[In the following essay, Rosengarten identifies several literary influences on Pleasures and Regrets.]

Proust's work is like a lens where all the tendencies of our literature converge.

—Simone Kadi, La Peinture chez Proust et Baudelaire

As a critical approach to various forms of literary appropriation by one writer of another writer's work—images, stylistic mannerisms, epigraphic passages, technical devices, even plagiarism, an example of which, according to Anne Henry, is Proust's use of Tolstoyan death scenes for several of the short stories in [Les plaisirs et les jours]—the study of intertextuality has become a staple of contemporary literary criticism. Julia Kristeva, who helped to popularize the term, considers it a key component of the poststructuralist view of writing as perpetually open to new readings and interpretations.¹ But its usefulness to ideological criticism is just as important.

Intertextual references are pervasive in PJ [Les plaisirs et les jours] In the title itself Proust borrows playfully from a Greek classical work, Hesiod's Works and Days. The irreverent nature of the title derives from the fact that it points up a contrast between Hesiod, who conceived of work as a remedy for corruption and evil, and the modern era, where the pursuit of pleasure was not seen as an occasional respite from toil but as the primary purpose of life. In the opening section of his poem, Hesiod recounts the five ages of the world, which parallel the five races or “generations” of human beings created by Zeus, the last of which, forefathers of the generation existing in Hesiod's own time, is in desperate need of redemption. Such redemption, the poet says, can come only from pious respect for the superior power of the gods and from daily labor both in the fields and in the industrious production of useful goods. In short, religion and work were Hesiod's solutions to the ills that afflicted humanity.

The title of PJ, therefore, accomplished by insinuation what would have taken many pages to accomplish by persuasive argument, namely to highlight the current moral decline, seen in turn as a possible portent of economic and social decline. In this sense, a rather substantial part of PJ, especially the stories and the portraits in “Fragments de comédie italienne,” can be read as exempla illustrating prevalent situations and character types in the Paris of the 1890s. On the one hand, the title serves to connect PJ to an ancient tradition of thought about the human condition, and on the other to complicate that connection by inviting the reader to reflect on the similarities and differences between past and present. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams notes that tradition is usually “a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the present” (116). But Proust uses literary and cultural tradition in a highly selective manner; he is an arbiter and decision-maker, not a servile imitator. One part of him wanted to ratifiy the present by appealing to the past, but another equally strong part of him interrogated and critiqued that past, and questioned the present. He no doubt wanted to stimulate his readers to look at the state of their society from a morally critical point of view, not, to be sure, with a view to radically changing it but, rather, to correcting certain of its egregiously harmful habits and vices. Like his mentor Anatole France, and in the spirit of idealist philosophy imparted to him by Alphonse Darlu, Proust was seeking in his own way to restore the conception of literature as a vehicle of thought and worldly enlightenment. By linking himself to the classical world in this way, he was trying to reaffirm the natural, millennial alliance between literature and moral philosophy.

In her 1966 study The World of Marcel Proust, Germaine Brée observes that “For Hesiod's round of work, Proust substituted the calendar of social pleasures, but he kept the moral intent. His short stories read like allegories, and the ‘Fragments of Italian Comedy’ are transparently moral in mood” (41). This is a handy formulation, which Luzius Keller takes one step further when he opines, with reference to the biblical allusion in the dedication, that Proust wanted the story of Noah and the Ark to stand for the imminence of an “apocalyptic” end to modern civilization. Like the apocalypse mentioned in Hesiod's Works and Days, Keller proposes, “the flood is the punishment for the decline of morals” (Keller, 291 n. 10). In another remark in his German edition of PJ, Keller sees a thematic connection between Hesiod and modern decadence in the portrait “Olivian,” where the writer, speaking directly to his character, admonishes him to “have the courage to take up rake and hoe. And one of these days you will know the pleasure of sensing a delicious odor rising in your memory as from a garden wheelbarrow filled to the brim” (Dupee 51). With this allusion to pick and hoe, Keller believes, Proust was alluding to a poet who was among the first to value manual labor as a remedy against destructive pleasures and amusements.

But Keller's ingeniously conceived literary and moral connections between Hesiod and Proust rest on somewhat shaky ground, inasmuch as the allusion to Noah in the dedication was designed to convey a deeply felt personal memory, not primarily an apocalyptic one, while the passage from “Olivian” has a distinctly metaphorical character, even if it is possible to see the allusion to “rake and hoe” as a reminder of the agricultural labors recommended by Hesiod. Keller's interpretations of these two passages do have the merit, however, of recalling to mind the “prophetic” side of Proust's personality, which has been appropriately emphasized by several literary scholars, notably by Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (143-145).

The epigraphs and other literary appropriations in PJ are too numerous to be discussed in detail within the framework of this chapter. I shall limit myself therefore to the most significant ones and attempt to give the reader a sense of their purpose in the overall economy of the book by pointing out what I think are the basic attitudes and ideas Proust wished to communicate through them. I am referring specifically here to the epigraphic uses he made in PJ of the following writers: Emerson, Thomas à Kempis, Horace, Racine, Baudelaire, La Bruyère, and Tolstoy.

