How Proust Can Change Your Life

Simple images are nevertheless attractive in their lack of ambiguity. Before he saw Chardin’s paintings, the sad young man could at least believe that all bourgeois interiors were inferior to palaces, and could therefore make a simple equation between palaces and happiness. Before meeting aristocrats, Proust could at least trust in the existence of an entire class of superior beings, and could equate meeting them with acquiring a fulfilled social life. How much more difficult to factor in sumptuous bourgeois kitchens, boring princes, and drivers with more class than dukes. Simple images provide certainties; for instance, they assure us that financial expenditure is a guarantor of enjoyment.

One sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, but who become convinced that they are—and also convinced of the rare quality of their wholly detached tastes—when they have agreed to pay a hundred francs a day for a room in a hotel which will enable them to enjoy this sight and sound

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Similarly, there are people who are doubtful whether someone is intelligent, but who rapidly become convinced that they are once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge, and university degree.

Such people would have had no difficulty determining that Proust’s maid was an idiot. She thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant (“I’ve never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts”). This isn’t to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence.

Albertine has never taken an art history course. One summer afternoon in Proust’s novel, she is sitting on a hotel terrace in Balbec talking to Madame de Cambremer, her daughter-in-law, a barrister friend of theirs, and the narrator. Suddenly, out at sea, a group of gulls who have been floating on top of the water take off noisily.

“I love them; I saw them in Amsterdam,” says Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”

“Ah, so you’ve been to Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” asks Madame de Cambremer. Albertine replies that unfortunately she doesn’t know them, at which point Proust quietly shares with us Albertine’s even more unfortunate belief that these Vermeers are a group of Dutch people, not canvases in the Rijksmuseum.

Luckily, the lacuna in her knowledge of art history goes by undetected, though one can imagine Madame de Cambremer’s horror had she discovered it. Nervous about her own ability to respond correctly to art, the external signs of artistic awareness take on a disproportionate significance for an art snob like Madame de Cambremer. Much as for the social snob, unable to judge others independently, a title or reputation becomes the only guide to eminence, so too for the art snob, information is ferociously clung to as a marker of artistic appreciation—though Albertine would only need to make another, culturally aware trip to Amsterdam in order to discover what she had missed. She might even appreciate Vermeer far more than Madame de Cambremer, for in her naïveté, there would at least be a potential for sincerity absent from de Cambremer’s exaggerated respect for art, which ironically ends up treating canvases far more like a family of Dutch burghers whom one would be privileged to meet.

The moral? That we shouldn’t deny the bread on the sideboard a place in our conception of beauty, that we should shoot the painter rather than the spring and blame memory rather than what is remembered, that we should restrain our expectations when introduced to a Comte de Salignac-Fénelon-de-Clermont-Tonnerre and avoid fixating on spelling mistakes and alternative histories of imperial France when meeting those less elaborately titled.

Q: Would Proust really be someone to consult for advice on romantic problems?

A: Perhaps—in spite of the evidence. He outlined his credentials in a letter to André Gide: