MARCEL PROUST
vast freshness, as ifhe had become young again'.l The poems of
the Vicomtesse de Reveillon, which are those of Anna de NoaiIles
heard in the spring of 1899, show Jean that she, too, has known
'that profound essence of our being, which is restored instan-
taneously by a perfume, a ray of light falling into our room, and
so intoxicates us that we become indifferent to real life ... and
are momentarily freed from the tyranny of the present'.2 But the
mystery is studied most persistently in chapter IX of Part VI,
which describes an incident in Proust's stay at Evian in September
1899, and is therefore among the last passages Proust wrote
before he abandoned his abortive novel. While Jean is driving
back from Mme d'Aleriouvres's villa on the Lake of Geneva-
evidently Princesse de Brancovan's Villa Bassaraba-and re-
proaching himself for his wasted life, the tracks of boats on the
lake recall those on the sea at Beg-Meil: 'his heart swelled, and the
life which he had thought so useless and unusable seemed en-
chanting and beautiful'. Once again he attempts to explain his
feeling, and this time, at least, makes a great advance: he sees that
he has experienced something more than a mere recrudescence of
the past, since his past pleasure at Beg-Meil was much smaller
than his present pleasure by the lake-shore. The meaning of his
experience lies in something incommensurable which has been
added to both past and present. But here Jean, and Proust with
him, lacks the essential clue, and can only enter upon a false path.
The unknown power, he decides, is poetic imagination, 'which
cannot work upon present reality, nor yet upon past reality as
restored to us by memory, but hovers only round the reality of
the past when it is entangled in the reality of the present'. Proust
(for in his excitement he has begun to use the word'!') presses on,
and once or twice again touches upon the truth: 'what the poet
needs is memory, or not strictly speaking memory at all, but the
transmutation of memory into a reality directly felt'; 'from that. juxtaposition issues a sensation freed from the bonds of the
senses'; 'we are torn loose from the slavery of the present and
flooded with the intuition of an immortal life'. He even divines the
possibility of a work, the future A fa Recherche, in which he would
write 'nothing of what I saw, or thought, or apprehended by
mere reasoning, or remembered by mere memory, but only of the
past br ought to life in an odour or a sight which it causes to
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. ), 225 2 Jbid., vol. 2, 305~6