The Year of Reading Proust discussion

Towards the end of 'The Fugitive', Marcel notes that the careful reader would have picked upon the fact that Odette and Jupien are first cousins. Where is this hinted at or mentioned?

Inderjit wrote: "Towards the end of 'The Fugitive', Marcel notes that the careful reader would have picked upon the fact that Odette and Jupien are first cousins. Where is this hinted at or mentioned?"

Jim Everett explains it best, in his indispensable blog, "Proust Reader:" http://proustreader.wordpress.com/201...

I think this is translation issue. Scott Moncrieff has it as "the reader must now be told". Kilmartin changed it to "the better informed reader knows". I am rather certain that Proust did not earlier reveal that Jupien and Odette were cousins, so I'm guessing that Kilmartin introduced a confusion here. Perhaps someone who can read the original will help resolve the issue.

Thanks, Marcelita, for your generous words.

Thanks for the reply guys. Hopefully we can get an answer from a French reader who will satisfy my pedantic question!

Bill Carter led me back to the original Moncreiff* translation below.


FRENCH:
The Pléiade at III, 251 and 1137-38 gives:
<< Jupien, dont notre lecteur plus instruit sait qu'Odette était la cousine germaine >>.
(via Proustian James Connelly, "The notes indicate that he reminded himself to develop this with an unknown character, Rigaud, but death intervened.")

The Modern Library translation which led us on this exploration:
V, 915 of the ML (The Fugitive):
"Jupien, who, the better informed reader knows, was Odette's first cousin".

Original Moncreiff translation:
"Yet another mistake which any young reader not acquainted with the facts might have been led to make was that of supposing that the Baron and Baronne de Forcheville figured on the list in their capacity as parents-in-law of the Marquis de Saint-Loup, that is to say on the Guermantes side. But on this side, they had no right to appear since it was Robert who was related to the Guermantes and not Gilberte. No, the Baron and Baronne de Forcheville, despite this misleading suggestion, did figure on the wife’s side, it is true, and not on the Cambremer side, because not of the Guermantes, but of Jupien, who, : the reader must now be told,: was a cousin of Odette."

*Title: The Sweet Cheat Gone
(Albertine disparue)
[Vol. 6 of Remembrance of Things Past—
(À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author: Marcel Proust
Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0300541.txt
Language: English

Scroll down...14th paragraph from the bottom:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300...

*The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust (Moncrieff)
Chapter Four — A Fresh Light Upon Robert De Saint-Loup

Scroll down...14th paragraph from the bottom also.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/prous...

Looks like I have to take back what I said about Kilmartin mistranslating the original. His "better informed reader" seems about right. But from a narrative standpoint it sounds wrong, in that we readers have not been informed about the cousin relationship. My guess is that Scott Moncrieff felt the same way and so offered up what he thought Proust wanted to say. Which illustrates both his strength and weakness as a translator.

James Connelly's comment about Proust intending to develop this passage further points to the likely cause of this problematic passage. Perhaps Proust intended to develop the Jupien-Odette connection but death caught him short. The novel has a number of such contradictory or incomplete passages and this may one of them.

Albertine Disparue (The Fugitive) definitely feels unfinished. Like the last 3 volumes of La Recherche it was published posthumously (and edited by Marcel's brother, Robert Proust, and Jacques Rivière from Gallimard). We can only imagine what a few more years would have allowed Marcel to write, probably adding a few more volumes in the process.

There is consequently no definitive text of Albertine Disparue. In 1986 a Proust heir unveiled a "dactylographie" where Proust had removed about 150 pages of the text, leading to a new, shorter version of Albertine, which was even less satisfying... More on this here (in French): http://www.fabula.org/cr/412.php

Re Odette & Jupien's relationship, it was never mentioned before this passage. My sense is that Marcel talks of "notre lecteur plus instruit" (our better informed reader) by opposition to the younger people ("les jeunes gens des nouvelles générations" and "tout jeune lecteur") who do not know precisely the complex genealogy of the aristocraty, pleasantly assuming that his reader ("notre lecteur") knows all this as well as he does. ^.^

Mais bien des jeunes gens des nouvelles générations et qui ne connaissaient pas les situations réelles, outre qu'ils pouvaient prendre Marie-Antoinette d'Oloron, marquise de Cambremer, pour une dame de la plus haute naissance, auraient pu commettre bien d'autres erreurs en lisant cette lettre de faire-part.

...

Une autre erreur encore que tout jeune lecteur peu au courant eût été porté à faire eût été de croire que le baron et la baronne de Forcheville faisaient part en tant que parents et beaux-parents du marquis de Saint-Loup, c'est-à-dire du côté Guermantes. Or de ce côté ils n'avaient pas à figurer puisque c'était Robert qui était parent des Guermantes et non Gilberte. Non, le baron et la baronne de Forcheville, malgré cette fausse apparence, figuraient du côté de la mariée, il est vrai, et non du côté Cambremer, à cause non pas des Guermantes mais de Jupien, dont notre lecteur plus instruit sait qu'Odette était la cousine germaine.

ETA: a quick summary of the publication of the novel on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Searc...

Yours is the best answer. Proust juxtaposes The "well-informed reader" to the "young reader", which occurs both in this paragraph and a couple of pages earlier. This section of The Fugitive titled "New Aspect of Robert de Saint-Loup" deals with the constant regeneration of society. The young contemporaries just beginning to move about society tend to see the current order as fixed and ancient. Proust counters with the stories of the elevation to nobility of a tailor's daughter to the titled Mlle d'Oloron and her marriage to the son of the engineer's daughter and nephew of the self-styled Legrandin de Meseglise (later self-enobled to Comte de Meseglise), the Marquis de Cambremer. And with the marriage to the genuine noble Robert de Saint-Loup to the daughter of the coquette Odette.

Proust developed these histories in the way described by Book Portrait, as a comparison of the views of the young and naive to those of their better informed elders: "...but many young people of the rising generation.." (V,913) and repeated in "Yet another mistake which any young reader not acquainted with..." to their more knowledgeable elders "the better informed reader...".

But the earlier explanations we came up with still hold merit. Scott Moncrieff, by changing "better informed" to "the reader must now be told" obscures, if not entirely hides, Proust's parallel construction. And Connelly is surely correct in saying that Proust intended to further develop the Jupien-Odette cousin story (Jupien brokered the sale of his very young cousin Odette to that English gentleman in Nice).