How Proust Can Change Your Life

• At a busy crossing in Villeurbanne, a horse leapt into the rear carriage of a tram, overturning all the passengers, of whom three were seriously injured and had to be taken to the hospital.

• While introducing a friend to the workings of an electric power station in Aube, Mr. Marcel Peigny put a finger on a high-voltage cable and was at once fatally electrocuted.

• A teacher, Mr. Jules Renard, committed suicide yesterday in the Métropolitain, in the République station, by firing a single revolver shot into his chest. Mr. Renard had been suffering from an incurable disease.

What sort of tragic or comic novels would these have swelled into? Jules Renard? An unhappily married, asthmatic chemistry teacher employed by a Left Bank girls’ school, diagnosed with colon cancer. The electrocuted Marcel Peigny? Killed while impressing a friend with a knowledge of electrical hardware in order to encourage a union between his harelipped son, Serge, and his friend’s uncorseted daughter, Mathilde. And the horse in Villeurbanne? A somersault into the tram provoked by misjudged nostalgia for a show-jumping career, or vengeance for the omnibus that had recently killed its brother in the market square, later put down for horse steak, suitable for feuilleton format. Echoes of Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Zola.

A more sober example of Proust’s inflationary efforts survives. In January 1907 he was reading the paper when his eye was caught by a headline of a news-in-brief, which read A TRAGEDY OF MADNESS. A bourgeois young man, Henri van Blarenberghe, had, “in a fit of madness,” butchered his mother to death with a kitchen knife. She had cried out, “Henri, Henri, what have you done to me?” raised her arms to the sky, and collapsed on the floor. Henri had then locked himself in his room and tried to cut his throat with the knife, but he had had difficulty severing the right vein, and so had put a revolver to his temple. Yet he wasn’t an expert with this weapon either, and when the police officers (one of whom happened to be called Proust) arrived at the scene, they found him in his room, lying on his bed, his face a mess, one eye dangling by connecting tissue out of a blood-filled socket. They began to interrogate him about the incident with his mother outside, but he died before an adequate statement could be drawn up.

Proust might quickly have turned the page and taken an extra gulp of coffee had he not happened to be an acquaintance of the murderer. He had met the polite and sensitive Henri van Blarenberghe at a number of dinner parties, they had exchanged a few letters thereafter; indeed, Proust had received one only a few weeks earlier, in which the young man had inquired about his health, wondered what the new year would bring for them both, and hoped he and Proust would be able to meet up again soon.

Alfred Humblot, Jacques Madeleine, and the beautiful American correspondent from Rome would possibly have judged that the correct literary response to this grim crime was an appalled word or two. Proust wrote a five-page article instead, in which he attempted to place the squalid tale of dangling eyeballs and daggers back into a broader context, judging it not as a freak murder defying precedent or understanding, but rather as a manifestation of a tragic aspect of human nature which had been at the center of many of the greatest works of Western art since the Greeks. For Proust, Henri’s delusion while he stabbed his mother linked him to the confused fury of Ajax massacring the Greek shepherds and their flocks. Henri was Oedipus, his dangling eye an echo of the way Oedipus had used the gold buckles from the dead Jocasta’s dress to puncture his own eyeballs. The devastation Henri must have felt at seeing his dead mother reminded Proust of Lear embracing the body of Cordelia and crying out: “She’s gone for ever. She’s dead as earth. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all?” And when police officer Proust had arrived to question Henri as he lay expiring, the author Proust had felt like acting as Kent had done when telling Edgar not to awaken the unconscious Lear: “Vex not his ghost: O! let him pass; he hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer.”