EMERSON

An unexpectedly dominant epigraphic presence in PJ is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, two of whose essays, “History” and “The Poet,” had a strong impact on Proust. In 1894 or 1895, he read them in a French translation by Emile Montégut. It is possible, however, that his attention was first drawn to the American philosopher by an article in the June 1894 issue of Le Mercure de France, where Camille Mauclair reviewed a more recent translation of Emerson's essays prefaced by the Belgian symbolist playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck. In his twenty-page preface, Maeterlinck called Emerson “the wise man of ordinary days,” meaning that while Emersonian philosophy was transcendental in its inspiration, it was also practical and down-to-earth. Mauclair felt that Maeterlinck's long preface “was one of the rare metaphysical documents of French intellectuality in this century” and that it constituted a crucial link between American transcendentalism and European spiritualism.² In any event, in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn, written on January 18, 1895, Proust said that he was reading Emerson avec ivresse, in an “enraptured” state (Corr. 1: 363). The fact that he was under Emerson's spell at this particular time probably accounts for the four epigraphic citations from his essays in PJ, one each at the beginnings of “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” “Fragments,” and “Regrets,” and one for part 3 of “La Fin de la jalousie.”

As Larkin Price has shown (1965, 233-235), the passage from Emerson's “History” that introduces part 1 of the story “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande” intrigued Proust; it appears in various guises elsewhere in PJ and in several of his letters. What attracted him to this particular passage in “History” appears to have been not only its explicit philosophical content but also its form, which relies on myth to convey its meaning rather than on logical argument. But a problem presents itself here: the French translation (translated in its turn into English) cited by Proust reads as follows: “Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, say the poets; each man is also a hidden god who apes the fool.” The original English is: “Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakespeare were not” (Emerson 13).

Both passages stress the role of poets in transmitting myths down through the ages, myths that encapsulate basic narratives of birth, death, and rebirth, and signal the eternal duality of the human soul, which is of divine origin but which also assumes a fallible, all-too-human form. But the French passage is more laconic; it stresses the double nature of the human species. The English original honors the poets among us by comparing Socrates and Shakespeare, mere mortals, to Jesus, and it does so by placing them on the same plane as God. The French passage is more pertinent to the story of Baldassare Silvande, because he, although a gifted musician and composer, has “aped the fool” by devoting much of his life to superficial and wasteful pursuits instead of cultivating the deepest part of himself. Yet he is “a hidden god,” his genius comes from above, it cannot be attributed solely to chance, or to biological heredity. This hidden god also performs humble tasks, he mixes with ordinary people, and suffers in the same way that all mortal creatures suffer.

The passage introducing “Les Regrets: Rêveries Couleur du temps” is taken from the essay “The Poet,” where Emerson undertakes “a consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet” in modern times. One of the characteristics of this essay for which Proust felt an affinity was that it gave a primary role to philosophical thought in the process of poetic creation. Proust found in Emerson a kindred spirit, for he was a thinker who understood what Proust felt almost instinctively, namely that

it is not meters, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.

(Emerson 68)

In Emerson's somewhat overheated prose we recognize some of the cardinal features of Proust's idealist aesthetics: his belief that each new writer or artist renews the world with a fresh vision of things; his belief that thought is generative of beauty; his subordination of form to feeling. But the passage he uses for “Les Regrets” is of another order; it concerns the poet's “manner of living,” where Emerson's responsiveness to the ordinary aspects of natural life struck another sympathetic chord in Proust. In this case, the French translation is more literally faithful to the English original. It exhorts the poet to live a simple life, and to take delight in the sun, the sky, the air. Proust translated Emerson's advice, for example, into the exquisitely earthy lines that open the prose poem “Promenade.” This prose-poetic fragment, written in the first person, begins by describing the colors, the vibrancy, the joyfulness of a cold morning in early spring, where an “intense and ardent” sky and the clear water of a nearby pond form the backdrop of an idyllic scene. But in the second paragraph, Proust shifts our mind's eye to another very different site, a nearby barnyard, which leads then to a moment of reflection and to the use of imagery that express one of the core principles of his aesthetic philosophy:

The barnyard, where one went for eggs, was a no less pleasing sight. The sun, like an inspired and prolific poet who does not scorn to dispense beauty in the humblest places, which no one had ever dreamed of including in the realm of art before, warmed the salutary vigor of the dunghill, of the rough paved court, and of the pear tree broken and bent like an old serving woman.

(Dupee 102)

This short passage suggests that Proust's obsession with sunlight may have had a “mythic” origin in that Apollo was at once the god of light, of poetry and music, and of youth (and therefore of ardent desire). He was also associated with the care of flocks and herds, noted earlier with regard to Baldassare Silvande, which reappears in the final paragraph of “Promenade.” After drawing the reader's attention to the “regally attired” peacock (a common image of beauty in symbolist and decadent verse), the narrator tells us that it is right here, among ordinary animals and “rustic farm implements”

that the peacock spends his life, a veritable bird of paradise in the barnyard among the turkeys and the hens, like a captive Andromache spinning her wool among her slaves, except that unlike her he has left behind none of the splendors of royal insignia and crown jewels, a radiant Apollo, recognizable always—even when he guards Admetus' flocks.

(Dupee 103)

THOMAS à KEMPIS

Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ was widely read and cited in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1893, Proust went to the trouble of borrowing a copy from Pierre Lavallée, and seems to have been quite affected by it. In a short letter to Lavallée, Proust assured his friend that he would soon return his copy of the Imitation, “which I have enjoyed and used very much” (Corr. 1: 234). Like Maurice Barrès in Un Homme Libre (1889), volume 2 of his trilogy Le Culte du moi, Proust found in the Imitation an eminently quotable authority on how to live with rectitude in a corrupt social environment that perpetually distracts and attracts the vulnerable individual with its pleasures and refinements. Barrès was moved by the book's arguments for the virtue of solitude and silence (Barrès 16, 135).

Proust used this influential fifteenth-century work as an ideological support for two of his short stories, “Violante ou la mondanité,” and “La Confession d'une jeune fille.” Both are stories of young women who come to an unhappy end: Violante, who survives physically to old age but who dies spiritually at the moment when she rejects her tutor Augustin's advice to seek fulfillment not in worldly pleasures but in doing what she loves with “the deepest tendencies of her soul; and an unnamed young woman who tells her story in the form of a confession to an equally anonymous but sympathetic listener.

In both stories the parental role is important, either by reason of its absence because of an untimely fatal accident (in “Violante” [“Violante ou la mondanité”]) or because of a mother's inability to prevent her daughter, the first person narrator, from yielding to her sexual impulses in the arms of a seductive young man (in “La Confession d'une jeune fille”). The epigraphs from the Imitation are used to emphasize how narrow and hazardous the path to virtue is, and how fearsome the temptations that lie in wait once a young person during her formative years fails to develop the strength of will necessary to maintain her moral equilibrium. Kempis's ascetic thought serves the purpose of placing these two tales in a fabular atmosphere where good and evil, rectitude and sin, are at war with each other, and where what is at stake are the souls of the two protagonists. Stéphane Sarkany speaks in this connection of the “Christian ascetic and medieval morality” of PJ (Erickson and Pagès 115-122). In fact, there is no way of avoiding the conclusion that for young Proust the human soul is a battleground fought over by fiercely opposed forces, in a war that can give no quarter, for the stakes are high and permanent.

The confessional mode has induced some Proust scholars to suspect the influence of Saint Augustine and Rousseau. One could make a reasonable case for the former, inasmuch as Violante's mentor and tutor is named Augustin, who intervenes in one of the exceedingly rare moments in Proust's early fictions where the leading character enters into a dialogic relationship with someone who looks at the world from a different and critical perspective, thus allowing for a more dialectically structured plot. In “La Confession d'une jeune fille,” however, there is nothing of this sort, only the shocked expression and fatal collapse of the mother when she sees her daughter locked in passionate embrace not with her fiancé but with another young man. As a result of this horrific incident, the girl shoots herself, and it is in this mortally wounded state that she tells her story. Life is thus seen as a perilous adventure demanding the utmost rigor and self-discipline to be lived successfully, from a Christian point of view.

HORACE

Proust uses two lines from a Horatian satire to set the tone of “Un Dîner en ville,” the equal in its humorous effects to similar episodes in the Recherche, and the most acute collective portrait in PJ. Unlike almost all of the book's other stories and sketches, “Un Dîner en ville” lets in some air from the outside world, a refreshing relief from the book's hothouse atmosphere. We are made privy to amusing exchanges between characters, several of whom are servilely attached to various personalities in the Parisian literary world, while the narrator lets the reader in on the little games and secrets of this socially elite but morally degraded group of dinner guests. There is even a soupçon of explicit political commentary in this sketch, rare in Proust's early writing, when the hostess, Mme Fremer, ends a brief discussion about anarchism by asking what such a doctrine could possibly do for the world, since “rich and poor we have always with us.” The narrator comments:

And all these people, the poorest among them having an income of at least a hundred thousand pounds, impressed by the truth of her remark and relieved of their scruples, emptied with beaming cheerfulness their last glass of champagne.

