SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN >'79with my friends.' Truth and happiness, he felt for a time, could
be discovered by seeing the right places with the right persons.
His illusion was less absurd and less unfruitful than it might seem:
ror although reality, in the metaphysic of A fa Recherche, lies only
in the utmost depths of our being which are in contact with
eternity, images of reality are wherever we find them. Of the two
false quests which for the Narrator were necessary stages in his
recovety of Time Lost, and which he calls Names of People and
Names of Places, Proust's pursuit of high society corresponded
to the first, and his circular journey in the steps of Ruskin to the
second.
Ruskin appears occasionally in A fa Recherche under his own
name. The Narrator's mother, seeing her son heartbroken by
their parting as he sets out for Balbec with his grandmother,
asks: "What would the church at Balbec say? Where's that en-
raptured tourist we read about in Ruskini'''l Bloch exhibits his
vulgarity, when the Narrator reveals that the visit to Balbec
'fulfils one of my oldest desires, only less profound than that of
going to Venice', by exclaiming: "Yes, you would! You'd like
to drink sherbet with the pretty ladies"-as Proust had with
Marie Nordlinger-"while you pretend to read The Stones of
Venighce by Lord John Ruskin, that dreary old fossil, one of the
most crashing bores who ever existed !"2 At Venice the Narrator,
like Proust himself, takes 'notes for some work I was doing on
Ruskin'.3 Jupien in his brothel jests upon 'a translation of
Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies which I had sent to M. de Charlus':
"if you see a light in my window you can come in, that's my
Open Sesame," he says, "but ifit's Lilies you're after, you'd better
try elsewhere."4 These words, as we shall see later, may actually
have been spoken to Proust, some eighteen years afterwards, on
a dark night in war-time Paris when the bombs were falling.
If Bergotte is in the habit of visiting gothic cathedrals, how-
ever, it is not because he has collected in passing-as he takes
Renan's snail-shell nose, Bourget's words of advice, Bergson's
name, and the magic of Barres's prose-a trait from Ruskin.
Just as much as in his social presence he is Anatole France, in the
effect of his works on the Narrator Bergotte is Ruskin. 'One of
the passages from Bergotte gave me a joy I was aware of feeling
ill a deeper region of myself,' the t-Iarrator tells us, 'a region vaster
1 1,649 ' I, 739 3 III, 645 • III, 833