Amazon used to have a feature called “Statistically Improbable Phrases.” For whatever book you happened to be viewing, you could see the bigrams that were least likely to appear in any other book in their system. I played with this feature quite a bit, and Proust — specifically, Proust in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation, revised by D.J. Enright for the Modern Library edition — offered plenty of juicy improbabilities. I particularly remember “little clan” and “little nucleus,” phrases Mme. Verdurin uses to describe her social circle; I’ve never been quite sure how much of this oddity reflects her characteristic posture of snobbish humility, and how much should be put down to petit being a bit more versatile in French than “little” is in English.
Anyway! Another Proustian/Moncrieffian SIP was “arborescent page.” Not being nineteenth-century people of leisure, our first association with the word “page” is not the kind of pageboy who holds the door or carries your bags, but this is, as it turns out, precisely what Proust was referring to, in one of his more surreal metaphors: a hotel page “who attracted the eye no less by the unusual and harmonious coloring of his hair than by his plant-like epidermis.” Proust gives us a little glimpse into the melancholy life and backstory of this curious plant-boy, who rarely gets a decent tip thanks to his unfavorable position in the lobby, and whose brothers have all pursued “brilliant careers” while he remains trapped in this little resort town. And then, as another hotel patron comes and goes without using his baggage-carrying services, “the arborescent page” fades once more from our view, returning to the “vegetable immobility” that lets him merge into the background of Balbec.
The phrase isn’t a pun in French: “le chasseur arborescent,” not “la page” (which only refers to the page of a book). But I do like to think that Moncrieff, for whose translation I feel a stubborn affection despite its overwritten side and its silly idioms, might have meant to evoke the endlessly branching parse trees of Proust’s sentences when he chose those words for a character who lives for the length of a paragraph. That’s what improbability feels like to me: these arborescent pages, and the hybrid creatures they sustain.
The Arborescent Page 