'Per Viam Rectam' - Proust (II)

It’s not that my Latin is close to non-existent, but rather the problem is that I often don’t punch the right words into the search engine.

Marcel Proust in playful mood

Thus, when trying to decipher Gilberte Swann’s motto, one that appears on certain pieces of her ever-changing headed notepaper, I ended up translating ‘Per Viam Rectum’ rather than ‘Per Viam Rectam’. Rather different ways to live your life, you might agree. As we know, Marcel Proust’s inclinations never inclined to the ‘straightest path’ (no pun intended here) and would often take over one hundred pages to reach, as it were, a decision. Yet his sexual proclivities did incline towards my mistake, and – playful fellow that he was – I wondered if this was a deliberate pun.

‘Finally, as the series of different writing-papers which Gilberte possessed, numerous though it was, was not unlimited, after a certain number of weeks saw reappear the sheet that bore (like the first letter she had written me) the motto Per viam rectam, and over it the helmeted head set in a medallion of tarnished silver.’

Look no further than the illustration above Gilberte’s motto: an helmeted head. Sniggering like a schoolboy, I think no, that’s not at all what he meant. But then, with ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ just over one thousand pages away, maybe that’s exactly what he meant.