Revue Hebdomadaire
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Perhaps, but since its editor was sure it wouldn’t, they had no chance to find out. Turning the piece down was an understandable oversight. This was 1895, and Mainguet didn’t know Proust would one day be Proust. What is more, the moral of the essay lay not too far from the ridiculous. It was only a step away from suggesting that everything down to the last lemon was beautiful, that there was no good reason to be envious of any condition besides our own, that a hovel was as nice as a villa and an emerald no better than a chipped plate.
However, instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe to them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings and a misguided enthusiasm for others. If it hadn’t been for Pierre Mainguet’s rejection, the readers of the Revue Hebdomadaire would have benefitted from a chance to reappraise their conceptions of beauty, and could have entered into a new and possibly more rewarding relationship with saltcellars, crockery, and apples.
Why would they previously have lacked such a relationship? Why wouldn’t they have appreciated their tableware and fruit? At one level, such questions seem superfluous. It just appears natural to be struck by the beauty of some things and to be left cold by others. There is no conscious rumination or decision behind our choice of what appeals to us visually; we simply know we are moved by palaces but not by kitchens, by porcelain but not by china, by guavas but not apples.
However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. Proust’s letter to Monsieur Mainguet hinted as much. By saying that great painters were the ones by whom our eyes were opened, Proust was at the same time implying that our sense of beauty was not immobile, and could be sensitized by painters, who would, through their canvases, inculcate in us an appreciation of once neglected aesthetic qualities. If the dissatisfied young man had failed to consider the family tableware or fruit, it was in part out of a lack of acquaintance with images that would have shown him the key to their attractions.
Great painters possess such power to open our eyes because of the unusual receptivity of their own eyes to aspects of visual experience: to the play of light on the end of a spoon, the fibrous softness of a tablecloth, the velvety skin of a peach, or the pinkish tones of an old man’s skin—qualities that can in turn inspire our impressions of beauty. We might caricature the history of art as a succession of geniuses engaged in pointing out different elements worthy of our attention, a succession of painters using their immense technical mastery to say what amounts to “Aren’t those back streets in Delft pretty?” or “Isn’t the Seine nice outside Paris?” And in Chardin’s case, to say to the world, and some of the dissatisfied young men in it, “Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.”
The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them. Appreciating the beauty of crusty loaves does not preclude our interest in a château, but failing to do so must call into question our overall capacity for appreciation. The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat and what Chardin noticed in very similar interiors places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.
The young man in the Chardin essay of 1895 was not the last Proustian character to be unhappy because he couldn’t open his eyes. He shared important similarities with another dissatisfied Proustian hero, who appeared some eighteen years later. The Chardin youth and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time were both suffering from depression and were both living in a world drained of interest when they were both rescued by a vision of their world which presented it in its true, yet unexpectedly glorious, colors, and which reminded them of their failure to open their eyes adequately until then—the only difference being that one of these glorious visions came from a gallery in the Louvre, and the other from a boulangerie.
To outline the baking case, Proust describes his narrator sitting at home one winter’s afternoon, suffering from a cold and feeling rather dispirited by the dreary day he has had, with only the prospect of another dreary day ahead of him tomorrow. His mother comes into the room and asks if he’d like a cup of lime-blossom tea. He declines her offer, but then, for no particular reason, changes his mind. To accompany this tea, his mother brings him a madeleine, a squat, plump little cake that looks as if it had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. The dispirited, rheumatic narrator breaks off a morsel, drops it into the tea, and takes a sip, at which point something miraculous happens:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disaster innocuous, its brevity illusory.… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal
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What sort of madeleine was this? None other than the kind that Aunt Léonie used to dip into her tea and give to the narrator’s childhood self, on Sundays when he would come into her bedroom and say good morning to her, during the holidays his family used to spend at her house in the country town of Combray. Like much of his life, the narrator’s childhood has grown rather vague in his mind since then, and what he does remember of it holds no particular charm or interest. Which doesn’t mean it actually lacked charm; it might just be that he has forgotten what happened. And it is this failure that the madeleine now addresses. By a quirk of physiology, a cake that has not crossed his lips since childhood, and therefore remains uncorrupted by later associations, has the ability to carry him back to Combray days, introducing him to a stream of rich and intimate memories. He recalls with newfound wonder the old gray house in which Aunt Léonie used to live, the town and surroundings of Combray, the streets along which he used to run errands, the parish church, the country roads, the flowers in Léonie’s garden and the water lilies floating on the Vivonne River. And in so doing, he recognizes the worth of these memories, which inspire the novel he will eventually narrate, which is in a sense an entire, extended, controlled “Proustian moment,” to which it is akin in sensitivity and sensual immediacy.
If the incident with the madeleine cheers the narrator, it is because it helps him realize that it isn’t his life that has been mediocre so much as the image of it he possessed in memory. It is a key Proustian distinction, as therapeutically relevant in his case as it was for the Chardin young man:
The reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgement, ordinarily, not on the evidence of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life—and therefore we judge it disparagingly