Marcel Proust: A Biography

MARCEL PROUST
minor reputation and merit and an intimate friend of Mallarme
and Francis Jammes; and he was noted for social climbing.
IIIiers was more, even, than an earthly paradise lost, a symbol
of innocence, childhood, natural beauty and family affection for
loved ones since aged or dead. It gave Proust not only the first
chapter of his novel, but the philosophy of the whole: for it was
here that he had his first intimations of unconscious memory. At
first, as recorded in Jean Santeuil, the memory was preconscious
rather than unconscious, roused by the repetition of some sight
or feeling of the previous year, forgotten during the intervening
winter in Paris, but remembered instantly and without obstruc-
tion on his return to IIIiers. He would see cordon apple-trees in
flower in the orchards of the Rue des Lavoirs, and recollect seeing
them a year ago; or at home in Paris he would hear buzzing flies
in his room, and they would call to mind his bedroom in the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, and the dazzling noise of M. Legue breaking up
his packing-cases next door. Memories of this kind only became
truly unconscious when they had been driven deeper by the
passage of years, by long periods in which they had no oppor-
tunity of recurring, and by changes in his personality. Then the
memory was mysterious, and not even recognisable at first as
memory; only prolonged effort could bring its source to con-
sciousness, and the struggle was rewarded not only by the joy
and release of success, but by the intrinsic value of what was
discovered: a fragment of the past miraculously preserved in
eternity, a moment of time regained. Unconscious memory was
linked with other feelings of inexplicable delight in which
memory had no part, such as the ecstasies he owed to the moving
spires, or the 'little phrase' in what became the Vinteuil Sonata.
They revealed the existence, somewhere deep within him, of a
region in which beauty was real and eternal, uncontaminated by
disappointment, sin and death. Later in life these feelings became
more important than anything else in the world, more valuable
than the false enchantments of love or society: they were sign-
posts, marked with an unexpectedly short distance, to the only
true reality. If he could find his way back to their lost country,
his life would be justified and his sins forgiven.
But IIIiers, like Time, had to be lost before it could be regained.
The break seems to have come when he was thirteen, after the
summer which was long known as 'the summer of Augustin