Jean Béraud’s paintings capture with remarkable precision the milieu and era described by Proust: the Belle Époque drawing-room hostesses of the high bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Incidentally, Jean Béraud acted as Proust’s second during his duel with Jean Lorrain!
Love is a central theme in In Search of Lost Time. Alas, for Proust, even simple affection ultimately brings more pain than joy. Like the tragic figures of Racine — such as Phèdre or Nero — the characters in In Search of Lost Time are consumed by their passions. For Proust, love is fundamentally pathological: it strays from its object, inflicts suffering, and is inherently cruel. It is inseparable from jealousy, and comes into being alongside it.
Love in Proust perfectly illustrates anthropologist René Girard’s mimetic theory, according to which desire does not arise independently but through a triangular configuration — mediated by the desire of another. We desire someone or something because we perceive that another desires it. This is the very principle used today in advertising through influencers: desire is awakened not by extolling an object’s qualities, but by showing a celebrity desiring it.
Thus, Swann finds Odette beautiful the day he realizes she resembles a figure in a famous painting. He becomes passionately in love with her when he believes she is unfaithful and desired by another. Swann concludes with this famous line:
To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I had my greatest love, for a woman I didn’t even like, who wasn’t my type!
In Search of Lost Time is also filled with humor. Anyone who closely observes the theatre of society cannot fail to find it comical — often tragically so, and sometimes both at once. One recalls the moment when Swann informs the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes that he is soon going to die; eager to get to a party, they pretend not to take him seriously. As he descends the steps, the Duke finally calls after him:
“You’ll bury us all!”
Like the Duke of Saint-Simon — with whom he shared affinities and whom he imitated in a short piece from Pastiches et Mélanges — Proust is a master portraitist. Madame Verdurin in her salon, “weeping with kindness,” is a celebrated example.
Dr. Cottard, a regular at her gatherings, has a peculiar trait: metaphors and irony are utterly lost on him, making social interaction a constant struggle.
Sarah Bernhardt is the Golden Voice, isn’t she? They also say she sets the stage alight. What a strange expression, don’t you think?
Proust’s humor can also take a sharper, more caustic tone, born from the very personalities of his characters — as when Baron de Charlus, offended by the naïveté of a narrator blind to his advances, retaliates with a perfectly aimed tirade.
Jean Béraud and the Belle Époque
Beyond the dignified appearances depicted above, Jean Béraud’s paintings sometimes reveal the violence hidden beneath the polished façade of the Belle Époque.
Time is, of course, the central subject of the novel — or more precisely, its raw material. What is time? “When I am not asked, I know; when I am asked and must explain, I no longer know,” said Saint Augustine, more or less. It is the ultimate philosophical paradox: the most universal of experiences, and yet the hardest to define.
Proust’s central insight can be summed up as follows: time transforms us and eventually carries us away; we can only communicate with the future, and there is no way of escaping time — except in those rare moments when involuntary memory revives the past in flashes of eternity, that is, outside time. This is the famous madeleine moment. These are moments of grace — unpredictable, magical — in which we seem to exist on a different plane. A little like the experience of orgasm in Michel Houellebecq, and even more like intoxication — by opium, wine, perfume — in Baudelaire.
Part of the ambition of In Search of Lost Time is to render perceptible this dimension of human life, “which usually remains invisible to us,” yet shapes our thoughts, emotions, and entire future — growing over time like a ball and chain that the elderly drag behind them, slowing their movements. Or, to borrow the final metaphor from Time Regained, like long stilts which, by the end of our lives, are so high that they make our gait unsteady and uncertain.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the literary world was largely homosexual; within this circle, homosexuality was anything but shameful. Yet no book discussed it openly. There was an hypocrisy which minds devoted to sincerity and truth could not long tolerate. According to André Gide, he and Proust often spoke of their desire to confront the subject and break the taboo. Proust was the first to do so, with the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodome et Gomorrhe, also formerly translated as Cities of the Plain).
The homosexuality of Baron de Charlus, revealed in this volume, is accompanied by a form of perversion and a nearly delusional megalomania. Gide reproached Proust for presenting homosexuality in such an unflattering light. However, the narrator gradually discovers that Charlus is not alone; through successive revelations, he comes to suspect the existence of a parallel world — one condemned and marginalized — whose members must exercise discretion and use a system of mutual recognition understood only by themselves.
Ultimately, numerous characters prove to be homosexual or to have experienced homosexual impulses (Proust himself disliked the term homosexual, preferring invert). These include Albertine, Adalbert de Courvoisier, Esther Lévy, Gilberte Swann, the Prince de Foix (father and son), the Prince de Guermantes, Jupien, Léa, Legrandin, Robert de Saint-Loup, Odette Swann, Morel, Vinteuil’s daughter, and many others — though not the narrator!
Scenes of Parisian life during Proust’s youth (late 19th century), painted by his friend Jean Béraud: