Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) looks across the arts to construct a

monumental meditation on the significance of art in life. Prousts sweep is both retrospective,
turning to painting, architecture and music from centuries past, and forward-looking,
anticipating the fragmented aesthetic of a new century. On the centenary of the publication
of Swanns Way, the first volume of Prousts immense novel, this conference brings together
scholars and performers from a plurality of fields to examine and celebrate the connections
Proust invites us to make between art and life, past and future.

Exhibitions and programming accompanying the conference highlight Harvard Universitys

extraordinary Proust-related holdings, including drafts, letters and drawings by Proust at
Houghton Library, turn-of-the-century photographs from the Harvard Art Museums at the
Mather House SNLHTC Gallery, and selections from the Harvard Art Museums' remarkably
Proustian collection of paintings and drawings at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and in an
online exhibition.

Students enrolled in French 165: Marcel Proust, offered in Spring 2013, will be actively
involved in the conference and related events.

Conference Program
Friday April 19, 2013
Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall, Harvard University

9 AM: Welcome
Virginie Greene (Harvard)

9:15 AM: Art's Way

Chair: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Harvard)

Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (ITEM-CNRS), Proust du ct des Primitifs

Sophie Duval (Bordeaux III), Some dear or sad fantasy: Foi, Idoltrie, Infidlit
Christie McDonald (Harvard), If I were [not] a painting

10:45 AM: Break

11 AM: Ancient to Nouveau

Chair: Katherine Kolb (Southeastern Louisiana)

Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa (Kyoto), Proust et les dcouvertes archologiques

Virginie Greene (Harvard), Art and Craft in Prousts Life and Works
Elaine Scarry (Harvard), Glass and Clay, Proust and Gall

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12:30 PM: Lunch

1:15 PM: Patronage

Chair: Susan Rubin Suleiman (Harvard)

Caroline Weber (Barnard), Proust's Muses: Mesdames Straus, de Chevign, and Greffulhe as
Patrons of the Arts
Suzanne Guerlac (Berkeley), Swanns Gift Odettes face (Photography, Money and the Social
World in la recherche du temps perdu)
Maurice Samuels (Yale), Proust, Jews, and the Arts

2:45 PM: Break

3 PM: Proust at Harvard

Chair: Christie McDonald (Harvard)

Susan Ricci-Stebbins (Independent Scholar), Parallel Passions: Ruskin, Proust and Harvard
Franois Proulx (Harvard), Irregular Kin: Proust in Reynaldo Hahns Unpublished Letters to
Madeleine and Suzanne Lemaire

Saturday April 20, 2013

Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall, Harvard University

9 AM: Young Scholars

Chair: Franois Proulx (Harvard)

Stefanie Goyette (Harvard), Proust and the Pose of Early Photography

Matthew Rodriguez (Harvard), Artist, Connoisseur, Undertaker: Death on Exhibit from Painting
to Writing
Christina Svendsen (Harvard), Prousts Photographic Flash

10:30 AM: Break

10:45 AM: Sound and Resonance

Chair: Alexander Rehding (Harvard)

John Hamilton (Harvard), Cette douceur, pour ainsi dire wagnrienne: Musical Resonance in
Prousts Recherche
Sindhumathi Revuluri (Harvard), Sound and Music in Proust: What the Symbolists Heard
Louis Epstein and Hannah Lewis (Harvard), Proust and Music: Reflections on Contemporary
Performance

12:15 PM: Lunch

1 PM: Art and Reflection

Chair: Tom Conley (Harvard)

Evelyne Ender (CUNY), Inside a Red Cover: Proust and the Art of the Book

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 Franoise Leriche (Grenoble III), Proust au miroir des images
Richard Moran (Harvard), The Involuntary, the Magical, and the Other in Proust

2:30 PM: Break

2:45 PM: Proust's Last Laugh

Chair: Virginie Greene (Harvard)

Elisabeth Ladenson (Columbia), Proust and the Marx Brothers

Antoine Compagnon (Collge de France/Columbia), Lart de lchec

3:45 PM: Closing Remarks

Christie McDonald (Harvard)

Abstracts
Antoine Compagnon
Lart de lchec

Sophie Duval
Some dear or sad fantasy : Foi, Idoltrie, Infidlit
On sait que Proust critique dans la Recherche ce quil appelle en empruntant cette notion
Ruskin le vice didoltrie, notamment travers Swann, qui a la manie de superposer des
tableaux de matres la physionomie des gens quil connat. Le narrateur ne se prive pourtant
pas de faire de mme, allant jusqu paradoxalement rapprocher Albertine de lInfidelitas de
Giotto : non seulement il semble ritrer la vicieuse comparaison de Swann entre la fille de
cuisine et une fresque de lArena, mais cest mme lIdoltrie qui devient le comparant dune
analogie apparemment idoltre. En quoi lappropriation proustienne dimages aimes peut-
elle diffrer de la fabrication dune fantasy cre son usage par lidoltre ? Cest partir
de la dfinition de Ruskin, reprise et dveloppe par Proust, des fresques de Giotto
reprsentant la Foi et lIdoltrie, des deux traductions possibles d Infidelitas ainsi que des
figures symboliques sculptes aux porches des cathdrales que lon cherchera clairer les
apparents paradoxes de lidoltrie, comprendre pourquoi Swann en est le support principal
et dterminer ce qui pourrait tre lallgorie proustienne de lanti-Idoltrie, pour finalement
tenter de cerner ce que Proust conoit comme une morale de lart.

Evelyne Ender
Inside a Red Cover: Proust and the Art of the Book
Whats inside a book beside lines, or words, or images, or ideas? When Du ct de chez Swann
came out in 1913 as the first volume of Proust's artwork, it showed, in a spectacular and often
studied scene of reading, that the answer to this seemingly simple (but phenomenologically
very complex) question may be no less than the totality of an experience captured in signs.
This initial discovery might explain why, in the last volume of his uvre and the place of the
final revelation, a book with its red cover, Franois le Champi, awaits the hero.

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Following the authors own promptings, who saw his work as equally manual and spiritual, this
paper will sketch out how Prousts thoughts about the book and about reading can enter into
dialogue with our time and help us conceptualize the reading mind. What can the Recherche
tell us about the experience of reading and about the book in our changing world? As we
watch how images compete with words and how books are read on screens, Prousts
reflections in Le temps retrouv on the dangers of bibliophilia and the way sentences just like
photographs can turn into an impediment for the mind can indeed seem remarkably
contemporary.

Louis Epstein and Hannah Lewis (with Sindhumathi Revuluri)

Proust and Music: Reflections on Contemporary Performance
In this moderated discussion, we will consider the musical performance culture of Prousts
time, with special attention to the artistic networks that salons and domestic music-making
might have engendered. We will also reflect on the idea of contemporary musical performance
of works that figure in Prousts biography, in la recherche, or both. What might we learn
from a multimedia historical exploration?

Stefanie Goyette
Proust and the Pose of Early Photography
The invention and propagation of photography in the nineteenth century, particularly in the
form of the portrait photograph, significantly impact understandings of the relationship
between self and other. The photograph, described by Roland Barthes as an anthropologically
new object, is adopted by Proust as the basis for a vocabulary of interrelation and its failures.
In Swanns Way, Proust posits the constitution of a subject as a function of multiplicity:
encounters with the other repeated through time and conditioned by the interplay between
expectation and perception. The repeated viewing of the photograph of a lover is not only
staged in the relationship between Swann and Odette, but also becomes a metaphor for the
nature of the encounter itself. Through an exploration of Nadars portrait photography and
the peculiar love story between Swann and Odette in Swanns Way, I argue that Proust denies
the possibility of a singular or static subject, and instead represents an encounter with the
other that is predicated on expectation and realized through iteration. This encounter is
analogous to the experience of viewing a photograph, and distinct from that of contact with
other types of images, for as Barthes suggests, the subject looks through the photograph and
says this is me, or this is you, just as when we encounter others, we do not say, I
represent this person to myself, but rather, here is this person. For Proust the act of
perceiving, or knowing, occurs through re-presentation, through iteration, and through
multiplicity.