(Dupee 97)

RACINE

The epigraphic quote from Racine's Phèdre that introduces “La Mélancolique villégiature de Mme de Breyves” is taken from the same scene of act 1 to which Proust refers in the dedication. It revolves around the moment in which Phèdre summons up the courage to confess her sexual love for Hyppolyte to her nurse Œnone. In the passage cited here, she compares her striken heart to the “wound” her sister Ariadne had suffered when she was abandoned by Theseus, now Phèdre's husband, on the island of Naxos. According to the version of the Greek myth used by Racine, Ariadne died after her abandonment by Theseus, and it is this link between love and death that the playwright wanted to underline in the passage quoted by Proust, who in turn treats the theme of love precisely as a wound, as an affliction, a terrible and irrational illness of the soul that consumes its victims. When deep-seated taboos are added to the natural pains of love, the end result is tragic, whether literally as in the story of Phèdre, or spiritually, as in the story of Mme de Breyves.

There is a reason rooted in myth underlying Proust's use of the passage from act 1, scene 3 when Phèdre exclaims: “Ariadne, my sister, by what a love wounded did you die on the shores where you were abandonedl.” It shows how carefully Proust arranged his materials in some of these stories, where the form and the theme complement each other in suggestive ways. The end of the long last paragraph of “Mélancolique villégiature” [“La Mélancolique Villégiature de Mme de Breyves”] picks up again on the theme of a young woman wounded by love:

If, sometimes, walking along the beach or in the woods, she lets the pleasure of contemplation or of reverie, or even a sweet odor, or a song brought from a distance and muffled by the breeze, gently take possession of her, make her for an instant forget her pain, all at once she feels a terrible blow and a wound in her heart-and above the waves, higher than the leaves, in the misty horizon of woods or sea, she catches sight of the vague image of her invisible and ever-present conqueror, his eyes shining through the clouds, as on the day when he offered himself to her, and sees him vanish with the quiver from which he has taken and let fly another arrow.

(Dupee 78)

BAUDELAIRE

Baudelaire was one of Proust's favorite poets from his student days on. A few scholars have suggested the possibility that PJ is in effect Proust's Les Fleurs du mal. Like Les Fleurs du mal, the pieces in PJ assumed form and unity only after their author had written most of them prior to the book's definitive status as a collection of disparate writings held together by a unitary vision and by some common themes. More essentially, PJ, like the Les Fleurs du mal, was a work in which beauty had been wrested and shaped from its source in “evil,” i.e. death as well as various forms of social and moral corruption. Keller's thesis that PJ is at bottom a “decadent” work exemplifying the concerns of poets and novelists belonging to that school, and Kingcaid's stress on young Proust's obsession with “neurosis,” illness, and “fetishism” give such an interpretation some critical authority.

One expression of Proust's deep affinity for Baudelaire was his desire to appropriate some of the qualities of poetry, music, and painting in his prose style. Another was his conviction that criticism was the partner of creativity not its enemy. Both Baudelaire and Proust thought of their writing as having an organic unity. Both were modernist in their sensibilities, yet both were deeply influenced by an essentially Catholic conception of good and evil. Perhaps most important, both attributed primary importance to the notion of an inner self, a core of individuality that they articulated in various ways, as in Baudelaire's belief—one with which Proust certainly agreed—that “there can only be any true, that is to say, any moral, progress in the individual and through the individual himself.”³ In addition, we need to remember that it was not only Les Fleurs du mal that enchanted Proust. The Petits poèmes en prose (Little prose poems) were also a literary reference point that affected him as it did successive generations of writers, and not only in France.

There were also differences between the two writers. Proust was less prone than Baudelaire to supernaturalism and especially to the idea that evil exists not only in human affairs but in the very constitution of the universe. Baudelaire truly believed that “the cleverest ruse of the devil is to persuade us that he doesn't exist.” In Les Fleurs du mal the poet oscillates between “the dark abyss into which my heart has fallen” and “the clear fire that fills the limpid spaces.” Proust did not see descent into the abyss as a condition for ascent to the realm of the spirit in the same way that Baudelaire did. Yet he did believe, with Baudelaire, that beauty could be extracted from evil and that artistic creation was a means with which to redeem a fallen world.

Proust drew in PJ from both Les Fleurs du mal and the Petits poèmes en prose for images, devices and themes. Two examples of how the former work lived on in the pages of PJ are the “Portraits de peintres” and the prose poem “La mer,” while the Petits poèmes en prose are present in the short story “Mélancolique villégiature” and in the last of the thirty pieces comprising the “Regrets,” titled “Voiles au port” (Harbor sails).

Baudelaire was a major contributor to the subgenre of poetry about painting in “Les Phares” (The beacons), part of the first section of his Fleurs du mal. Proust followed his lead in PJ, not in a single poem but in four, one of which, on Watteau, recalls Baudelaire's quatrain on the eighteenth-century painter. Baudelaire and Proust both chose to emphasize the “carnivalesque” and theatrical side of Watteau's artistic personality, as seen in his depictions of actors from the Italian and French comic theatre, and in his famous “Embarkation for Cythère,” an airy evocation of a fête galante that has charmed generations of visitors to the Louvre.

