“Geneviève de Brabant” André Maréchal on Columbia cylinder (c. 1903) French music hall, Paris
Columbia cylinder 33502
My favorite novel is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In the opening pages of Du côté de chez Swann (1913) the narrator recalls his boyhood after a madeleine dipped in tea triggers old, hidden memories. He recalls Geneviève de Brabant (the legend of Genevieve of Brabant) coming alive through a lantern that projected colorful slides onto walls and a ceiling. His age is not stated. Age 5?
In this medieval legend, a nobleman’s wife is wrongly accused of adultery with the evil Golo. Geneviève escapes execution and hides in a cave for years with her child before being discovered by her husband and reinstated. The Merovingians–a dynasty of French kings–ruled at this time.
A lantern sounds fun, right? Not for the neurotic narrator, who is disturbed by his bedroom losing stability when the lantern is used: “But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which…”
The setting is a boy’s bedroom in Combray, France, in the 1870s. As each new slide is projected, the narrator’s “great-aunt” reads aloud text (from a booklet that came with the slides?)
The “great-aunt” who reads is given no name. This mother of the bed-ridden Aunt Léonie is not technically the narrator’s “great-aunt.” She is really a cousin of the grandfather.
The maternal grandmother has two unmarried sisters. They are technically great-aunts to the narrator. But each is called “aunt.” Confusing, eh? Céline and Flora are minor characters.
The novel’s “Combray” is based on Illiers, where Proust’s father was raised, but, in the novel, characters who live in Combray were based on his mother’s family! It’s backwards–get it?
Did Françoise or another servant keep dust off the lantern?
The narrator reports, “Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colors, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of having to go to bed, it had become quite endurable. Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it…Golo, filled with an infamous design, issued from the little triangular forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced fitfully towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their color without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the accompanying patter read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame all material obstacles…by taking it as an ossature and embodying it in himself: even the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float irresistibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility…as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.”
“Geneviève de Brabant” André Maréchal on Columbia cylinder (c. 1903) French music hall, Paris Proust