The thirteen volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu1 are the outcome of an unplannable synthesis in which the contemplation of the mystic, the art of the prose writer, the verve of the satirist, the knowledge of the scholar, and the self-absorption of the monomaniac all come together in a work of autobiography. It has rightly been said that all great works of literature either establish a genre or wind one up – in other words, are special cases. However, this is one of the hardest of them to pin down. Here everything from structure (work of literature, book of memoirs, comment, all in one) to the syntax of limitless sentences (a Nile of language bursting its banks to fertilize the plains of truth) is outside the norm. That this great one-off of literature at the same time represents its greatest achievement in recent decades is the first revealing discovery confronting the reader. And in the highest degree unhealthy are the conditions underlying it. An out-of-the-ordinary illness, exceptional wealth, and abnormal tendencies. Not everything about this life sets an example, yet everything about it is exemplary, placing the towering literary achievement of our age at the heart of impossibility, at the centre of while simultaneously at the point of indifference to all risks, and marking out this great realization of a ‘life’s work’ as the last for a long time. Proust’s image is the highest physiological expression to which the inexorably growing discrepancy between poetry and life has managed to attain. That is the moral justification for this attempt to summon it up.
As everyone knows, Proust did not, in his work, describe a life as it had been but a life as the person who had lived it remembered that life. Yet even that is obscure and put far too broadly. The fact is, the chief role here, so far as the reminiscing author is concerned, is played not by what he experienced but by the weaving together of his memories, Penelope’s labour of bearing things in mind. Or should one perhaps speak instead of Penelope’s labour of forgetting? For surely involuntary bearing in mind, Proust’s mémoire involuntaire, is much closer to forgetting than what is usually referred to as memory? And surely this labour of spontaneously bearing things in mind, in which remembering is the weft and forgetting the warp, is actually the opposite of Penelope’s labour, not its likeness? For this is where day undoes what night had brought about. Waking up each morning we hold in our hands, usually feebly and slackly, only frayed scraps of the tapestry of lived existence, as forgetting has woven it within us. Yet each day, with its purposive actions and even more with its purpose-rooted recall, unpicks the web, the ornamentation of forgetting. That is why towards the end of his life Proust turned day into night – he wished, in a darkened room, lit by artificial light, to devote his every hour, without interruption, to his work, determined not to miss a single one of those interwined arabesques.
If the Romans called a text ‘woven’, there is scarcely one more woven and more densely so than Marcel Proust’s. Nothing, for him, was sufficiently dense, sufficiently enduring. According to his publisher, Gallimard, the way Proust corrected proofs was the despair of the typesetter. The galleys invariably came back with their margins crammed full of handwriting. Yet not a single printing error had been eliminated; all the available space was packed with fresh text. The laws of remembering affected the very scale of the work. The reason was that, while an event experienced is finally closed, at least in the one sphere of experience, an event remembered has no bounds, being simply a key to all that came before and all that came after it. Moreover, there is another sense in which it is remembering that dictates the strict weaving pattern here. The fact is, the unity of the text stems solely from the actus purus of remembering. Not from the person of the author and certainly not from the plot. Indeed, the vagaries of the latter can be said to be merely the obverse of the continuum of remembering, the pattern on the back of the tapestry. That was what Proust wanted, what he meant when he said he would really like to see his entire work printed in a single volume, with two columns to the page and no paragraph divisions at all.
What was he seeking so frantically? What lay behind this tireless effort? Can we say that all life, all works, all deeds that count were never anything but the unswerving development of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, feeblest hours in the existence of the person to whom they belong? And when Proust, in a famous passage, described these most personal hours of his, he did so in such a way that everyone rediscovers them in his or her own existence. We are a hair’s breadth away from being able to deem that existence everyday. It comes with the night, with a lost chirruping, or with that deep breath drawn in while leaning from a window. And there is no telling what encounters might have been meant for us had we worried less about sleeping. Proust paid no heed to sleep. And yet (no: for that very reason) Jean Cocteau was able in a fine essay to say of the sound of Proust’s voice that it obeyed the laws of night and of honey. Through submitting to the dominion of those laws he overcame the hopeless grief inside him (what he once called ‘the incurable imperfection in the very essence of the present’ [‘l’imperfection incurable dans l’essence même du présent’]) and built a house for his swarming thoughts from the honeycomb of remembering. Cocteau saw what ought to preoccupy every Proust reader in the highest degree: he saw the blind, absurd, obsessive demand for good fortune in the man. It flashed from his glances. His glances were not themselves blessed. But in them sat happiness/good fortune2 as in gambling or in love. Nor is it hard to say why this heart-stopping, explosive will to bliss that permeates Proust’s writing so seldom reaches his readers. Proust himself made it easier for them at many points to consider this oeuvre too from the tried-and-tested, comfortable viewpoint of self-denial, heroism, asceticism. What, after all, could make more sense to model students of life than that great achievement should be the fruit of pure toil, misery, and disappointment? That such a thing as blessedness might also have a part in the beautiful would be too much for them; their resentment would never accept it.
However, there is a twofold will to bliss, a dialectics of the phenomenon. A hymnic and an elegiac form. One is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the acme of good fortune. The other is the everlasting yet-again, the ever-recurring restoration of the original, primal state of bliss. It is this elegiac idea of bliss (one might also call it Eleatic) that for Proust transforms existence into a forest reserve of remembering. To it he sacrificed not only (in life) friends and society, but also (in his work) plot, unity of person, narrative flow, play of imagination. It was not the worst of his readers (Max Unold) who picked up the resultant ‘boredom’ of his writings in order to compare it with shaggy-dog stories,3 inventing the formula: ‘He [Proust] has contrived to make the shaggy-dog story interesting. He says, “Just imagine, gentle reader, yesterday I dunk a madeleine in my tea and it occurs to me that as a child I lived in the country…” – and he goes on for the next eighty pages, and the story is so riveting that one believes one is no longer the listener but the actual person daydreaming.’ In such yarns (‘all normal dreams become “shaggy-dog stories” as soon as they are narrated’), Unold discovered the bridge to dream. Every synthetic interpretation of Proust must follow him. Plenty of invisible gateways lead in that direction. There is Proust’s frantic studying, his enthusiastic cult of similarity. It is not in the places where he unexpectedly comes across similarity in works, in faces, in turns of phrase, invariably to his alarm, that it allows the true signs of its dominium to be identified. The similarity of one entity with another that we take into account, that preoccupies us in our waking hours, merely laps around the deeper dream world, where what occurs is never identical yet appears similar – inscrutably similar, even to itself. Children are aware of a symbol of this world, the sock, which has the structure of the dream world when, rolled up in the clothes drawer, it is simultaneously ‘bag’ and ‘things brought along’. And as they can never get enough of turning both (bag and baggage) into something else (the sock) at one stroke, so Proust was insatiable when it came to emptying the dummy, the self, at a stroke in order to bring in, over and over again, that other thing, the image that stilled his inquisitiveness – no: his homesickness. He lay in bed ravaged by homesickness, homesickness for the world distorted into the state of similarity, the world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through. To it belongs what happens in Proust, and how discreetly and nobly it appears. Never in isolation, in fact, never dramatically and in a visionary manner, but heralded and often supported, bearing a fragile, precious reality: the image. It detaches itself from the fabric of Proustian sentences in the same way as, in Balbec, beneath Françoise’s hands, the summer’s day emerges immemorially old, almost mummy-like, from the net curtains.
The most important thing a person has to say he will not always proclaim out loud. Nor, even quietly, will he always confide it to his confidant, the person closest to him, the one who most devotedly stands ready to hear his confession. However, if it is not people alone but also periods of time that have this modest but actually sly, rather suggestive way of conveying deeply private matters to just anyone, for the nineteenth century it is not Zola or Anatole France but the young Proust, the insignificant snob, the fantastical society man, who from a dying era (as from that other person, the equally moribund Swann) caught the most astonishing secrets on the wing. It took Proust to make the nineteenth century a fit subject for memoirs. What had been a lacklustre century before he came along was transformed into a force field in which a wide variety of currents were uncovered by subsequent authors. Nor is it at all by chance that the most interesting work of this kind was written by someone, a woman, who knew Proust personally as an admirer and friend. The very title under which Princess Clermont-Tonnerre brought out the first volume of her memoirs (Au temps des equipages) would have been scarcely conceivable pre-Proust. It quietly echoes, in fact, the ambiguous, affectionate challenge that the writer had issued from the Faubourg Saint-Germain. More than that: this (euphonious) portrayal is full of direct or indirect references to Proust in its tone and in its figures, who include Proust himself and some of his favourite objects of study from the Ritz.
