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images and scenarios that are developed in his subsequent writings. Involuntary memory, the best known of Proust’s fascinations, features with some regularity in the collection, although without the same impact it has for the Narrator in the Search. The dying Baldassare Silvande hears the sound of distant bells on the breeze that enters his sickroom: ‘it was a voice both present and very ancient’, we read as the bells remind him of crossing the fields in the evening, heading home as a young boy (PD, 27; PJ, 27). In ‘Mme de Breyves’s Melancholy Summer Vacation’ the heroine longs for a man she has fallen for but who escapes her grasp. Hearing again a phrase from Die Meistersinger, heard the night they first met, ‘had the capacity to evoke M. de Laléande for her with the greatest precision’ (PD, 77; PJ, 74). ‘She had involuntarily turned [the phrase] into the real leitmotif of M. de Laléande’, we are told (PD, 77; PJ, 74): this anticipates Swann and Odette’s relation, in which the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, heard the night they first met, becomes for Swann the mnemonic embodiment of his love for Odette, the ‘national anthem of their love’ (SW, 262; 180).

Besides early indications of Proust’s recognition of the affective potential of involuntary memory, we also find in Pleasures and Days fledgling forms of certain images and motifs. In ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’ the Narrator speaks of a character called Hippolyta whose sons and nephews ‘like her, all have aquiline noses, thin lips, piercing eyes, and over-delicate skin’ in which he recognizes ‘traces of her lineage, which doubtless issued from a goddess and a bird’ (PD, 43–4; PJ, 42–3). In The Guermantes Way, this genealogical image returns, refined:

The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, … the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes, seemed to have served also as a pattern for … Robert’s face … I looked longingly at those features of his so characteristic of the Guermantes, of that race which … seemed to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess with a bird. (G, 84–5; 807)

Readers will find many such instances of Pleasures and Days serving as a testing ground for Proust’s pen: the cherished goodnight kiss features in ‘The Confession of a Young Woman’; in the Flaubert pastiche the Jews are described as forming ‘a sort of vast secret society, like the Jesuits and the Freemasons’ (PD, 64; PJ, 62), terms which recur almost verbatim to describe homosexuals in Sodom and Gomorrah. The clinching ‘meeting by the lakeside’ in ‘Nostalgia – Daydreams under Changing Skies’ is a contingent moment of misinterpretation, similar to when in The Guermantes Way Saint-Loup, passing in an open carriage at Doncières, apparently feigns not to recognize the Narrator. In the earlier piece we see Proust’s recognition of the force of the mind in convincing us of the reality of states of affairs that are only ever figments of our imagination. ‘The most horrible thing about my mistake’, the protagonist reflects, ‘was that it refused to go away’ (PD, 129; PJ, 124), anticipating the Narrator’s agonizing in The Captive over Albertine, fuelled more by his ever-active mind than by any hard proof of wrongdoing.

It is instructive to consider the image of society that emerges from Pleasures and Days. Proust was initially taken for little more than a fawning socialite but reading the collection shows us in fact how clear-sighted he was from an early age about the reality of high society. Violante explains to her family servant why she speaks about things she formerly despised: ‘I would be less popular if I expressed preoccupations which, by their very superiority, are neither liked nor understood by people in high society’ (PD, 35; PJ, 35). Why, we might ask, with this awareness, is she not able to escape? Because, writes Proust with remarkable maturity (the story is dated August 1892), of the force of habit, ‘a force which, if it is nourished at first by vanity, vanquishes weariness, contempt, and even boredom’ (PD, 38, trans. mod.; PJ, 37). For the protagonist