À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, relu

Say that I'm a tenth of the way through, and it's taken me a month so far, reading a little bit every morning while I'm waking up. Really, did I read this all the way through, in French, 39 years ago? It's nothing like what I thought I remembered. Just now I'm at the Verdurin dinner party, with everybody (except Swann) being such asses, making such stupid and frequently vulgar jokes, and congratulating themselves on being oh-so-cool, and cutting down their intellectual and aristocratic betters, and putting the real excellencies of Alexandre Dumas fils (Francillon) on a par with the slavering vulgarity and snobbism of Georges Ohnet (Le Maître des Forges and Serge Panine)--whom I happen to know about because because I read (about 20 years ago) in the collected works of my mentor, guide, philosopher and friend Anatole France, mon cher Maître's appallingly brutal literary criticism of Georges Ohnet the man (snob) and the writer (vulgarian). I knew that there was something mean (in the American sense) about Anatole France--and that's why, partially, I liked him; but the Master's deadly venomous evisceration of Ohnet was a shock--almost as doubtful in taste as his taking advantage of his position as the chief eulogist at Zola's funeral to tell the world how bad and ugly Zola's French prose was. Which he did do. Every once in a while you get the impression that being an "Immortal" sort of goes to the head of a Frenchman who's been elected to the French Academy--not unlike the divine afflatus that sometimes seized Roman Emperors--and causes him to lose all sense of human proportion, and, so to say, nominate his horse as Consul.