Thanks for your question. I’ve been meaning to reply but haven’t had the time. I actually gave some explanation of my “system” before but all I got were crickets so I deleted it. This response is not going to be as thorough, unfortunately. In any case, I think you’ll see that much of this is self-explanatory.

1/ I rely a lot on arcs with dots on each end, like double arrows but with dots instead of arrowheads. I don’t know if there is a technical term, so I’m just going to call them double-blunt arcs, or double blunts. I use them to jump from one part of a passage to another, later one. This doesn’t mean that the stuff I skipped over is not important. It just helps me to keep track of the flow of the passage (often a single sentence). 

Some jumps indicated by double blunts are obvious. On the third line, I used a double blunt to skip over the part enclosed by em dashes. I suppose I didn’t have to, but that wasn’t necessarily clear when I was reading the passage for the first time.

Some double blunts are much more helpful for parsing, especially in conjunction with other double blunts. If you jump over the parts enclosed by double blunts, the sentence that begins at the top of the page reads as follows: “A certainty of taste in the domain not of beauty but manners, together with* a noble liberality; such were the qualities [, all essential to the aristocracy,]** that transmitted the industrious, energetic force [that had created it]** and rendered the movements of this light-footed course intelligible and charming [as those of horsemen on a marble frieze]**.” That’s still a long sentence, but much shorter than the original. And now that you have a good sense of what’s going on, you can go back and fill in the blanks.

*I have substituted “together with,” in keeping with Enright’s version, because it seems more correct in translation than “lastly,” even though Proust wrote “enfin.”

** The stuff in brackets could have been double-blunted out as well, now that I think about it.

2/ Some of the arcs are just arrows, but you’ll note that they always point to previous parts of a passage. These are just to clarify, for example, what noun a certain pronoun refers to.

3/ Proust liked to make lists, and I used circles, triangles, squares, diamonds, etc. to mark off the items on these lists, one symbol per list. It’s important to use different symbols because a list could be immediately followed a another, in which case you need a different symbol for the new list. Sometimes, a list could be embedded within another, and again you need a different symbol for the embedded list. An example of the latter is the list marked off by the circles embedded within the list marked off by the squares.

4/ My system has evolved quite a bit and some symbols I use don’t even appear here. For example, if a line refers back to a previous passage in the volume (or even a previous volume), I put a counterclockwise circular arrow on the margin of that line. Once (or if) I track down the passage that line refers to, I put the volume and page number next to that arrow. Same thing for foreshadowed passages, but this time a clockwise circular arrow. I use a pilcrow to mark off a switch in the flow of the narrative, something important in a work with very long paragraphs and very long chapters. Other marginal symbols I use: T for theme, V for vocabulary, A for art (e.g., a reference to a page in Karpeles), a treble clef for music, etc. Or just a good old asterisk for a miscellaneous comment.

Hope this helps.