Virginie Greene
Art and Craft in Proust's Life and Works
This study is part of a broader reflection on the place of craft in industrial and post-industrial
societies and cultures, both at a material level and at a symbolic or metaphorical level. Proust
was certainly not a craftsman in a concrete way, but his interest for creative processes and
productions included not only arts and art works, but also crafts and craftworks. In my paper I
will first examine the various crafts Proust mentions in his letters and works, from the

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Japanese toys unfolding in a bowl of water to Art Nouveau ceramics, medieval sculptures,
culinary masterpieces, dresses, and the famous "paperolles" crafted by Cleste Albaret.
Second I will look at the ways Proust uses craft as a model or metaphor for the writing process,
which became his craft as well as his art.

Suzanne Guerlac
Swanns Gift Odettes Face (Photography, Money and the Social World in la recherche du
temps perdu)
At the end of Du Ct de Guermantes II, Swann brings a gift to his friends the Guermantes. It is
an enormous photograph of images of the Knights of Rhodes as they appear on ancient coins.
Through its exaggerated size, the gift introduces an image of photography itself into the novel,
and places it in relation to issues of money and class. Taking this gift as our point of departure,
we will examine relations of money, photography, and social identity in the Recherche by
attending closely to Odettes face. Odette produces herself as a social subject through the
image machine of commercial portrait photography that has become profitable during the
Second Empire. In his Essai sur lart de la photographie esthtique photographique (1862),
Disdri anticipates Deleuzes notion of visageification in his theory of the photographic pose as
practiced in the new commercial context. He challenges the notion of portrait photography as
exact imitation and proposes a complex theory of resemblance as social construction. An
examination of the way Proust introduces photographic figures into the story of Odette invites
a consideration of Proustian desire as an economic structure that hinges on what Georg
Simmel considered the defining term of modernity: money.

John Hamilton
Cette douceur, pour ainsi dire wagnrienne: Musical Resonance in Prousts Recherche
The paper entertains a passing but striking reference to the gramophone at the head of the
third volume of Prousts Recherche in order to reconsider the function and value of music
particularly Wagners musicacross the novel. The medial specificity of the gramophone as a
storage technology, curiously marked by the qualifying phrase pour ainsi dire, highlights key
aspects of the mmoire involontaire and thereby demonstrates how writing becomes
possible only when conscious memory is reminded of the acoustic phenomena (or acoumena)
that have been mechanically preserved. The musical resonance that informs Prousts work
thus can be understood as part of a massive playback system that is subsequently transcribed
before being erased forever.

Elisabeth Ladenson
Proust and the Marx Brothers

Franoise Leriche
Proust au miroir des images
partir danalyses menes sur les dessins de Proust et sur sa faon dutiliser la rfrence
picturale dans son roman, jinsisterai sur le rapport projectif que lauteur de la Recherche
entretient spontanment avec les arts visuels, quil semble considrer essentiellement dans
leur dimension figurale, scnarique. A la diffrence de la plupart des tudes menes ces vingt
ou trente dernires annes sur les sources picturales de Proust, je mintresserai lattitude

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perceptive de Proust face aux arts visuels, telle quelle apparat dans ses commentaires et
lusage, lappropriation quil en fait.

Nathalie Mauriac Dyer

Proust du ct des Primitifs
Au dbut du XXe sicle on entend par primitifs aussi bien les populations europennes
pr-historiques et les populations non-europennes, souvent colonises, dont les artefacts
inspirent le mouvement artistique quon nommera plus tard primitivisme , que les artistes
europens antrieurs la Renaissance. Proust a sembl plus proche des seconds. Il visite
Bruges en 1902 lexposition des Primitifs flamands et au Louvre en 1904 celle
des Primitifs franais ; en 1906, il rve mme dacqurir une toile de primitif italien.
La Recherche porte, par touches, la trace de ces motions esthtiques, en partie encore
mdiatises par Ruskin. Mais Proust qui ne croit pas au progrs en art ne souscrit pas la
hirarchie qui sous-tend ces catgorisations. Et on pourrait mme soutenir que
la Recherche revisite, sa manire, certains aspects du courant primitiviste en plein essor, par
une sorte de porosit des problmatiques contemporaines.

Christie McDonald
If I were [not] a painting

Richard Moran
The Involuntary, the Magical, and the Other in Proust
The theme of the involuntary is perhaps most explicitly announced in Proust through its
connection with "involuntary memory", where the characterization of such experiences as
beyond the control of the "Intellect" or the conscious will is a criterion of their special value
and their reality. However the theme of Reality as that which resists the will informs the
metaphysics of the whole novel (the infant's relation to the external world, the child's relation
to the family, the young man's relation to social worlds of exclusion). In its epistemological
dimension, this relates to the resistance of others to being known, and the ways in which
people reveal themselves in spite of themselves, involuntarily. In this excerpt I concentrate on
the interpersonal theme of the Other as representing a form of value which necessarily and
not just contingently resists one's efforts to manipulate or control. Here it is the
responsiveness of the Other that is sought, and whose value is grounded in the reality of a
desire and a freedom distinct from and independent of one's own. This very distinctness is
constantly threatened by the Narrator's anxious, engulfing will. This strand of the "contra-
voluntary" in Proust connects the erotic and aesthetic themes with the more general themes
of reality and solipsism in the novel.

Franois Proulx
Irregular Kin: Proust in Reynaldo Hahns Unpublished Letters to Madeleine and Suzanne
Lemaire
Nearly 300 letters from the composer Reynaldo Hahn to Madeleine Lemaire and her daughter
Suzanne, sent between 1894 and 1917, entered Harvards collections in 1963. Hahn was
Prousts lover from 1894 to 1896, and remained a close friend, perhaps the closest, until

6
Prousts death in 1922. Madeleine Lemaire was a painter and society hostess; it was in her
salon that Proust met Hahn in May 1894. Hahns letters make frequent mention of Marcel
and offer intimate glimpses into their lives, particularly in the mid-1890s.
While about 180 letters from Proust to Hahn have been published to date, very few letters
from Hahn to Proust have reached us. The number of published letters between Proust and
the Lemaires is also very small. Hahns letters to the Lemaires help fill in the picture of this
network of close relations between a writer, a musician, and two painters. These letters have
never been published and are here presented to the public for the first time.

Sindhumathi Revuluri
Sound and Music in Proust: What the Symbolists Heard
I begin with the suggestion that sound is a critical sensory mode in the experience of reading
Proust. Music is a category of sound, but stands quite apart from the specificity with which
sounds are usually deployed in Prousts text. Music punctuates the sonic textures of Prousts
world alternately as memory, event, community, and shared experience. The passages in
which a musical performance is narrated, however, are often remarkably silent. Using these
musical moments as points of departure, I offer an analysis of the interaction between sound
whether mechanical or organic, of the city or nature and music configured most often as
event.
Though clues embedded in descriptions of actual works and pieces have led to compelling
arguments for what the music might have been, what is remarkable is how much is left to
imagination and allusion a quality the Symbolists prized in music (as an art), even as they
involved few composers in their philosophy and ideology. A notable exception was the
composer Claude Debussy, who has, in recent years, begun to be treated in productive ways
under the Symbolist umbrella. I conclude the examination of sound and music in Prousts text
by drawing connections between Proust and Debussy, their relationship (fraught and loving)
with Symbolism, and acknowledge the debt that they both held to Richard Wagner, whether
that was embraced or denied by the author and composer.