This puts us, of course (there is no denying it), in a very feudal milieu, and with characters of the stamp of Robert de Montesquiou (of whom the princess gives a fine portrayal) in a very particular one at that. But Proust does the same; and in Proust, too, as everyone knows, there is no lack of a Montesquiou equivalent. None of this would be worth discussing (especially since the question of models is of secondary and so far as Germany is concerned of no consequence) were it not for the fact that German criticism is so very fond of taking the easy way out. Above all, it could not pass up the opportunity of going slumming with the lending-library mob. So its hired experts were very ready to read back from the work’s snobbish setting to the man who had written that work and to dismiss Proust’s work as an internal French affair, a diverting supplement to the Almanach de Gotha. Yet it is obvious: the problems of Proustian man stem from a complacent society.
Even so, not one of those problems chimes with Proust’s own. These are subversive. If one had to reduce them to a formula, his interest would lie in constructing the whole edifice of high society in the form of a physiology of tittle-tattle. There is nothing in the arsenal of its prejudices and watchwords that his dangerous comedy does not annihilate. Having been the first to point this out is not the least of the important services performed by Léon Pierre-Quint, Proust’s first interpreter. ‘If the talk turns to humorous works,’ Pierre-Quint writes, ‘we usually think of short, funny books in illustrated covers. We forget Don Quixote, Pantagruel, and Gil Blas, sprawling tomes in dense print.’ In this company, the subversive side of Proust’s work comes out most conclusively. Moreover, here it is not so much humour as comedy that constitutes the real core of his strength; he does not hold the world up to ridicule, he hurls it down to ridicule. At the risk of its smashing to pieces, whereupon he alone will shed tears. And smash to pieces it does, or rather its contents do: the unity of the family and the individual, sexual morality, respect for rank. The pretensions of the bourgeoisie explode amid ridicule. Their headlong retreat into and reassimilation by the aristocracy is the sociological topic of the work.
Proust never tired of the training required to move in feudal circles. Unflaggingly and without having to force himself particularly, he so fashioned his nature as to make it as unfathomable, inventive, obsequious, and difficult as for the sake of his task it needed to become. Later, mystification and elaboration came so naturally to him that his letters are sometimes whole systems of parentheses (and not just grammatical ones, either). Letters that despite their infinitely witty and nimble composition occasionally recall that legendary device: ‘Esteemed madam, I have this minute realized that I left my cane at your house yesterday. Would you please hand it to the bearer of this letter. P.S.: Please forgive the disturbance, I have just found it.’ And how resourceful he is in difficulties. Late one night he appears at Princess Clermont-Tonnerre’s residence and says he will stay on condition that the doctor is called out to attend him. He then proceeds to dispatch the valet, giving him a detailed description of the district and of the house, ending with: ‘You can’t miss it. The only window along Boulevard Haussmann where the light is still on.’ Everything but the number. Try locating the address of a brothel in a foreign city, even if you have been given the most long-winded instructions (excepting only the name of the street and the number of the house) and you will understand what is meant here – and how it has to do with Proust’s love of ceremony, his admiration for Saint-Simon, and last but not least his intransigent Frenchness. The quintessence of experience, surely, is experiencing how very difficult it is to experience many things that can in fact (so it would appear) be told in a few words. The trouble is, those words belong to a special jargon based on caste and social rank and incomprehensible to outsiders. No wonder the secret language of the salons so roused Proust’s passion. When he later came to give a merciless description of the little Courvoisier clique, the ‘esprit d’Oriane’, he had personally, through frequenting the Bibescos, become acquainted with the improvisations of a coded language (to which we too have now been introduced).
