SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 2.57Douglas Ainslie, an English friend of Robert de Billy, met Proust
at the Daudets' in the Rue de Bellechasse, at 9 Boulevard
Malesherbes, and in the Cafe Weber, where they argued about the
relative merits of Ruskin and Pater. Proust arrived late at Weber's
with the velvet collar of his greatcoat wrapped about his ears;"I
can only stay a minute," he would announce, and then talk, as he
did to Albert Flament, till dawn, growing ever more brilliant to
stave off the moment of parting: 'to give of his best,' remarks
Ainslie, 'he had to feel he was keeping an impatient cabman
waiting'. Ainslie quoted a remark made to him by Pater in
person: "I can't believe Ruskin could see more in St Mark's at
Venice than I do !"; to which Proust retorted, with a despairing
shrug of the shoulders: "What's the use! You and I will never see
eye to eye about English literature!" Either at this time or a little
later Proust read a less authoritative and much earlier study of
Ruskin, J. A. Milsand's L'Esthhique anglaise, which appeared in
1864, when only half of Ruskin's work had been written and before
his philosophy reached its mature form.
In 1898 two other personal influences converged to join the
undercurrent which, beneath the opposing stream of the Dreyfus
Case, was directing Proust's thoughts towards Ruskin. In the
autumn Robert de Billy visited Paris on leave from the French
Embassy in London, where he served from 1896 to 1899. Billy
described his recent visit to the romanesque churches of the
Auvergne and Poitou, talked of Ruskin, and lent Proust his own
copy of Emile Mille's L' Art religieux du XIIIe si,ele en France,
which had just appeared. The book returned four years later,
bereft of its cover and stained with patent medicines: Proust
quoted it copiously in his Ruskin studies, and later used it for the
iconography of Saint-Andre-des-Champs and Elstir's explanation
of the sculptures in the 'Persian' church of Balbec.
Marie Nordlinger, too, during her stay in Paris from December
1896 to August 1898, was a valuable source of information about
Ruskin. She found Proust had read 'everything by Ruskin that
had been translated into French' -the extracts in the Bulletin de
l' Union pour l'Action Morale, that is, and the extensive quotations
in La Sizeranne's book. Proust, in tum, was delighted to discover
that she came from Rusholme, the very suburb of Manchester in
which Ruskin had delivered his lectures of Sesame and Lilies; so
that henceforth the grey place-name of Manchester incongruously