Matthew Rodriguez
Artist, Connoisseur, Undertaker: Death on Exhibit from Painting to Writing
In La nuit sexuelle, Pascal Quignard collects a series of images that he weaves into a meditation
on the limits of the knowable. The various paintings, drawings, and prints he has gathered
become epistemological points of departure into the obscurity of death. The image thus
conceived as a site of reflection upon the unknowable opens up a reading of Proust where the
literary transcription of painting is a window into the intricate relation of death, style, and
remembrance. Prousts ekphrasic impulse as it unfolds in la recherche du temps perdu strives
to reconcile painting and writing, life and death, and his double role of artist (in his own right)
and connoisseur. The consanguinity of Quignards text with Prousts illuminates the continued
resonance of investigations into what it means to contemplate an image, in person or in
writing, which could mean recognition of ones mortality.

Susan Ricci-Stebbins
Parallel Passions: Ruskin, Proust and Harvard

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In the years after 1850, writers and artists on both sides of the Atlantic became disciples of
John Ruskin. Of those who came under his spell, few were more passionate than Charles Elliot
Norton and Charles Herbert Moore at Harvard or Marcel Proust, the aspiring young writer in
Paris. With Ruskins writings as catalyst, all three assumed self-appointed apprenticeships to
the sage for certain periods in their lives. Using works from Harvards art collection, my paper
will present a short history of Harvards and Prousts early connections with Ruskin including
their parallel Ruskinian pilgrimages to the gothic churches of Normandy, to the Alps of Turner,
and to the Venice of Ruskin and Carpaccio. I will examine a few of the effects of Ruskins
thinking on both sides of the Atlantic, what some have called the religion of Ruskin: at
Harvard, the art history department and museum program were established in Ruskins image,
later culminating in the amazingly Proustian collection donated by Grenville Winthrop. In
turn, Prousts much studied assimilation of Ruskin contributed to his multi-layered use of
pictorial art in his novel. Though Proust, like Norton and Winthrop, never forgot his Ruskinian
roots, I will explore how each moved beyond Ruskin to a wider aesthetic, eventually embracing
works and movements that would have astonished Ruskin, but that spoke to their personal
interests and their own eras.

Maurice Samuels
Proust, Jews, and the Arts
Un Amour de Swann has most often been rendered in English as Swann in Love but an equally
accurate translation might be A Love of Swann. This paper asks: What makes Swann so
lovable? What turns this dilettantish connoisseur into the friend of the Prince of Wales, the
darling of the Faubourg St. Germain, and the only Jew admitted to the Jockey Club? The
answer, Ill suggest, has something to do with the relationship of Jews to art. Through its
depiction of Swann and other Jewish parvenus (such as the writer Bloch and the actress
Rachel), who all make their way into the heart of French high society thanks in some way to
their artistic esprit or wit, the novel participates in (while also subtly mocking) debates that
raged at the time over the relationship of Jews to French culture and of French culture to the
Jews. Given that the narrator declares that la matire de mon exprience, laquelle serait la
matire de mon livre, me venait de Swann, Ill suggest that understanding the Jews peculiar
talents proves central to understanding the novel itself as well as to understanding Prousts
own conflicted identity as a Jewish artist.

Elaine Scarry
Glass and Clay, Proust and Gall

Christina Svendsen
Prousts Photographic Flash

Caroline Weber
Proust's Muses: Mesdames Straus, de Chevign, and Greffulhe as Patrons of the Arts
This lecture examines the arts patronage in music, literature, the visual arts, and dance of
three of the grandes mondaines upon whom Proust based the character of Oriane, Duchesse
de Guermantes. In the novel, the Duchesse's artistic interests and pretensions are shown to be
superficial at best; her real-life counterparts had a far more complicated relationship to and
engagement with the art and artists of their era. Drawing on extensive archival biographical

8
research, this talk will examine the achievements and limitations of the salonnires from
whom Proust derived his vision of the ct de Guermantes, and to whom they afforded a
restricted but invaluable glimpse into the exclusive, inward-looking world of the Belle Epoque
gratin.

Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa
Proust et les dcouvertes archologiques
La seconde moiti du XIXe sicle et le dbut du XXe ont vu se succder des dcouvertes
archologiques clairant les grandes civilisations de lAntiquit, en gypte, en Assyrie,
Pompi, Athnes et en Crte. Jessaierai de montrer comment Proust les a intgres dans sa
Recherche et quelles fonctions il leur a donn remplir.

Presenters
ANTOINE COMPAGNON is Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University and Professor of Modern and Contemporary French Literature at the
Collge de France. In addition to editing Prousts Du ct de chez Swann (1988), Sodome et
Gomorrhe (1988), and Carnets (2002) for Gallimard, he has authored several books of literary
criticism, theory, and history, including Proust Between Two Centuries (1989; English
translation 1992), Five Paradoxes of Modernity (1990; English translation 1994), and Les
Antimodernes (2005). The collected papers from his 2006-07 Collge de France seminar on
Proust and memory were recently published under his direction as Proust, la mmoire et la
littrature (2009).

SOPHIE DUVAL is Assistant Professor at the Universit Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III and
a member of the quipe Proust (Proust Team) at the Institute of Modern Texts and
Manuscripts (ITEM) at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. A specialist
of literary irony and satire, she is the author of two books (La satire, 2000; Lironie proustienne,
2004) and over twenty articles, many of them on Proust.

EVELYNE ENDER is Professor of French at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at CUNY.
She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (1995) and has
published articles on topics such as dj-vu in Nerval and Proust, Proust and desire, George
Sand and eros, masculinity and illness, and Flaubert and consciousness. Her book Architexts of
Memory: Literature, Science, and Autobiography (2005), which won the MLAs Scaglione Prize
for Comparative Literary Studies, draws from neuroscientific models of memory and cognition
to read literary works by Proust, Woolf, Nerval, and others as laboratories for the study of
human memory.

LOUIS EPSTEIN is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. He is

currently completing his dissertation, entitled "Towards a Theory of Patronage: Funding for
Music Composition in France, 1918-1939." Louis's research focuses on how funding practices
informed the sounds and meanings of new music during a period characterized by social,
economic, and aesthetic turmoil. The winner of Fulbright, Chateaubriand, and Georges Lurcy

9
Fellowships, Louis has presented his work at local and national meetings of the American
Musicological Society.

SUZANNE GUERLAC is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She has
published widely on 19th- and 20th-century French literature and cultural ideology, including
the books Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (2006) and Literary Polemics:
Bataille, Sartre, Valry, Breton (1997), for which she received the MLAs Scaglione Prize for
French and Francophone Studies. Her recent work on the articulations between literature, the
visual arts, and philosophy includes her current book project, Proust and Photography, which
examines the relationship between time, vision, memory, and the production of experience in
In Search of Lost Time.

JOHN HAMILTON is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author

of Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (Harvard, 2003); Music,
Madness, and the Unworking of Language (Columbia, 2008) [German translation: Musik,
Wahnsinn und das Auerkraftsetzen der Sprache, trans. Andrea Dortmann, (Gttingen, 2011)];
and Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philogogy of Care (Princeton, 2013), as well as
numerous articles on literature and music in journals including Modern Language
Quarterly, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, Comparative Literature
and Zeitschrift fr Deutsche Philologie.

ELISABETH LADENSON is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the
Department of French at Columbia University. Her book Proust's Lesbianism (1999) has been
translated into French (2004) and Spanish (2010). She has published essays on a wide range of
subjects in journals including Yale French Studies, The Yale Review, and The London Review of
Books. Her most recent book is Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Lolita to Madame
Bovary (2007).

FRANOISE LERICHE is Associate Professor at the Universit de Grenoble III and a member of
the quipe Proust at the ITEM-CNRS in Paris. Her research explores the connections between
Proustian aesthetics and visual art, and she has published articles on subjects including Proust
and Art Nouveau, the role of the arts in the genesis of Prousts novel, originality and
intertextuality, and painting and representation in In Search of Lost Time. She is currently
editorial director for the production of an electronic edition of Prousts monumental
Correspondance at the ITEM-CNRS.

HANNAH LEWIS is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. She received
her BA in Music from Brown University in 2007. She is the recipient of grants from the
American Musicological Society Harold Powers World Travel Fund, the Charles Warren Center
for Studies in American History, and the Harvard University Arthur Lehman Fund. She is writing
her dissertation on music in early sound film in the U.S. and France, and her research interests
include film music, early twentieth-century French music, post-war American experimental
music, musical theater, and technologies of sound.

