Proust makes a subtle illusion to the sexual undertone of Charlus' proposition by playing on the reader's memory of Proust fantasizing about "possessing" Mme Stermaria on the Bois de Boulogne, the same setting as the sexually provocative painting "Luncheon on the Grass" by Manet.

This is the last impression until Time Regained, with the most explicit attempt and failure to better understand a hidden aspect in an object which reminds the narrator of his past. There is an implicit reference to the three steeples from Swann's Way. Although there are in reality two steeples, the narrator's memory superimposes a third steeple from a nearby town onto the scene, as he did in his childhood at Combray.

More flower comparison between GIlberte and Mme Swann.

The narrator cops Swann's practice of naming women of lower social status after cultural icons. Rachel is a biblical figure, one of the mothers of the tribe of Israel, who was briefly cursed by God with infertility, later dying in childbirth.

A reference back to the water bowl of violets which Odette Swann keeps in her drawing room-- "It was annoying, when one entered the room to pay Mme. Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her not to find the room empty, so prominent a place in it, enigmatic and intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume which had not been made ready for Odette's visitors but, as it were, forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again private conversations which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in vain to read, fastening one's eyes on the moist purple, the still liquid water-colour of the Parma violets." There is constant correlation between Mademoiselle Swann and the picking and arranging of flowers. The way in which Mademoiselle Swann decorates her room, in respect to her past as a courtesan, is often highlighted in this volume, as is the comparison between objects of affection and houseplants.

"Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia." -- Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout

Proust spends a lot of time examining biases, and the ways in which we project what we do know unto what we don't in order to create the illusion of whole experience, as we saw with Swann's jealousy and now with the Balbec peasant.

The analogy of French society bourgeois as being fish in an aquarium, unaware of their own confinement, is repeated in a party scene on page 303 where the narrator describes M. de Palancy's monocle as a "purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium."

Proust reveals once again his obsession with the conflict between the idea and the actual-- Swann is shocked by Odette's real existence outside of the scope of his perception and imagination, as the narrator will later be with Albertine's "broke her pot."

A project done by Bard College to recreate the sonata

Giotto's Charity/Envy

Bloch acts as a counter to the parodic romanticism of Legrandin, offering a caricature of idealism-- the belief that underneath physical phenomena lies a perfect idea or sensation, and that the goal of experience is to transcend those phenomena in pursuit of the ideal.

The character who took pleasure in imagining the emotional benefits of the death of her own family is the first in that family to die. Note also that the mourning around a character who imagined the great emotional depths of mourning she would have for her lost family is mourned improperly in the eyes of Francoise, with a lack of pathos or dedication. A contrast between the idea and "seamy reality," as Proust puts it earlier in the novel.

In the original French: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. The unusual use of a tense in the first clause which suggests both the past and the present in conflict with the second clause, which is written in a perfect past, is a microcosm of Proust's larger project to reconcile the past with the present.