In the years of his salon existence Proust developed not only the vice of flattery to an eminent (one might almost say ‘theological’) degree; he also developed that of inquisitiveness. On his lips was a reflection of the smile that in the intrados of some of the cathedrals he so loved flits like a brush fire over the lips of foolish virgins. It is the smile of inquisitiveness. Was it inquisitiveness that basically made him such a great parodist? That would tell us, at the same time, what to think of the word ‘parodist’ as used here. Not a lot. For even if it does justice to his boundless malice it completely misses the bitter, savage, intractable nature of the splendid pieces of reportage that he wrote in the style of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Henri de Régnier, the Goncourts, Michelet, Renan, and lastly his darling Saint-Simon and that he collected in book form in Pastiches et mélanges. It is the mimicry of the inquisitive observer that constitutes the brilliant trick of this series – as well as constituting an element of Proust’s entire output, in which a passion for the [physiologically] vegetable can never be exaggerated. Ortega y Gasset was the first to draw attention to the vegetative existence of Proust’s figures, tied in so permanent a fashion to the place where they are found in society, a place dictated by the position of the feudal sun of grace, swayed by the wind that blows from Guermantes or Méséglise, impenetrably intertwined in the thicket of their fate. It is a circle that spawned mimicry as a literary method. The most sharply focused, most obvious findings of such mimicry squat on their objects as insects sit on leaves, flowers, and twigs, giving away nothing of their existence until a leap, a wingbeat, a start by the frightened observer indicates that here an unpredictable, wholly separate life has slipped inconspicuously into a foreign world. ‘Metaphor,’ says Pierre-Quint, ‘no matter how unexpected, moulds itself closely to ideas.’
The proper reader of Proust will be constantly shaken by tiny alarms. Moreover, he will find in metaphysics the expression of the same mimicry as must have impressed him as a fight for life on the part of this mind high up in the canopy of society. A word must be said about how closely and fruitfully these two vices, inquisitiveness and flattery, were intertwined. An informative passage in Princess Clermont-Tonnerre reads: ‘Nor can we, in conclusion, conceal the fact that Proust would get quite carried away, studying the servants. Was it because something he encountered nowhere else stimulated his intuition in this context, or did he envy them their being in a better position to observe intimate details of matters that tickled his fancy? Be that as it may – domestics of every kind and colour constituted his passion.’ In the exotic shades of a Jupien, a Monsieur Aimé, or a Céleste Albaret, the line of such characters extends from a Françoise, who with the beaky features of the blessed Martha looks as if she has stepped bodily from the pages of a Book of Hours, all the way to those grooms and footmen who are paid, it seems, not for working but for standing idle. And it may be that nowhere are the requirements of display of keener interest to this connoisseur of ceremony than at these lowermost ranks. Who can say how much servile inquisitiveness went into Proust’s flattery, how much servile flattery went into his inquisitiveness, and how far it went, this crafty copying of the servant role in the upper levels of social life? He practised it, and he could not help doing so. For as he himself reveals on one occasion: ‘voir’ and ‘désirer imiter’ [‘seeing’ and ‘wishing to emulate’] were one and the same so far as he was concerned. It was an attitude that, in all its superiority and servility, Maurice Barrès captured in one of the most distinctive pronouncements ever made about Proust: ‘Un poète persan dans un loge concierge’ [‘A Persian poet in a porter’s lodge’].
There was something of the detective about Proust’s inquisitiveness. To him, the top ten thousand were a criminal family, a bunch of conspirators like no other: the Camorra of consumers. That Camorra excludes from its world anything playing a part in production. Or at least requires that part to be concealed, graciously and modestly, behind outward behaviour of the kind affected by consummate professionals of consumption. Proust’s analysis of snobbery, which is of far greater importance than his apotheosis of art, represents the high point of his social criticism. For the attitude of the snob is quite simply the consistent, organized, hardened view of existence seen from the almost chemically pure standpoint of the consumer. And since the remotest as well as the most primitive memory of the productive forces of nature was to be banished from this satanic fairyland, even in love the inverted attachment suited Proust better than the normal. Yet the pure consumer is the pure exploiter. He [or of course she] is so logically and theoretically; in Proust he is so in all the concreteness of his current historical existence. Concrete because inscrutable and not to be posed. Proust portrays a class that is obliged in every respect to disguise its material foundation and for that very reason is based on a feudalism that, lacking economic importance in itself, lends itself all the more to being used as a mask for the haute bourgeoisie. This illusionless, merciless breaker of the spell of self, of love, and of morality (the persona Proust liked to claim for himself ) makes of his entire, boundless art a veil concealing this one vitally important mystery of his class: the economic dimension. Not as if he were thereby being of service to it. He is simply ahead of it. What it lives begins, in him, to become comprehensible. Yet much of the greatness of this work will remain inaccessible or undiscovered until that class reveals its sharpest features in the final struggle.
