How Proust Can Change Your Life

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.”

Compared to these unfortunate sufferers, Proust’s approach to his own grief now seems rather admirable.

Though asthma made it life-threatening for him to spend time in the countryside, though he turned purple at the sight of a lilac in bloom, he resisted following the example of Madame Verdurin: he did not peevishly claim that flowers were boring or trumpet the advantages of spending the year in a shuttered room.

Though he had spectacular gaps in his knowledge, it was not beyond him to fill them. “Who wrote The Brothers Karamazov?” he was asking Lucien Daudet (at the age of twenty-seven). “Has Boswelle’s [sic] Life of Johnson [sic] been translated? And what’s the best of Dickens (I haven’t read anything)?”

Nor is there evidence that he redirected his disappointments onto his household staff. Having acquired a skill at turning grief into ideas, in spite of the state of his romantic life, when the driver he regularly used, Odilon Albaret, married the woman who would later become his maid, Proust was able to respond with a telegram congratulating the couple on their special day, and did so with only the briefest burst of self-pity and the most modest attempt at guilt-induction, here highlighted in roman type:

Congratulations. I am not writing to you at greater length, because I have caught a flu and I am tired, but I send you all my deepest wishes for your happiness and that of your families

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The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most. Proust got very annoyed by the way some people expressed themselves. Lucien Daudet tells us that Proust had a friend who thought it chic to use English expressions when he was speaking French, and would therefore say “Good-bye” or, more casually, “Bye, bye” whenever he left a room. “It made Proust positively unhappy,” reports Daudet. “He would make the kind of pained, irritated grimace which follows when a stick of chalk has been scraped across a blackboard. ‘It really hurts your teeth, that kind of thing!’ he would exclaim plaintively.” Proust displayed similar frustration with people who referred to the Mediterranean as “the Big Blue,” to England as “Albion,” and to the French army as “our boys.” He was pained by people whose sole response to heavy rain was, “Il pleut des cordes,” to cold weather, “Il fait un froid de canard,” and to another’s deafness, “Il est sourd comme un panier.”

Why did these phrases affect Proust so much? Though the way people talk has altered somewhat since his day, it is not difficult to see that here were examples of rather poor expression, though if Proust was wincing, his complaint was more a psychological than a grammatical one (“No one knows less syntax than me,” he boasted). Peppering French with bits of English, talking of Albion instead of England and the Big Blue instead of the Mediterranean were signs of wishing to seem smart and in-the-know around 1900, and relying on essentially insincere, overelaborate stock phrases to do so. There was no reason to say “Bye, bye” when taking one’s leave, other than a need to impress by recourse to a contemporary fad for all things British. And though phrases like “Il pleut des cordes” had none of the ostentation of a “Bye, bye,” they were examples of the most exhausted constructions, whose use implied little concern for evoking the specifics of a situation. Insofar as Proust made pained, irritated grimaces, it was in defense of a more honest and accurate approach to expression.

Lucien Daudet tells us how he first got a taste of it: