How Proust Can Change Your Life

Unfortunately for Proust, the attempt to be honest and keep his friends was somewhat marred by the vulgar insistence of members of Parisian society on reading his work as a roman à clef. “There are no keys to the characters of this book,” insisted Proust, but even so, the keys took grave offense, among them Camille Barrère for finding bits of himself in Norpois, Robert de Montesquiou for finding bits of himself in the Baron de Charlus, the Duc d’Albufera for recognizing his love affair with Louisa de Mornand in Robert de Saint-Loup’s affair with Rachel, and Laure for finding traits of herself in Odette de Crécy. Though Proust rushed to assure Laure that in fact Odette was “exactly the opposite of you,” it wasn’t surprising that she had difficulty believing him, given that even their addresses were the same. The Paris Yellow Pages of Proust’s time refers to “HAYMAN (Mme Laure), rue Lapérouse, 3,” and the novel to Odette’s “little hotel, on the rue La Pérouse, behind the Arc de Triomphe.” The only ambiguity seems to be the spelling of the street.

Despite these hiccups, the principle of separating what belongs to friendship and what belongs to the unsent letter or novel can still be defended (albeit with a proviso that one changes the street names and keeps the letters well hidden).

It may even be defended in the name of friendship. Proust proposed that “the scorners of friendship can … be the finest friends in the world,” perhaps because these scorners approach the bond with more realistic expectations. They avoid talking at length about themselves, not because they think the subject unimportant, but rather because they recognize it as too important to be placed at the mercy of the haphazard, fleeting, and ultimately superficial medium that is conversation. It means they feel no resentment about asking rather than answering questions, seeing friendship as a domain in which to learn about, not lecture, others. Furthermore, because they appreciate others’ susceptibilities, they accept a resultant need for a degree of false amiability, for a rose-tinted interpretation of an aging ex-courtesan’s appearance, or for a generous review of a well-intentioned but pedestrian volume of poetry.

Rather than militantly pursue both truth and affection, they discern the incompatibilities, and so divide their projects, making a wise separation between the chrysanthemums and the novel, between Laure Haymann and Odette de Crécy, between the letter that gets sent and the one that stays hidden but nevertheless needs to be written.

Proust once wrote an essay in which he set out to restore a smile to the face of a gloomy, envious, and dissatisfied young man. He pictured this young man sitting at table after lunch one day in his parents’ flat, gazing dejectedly at his surroundings: at a knife left lying on the tablecloth, at the remains of an underdone, rather tasteless cutlet, and at a half-turned-back tablecloth. He could see his mother at the far end of the dining room doing her knitting, and the family cat curled up on top of a cupboard next to a bottle of brandy being reserved for a special occasion. The mundanity of the scene would contrast with the young man’s taste for beautiful and costly things, which he lacked the money to acquire. Proust imagined the revulsion the young aesthete would feel at this bourgeois interior, and how he would compare it with the splendors he had seen in museums and cathedrals. He would envy those bankers who had enough money to decorate their houses properly, so that everything in them was beautiful, was a work of art, right down to the coal tongs in the fireplace and the knobs on the doors.

To escape his domestic gloom, if he couldn’t catch the next train to Holland or Italy, the young man might leave the flat and go to the Louvre, where at least he could feast his eyes on splendid things, grand palaces painted by Veronese, harbor scenes by Claude, and princely lives by Van Dyck.

Touched by his fate, Proust proposed to make a radical change in the young man’s life by way of a modest alteration to his museum itinerary. Rather than let him hurry to galleries hung with paintings by Claude and Veronese, Proust offered to lead him to a quite different part of the museum, to those galleries hung with the works of Jean-Baptiste Chardin.

It might have seemed an odd choice, for Chardin hadn’t painted many harbors, or princes, or indeed palaces. He liked to depict bowls of fruit, jugs, coffeepots, loaves of bread, knives, glasses of wine, and slabs of meat. He liked painting kitchen utensils, not just pretty chocolate jars but saltcellars and strainers. When it came to people, Chardin’s figures were rarely doing anything heroic: one was reading a book, another was building a house of cards, a woman had just come home from the market with a couple of loaves of bread, and a mother was showing her daughter some mistakes she had made in her needlework.