“La mer,” mentioned in chapter 3 in connection with Proust's “musical” aesthetic, is replete with Baudelairian imagery, as noted by Anne Henry and Thierry Laget. Baudelaire's “L'Homme et la mer” (Man and the sea) is a philosophical poem of the kind that Proust admired, both for what it said and for what it suggested, in the sense that the poem acts as a catalyst for further thought on the part of the reader. It first likens man and the sea, in the depth of their “intimate riches” and “secrets,” then alludes to the eons of time during which man and sea have been enemies, both “remorseless” lovers of “carnage and death,” and because of this, “eternal combatants, implacable brothers.” Baudelaire's poem “Music” is closer in spirit to Proust's “La mer” inasmuch as it explicitly compares the effects of the sea on his state of mind with the effects of music. But Proust does something different with this relationship. Where Baudelaire pictures the sea as expressing both the turbulent and the depressive parts of his personality, Proust begins his little essay by reflecting on the fascination of the sea for those who have known the “disgust of life” and “the lure of mystery” even before sorrow has afflicted them. Unlike Baudelaire, he then dwells exclusively on why the sea, in its vastness and purity, “bears no traces of men's toil and of their lives.” In other words, Proust does not follow Baudelaire's cue, at least not in his vision of what the sea symbolizes in human experience, and he uses the poet's evocation of the sea's “musical” enchantment for his own quite different purposes.

Thus, there is nothing crudely imitative in Proust's use of these Baudelaire poems. He seizes upon their imagery and reflects on how music is comparable to the sea in its freedom from all worldly taint, but he does not merely ape his predecessor. Intertextual presences in this instance are signs not of subordination on Proust's part to a revered model but of independence grounded in knowledge of what his literary heritage offered him that could be turned creatively to his own ends.

The same is true of Proust's use of Baudelairian images and themes in the story “Mélancolique villégiature,” which has been studied most intensively by Maria Paganini. At the end of part 4 of this story that mixes fabular and real historical elements, the narrator dwells on a conception of the enraptured lover that is in fundamental respects akin to the state of mind customarily associated with the “intuitive” poet, the “ecstatic” believer, and the “mystically” exalted lover of nature and music, which have their seat in “the mind in its divinest form.” Françoise, the story's unhappy heroine, experiences a passion fed by her mind and her imagination that have fixed themselves on an individual who bears little if any resemblance to the figure conjured up by her fantasy. It is this fantasy that gives meaning and purpose to her life, and it is embodied in the rather ordinary figure of Monsieur Jacques de Laléande, a musician associated by Proust with several “Wagnerian” leitmotifs. Part 4 ends with the following portentous words, which comment on Françoise's reviling of that part of her which, in Proust's scheme of things, endows her with a spiritual nobility far more precious than the aristocratic name she has inherited by birth:

She reviled that inexpressible feeling of the mystery of things when our spirit loses itself in the radiance of beauty like that of the sun when it sinks into the sea, for having deepened her love, for having immaterialized, broadened, infinitized it without, for all that, making it less agonizing, for as Baudelaire says (speaking of the end of autumn days), “there are certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague; and there is no sharper point than that of infinity.”

(Dupee 75)

The quote is from the prose poem “Le ‘Confiteor’ de l'artiste” (The artist's confession), where Baudelaire uses the sacrament of confession to speak of his tormented desires as a lover and as a poet. It is an exceedingly compressed expression of the “duel” in him resulting from his incessant “study of the beautiful,” which makes him, like all artists, “cry with fright before being beaten.” Something of this “duel” and this duality is what Proust seems to have been alluding to in the passage quoted above, where he makes use of a Baudelairian concept but applies it to a woman, Françoise, rather than to a man. Françoise is in the grip of a kind of “divine” fury, a struggle that will go on in her soul for as long as her passion for Laléande feeds on itself and its accompanying fantasies and not on the flesh and blood man called Jacques de Laléande.⁴

Another key with which to unlock the secrets of intertextuality in PJ is provided by Baudelaire's prose poem “Le Port,” which Proust assimilates in “Voiles au port.” Both of these prose poetic texts fix the mind's eye on the sense of mystery and the unknown that emanates from ships in the harbor, vessels that have traveled the seas and that now enjoy a brief moment of repose before setting sail again to far-off places.

LA BRUYèRE

In the literature of what the French call mondanité, dealing with the behavior of men and women in society who act parts assigned to them by their social class but who are also prey to their own ambitions and insecurities, the seventeenth century produced Molière and Pascal, together with La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fénelon, and others. What La Bruyère brought to the genre of moral and social observation is the ideal of the sincere man, the person who combines elegance, restraint, tact, and good taste in equal measure, and who moves in society with considered regard for himself and others. La Bruyère evaluated his fellow human beings according to this standard and found most of them sadly deficient. He is pessimistic yet modestly hopeful that sound advice, if couched in pleasurable form, as in his own writing, might lead to the correction of foibles and vices that otherwise would fester and deteriorate. He denounced pretense and snobbery and, within limits, argued against some of the more obvious manifestations of inequity and injustice. He was a man of moderate views, a conservative in his thinking, never prone to advocacy of extreme positions. These traits and qualities were what made him attractive to Proust, whose own writings, from PJ to the Recherche, have an honorable place in the history of French literature about “worldly” people.⁵

