SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 2.59minded places such as the Louvre or the Bibliotheque Nationale.'
In that library he discovered a fragment of The Seven Lamps oj
Architecture translated in the Revue Generale of October 1895,
nestling, as he noticed with amusement, between articles by two
of his summer acquaintances, Henry Bordeaux, and Chevilly's
sister's fiance Edouard Trogan. Finding that no more trans-
lations from Ruskin existed, he began to read him, painfully but
successfully, in the original. A letter of 30 November asks Pierre
Lavallee, then a librarian at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, whether
his library possesses a copy of The Queen of the Air ('ple~se leave
a note with the concierge--I never wake before two in the after-
noon'); and whether or not Lavallee could supply the book,
Proust soon had a copy of his own.' The Queen of the Air was
chosen, no doubt, for the sake of the many superb and brilliantly
translated quotations from it in La Sizeranne: possibly for the
aphorism which fitted so aptly his new fervour and his abandon-
ment of Jean Santeuil: 'A truly modest person admires the works
of others with eyes full of wonder, and with a joy that leaves him
no time to deplore his own.' Perhaps he was equally attracted by
the passages on the symbolism of flowers, including the lilies of
Florence, or on the limpid water of the Swiss lakes, which in
La Sizeranne' s French astonishingly resemble, with their long
sentences winding in arabesque round the central column of their
meaning, his own prose in Jean Santeuil; for the influence of
Ruskin on Proust's later style came not so much from a desire
to write like Ruskin, as from a realisation that Ruskin already
wrote like himself.
On 5 December 1899, encouraged by unexpected praise of Les
Plaisirs et les Jours in a letter from Marie Nordlinger, he revealed
his momentous decision. Since they last met, a year and a half
before, he has been unhappy (he means, as always, unhappy in
love), and his creative powers have suffered from the deteriora-
tion in his health; his novel has failed (je travaille depuis tres
longtemps a un ouvrage de tres longue haleine, mais sans rien
achever'), and he sometimes feels, he confesses, like Mr Casaubon
in Middlemarch, who wastes his life on a masterpiece he will never
, He appealed also to Marie Nordlinger, who sent him her copy of the
Queen of the Air with her own marginal annotations, early in January 1900;
but meanwhile he had acquired one by his own efforts, and gave her it in
exchange.