How Proust Can Change Your Life

Yet, in spite of the ordinary nature of their subjects, Chardin’s paintings succeeded in being extraordinarily beguiling and evocative. A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherubim; a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality. A skate, slit open and hanging from a hook, evoked the sea of which it had been a fearsome denizen in its lifetime. Its insides, colored with deep red blood, blue nerves, and white muscles, were like the naves of a polychrome cathedral. There was a harmony, too, between objects: in one canvas, almost a friendship between the reddish colors of a hearthrug, a needle box, and a skein of wool. These paintings were windows onto a world at once recognizably our own, yet uncommonly, wonderfully tempting.

After an encounter with Chardin, Proust had high hopes for the spiritual transformation of his sad young man.

Once he had been dazzled by this opulent depiction of what he called mediocrity, this appetising depiction of a life he had found insipid, this great art of nature he had thought paltry, I should say to him: Are you happy?

Why would he be? Because Chardin had shown him that the kind of environment in which he lived could, for a fraction of the cost, have many of the charms he had previously associated only with palaces and the princely life. No longer would he feel painfully excluded from the aesthetic realm, no longer would he be so envious of smart bankers with gold-plated coal tongs and diamond-studded door handles. He would learn that metal and earthenware could also be enchanting, and common crockery as beautiful as precious stones. After he had looked at Chardin’s work, even the humblest rooms in his parents’ flat would have the power to delight him, Proust promised:

When you walk around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, this is interesting, this is grand, this is beautiful like a Chardin

.

Having started on his essay, Proust tried to interest Pierre Mainguet, the editor of the arts magazine the Revue Hebdomadaire, in its contents:

I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones “by whom our eyes are opened,” opened, that is, on the world. In this study, I use the work of Chardin as an example, and I try to show its influence on our life, the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into the life of still life. Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the

Revue Hebdomadaire

?

Perhaps, but since its editor was sure it wouldn’t, they had no chance to find out. Turning the piece down was an understandable oversight. This was 1895, and Mainguet didn’t know Proust would one day be Proust. What is more, the moral of the essay lay not too far from the ridiculous. It was only a step away from suggesting that everything down to the last lemon was beautiful, that there was no good reason to be envious of any condition besides our own, that a hovel was as nice as a villa and an emerald no better than a chipped plate.

However, instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe to them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings and a misguided enthusiasm for others. If it hadn’t been for Pierre Mainguet’s rejection, the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire would have benefitted from a chance to reappraise their conceptions of beauty, and could have entered into a new and possibly more rewarding relationship with saltcellars, crockery, and apples.