Proust's reflections on matters of the heart, on various types of women, on fashion, on social mores and habits, on the faults of the aristocracy, and on such things as the art of conversation, dinner parties, and salons owe much to La Bruyère's treatment of these subjects. Like Proust, La Bruyère did not question the idea of a social hierarchy, but he did point out flaws in the morals underlying that hierarchy. Roger Francillon put the essential elements of the connection between La Bruyère and Proust quite succinctly when he observed that “the most important bases for the relationship between the two writers are: a controlled sensitivity both to the delicacy of feelings and to what is laughable in society, an understanding of the transitoriness of men and things, a rejection of all systems of thought and a stubborn determination to transform the banal and daily stuff of life, by means of style, into a work of art.”⁶

A few comparative examples from La Bruyère's Les Caractères and PJ will have to suffice here. Consider for example what La Bruyère has to say about love and friendship in the section of his book called “Sur le cœur” (On the heart):

Love is born suddenly, without reflection, by attraction or by weakness: a beautiful feature seizes us, and determines us. Friendship on the other hand is formed little by little, with time, through contact, by long interaction. How much intelligence, goodness of heart, commitment, favors and generosity among friends, in order to do in several years much less than is done sometimes in a moment by a beautiful face or a beautiful hand!

(La Bruyère 136)

The tone and attitude conveyed by La Bruyère is very close to Proust's understanding of the contradictions and apparent paradoxes that pervade intimate human relationships. What Proust brings to his depictions of these relationships, however, which is entirely missing in La Bruyère, is an intense sensuality and an enjoyment of and need for natural beauty and sensorial expressiveness.

Another feature of Les Caractères that appears in PJ is a series of “portraits” drawn from life and elaborated with great artistry; they are close in spirit to Proust's portraits of Parisian men and women. Proust's portrait of “Oranthe” (an invented name like many of La Bruyère's) is no doubt a pastiche of La Bruyère's manner in describing such characters. It begins by directly interrogating the character, in much the same way that La Bruyère addressed some of his creations:

So you didn't go to bed last night? You haven't washed this morning?

But why proclaim it from the house tops, Oranthe? Brilliantly gifted as you are, isn't that enough to distinguish you from common mortals? Must you insist upon acting such a pitiful role besides?

You are hounded by creditors, your infidelities drive your wife to despair. To put on evening dress would seem to you tantamount to donning a livery, and no one could persuade you to go into society other than disheveled. Seated at dinner you keep your gloves on to prove that you are not eating, and if ever you have a fever at night you call for your victoria and go for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne.

(Dupee 43)

“Contre la franchise” (Against frankness) is another pastiche in the manner of La Bruyère. Proust introduces three men, Percy, Laurence, and Augustin, calling the latter, who “always tells the truth,” a true friend, but we quickly learn that “he is frank, in the same way that Percy is a lecturer, not in your interest but for his own pleasure.” The little sketch ends by informing the reader that these three “impudent scoundrels,” far from losing favor in society, are the object of applause and keen interest. The three men have hoodwinked an entire social milieu. Little gems similar to this are numerous in the Caractères.

The snobs, the roués and sophisticates, the haughty women and pretentious men of the Caractères and the people depicted by Proust in “Fragments de comédie italienne” are actors performing their parts in ways that, as Proust saw it, remain fixed in the minds of their social peers, thus allowing the individuals who wear these masks in society a wide latitude within which, in their private lives, they can be as outrageous as they wish. Assuming the identities of typical comic characters is the price that real people, unlike the stock characters they imitate, gladly pay for a freedom from restraint that allows them virtually unlimited license to do and say what they want. For Proust, Italian comedy was a convenient metaphor for society itself in its hilarious and tragicomic displays of affectation, foolishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, cowardice, pretense. Proust's voice in these “Fragments” was that of a satirist, a moralist, and a shrewd man of the world.

TOLSTOY

Proust's interest in Russian fiction was noted by several of his friends in the early years of the 1890s. He was keenly interested in the moral questions raised by Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, and he turned to them, as he did to certain nineteenth century English novelists, especially George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, for perspectives on the problems of modern society for which the French novel and French poetry did not furnish entirely satisfactory answers. Concern with the interrelations between art and morality was deeply rooted in French literature, but the Russians and the English gave a new immediacy to this concern, and in ways that reflected societies whose social structures and historical experiences diverged radically from those of France. The Russian sense of character and the British flair for social contextualization were among the qualities that attracted Proust to their work.

As far as a Tolstoyan presence in PJ is concerned, the case for it has been persuasively argued by Anne Henry and several others, notably Pierre Daum, but Henry should be credited for a discovery and an insight that had not occurred to anyone before her, as far as I know. There is only one unresolved question in her analysis, and it is that she seems to contradict herself on the nature of Proust's attitude toward the two characters, Baldassare and Honoré, the ill-fated but finally redeemed protagonists of the stories that open and close his volume.

