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characteristic of the voice of other authors was a vital step in Proust’s development as a writer. The pastiches demonstrate brilliantly Proust’s ear for the particular music of an author’s prose style, his eye for motifs, tics or favoured structures. His virtuosity is evident in the range of authors and genres he takes on: he offers accounts of the affair with the exhaustive socio-historical chronicling of Balzac, the tense impersonality of Flaubert, and offers an imaginary critique of the latter piece as if written by Sainte-Beuve. He recreates the voices of recent and contemporary writers Ernest Renan, Henri de Régnier, the Goncourt brothers in their journal (a brilliant pastiche of the Goncourt journal, chronicling a dinner chez Verdurin, features, of course, in Time Regained: see TR, 23–32; 2140–6) and the critic and Académicien Emile Faguet. The more distant voices of the historian Jules Michelet and the Duc de Saint-Simon complete the set collected together in 1919 in Pastiches et mélanges. These pieces show Proust honing his craft as a writer and expose the sense of humour, often overlooked, that subtends so much of the Search. Looking back, Proust described the exercise as ‘a matter of hygiene; … necessary to purge oneself of the most natural vice of idolatry and imitation’.5 He thought it better consciously to perform a parody and then move on than risk spending a lifetime writing involuntary imitations of revered forebears. He described his pastiches as ‘literary criticism “in action”’.6 That he should envisage his instinctive, creative endeavours as a form of criticism points towards the lack of rigid generic divisions in his thinking: this fluidity would become all the more apparent in the subsequent writings we know as Against Sainte-Beuve, the abandoned hybrid project from which the great novel would grow.

Against Sainte-Beuve

Although the published editions suggest otherwise, like Jean Santeuil, the writings known as Against Sainte-Beuve are fragmentary and unfinished. They are, however, extremely valuable for the insight they offer into the development of Proust’s aesthetics since, like the earlier essay ‘Against Obscurity’, they provide an opportunity to see Proust functioning as critic. They also show him trying out and refining material that was subsequently incorporated into the Search. In a letter of May 1908, in an eclectic list of works in progress, including ‘a Parisian novel’, ‘an essay on pederasty’ and ‘an article on stained-glass’, Proust mentioned ‘an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert’.7 This is the first of his mentioning a projected work relating to the critic. Six months later, it had still not taken material form. Proust told two correspondents that in his mind he had constructed an article on Sainte-Beuve in two different forms: one classical essay and one more narrative in style, where his mother arrives at his bedside and he proceeds to tell her about an article on Sainte-Beuve that he intends to write.8 When he eventually put pen to paper in the Carnet de 1908 and elsewhere, the notes and drafts that he made show that he never definitively made his mind up with regard to the generic nature of the project: some of the critical pieces bear traces of the envisaged dialogue form and different editions of Against Sainte-Beuve give varying impressions of the balance between critical essay and fictional development. The material was first edited by Fallois in 1954. This edition includes a good deal of Proust’s sketches that are in fact early drafts for the Search, and not therefore strictly related to Sainte-Beuve. This edition is still published in the Folio ‘Essais’ collection. In 1971 the text was re-edited for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade by Pierre Clarac, who excised the purely fictional material and focused uniquely on the fragments of the abandoned critical essay.

Against Sainte-Beuve is something of a miscellany, then, encompassing critical reflection and appraisal, novelistic drafts and theoretical passages on the nature of memory, creativity and art. Proust’s half-dozen