In the last [nineteenth] century there used to be (I don’t know if there is still) a pub in Grenoble called ‘Au Temps Perdu’. With Proust too we are guests, passing beneath a swinging sign and stepping over a threshold beyond which eternity and intoxication await us. Fernandez was right to distinguish in Proust a thème de l’éternité from the thème du temps. However, far from being Platonic and Utopian, that eternity is intoxicating. So if ‘time, for all who study its passage, reveals a new and hitherto unknown kind of eternity’, this does not at all mean that the individual is thereby approaching ‘the higher climes that a Plato or a Spinoza reached with one beat of their wings’. No – because the fact is, there are in Proust rudiments of a surviving idealism. But it is not they that determine the importance of this work. The eternity in which Proust opens up aspects is a finite time, not infinite time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real nature – which, however, is a bounded nature and prevails nowhere in less distorted form than in remembering (internally) and in growing old (externally). Tracing the action and counteraction of ageing and remembering means penetrating to the heart of Proust’s world, the universe of finitude. It is the world in a state of similarity, ruled by the correspondances that first Romanticism and then, most intimately, Baudelaire registered but that Proust (alone) contrived to bring to light in our own lived lives. That is the work of mémoire involuntaire, the rejuvenating force that proves a match for the relentless ageing process. Where things past are reflected in the freshly dew-drenched ‘now’, a painful shock of rejuvenation once again inexorably gathers them up in the manner that, for Proust, the Guermantes way and Swann’s way cross when (in volume thirteen)4 he wanders through the Combray district one last time and discovers how the paths intertwine. In no time the landscape veers round like a wind. ‘Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! / Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!’5 Proust’s tremendous achievement was in no time to cause the whole world to age by an entire human life. But that very concentration, in which what otherwise simply wilts and fades is suddenly burned up in a flash, is called rejuvenation. A la recherche du temps perdu is a sustained attempt to charge a whole existence with the highest possible degree of presence of mind. Proust proceeds not by reflection but by recall. He is positively permeated by the truth that we all of us lack the time to live the real dramas of the existence assigned to us. That makes us age. Nothing else. The lines and wrinkles in our faces are so many entries recording the great passions, the vices, the discoveries that presented themselves at our door – but we, the people of the house, were not at home.
Scarcely has Western literature seen a more radical experiment in self-absorption since Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. They too have at their core a solitude that with the power of the maelstrom drags the world down into its whirling. And the noisy and inconceivably vacuous tittle-tattle that comes booming in our direction from the pages of Proust’s novels is the roar with which society plunges into the abyss of that solitude. This is where Proust’s inveighing against friendship has its place. The silence at the bottom of this crater (his eyes are the most silent, taking everything in) wished to be preserved. What, annoyingly and capriciously, appears in so many anecdotes is the combination of an unparalleled intensity of conversation with the most extreme remoteness from the interlocutor. Never before was anyone able to show us things as he did. His pointing finger is without equal. But there is another gesture in that most friendly of exchanges that is conversation: touch. The touch gesture is wholly foreign to Proust. He is incapable, too, of touching his readers – he never could. Were literature to be arranged around these two poles (the indicative and the touching), Proust’s work would constitute the centre of one pole, Péguy’s of the other. This, basically, is what Fernandez understood so well: ‘Depth or should one say penetration is always on his side, never on that of his partner.’ With a dash of cynicism and great virtuosity, this comes out in his literary criticism. Its chief document an essay written at the zenith of his fame and the nadir of his deathbed: ‘A propos de Baudelaire’. Jesuitical in approval of his own affliction, excessive in the volubility of the bedridden, alarming in the indifference of the man doomed to die, who wishes to say something more at this point and does not mind what about. The thing that inspired him here, as he faced death, also governs his dealings with contemporaries: an alternation of sarcasm and affection, affection and sarcasm, so jerky and harsh that his subject threatens to collapse in exhaustion beneath it.