Henry argues that “without the story of Ivan Ilych which tells an identical story of revolt and then of inward conversion that allows for a reconciliation with death, “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande” could never have been written.” To this she adds, apropos of “La Fin de la jalousie,” that this story too, on the basis of strong internal evidence, “recalls too irresistibly the death of Prince André, also a jealous lover, his slow agony next to the woman who keeps watch over him and who has caused his torment, to allow us to discard the hypothesis of a direct influence of these pages from War and Peace on Proust's short story” (1973, 34).

Proust's Baldassare greatly resembles the refined dandy and aesthete, Robert de Montesquiou. He lives surrounded by chrysanthemums, kid goats, and black cats in a circular-shaped living room looking out on the ocean. But in the face of illness and death, he at last renounces his decadent existence, the appurtenances of which Proust describes in considerable detail. In his last days of life, he redeems himself in a way that Henry believes, with good reason, Proust borrowed from Tolstoy. She points out that an anthology of Tolstoyan death scenes titled La Mort had appeared in 1886, which contained for the first time in French translation the death scene from Tolstoy's “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” plus extracts from already published novels depicting the death of Prince André in War and Peace, the death of Levin in Anna Karenina, and three other sketches on the same theme titled “The Three Dead.” That such writing on a theme that was never far from Proust's consciousness could have affected him deeply makes good sense. Henry notes in support of her thesis that Baldassare, this esthete and viscount in the vaguely named country of Sylvania, after a life of extravagant wastefulness and only occasional musical productivity, of numerous love affairs and lavish banquets, comes to terms with his own spiritual needs in the last moments of his life, like the hero of “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

But in advancing the argument that, after 1893, Proust had shifted in his basic orientation from “vague idealism” to a much more critical and down-to-earth attitude toward his two protagonists, Henry makes us wonder about what exactly the vantage point was from which Proust was treating his death scenes. Were they really “plagiarisms” of Tolstoyan scenes, as she thinks, or were they borrowings for satirical and even caricatural purposes, or perhaps intended to say something about human existence that might differ significantly from what Tolstoy had to say? I would venture to guess that, as was his wont, Proust was making use of another writer, in these two instances Tolstoy, but that he was doing so for reasons of his own, having to do with what Henry herself calls his new understanding that asestheticism was unable to confront the great questions of existence. Thus it is my contention that Proust did not so much imitate Tolstoy plagiaristically as make use of him in a way that lent greater moral authority to his youthful fictional writings.

There is little doubt that Tolstoy helped Proust to shape his death scenes. A comparison of the endings of “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande” lends credence to Henry's belief that a usage of some sort was operative. Here is the ending of Tolstoy's story, written in 1886:

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”

He turned his attention to it.

“Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.”

“And death where is it?”

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.

“So that's what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy”!

To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.

“It is finished!” said someone near him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!”

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

(302)

And now the last scene of “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande:”

At this moment the doctor beckoned everyone to approach, saying, “This is the end!”

Baldassare lay with closed eyes, and his heart listened to the bell which his ears, paralyzed by approaching death, could no longer hear. Once more he saw his mother kissing him as she always did when he came home, then in the evening tucking him in bed, warming his feet in her hands, staying with him if he could not sleep. He remembered Robinson Crusoe, and evenings in the garden when his sister sang, and his professor predicted that one day he would be a great musician, and his mother's emotion which she tried in vain to hide. Now there was no more time to realize that passionate expectation of his mother and sister which he had so cruelly disappointed. He saw again the tall linden tree under which he had become betrothed and the day when his betrothal had been broken, when only his mother had known how to comfort him. He thought he was kissing his old nurse, holding his first violin. He saw it all again through a luminous distance, sweet and sad like the one on which the sightless windows gazed, facing woods and pastures.

All this he saw, yet not two minutes had elapsed since the doctor, listening to his heart, had said “This is the end!” Then, rising, “All is over.”

Alexis, his mother, and Jean Galéas knelt down, together with the Duke of Parma, who had just arrived. The servants were weeping in the open doorway.

(Dupee 23-24)

Compared with the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” where there truly is a reconciliation of sorts with death, Baldassare's final moments are much more taken up with remembrances of people, places, and emotions associated with his formative years than they are with death. But let's look a bit more closely at the Tolstoyan and the Proustian scenes. There are common features. They are the death sentence itself, pronounced by someone at Ivan's bedside in Tolstoy, by the doctor in Proust; the distortion of the sense of time in both stories, where thought is extraordinarily compressed as death approaches; the presence of family members and friends at the death scene; the image of light, presented in an unadorned way by Tolstoy, in an image, that of “luminous distance,” by Proust.

