BERGOTTE AND DONCIERESfor the nose of Anatole France was quite different, being long,
thin and a little to one side; and Bergotte's famous invocation to
the Korai on the Acropolis was suggested by Renan's Priere sur
l'Acropole. Bergotte's early essay on Racine, which Gilberte gives
to the Narrator in a white packet tied with mauve ribbons, was a
contribution by France, which was also printed sepa..""ately, to an
edition of Racine's works published in 1874.1 Conversely, when
M. de N orpois remarks that Bergotte has 'the subtlety of a de-
liquescent mandarin', Proust has in mind Lemaitre's comparison
of France to 'an extraordinarily learned and subtle mandarin'.
Was the influence of France upon Proust comparable to that
of Bergotte on the Narrator? Many of France's themes-the un-
reality of the phenomenal world, the poetic nature of the past in
which the only true reality is hidden, the impossibility of knowing
another person, the continual process of change in the self,
feelings and memory, his pessimism-are to be found in A fa
Recherche. The influence of his style is there long outgrown, but
it is perceptible not only in Proust's early stories, written in the
1890S and collected in Les Plaisirs et les lours, for which France
wrote the preface, but even in lean Santeui/. When the Narrator
of A la Recherche speaks of 'a book I began to write', and of
finding 'the equivalent in Bergotte of certain of my own phrases,
whose quality was insufficient to determine me to continue it?
Proust is thinking of his unfinished lean Santeuil; though no
doubt the process was really in the reverse direction, and he had
already found in France's novels the passages which he un-
consciously reproduced in lean Santeuil.
;To the Narrator, however, the work of Bergotte was a
discovery which was one of the foretastes of Time Regained, and
gave him 'a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster,
more unified region of myself, from which all obstacles and
separations seemed to have been removed'.3 As we shall see, the
only writer from whom Proust was to be granted a similar revela-
tion-and that only a partial and temporaty one, since the true
revelation was to come from himself-was Ruskin, whom he
1 But the reference in Bergotte's essay to the 'plastic nobility' and 'Delphic
symbol' of Benna's acting in PhUre comes from a critique by Jules Lemaitre
on Sarah Bernhardt's appearance in Racine's play at the Theatre de la
Renaissance in November 1893.
- ~~ ·~M