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of ‘The Confession of a Young Woman’, society is a place where vice is easily indulged, characterized by the ‘plaisirs déssechants’ [dessicating pleasures] it offers (PD, 95; PJ, 90). And the socialites in ‘The Death of Jealousy’, like Mme Verdurin eating her croissant as she reads about the sinking of the Lusitania (TR, 102; 2190), pay lip service to a fellow mondain’s suffering ‘while they swallow a last glass of champagne … sensing, from the pleasure they derived from drinking it, that “they were in an excellent way”’ (PD, 163; PJ, 158). Proust’s vision of society life and people is neither sycophantic nor snobbish here; he cuts through the trappings of privilege and knocks holes through the gleaming surfaces to expose the empty centre of le beau monde. The collection contains many promising and beautifully crafted miniatures, but it would take over ten more years for the grander structures of the mature novel to coalesce.

Jean Santeuil

It is likely that it was in September 1895, during a trip with Reynaldo Hahn to Sarah Bernhardt’s summer retreat at Belle-Île-en-Mer off the Britanny coast and to Beg-Meil on the mainland, that Proust began work on drafts for a novel that he never finished, entitled by its first, posthumous editor Jean Santeuil. To call it a novel is already an overstatement: Proust’s notes are fragmentary, frequently contradictory and lacking in unifying structure. In mid September 1896 Proust explained that he had written over 100 pages of his project but was still not able ‘to conceive of its totality’.2Jean Santeuil was first published in 1952 in three volumes edited by Bernard de Fallois, who pieced the ‘novel’ together from 1,500 pages of notes by moving passages around, omitting sections, amalgamating disparate ones, modifying and suppressing names and details as he saw fit, ultimately compiling ten thematic sections organized according to the apparent age of the protagonist. In 1971 the material was re-edited for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Although the Pléiade editors acknowledge the unfinished nature of the text, their editorial interventions, like those of Fallois, give a greater impression of cohesion and uniformity than is in fact evinced by the materials themselves. In an unfinished introductory note, Proust wrote ‘Should I call this book a novel? It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life, with nothing extraneous added’.3 And this is precisely the issue: the fragments that make up Jean Santeuil represent a store of raw materials harvested from Proust’s personal experience, but they are not yet bound together coherently by plot, structure and pacing, crucial elements that define the novelist’s craft.

Proust began with a frame narrative in which two friends meet an author, ‘C…’, who gives them a manuscript, the story of Jean Santeuil, which they publish when its author dies. Many characters and events that first take shape in the Jean Santeuil notes can be found in similar or transposed forms in the Search. Jean’s fictional friend Henri de Réveillon, for example, may be seen as an early version of Robert de Saint-Loup, and Jean shares many traits with the Narrator of the Search. Jean wants to be an artist: he seeks ‘an opportunity of concentrating my mind, of digging deep into myself, of trying to find out the truth of things, of expressing the whole of myself, of occupying myself with what is genuine, and not … essentially futile’ (JS, 191; 440). An important development is the recognition of the power of involuntary memory as a potential route to revelation for the artist or potential artist. Memories of time spent by the sea are revived in Jean as he looks out over Lake Geneva: the sudden intrusion of an unexpected memory, he realizes, ‘nous attache définitivement à la vie et nous l’incorpore’ [attaches us firmly to life and makes it part of us] (JS, 407, trans. mod.; 399). Anticipating the role of involuntary memory in the Search, Jean recognizes such moments as

the happy hours of the poet’s life when chance has set upon his road a sensation