Tolstoy focuses quite closely on the fact of impending death itself, and on how Ivan comes to terms with it through an exceptional moment of reconciliation involving a falling away of pain and, above all, of the fear of death that had always haunted him. In Tolstoy, death has almost a friendly mien; it is what separates Ivan from his family and friends. They cannot comprehend what the dying man is experiencing. Ivan thinks of the world outside his room now as something remote, far off, irrelevant to the great and decisive moment through which he is passing.

In Proust's scene, the emphasis is on life, not death, or at least on Baladassare's still powerful attachment to life, as we see in the series of memories that occur to him as he lies paralyzed in his bed. In fact, we recognize in this ending several of the key components of Marcel's first experiences as recounted in the Recherche, but already very much present to Proust's imagination in PJ, and in JS: his mother's ever comforting presence, his favorite childhood reading, the benevolent aspects of nature that surrounded him. Baldassare is but a projection of Proust's own personality and vision, and what matters in the death scene is the life he is able to recall not the death that is about to take him. Another difference is that the death scene in Proust highlights a failure, a missed opportunity, time spent frivolously, one of the central ideas informing all of Proust's writing and that preoccupied him constantly: the idea that life offers the individual only so many chances, only so many privileged moments, which must be seized in the eternal struggle against loss, waste, and dispersion. Such a failure is especially sad, in Proust's scheme of things, when it involves a person's capacity for creative and artistic expression, which alone, except for the illuminations made possible precisely by death, redeems the otherwise inevitable passing away of all beings and things, great and small. From Tolstoy, we learn something about how death might actually be experienced. From Proust we learn about the value of life, but through sensuous and sensory experience, through what memory brings in its wake that is meaningful, through light that truly enlightens the reader about a character's relationship with life much more than about his way of understanding death.

The last scene of “La Fin de la jalousie” is a much more authentically Tolstoyan ending than the one in “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” in that it is charged with that deep humanitarian feeling of universal fellowship that we associate with the Russian novelist. Both Tolstoy and Proust understood the psychological dynamics of jealousy very well, and it is logical that in this respect Proust owed much to Tolstoy. In any case, jealousy, and the epistemological and moral problems it raises, is a common theme that justifies a comparative study of the two writers.

Intertextual presences in Proust's early writings therefore reflect not only his reading and assimilation of the techniques and devices used by other authors he admired but also his formal education, his philosophical interests and concerns, his family life, his friendships and relationships in Parisian society of the 1880s and 1890s, and his social and class affiliations. In sum, writing for young Proust was the expression of his personal experience and his vision of the world.

In answer to the question of what the ideological implications of Proust's literary borrowings and appropriations are, I would say, first, that his early writing is in large measure a defense of tradition and an assertion of the place he hoped to make for himself in French literary history, which he looked at, however, in a critical and independent manner, often satirically; and second, that he was engaged in an exploration of psychological and philosophical problems to which the genres he was utilizing gave a particular kind of access. Proust was interested not in breaking entirely free from established literary practice, in the manner of the radical avant-garde, but, rather, in respecting what the past had to offer him and that he could then turn to his own purposes. There is nothing in his early writing that presents insuperable problems to most readers. Yet as this chapter has shown, there is a great deal going on in his texts that needs to be studied in detail in order to savor their peculiar stylistic qualities and comprehend their conceptual premises. Nothing in his writing can be taken for granted. One must probe its surfaces to extract the treasure below. He was a conservative thinker, in some respects, but able to see and to reveal the deficiencies of the existing order with considerable verve. His subsequent writing projects—the uncompleted novel JS, the essays on Ruskin, and, later, the Recherche—build on the foundation he laid in Les plaisirs et les jours.

Notes

1. As cited by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics, p. 139, where he mentions Kristeva's Semiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 146.

2. Le Mercure de France (June 1894): 117-122.

3. Baudelaire as cited and translated by John Middleton Murry in “Baudelaire,” in Henri Peyre ed., Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs. N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 107. In a letter of 1918, Proust expressed this idea with virtually the same words as Baudelaire. In praising his correspondent, Lionel Hauser, Proust wrote that “another reason why praise is due you is that you have understood that all reform would be vain if it were not first a reform of the individual himself, if it were not an interior reform” (Corr 17: 212).

4. Another short story by Proust with a theme similar to that of “Mélancolique villégiature” is “L'Indifférent” in which we find a treatment of love as degrading obsession that foreshadows Swann's “love” for Odette in the Recherche and the narrator's emotional involvements first with Gilberte and then with Albertine. Evidently Proust did not think that this story was worthy of inclusion in PJ (it appeared in La Vie contemporaine et revue parisienne (March 1, 1896): 428-439.

5. In 1888 the seventeen-year-old Proust won a de luxe edition of the Œuvres de La Bruyère ed. Gustave Servois Album (Paris: Hachette, 1882) as a school prize for French composition (Marcel Proust, Usuels de la Réserve, 14).

6. Roger Francillon, “Proust und La Bruyère,” in Marcel Proust, Bezüge und Strukturen: Studien zu Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. Luzius Keller, 52-74.