Swann's Way

Swann's Way is the first part of the work In Search of Lost Time written by Marcel Proust and published in 1913.

This first part, which can be read as an independent novel, focuses on detailing the narrator's childhood, which is practically the life of Marcel Proust. It tells the love story between Charles Swann, a character related to Combray and the entire Parisian high society, and a cocotte named Odette. She does not enjoy a good reputation among the upper class due to her work.

In this book we find one of the most famous pages of the work: the moment in which, before going to sleep, the taste of a cupcake evokes all the memories of the protagonist's childhood.

This evocation of childhood memories lived in Combray brings out various characters from the narrator's environment (Swann, his aunt Gilberte, Vinteuil,...) and details of the place, such as the Méséglise path or the Guermantes path.

The novel ends in the adolescent stage of the narrator and the discovery of love.

This digital edition of the book Swann's Way is based on C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation.

In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V".