruitlessness of love? The inherently amazing beauty of it? The crass reality of it? My suspicion is that it is a complex amalgamation of all those things and many others. A maze I am about to incontrovertibly enter as I begin volume two, Within A Budding Grove.

[obligatorymadeleinereference]

January 20, 2017, Page 283, Volume I

I miss the Narrator and his familial woes, because Odette kind of annoys me. But even so, her and Swann’s dynamic is so interesting and so weirdly melancholy and it’s definitely keeping me hooked. 

[obligatorymadeleinereference]

January 18, 2017. Page 267, Volume I

I’m over halfway through Swann’s Way, guys. 

As for the reaction, I’m missing the Narrator. Swann is nice and all, but the Verdurins and their circle are really irritating me. Weirdly enough, Odette is also kind of making me think of Sally Bowles, and I can’t quite figure out why (I blame the Isherwood kick I was on a few months ago). I can’t tell if I like her or not.