Yesterday I had the kid, and today I wound up making a lot of progress on Proust instead of starting Trials. (Is this just me being slow to get started and treating everything on my to-do list as if it were all of equal priority? Probably.)
Anyway, Proust is bad with continuity. That makes it difficult to remember who Smith, the red-headed lawyer from Lyons is when the last time he came up (three volumes and 1,350 pages ago), he was Jones, the blond accountant from Calais. The footnotes are both helpful and necessary, and today I came across a pretty funny one.
At a party in The Captive, it is mentioned that a character named Cottard has died. According to the footnote, "Cottard will nevertheless reappear--indeed at this same soirée (see p. 371)--to die during the Great War, in Time Regained."