The man’s provocative, restless side affects even the reader of his works. One need think only of the seemingly endless strings of concessive ‘soit que’ clauses that describe an action in an exhaustive, depressing fashion in the light of the countless motives that may have underlain it. Nevertheless, these paratactic perspectives show how in Proust weakness and genius are one and the same: the intellectual renunciation, the tried-and-tested scepticism he brought to things. He came after the smug introspection of Romanticism and was determined, as Jacques Rivière puts it, not to place any credence whatsoever in ‘inward sirens’. ‘Proust approaches experience without the least interest in metaphysics, without the least constructivist tendency, without the least inclination to spread consolation.’ Quite true – nothing more so. It follows that even the work’s basic shape, on the methodical nature of which Proust never tired of insisting, is not remotely a construction. Yet methodical it is in the sense that the lines on a hand are methodical or the arrangement of stamens in the calyx. Proust, that hoary child, deeply weary, had slumped back on the bosom of nature, not in order to suck at its breast but in order, hearing its heartbeat, to dream. We must picture him being as weak as that if we wish to grasp with what happy accuracy Jacques Rivière, understanding the man out of weakness, was able to say, ‘Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience as enabled him to write his work. He died of unworldliness and because he lacked the understanding to alter living conditions that had begun to crush him. He died because he did not know how to light a fire or open a window.’ And of his nervous asthma, of course.
The doctors were powerless against this affliction. Not so the writer, who very methodically harnessed it in his service. He was (to start with the most superficial element) a perfect director of his illness. For months, with crushing irony, he links the picture of an admirer who had sent him flowers with their scent, which he cannot stand. And with the times and tides of his affliction he caused alarm to the friends who both dreaded and desired his sudden appearance, long after midnight, in the salon they were currently attending – a man ‘brisé de fatigue’ [‘shattered with exhaustion’] and making, so he said, only a five-minute call – who then stayed on till dawn, too tired to regain his feet, too tired even to stop talking. Even the letter-writer never runs out of ways of deriving the most outlandish effects from his condition. ‘The rattle of my breathing drowns out the sound of my pen and that of a bath being drawn on the floor below.’ But that is not all. Nor is the fact that his illness keeps him from fashionable society. His asthma entered into his art, if it was not his art that produced it. His syntax rhythmically apes, step by step, his suffocation anxiety. And his ironical, philosophical, didactical musings are so many sighs of relief when the nightmare of remembering falls from his heart. But on a larger scale it was death that was ever-present to him, usually when he was writing, the threatening, suffocating throes of death. This was the guise in which death confronted Proust, long before his affliction assumed critical forms. But not as a hypochondriac’s fancy – as a réalité nouvelle, that new reality of which the reflection on things and persons constitutes the lineaments of ageing. The stylistics of physiology would lead into the heart of that creative endeavour. For instance, no one who knows the peculiar obstinacy with which memories are preserved in the sense of smell (not smells in memory, not at all!) will be able to dismiss Proust’s sensitivity to smells as in any way random. Certainly, most of the memories we seek come to us as visual images. And even the things that float up freely from the mémoire involuntaire are largely isolated visual images – as well as being somewhat mysteriously present. But that is precisely why, if we wish deliberately to abandon ourselves to the innermost rhythm of this writing, we must move to a particular level (the deepest one) of involuntary memory where the elements of memory no longer announce themselves to us individually, as images, but as non-pictorial, unformed, indeterminately weighty entities, much as the heaviness of his net tells the fisherman something of his catch. Smell – the sensory awareness of weight in anyone casting his net on the waters of le temps perdu.
Furthermore, Proust’s sentences are the entire musculature of the intelligible body; they constitute the whole unutterable effort of hauling that catch in.
One other point: the intimacy of the symbiosis between that specific creative endeavour and that specific physical affliction comes out most clearly in the fact that nowhere in Proust is there an irruption of the heroic ‘nevertheless’ with which otherwise creative people rail against their suffering. Which is why it can be said, on the other hand, that an involvement in the way of the world and in living as profound as Proust’s must inevitably have led to a commonplace, indolent self-satisfaction on any other basis than that of an affliction so deep and unrelieved. As things were, however, that affliction was destined to have a wholly wishless, wholly unrepentant furore show it its place in the great work process. For the second time there arose a scaffolding structure like Michelangelo’s, atop which the artist, head bent back, painted The Creation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling: the sickbed in which Marcel Proust covered, in the air, with his handwriting, the countless pages he devoted to creating his microcosm.
[1929]