Yet another social gathering, this time at Mme Verdurin’s salon, home of “the faithful,” “the little clan,” and occasional visitors.
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).
The Norwegian philosopher, we are told, speaks French very well but very slowly. He also knows how to leave a gathering of some size: “The fact was that he had vanished without anyone having had the time to notice, like a god.” I’d say that he had the good sense to get out. Perhaps the narrator will follow his example.
I have long thought of such a departure as an Irish goodbye. I had wanted to make a joke about the philosopher being fluent in French and Irish, but I just learned that the Irish goodbye is also known as the Dutch leave, the French exit, and French leave. And in French, one might filer à l’anglaise.
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
[One reason the philosopher appears in the novel, aside from the comedy of his disappearance: he’s described as having recounted to the narrator, perhaps reliably, Henri Bergson’s thinking about memory and hypnotics.]
Thursday, March 11, 2021
A missing person
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comments: 2
A friend who married a Serbian says that at parties they did "Serbian good-byes," where you have to say good-bye to every single person before you leave. She said it would take an hour and a half to leave a party.
I wonder if a Serbian in a hurry invented the Irish goodbye. : )
I'm glad to see you’re posting again, Mike. I’m passing on your library-card post to librarians I know.
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