NATHALIE MAURIAC DYER is Senior Research Fellow and head of the quipe Proust at the
ITEM-CNRS in Paris. She is director of the editorial committee for Prousts Cahiers 1 75 de la

10
Bibliothque nationale de France, as well as the author of dozens of articles on the genesis of
In Search of Lost Time. Her book Proust inachev (2005) addresses the implications of the
discovery in 1986 of the last hand-corrected manuscript of Prousts Albertine disparue, which
she edited for publication as Sodome et Gomorrhe III: La Prisonnire suivi de Albertine disparue
(1993). She is the co-editor (with Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa) of Proust aux brouillons (2011).

RICHARD MORAN is Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the

author of Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (2001) and has published
papers on metaphor, imagination, emotional engagement with art, and aesthetics and the
philosophy of literature. His article, Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty, appeared in the
Winter 2012 issue of Critical Inquiry, and he teaches a course at Harvard entitled Philosophy
and Literature: Proust.

MAURICE SAMUELS is Professor of French at Yale University. He is the author of The

Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (2004) and
Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), for which he
received the MLAs Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies. He has published
several essays and book chapters on Proust and the question of Jewish identity in France,
including Prousts Progenitors in Inventing the Israelite and Jews and the Construction of
French Identity from Balzac to Proust in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History
(edited by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, 2010).

ELAINE SCARRY is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at
Harvard and a Senior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows. She is the author,
among many books, of Thinking in an Emergency (2011); On Beauty and Being Just (1999);
Dreaming by the Book (1999; winner, Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism) and The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985).

CHRISTINA SVENDSEN is Lecturer on Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is

currently revising a book manuscript titled Stone, Steel, Glass: Constructions of Time in
European Modernity which contains multiple sections on Proust. In 2012, she published a
critical introduction and translation of the 1913 Lesabndio: an Asteroid Novel, by the avant-
garde architect and novelist Paul Scheerbart.

CAROLINE WEBER is Associate Professor of French at Barnard College. She is the author of
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2007) and Terror and its
Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (2003), and has published widely on
eighteenth-century French literature and culture and contemporary theory. Her current book
project, Prousts Duchess: In Search of the Exquisite in Belle poque Paris, studies fashion in
Prousts novel and its contexts.

KAZUYOSHI YOSHIKAWA is Professor of French at Kyoto University and a member of the

quipe Proust at ITEM-CNRS in Paris. He is the author of Proust et lart pictural (Proust and
Pictorial Art, 2010) and editor of the Index gnral de la correspondance de Marcel Proust
(General Index of Marcel Prousts Correspondence, 1998), and has co-edited two recent
collections of essays on the genesis of Prousts work: Proust aux brouillons (2011), and

11
Comment nat une uvre littraire? (2011). He has published numerous articles on the place of
painting and the visual arts in Prousts fiction, and has translated several volumes of In Search
of Lost Time into Japanese.

Music in Marcel's Time

April 18 2013, 7 PM
Leverett House Junior Common Room
Free and open to the public; seating is limited.

Reynaldo Hahn: selections

Si mes vers avaient des ailes

Mai
Chloris

Hannah Lewis, soprano

Samuel Parler, piano

Claude Debussy: from Prludes, book 1

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans lair du soir

Monica Hershberger, piano

Minstrels

Louis Epstein, piano

Gabriel Faur: selections

Clair de lune
Mandoline
Chanson damour
Notre amour

Hannah Lewis, soprano

Samuel Parler, piano

Maurice Ravel: Menuet antique

Louis Epstein, piano

Intermission

Frederico Mompou: Four quejas, from Impresiones intimas

12
 Lento cantabile expressive
Andante
Gracioso
Agitato

Monica Hershberger, piano

Claude Debussy: Trois pomes de Stephane Mallarm

Soupir
Placet futile
ventail

Hannah Lewis, soprano

Samuel Parler, piano

Arnold Schoenberg: Sechs kleine Klavierstcke, op. 19

Monica Hershberger, piano

Erik Satie: Embryons desschs

d'Holothurie
d'Edriophthalma
de Podophthalma

Louis Epstein, piano

Toward a Proustian Cinema

Harvard Film Archive

April 12-21, 2013

Friday April 12, 7 PM: LE TEMPS RETROUV (dir. Ral Ruiz, 1999)

Sunday April 14, 4 PM: LA CAPTIVE (dir. Chantal Ackerman, 2000)

Sunday April 21, 4:30 PM: UN AMOUR DE SWANN (dir. Volker Schlndorff, 1984)

13
Proust's Paris: Photographs from the Collections of the
Harvard Art Museums
Sandra Naddaff and Leigh Hafrey Three Columns Gallery, Mather House, April 1 - 22, 2013
Curator: Akili Tommasino (PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)

From scholars to artists, Proust's readers have noted the abundance of photographic
imagery in his oeuvre. Photography appears as both a motif and a model of perception
upon which Proust bases his writing. It is well documented that the author was as avid
a collector of photographs as he was obsessed with the frequency and manner in
which he was photographed.

In the second volume of the Search, Proust, through the voice of Charlus, opines that,
Photographs, once they cease to be a reproduction of reality and show us things
which no longer exist, acquire a certain dignity. This selection of photographs has
been made in the spirit of recapturing a time now lost. Featuring the work of
photographers active in Paris during the last decade of the nineteenth century and
early decades of the twentieth, from the rich holdings of the Harvard Art Museums,
this online gallery and a special exhibition of digital reprints at Mather House present a
snapshot of Prousts Paris.

The latest techniques of photographywhich lay at the feet of a cathedral the very
houses that so often seemed to us, close to, almost as high as the steeples, and against
a pale and faded background manage to keep a huge horizon under the arch of a
bridgeonly these, as far as I can see, might, like the kiss, derive from what we
supposed a thing of definite aspect, the hundred other things which it also is, since each
one is relative to a no less legitimate perspective.

- Within a Budding Grove

Proust celebrated the novel ways of seeing the world afforded by advances made in
photographic technology. Perhaps the anonymous author(s) of these photographs valued
the capacity of the panoramic format to convey the impressive breadth of spaces in Paris
transformed under the urban planning reforms initiated in the 1860s by Georges-Eugne
Haussmann and implemented through the end of the century.

14
 Unidentified Artist, Untitled (panorama of [*street], Paris), 1890s
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Gift of Dr. Robert
Drapkin, 2.2002.2744; 2.2002.2763; *2.2002.2693

At a time when the artistic merit of photography was still highly contested, Marcel Proust
emphatically declared photography is indeed an art. Throughout his career Alfred Stieglitz
devoted much of his effort to raising the status of photography to that of the traditional fine
arts.

Though he would later reject the term, during the early years of his activity Stieglitz
championed a mode of photography called pictorialism. To challenge the notion that
photography was a merely automated process inferior to painting, pictorialists employed
techniques that emphasized the intervention of the human hand in the production of the
photographic image. The soft focus of A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897 distances the
image from the scientific objectivity associated with photography and suggests that it is the
artist's interpretation of the scene, like a painting would be. To assert photography's place
alongside the established tradition of painting, pictorialists often chose subjects from the
history of painting. A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897 may be Stieglitz' response to an
iconic painting from twenty years earlier, Gustave Caillebottes Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877
(now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago).

15
 Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
A Wet Day On The Boulevard - Paris, 1897
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of
Photographs, 2010.538.3

An occasional destination of the author, the Alle des Acacias is the site of several fictional
public encounters in Prousts epic novel. This photograph of the popular pathway in the Bois
de Boulogne was reproduced as a postcard by the Parisian publishing house C.L.C.

The fact that the various figures that populate the bustling scene from the coachmen in the
background to the insouciantly posed woman in the foreground at right are impossibly all in
focus indicates that the image was produced by means of photocollage. Several prints were
meticulously cropped, the desired fragments adhered to a single print, and rephotographed.
The landscape photo that serves as the background was likely taken in the light of the early
morning, when the heavily frequented thoroughfare would have been devoid of figures in
transit that might blur the image.

Yet the limitations of photographic technology at the time do not fully account for the
rationale that motivated the laborious construction of this image. Indeed, Alfred Stieglitz
earlier A Wet Day On The Boulevard Paris, 1897 demonstrates that photographers had the
capability to successfully capture an urban scene teeming with intractable activity. Perhaps the
anonymous author of this photograph insists on composition as a tactile process of selection
and rejection in an appeal to traditional notions of artifice.

16
 Unidentified Artist, Recreation, Parks and Playgrounds: France. Paris. Luxembourg Gardens; Bois de Boulogne;
Boulevards: Parks and Playgrounds Paris, France: Bois de Boulogne. 22. Paris - Alle des Acacias C.L.C., c.1903
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum
Collection, 3.2002.2470.6

As Proust was in his writing, Jacques-Henri Lartigue was in his photography a keen observer of
the mores of contemporary Parisian society, in particular their expression through forms of
consumption and leisure. The rising spectacle of womens fashion did not escape the attention
of either figure as a key aspect of the citys self-image as the capital of modern culture.

In Avenue du Bois de Boulogne Lartigue captures the image of two promenading women. As
their backs are turned, it is unclear whether his subjects are conscious of being photographed,
yet their modish outfits and accessories denote an acutely modern awareness of appearance
as self-presentation. A peripatetic photographer, Lartigue was an avid proponent of the then
new handheld camera.

17
 Jacques-Henri Lartigue (French, 1894 - 1986)
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Dr. Myron A. Hofer, in memory of his mother, Frances L.
Hofer, P1978.90

Published the same year as Swanns Way, Steeple Chase Day, Paris, After the Races captures
the frenzied atmosphere at Longchamp racetrack, where in addition to the official
entertainment, Parisian society came to enjoy a sartorial spectacle, to relish in and to return
the gaze in the exhibition of new fashions.

A frequent collaborator with compatriot Alfred Stieglitz pioneering photographic journal,

Camera Work, Steichen shared the elder photographers ambition to elevate the perception of
the status of photography to that of a veritable art. Steeple Chase Day, Paris, After the Races
was printed by means of duogravure, a process which sought to achieve the subtleties of tone
of traditional drawing and etching.

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)

Steeple Chase Day, Paris, After the Races, 1913
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, P1972.162

18
As with Prousts novel, the object of the project that defines the career and legacy of Jean-
Eugne-Auguste Atget is the remembrance of things past. Armed with a cumbersome glass
plate camera that was already old-fashioned in his time, Atget set out to systematically
photograph the Vieux Paris ('old Paris') he perceived to be rapidly disappearing in the face of
the drastic socio-economic and architectural transformations that accompanied the citys
modernization.

69 Quai de la Tournelle epitomizes the sense of nostalgia that pervades Atgets photographic
oeuvre. With its theatrical arrangement of outworn furniture, outmoded decorative objects,
and obsolete household implements rendered ornamental curiosities, there could hardly be a
more fitting symbol of the antiquarian impulse than the antique shop.

Jean-Eugne-Auguste Atget (French, 1857-1927)

69 Quai de la Tournelle, 1912
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Purchase through the generosity of Jesse Lie Farber, Saundra B. Lane,
Barnabas McHenry, Richard and Ronay Menschel and Melvin R. Seiden, P2003.2

19
Such an image is the prostitute seller and sold in one.
- Walter Benjamin

The maison close (legally-sanctioned brothel) features prominently in the cultural imagination
of Belle poque Paris and indeed in Prousts life and literature. Versailles, maison close, Petite
Place is part of a series of about a dozen photographs Atget produced on commission by the
painter Andr Dignimont (1891-1965) for an unrealized publication.

Idling in the doorway of the establishment to which she is likely indentured, the prostitute in
this photograph is the image of contradiction. Her wan smile, nonchalant demeanor and
apparent assent to being photographed are at odds with the abject status of her mtier. There
is a tragicomic disparity between the elegance the fox fur pelt draped about her neck is
intended to convey and the vulgarity of her bare legs which advertise her trade in flesh.

A law prohibiting bordellos from using explicit signage forced proprietors to devise elusive
promotional techniques, like posting larger than standard address numbers and placing
workers out front. Like the wares displayed in the storefront of 69 Quai de la Tournelle, the
prostitute is both a commodity and a sign; she stands at the threshold of the spaces of public
exhibition and private consumption.

Jean-Eugne-Auguste Atget (French, 1857-1927)

Versailles, maison close, Petite Place, March 1921
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Dr. Donald Ottenstein in memory of Leah H. Ottenstein 1922-1999,
Radcliffe Class of 1943, P2004.8

20
The preoccupation with the past exhibited in Proust's and Atgets work in their respective
creative fields can seem to verge on brooding.

Far exceeding the merely documentary function of architectural survey photography its dryly
topographic title would suggest, Rue de Bretonvilliers conveys the melancholic aspect of
Atgets envisioned Vieux Paris. Taken from under the shelter of an arch during the calm of a
storm, the photograph evokes the uncanny lull of the island on which the street is located, its
quiet atmosphere paradoxical given its location near the geographical center of Paris.

Rather than simply empty, the scene seems eerily evacuated, as it is littered with traces of
former presence and activity. The unattended horse-drawn cart a forsaken remainder of an
increasingly obsolescent mode of transportationunderscores this sense of abandonment.

Jean-Eugne-Auguste Atget (French, 1857-1927)

Rue de Bretonvilliers, le Saint-Louis, Paris, 1924
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert W. Pratt, P1970.30.A

Though he did not take up photography until after the authors death, Brassa arguably bears
the strongest connection to Proust of any artist featured in this exhibition. A Hungarian
transplant to Paris in 1924, Brassa began to teach himself the French language by reading the
works of Proust.

21
In his book, Proust in the Power of Photography, which partially inspired the present
exhibition, Brassa argues, in his battle against Time, that enemy of our precarious
existence, ever on the offensive though never openly so, it was in photography, also born of an
age-old longing to halt the moment, to wrest it from the flux of dure in order to fix it
forever in a semblance of eternity, that Proust found his best ally. This image of a tenebrous
tombstone-laden plot of Montmartre Cemetery evokes the ultimate futility of the artists
attempt to salvage a moribund existence.

Brassa (French, 1899-1984)

Le cimetire Montmartre, 1932
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs,
P2000.70

22
Private Proust:
Letters and Drawings to Reynaldo Hahn
Houghton Library (Lowell Room), February 4 April 28, 2013
Guest Curator: Franois Proulx (Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)

Marcel Proust met Reynaldo Hahn in May 1894, when Proust was twenty-two. While Hahn, then
nineteen, was already a celebrated musician who had just composed his first opera, Proust had
only written a few short pieces for newspapers and literary magazines. The two were lovers until
the summer of 1896, and they collaborated on poems set to music included in Prousts first book,
Pleasures and Days, published that same year.

Prousts letters to Hahn in subsequent years are a testament to their enduringly close friendship.
Written in lansguage, a sibilant private code of deformed spellings and terms of endearment,
they were often accompanied by witty, irreverent drawings that Proust produced for no one else.
In letters leading up to 1913, Proust described to Hahn his ambitions and difficulties in writing the
novel that would become In Search of Lost Time.

Reynaldo Hahn by Nadar (1898).

Special courtesy of Dr. William C. Carter, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

23
1. Pleasures and Days (1894-1896)
Proust and Hahn met in the Parisian salon of Madeleine Lemaire, a painter and society
hostess who welcomed them to her country estate in the summer of 1894 and to her villa in
Brittany in 1895. Lemaire contributed drawings to the luxurious edition of Pleasures and
Days, which also included musical scores by Hahn.

Although generally well received by critics, Prousts first book was a commercial failure, the
bulk of its first printing remaining unsold long after 1896. A satirical review ridiculed its high
price, about four times the standard amount for a book: A preface by [Anatole] France, four
francs Drawings by Madame Lemaire, four francs Music by Reynaldo Hahn, four
francs Stories by [Proust], once franc A few poems by [Proust], fifty cents Total
thirteen francs and fifty cents, was that perhaps too much?

Marcel Proust, Les plaisirs et les jours.

Illustrations de Madeleine Lemaire, prface dAnatole France et quatre pices pour piano de Reynaldo Hahn.
Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1896. f*FC9.P9478.896p, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Purchase, Amy Lowell Fund, 1965.

24
In a letter from 1894 or 1895, Proust writes, Id like to go bid you good night if you hadnt
forbidden it, a scenario that recalls the famous scene of the mothers good-night kiss at the
beginning of Swanns Way. He signs, Your pony, Marcel, using Hahns pet name for him.

Marcel Proust, Letter to Reynaldo Hahn, [Dec 1894 or 1895?].

b 94M-48 (86), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

25
Here Proust urges Hahn to read his new story Dinner in Town, which was eventually included
in Pleasures and Days. He wants Hahn to casually mention it in a letter to Madeleine Lemaire,
without being too obvious. Proust believed Lemaires delay in finishing her drawings was
setting back publication of the book. He signs, Your little Marcel.

Marcel Proust, Letter to Reynaldo Hahn, [May? 1895].

b 94M-48 (85), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

26
Against Lemaires motherly cautions, Proust and Hahn traveled along the Brittany coast by
themselves in September 1895. The trip would inspire some of the descriptions of the seaside
in the second and fourth volumes of In Search of Lost Time. In this letter, Hahn addresses
Madeleine Lemaire as mother, and tells her that Marcel, her other boy, will write to her
the next day.

27
 Reynaldo Hahn, Letter to Madeleine Lemaire,
[Sept 1895]. b MS Fr 219 (2), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchase, Amy Lowell Fund, 1963.

28
In this New Years card to Lemaires daughter Suzanne, Hahn writes, Marcel is still asleep, so I
take the pen []. He goes on to reflect on how the passage of time changes even familiar
landscapes, a recurring theme in Prousts novel.

Reynaldo Hahn, Letter to Suzanne Lemaire, [1 Jan 1896].

b MS Fr 219.1 (20), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchase, Amy Lowell Fund, 1963.

29
2. Drawings (1902-1906)

While in Brittany with Hahn, Proust began to work on a novel largely inspired by their affair, now
known as Jean Santeuil. He abandoned the project around 1899, when he instead turned to writing
translations of John Ruskin. With the help of his mother and of Hahns cousin Marie Nordlinger,
Proust published translations of The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906).

As he worked on his translations, Proust often consulted mile Mles illustrated treatise, Religious
Art in France (1902, revised ed.). Tracing and modifying illustrations from that book, Proust
composed drawings for Hahn that are at once whimsical and profound.

Marcel Proust, "Sainte Anne portant la Vierge (Vitrail de Chartres)," [n.d.].

b 94M-48 (97), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.
Adapted from mile Mle, Lart religieux du XIIIe sicle en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1902. 203 M24ba, Fine Arts
Library, Harvard University.
A Proustian Gallery:
Selected Works from the Harvard Art Museums

In this and the next drawing, Proust casts himself as the suffering Christ; here he removes
Christs beard but preserves his own signature mustache. He provides captions peppered with
his private lansguage for Hahn:

"Symbolizes life blindly turning all its hopes away from Marcel, and Reynaldo full of pity
collecting blood from his wound and Konsoling him"

30
 Marcel Proust. Lglise et la Synagogue (aux yeux bands), [n.d.].
b 94M-48 (91), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.
Adapted from mile Mle, Lart religieux du XIIIe sicle en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1902.
203 M24ba, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

31
Christ symbolizes poor sickch Marcel, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit are the treasures of
genius and kindness that Reynaldo perpetually breathes into him (Under Christs arm, some
pretty book always forgotten by Reynaldo)

Marcel Proust, "Jsus Christ et les dons du St Esprit [n.d.].

b 94M-48 (91), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.
Adapted from mile Mle, Lart religieux du XIIIe sicle en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1902.
203 M24ba, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

32
Here Proust inscribes Hahns initials (RH) on the female figures crown and on the pages of the
open book. He replaces the caption Concordia with the biblical Esther, the subject of a
1905 opera by Hahn, and he sets her next to her adoptive father Mordecai, drawn from a
statue of Saint Jerome. Below, Proust writes that Esther is shown with little bbirds, while
Mordecai is botsched.

Marcel Proust, Esther pour Reynaldo Hahn [n.d.].

b 94M-48 (90), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.
Adapted from mile Mle, Lart religieux du XIIIe sicle en France. Paris: Armand Colin, 1902.
203 M24ba, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Proust traveled to Belgium and to the Netherlands in October 1902, primarily to view
paintings. In this illustrated letter to Hahn, Proust depicts the church and harbor in Dordrecht;
years later, in Swanns Way, he would describe the young narrators ardent wish to view a
church next to the sea.

On the back of the letter, a poem accompanies the drawing:

Dordrecht, a place so pretty

Cemetery
Of illusions I treasure
When I attempt to draw
Your canals, your roofs, your spire []

33
The first lecture in Prousts translation of Sesame and Lilies is dedicated To Reynaldo
Hahn, the author of The Muses Mourning the Death of Ruskin [] as a token of my
admiration and friendship. Hahn had composed and dedicated this piece to Proust in
1902.

John Ruskin, Ssame et les lys : des trsors des rois, des jardins des reines.
Trans. Marcel Proust. Paris: Mercure de France, 1906.
FC9 P9478 906r, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchase, Amy Lowell Fund, 1965.

3. "An Opuscule" (1909-1913)

Proust began to work on a new project in 1908 that would gradually become his novel In
Search of Lost Time.

In November 1909, he writes to another correspondent:

I read the opening (200 pages!) to Reynaldo and his response greatly encouraged me
[] I now feel it is my duty above all else to work toward finishing this.

34
 Marcel Proust. Letter to Georges de Lauris [late Nov. 1909].
b 94M-48 (108), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

35
In this letter from 1911 playfully addressed to Zadig, Hahns new dog, Proust explains in
simplified terms accessible to dogs his theory on the limited role of intellect and the
importance of longing in artistic creation.

Zadig, you not read, and you have not ideas. And you must be very unhappy when
you feel sad.

But know this, my good little Zadig [] intellect merely allows us to replace those
impressions that make you love and suffer with weak facsimiles that cause less sorrow
and give less affection. In the rare moments when I recover all my affection, all my
suffering, I no longer feel through these false ideas but rather through something that
is similar in you and in me, my little douog. And this seems to me so superior to all the
rest that it is only when I have reverted to the state of dog, to a poor Zadig like you,
that I start to write; books written this way are the only ones I love.

Marcel Proust, Letter to Zadig [Reynaldo Hahn], [early Nov. 1911].

b 94M-48 (93), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

Here, following his note to Zadig, Proust tells Hahn he will pay for the dog as a gift. He makes
extensive use of lansguage, adding ss, bs and hs to various words.

36
At the bottom of the letter, Proust includes a rhyming couplet where, in a rare boast, he
predicts that his opuscule will overshadow the work of Paul Bourget and Ren Boysleve, two
successful novelists of the era. Opuscule, a rare term meaning a work of small size, is a wry
description of his already sprawling novel.

My bugniguls,
Ive been so goods these last few days and always ups before 8 (a blie) that I am upshet
that you didnt come, and quite happy that you wont come (the btruth). Work well my
boy and be good to Zadig. But dont go so far as to sings Zadig, dig dig dig, as you used
to sings candle, dle dle dle, in such a lobely way for your dear Buncht []
I whroste that you should be sent the ransom for your douog.
'I'm writing an opuscule
That makes Bourget puny and Boysleve minuscule'

Marcel Proust, Letter to bugniguls [Reynaldo Hahn], [early Nov. 1911].

b 94M-48 (94), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

A year before Swanns Way was finally published, Proust gives Hahn a preliminary title for the
volume, Time Lost, and asks him to arrange a meeting with the editor of a literary magazine,
hoping to publish an excerpt before the book appears.

The excerpt, from the middle section of the novel, describes Swanns unhappy love for the
courtesan Odette and the crucial role of music in that love. The society dinners where the two
meet are largely inspired by Madeleine Lemaires salon in the 1890s, while the narrators
elaborate reflections on Swanns jealousy owe much to Prousts experience with Hahn.

Wistful yet facetious, Proust ends the letter with a citation from La Fontaines Fables.

It consists of dinners at the Verdurins that you thought were comical (melded into
one), after which Swann hears the phrase of the sonata that will become the national
anthem of their love. Two lines of ellipses. Swann abandoned by Odette attends an

37
evening reception [] suddenly he hears the little phrase again, and it makes him
realize what hes lost as it sings to him the forgotten refrains of happiness. []
Im up, you know. Yes it would be niscer if you gave your conferences next to your
Bunchts bed.
Absence is the greatest of pains.
Not for you, cruel one, but for he who remains!

Marcel Proust, Letter to Genstil [Reynaldo Hahn], [mid-Nov. 1912].

b 94M-48 (95), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Gift, Mrs. Bradley Martin, 1994.

38
4. How Proust Worked

Swanns Way, the first volume of Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, was printed at the
authors expense in 1913 after refusals from many prominent publishers.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the second volume of Prousts novel, was published in
1919 and awarded the prestigious Goncourt Prize. A late version of the manuscript (mostly
earlier galley proofs annotated by Proust, set on large sheets by the publisher) was dispersed
in a luxury edition in 1920. Proust expressed mixed feelings about this edition, but he
recognized the aesthetic quality of the collages, observing with characteristic self-
deprecation and attention to the skill of manual workers that the manuscript, in spite of my
ugly handwriting [] is lovely, and looks like a palimpsest thanks to the person who put it
together with exquisite taste.

In this fragment, the young narrator pays a visit to Odette, now married to Swann, and their
daughter Gilberte. The fragment shows how Proust did not merely correct typesetters errors
but made extensive revisions and additions to his work, even at this late stage of composition.

Marcel Proust, Hand-corrected galley proofs for lombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [1918], (detail).
p FC9 P9478 918aab, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchase, 1963.

39
 Further Reading
(in English)

Carter, William C. Proust in Love. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Gandelman, Claude. "The Drawings of Marcel Proust." ADAM International Review 40:394-396
(1976). 21-57.

Prestwich, P. F. The Translation of Memories: Recollections of the Young Proust. London: Peter
Owen, 1999.

(in French)

Greene, Virginie, and Caroline Szylowicz. "Le miroir des images: tude de quelques dessins
mdivaux de Marcel Proust." Bulletin d'informations proustiennes 28 (1998). 7-29.

Proust, Marcel. Lettres Reynaldo Hahn. Ed. Philip Kolb. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.

Sollers, Philippe. L'oeil de Proust: Les dessins de Marcel Proust. Paris: Stock, 1999.

Szylowicz, Caroline. "Les dessins dans les lettres de Marcel Proust Reynaldo Hahn." Cher ami...
votre Marcel Proust: Marcel Proust im Spiegel seiner Korrespondenz / Marcel Proust et sa
correspondance. Kln: Snoeck, 2009. 45-56.

Wise, Pyra. "L'dition de luxe et le manuscrit dispers d' l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs."
Bulletin d'informations proustiennes 33 (2003). 75-98.

40
A Proustian Gallery:
Selected Works from the Harvard Art Museums
Guest curator: Susan Ricci-Stebbins

The Harvard Art Museums collection of European art is remarkably Proustian. The Museums
own several of the very paintings described or alluded to in Prousts novel In Search of Lost
Time, including Gustave Moreaus The Young Man and Death and Ingress Odalisque With a
Slave. Overall, about seventy of the hundred or so visual artists mentioned by Proust are
represented in the Harvard collections, many by multiple examples.

The reasons for this are complex, but likely have to do with the fact that Harvard's first art
professors, Charles Eliot Norton and Charles Herbert Moore, emulated John Ruskin's teaching
methods. They, along with the many Harvard collectors they trained (including Grenville L.
Winthrop, Maurice Wertheim, and Paul Sachs) were grounded in Ruskinian aesthetics, as was
Proust himself.

Charles Herbert Moore (American, 1840-1930)

John Ruskin (c. 1876-77)
Watercolor and white gouache on off-white wove paper
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of the Misses Sara, Elizabeth, and Margaret Norton, 1919.1

41
C'est le plus souvent pour Saint-Marc que je partais, et avec d'autant plus de plaisir que,
comme il fallait d'abord prendre une gondole pour s'y rendre, l'glise ne se reprsentait pas
moi comme un simple monument, mais comme le terme d'un trajet sur l'eau marine et
printanire, avec laquelle Saint-Marc faisait pour moi un tout indivisible et vivant. (Albertine
disparue, 225)

John Ruskin (British, 1819-1900)

Part of a Sketch of the Northwest Porch of St. Mark's, 1879
Watercolor, white gouache, brown and black ink, and graphite on cream wove paper
51.2 x 38.1 cm (20 3/16 x 15 in.)

42
 Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Samuel Sachs, 1919.259

avec lefflorescence prodigieuse des Ballets russes, rvlatrice coup sur coup de Bakst, de
Nijinski, de Benois, du gnie de Stravinski, la princesse Yourbeletieff, jeune marraine de tous
ces grands hommes nouveaux, apparut portant sur la tte une immense aigrette ... ct
delle, dans son avant-scne, nous verrons, toutes les reprsentations des Russes, siger
comme une veritable fe, ignore jusqu ce jour de laristocratie, Mme Verdurin (Sodome
et Gomorrhe, 140)

Leon Bakst (Russian, 1866-1924)

The Firebird, 1915
Poster design: The Firebird and the Prince (Tzarevitch)
Harvard Theater Collection

43
Il aimait encore en effet voir en sa femme un Botticelli Swann possdait une merveilleuse
charpe orientale, bleue et rose, quil avait achete parce que ctait exactement celle de la
Vierge du Magnificat. Mais Mme Swann ne voulait pas la porter. ( l'ombre des jeunes filles
en fleurs, 186-187)

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro Filipepi) (Italian, 1445-1510)

Virgin and Child, c. 1490

44
 Tempera on panel, 88.9 x 55.9 cm (35 x 22 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.105

Depuis ce jour-l M. Nissim Bernard navait jamais manqu de venir occupier sa place au
djeuner (comme let fait lorchestre quelquun qui entretient une figurante, une figurante
celle-l dun genre fortement caracteris, et qui attend encore son Degas). (Sodome et
Gomorrhe, 237)

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Two Dancers Entering the Stage, c. 1877-1878
Pastel over monotype in black ink on white modern laid paper
38.1 x 35 cm (15 x 13 3/4 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.812

45
Il faut avouer quil y a quelque chose de curieux penser que le peintre des fleurs [Elstir] que
les amateurs dart nous citent aujourdhui comme le premier, comme suprieur mme
Fantin-Latour, naurait peut-tre jamais, sans la femme qui est l, [Mme Verdurin] su peindre
un jasmin. (Le temps retrouv, 20)

Ignace-Henri-Jean-Thodore Fantin-Latour (French, 1836-1904)

Roses in a Vase, c.1880-c.1889
Oil on canvas, 32.39 x 34.93 cm (12 3/4 x 13 3/4 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.236

46
 ces rves de tempte dont j'avais t rempli tout entier ... se substituait en moi le rve
contraire du printemps le plus diapr, non pas le printemps de Combray mais celui qui
couvrait dj de lys et danmones les champs de Fiesole et blouissait Florence de fonds dor
pareils ceux de l'Angelico. (Du ct de chez Swann, 379)

Fra Angelico (Italian, c. 1400-1455)

Christ on the Cross between the Virgin and Cardinal Torquemada and Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1446
Tempera on panel, 96.6 x 42.5 x 6.5 cm (38 1/16 x 16 3/4 x 2 9/16 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Hervey E. Wetzel Bequest Fund, 1921.34

47
Comment! Vous avez fait le voyage de Hollande et vous ntes pas all Haarlem? scria la
duchesse. Mais quand mme vous nauriez eu quun quart dheure, cest une chose
extraordinaire avoir vue que les Hals. (Le ct de Guermantes, 507)

Frans Hals (Dutch, 1581-1666)

Portrait of a Preacher, c. 1625
Oil on canvas, 61.6 x 51.4 cm (24 1/4 x 20 1/4 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Nettie G. Naumburg, 1930.186

48
 les plus vieux auraient pu se dire quau cours de leur vie ils avaient vu, la distance
infranchissable entre ce quils jugeaient un chef-doeuvre dIngres et ce quils croyaient devoir
rester jamais une horreur (par exemple lOlympia de Manet) diminuer jusqu ce que les
deux toiles eussent lair jumelles. (Le ct de Guermantes, 407)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780 - 1867)

Odalisque with a Slave, 1839-1840
Oil on canvas, 72.1 x 100.3 cm (28 3/8 x 39 1/2 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.251

49
Je savais ce que ctait quadmirer une femme dune faon artistique javais connu Swann ...
jtais moi-mme merveill quand Swann ajoutait rtrospectivement pour moi une dignit
artistique en la comparant pour moi, comme il se plaisait le faire gallamment devant elle-
mme, quelque portrait de Luini (La prisonnire, 369)

Bernardino Luini (Italian, 1480-1532)

Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, c. 1520-c. 1525
Oil on panel, 85.4 x 63.2 cm (33 5/8 x 24 7/8 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Nettie G. Naumburg, 1930.194

50
[Elstir:] 'Quelle transformation de toutes choses dans cette immensit lumineuse dun champ
de courses o on est surpris par tant dombres, de reflets, quon ne voit que l. Jamais je nai
vu les femmes arrivant en voiture, ou leurs jumelles aux yeux, dans une pareille lumire Ah!
que jaurais aim la rendre; je suis revenu de ces courses, fou, avec un tel dsir de travailler!'
( l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 459-50)

douard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Race Course at Longchamp, 1864
Watercolor and gouache over graphite on white wove paper on two sheets, joined;
22.1 x 56.4 cm (8 11/16 x 22 3/16 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.387

51
Cette manire, la premire manire dElstir, tait lextrait de naissance le plus accablant pour
Odette parce quil faisait delle non pas seulement, comme ses photographies dalors, une
cadette de cocottes connues, mais parce quil faisait de son portrait, le contemporain dun des
nombreux portraits que Manet ou Whistler ont peints daprs tant de modles disparus qui
appartiennent dj loubli ou lhistoire. ( l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 426)

douard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Skating, 1877 (Au Skating)
Oil on canvas, 92 x 71.7 cm (36 1/4 x 28 1/4 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906, 1951.50

52
Ces jeux des ombres, que la photographie a banaliss aussi, avaient intress Elstir au point
quil stait complu autrefois peindre de vritables mirages ( l'ombre des jeunes filles en
fleurs, 403)

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames, 1903
Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.4 cm (29 x 36 3/8 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs. Henry Lyman, 1979.329

53
Malheureusement ces lieux merveilleux que sont les gares, do lon part pour une
destination loigne sont aussi des lieux tragiques ... Il faut laisser toute esprance de rentrer
coucher chez soi, une fois quon sest dcid pntrer dans lantre empest par o lon
accde au mystre, dans un de ces grands ateliers vitrs, comme celui de Saint-Lazare o
jallais chercher le train de Balbec ( l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 214)

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, 1877
Oil on canvas, 80.3 x 98.1 cm (31 5/8 x 38 5/8 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906, 1951.53

54
Un jour que des rflexions de ce genre le ramenaient encore au souvenir du temps o on lui
avait parl dOdette comme dune femme entretenue, et o une fois de plus il samusait
opposer cette personification trange : la femme entretenue chatoyant amalgame
dlments inconnus et diaboliques, serti, comme une apparition de Gustave Moreau, de
fleurs vnneuses entrelaces des joyaux prcieux et cette Odette sur le visage de qui il
avait vu passer les mmes sentiments de piti pour un malheureux (Du ct de chez Swann,
263)

Gustave Moreau (French, 1826-1898)

The Apparition, 1876/1877
Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 46.7 cm (22 x 18 3/8 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.268

55
 sur le rebord du lit, il y avait sculpte une longue Sirne allonge, ravissante, avec une
queue en nacre, et qui tient dans la main des espces de lotus ... ctait tout fait
larrangement du Jeune Homme et la Mort de Gustave Moreau Swann, ajouta-t-elle [Mme
de Guermantes] a t frapp de la ressemblance de cette Sirne avec La Mort de Gustave
Moreau. (Le ct de Guermantes 503-4)

Gustave Moreau (French, 1826 - 1898)

The Young Man and Death, 1856-1865
Oil on canvas, 215.9 x 123.2 cm (85 x 48 1/2 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, Class of 1886, 1942.186

56
Ce nom de Gilberte passa prs de moi, formant, passager cleste au milieu des enfants et
des bonnes, un petit nuage dune couleur prcieuse, pareil celui qui, bomb au-dessus dun
beau jardin du Poussin, reflte minutieusement comme un nuage dopra, plein de chevaux et
de chars, quelque apparition de la vie des dieux (Du ct de chez Swann, 387)

Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594-1665)

The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs of Nysa; The Death of Echo and Narcissus, 1657
Oil on canvas, 122.6 x 180.5 cm (48 1/4 x 71 1/16 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Sachs in memory of her husband, Samuel Sachs, 1942.167

57
Le chagrin finit par tuer. chaque nouvelle peine trop forte, nous sentons une veine de plus
qui saillit, dveloppe sa sinuosit mortelle au long de notre tempe, sous nos yeux. Et cest ainsi
que peu peu se font ces terribles figures ravages du vieux Rembrandt, du vieux Beethoven,
de qui tout le monde se moquait. Et ce ne serait rien que les poches des yeux et les rides du
front sil ny avait la souffrance du coeur. (Le temps retrouv, 213)

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669)

Portrait of an Old Man, 1632
Oil on oak panel, 66.9 x 50.7 cm (26 5/16 x 19 15/16 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Nettie G. Naumburg, 1930.191

58
Pour russir tre ainsi reconnus, le peintre original, lartiste original procdent la faon
des oculistes. Le traitement par leur peinture, par leur prose, nest pas toujours agrable.
Quand il est termin, le praticien nous dit : Maintenant regardez. Et voici que le monde ...
nous apparat entirement diffrent de lancien, mais parfaitement clair. Des femmes passent
dans la rue, diffrentes de celles dautrefois, puisque ce sont des Renoir, ces Renoir o nous
nous refusions jadis voir des femmes. (Le ct de Guermantes, 317)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)

Seated Bather, c. 1883-1884
Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 91.4 cm (46 x 36 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906, 1951.59

59
Mais comme Elstir, quand la Baie de Balbec, ayant perdu son mystre, tait devenue pour
moi une partie quelconque, interchangeable avec toute autre, des quantits deau sale quil y
a sur le globe, lui avait tout dun coup rendu une individualit en me disant que ctait le golfe
dopale de Whistler dans ses harmonies bleu argent, (Le ct de Guermantes, 22)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)

Nocturne in Blue and Silver, c. 1871-1872
Oil on wood panel, 44.5 x 61 cm (17 1/2 x 24 in.)
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.176

French citations: Marcel Proust, la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. J.-Y. Tadi. Paris: Gallimard
(folio), 1988.

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