How Proust Can Change Your Life

Charitably, one could suggest escapism. Marooned in familiar circumstances, there may be pleasure in buying a paperback at the station newsstand (“I was attracted by the idea of reaching a wider audience, the sort of people who buy a badly printed volume before catching a train,” specified Proust). Once we’ve boarded a carriage, we can abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different, world, breaking off occasionally to take in the passing scenery while holding open our badly printed volume at the point where an ill-tempered monocle-wearing baron prepares to enter his drawing room—until our destination is heard on the loudspeaker, the brakes let out their reluctant squeals, and we emerge once more into reality, symbolized by the station and its group of loitering slate-grey pigeons pecking shiftily at abandoned confectionery (in her memoirs, Proust’s maid Celeste helpfully informs those alarmed not to have made much ground in Proust’s novel that it is not designed to be read from one station to the next).

Whatever the pleasures of using a novel as an object by which to levitate into another world, it is not the only way of handling the genre. It certainly wasn’t Proust’s way, and would arguably not have been a very effective method of fulfilling the exalted therapeutic ambitions expressed to Céleste.

Perhaps the best indication of Proust’s views on how we should read lies in his approach to looking at paintings. After his death, his friend Lucien Daudet wrote an account of his time with him, which included a description of a visit they had once made together to the Louvre. Whenever he looked at paintings, Proust had a habit of trying to match the figures depicted on the canvases with people he knew from his own life. Daudet tells us that they went into a gallery hung with a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It was called Old Man and Boy, it had been painted in the 1480s, and it showed a kindly-looking man with a set of carbuncles on the tip of his nose.

Proust considered the Ghirlandaio for a moment, then turned to Daudet and told him that this man was the spitting image of the Marquis de Lau, a well-known figure in the Parisian social world.

How surprising to identify the Marquis, a gentleman in late-nineteenth-century Paris, in a portrait painted in Italy in the late fifteenth century. However, a snap of the Marquis survives. It shows him sitting in a garden with a group of ladies wearing the kind of elaborate dress you would need five maids to help you into. He has on a dark suit, a winged collar, cuff links, and a top hat, and despite the nineteenth-century paraphernalia and the poor quality of the photo, one imagines that he might indeed have looked strikingly similar to the carbuncled man painted by Ghirlandaio in Renaissance Italy, a long-lost brother dramatically separated from him across countries and centuries.

The possibility of making such visual connections between people circulating in apparently wholly different worlds explains Proust’s suggestion:

Aesthetically, the number of human types is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know

.

And such pleasure is not simply visual, for the restricted number of human types also means that we are repeatedly able to read about people we know, in places we might never have expected to do so.

For instance, in the second volume of Proust’s novel, the narrator visits the Normandy seaside resort of Balbec, where he meets and falls in love with someone I know, a young woman with an impudent expression, brilliant laughing eyes, plump matt cheeks, and a fondness for black polo caps. Here is Proust’s portrait of what Albertine sounds like when she is talking: