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[Distance and time are overcome. Science/Traces around the earth a sad, straight path.]

In part lamenting the coming of the railways to France, these lines anticipate by over half a century Proust’s own exploration, discussed above, of the impact of technological advances on our spatio-temporal perceptions. Another Vigny poem, ‘The Wrath of Samson’, suggested the title and provided the epigraph (‘Woman shall have Gomorrah and man shall have Sodom’) for Sodom and Gomorrah. Similarly, Baudelaire’s poem ‘Lesbos’, banned from the original edition of Les Fleurs du mal, offers us insight into the veiled connotations of Proust’s enigmatic title A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs: ‘Car Lesbos entre tous m’a choisi sur la terre’, wrote Baudelaire, ‘pour chanter le secret de ses vierges en fleurs’ [For Lesbos has chosen me amongst all of earth/To sing the secret of its flowering virgins], lines quoted by Proust in his celebrated essay ‘Concerning Baudelaire’ of 1921.13

The younger Proust’s preference for Musset and for the novels of George Sand (1804–76) was, most likely, inherited from his grandmother. Sand gives way in the second questionnaire to two contemporary authors, Anatole France (1844–1924) and Pierre Loti (1850–1923). Loti is referred to in The Guermantes Way as the sort of popular figure who would be found in the best salons, providing the hostess with valuable cultural capital; France is referred to on a number of occasions in the novel (it is suggested that he frequents Mme Verdurin’s dreyfusard salon), and Bergotte, the Search’s fictional novelist, displays many of France’s characteristics as a writer. This sort of melding of the real and the fictional by Proust lends depth and nuance to the Search as a whole. As with Loti and France, artists or works of art are often mentioned in the Search not for aesthetic reasons but for social ones. To talk about the right artists, to mention the right works, is to show common cause with the salon elite and thereby to be accepted. Proust also uses this attitude of considering art as a commodity to send up his pompous or vacuous characters who in reality are far removed from the possible riches art can offer. M. de Guermantes, for example, proclaims with all the assurance of a true connoisseur: ‘Fra Diavolo and the Magic Flute, and Le Chalet, and the Marriage of Figaro, and Les Diamants de la couronne – there’s music for you!’; except he lays bare his ignorance by intermingling, in his role call of greats, Mozart’s masterpieces with some minor comic operas of the 1830s and 1840s. ‘It’s the same thing in literature’, he announces, ominously, ‘For instance, I adore Balzac, Le Bal de Sceaux, Les Mohicans de Paris’ (G, 567; 1123). The deflating truth that the second novel mentioned here is by Dumas Père and not Balzac is not acknowledged by the Narrator, but the message is clear. Art can lead us to knowledge and to beauty, it can help us understand or cope with pain; it might even offer us salvation; but for many mondains, art is just another social accoutrement, paraded like a flamboyant garment or a piece of jewellery, quite devoid of the potential transformative and revelatory force that the Narrator and other kindred spirits recognize it to have.

At times we find imaginary works of art being described in terms redolent of real, existing works of the period. Proust met the painter Paul Helleu (1859–1927) in Cabourg and he and the influential American James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), whom Proust admired enormously, are important models for Elstir, the fictional painter of the Search, whose name echoes those of both models. The descriptions of Elstir’s early mythological paintings bear striking similarities with those of Gustave Moreau (1826–98), whilst his seascapes – again, only ever existing in words on Proust’s pages – put one in mind of works by Helleu and Whistler as well as Claude Monet, J.M.W. Turner and others.

To take a further example of Proust’s borrowing from the major artistic currents of his time, let us consider