Marcel Proust: A Biography

MARCEL PROUST
the lion and the dragon, and the verse of Psalm lviii, 4, to which
Ruskin refers: 'Inculcabis super leonem et aspidem.' He descended
from the cathedral to the river, and looked back at the north
front; the sun shone directly through the plain glass of the
windows, and the cathedral, which till then had seemed an edifice
of stone, seemed to become transparent, 'to hold between its
pillars, erect and reaching to the sky, ghostly and immaterial
giants of green gold and flame'. He hurried west along the river
to the municipal slaughter-houses, to find the precise spot from
which Ruskin had made his distant sketch of 'Amiens, All Souls'
Day, 1880',' and back to catch his train for Paris. After his return
he hung in his bedroom, next to the Mona Lisa, a photograph of
the Gilded Virgin, whose smile was no less enigmatic than her
companion's: 'the one has only the beauty of a masterpiece, but
the Gilded Virgin has the melancholy of a memory'.
The visit to Amiens had been preceded by one to Bourges,
where he saw the porch carved with hawthorn blossom even more
profusely than the lintels round the Gilded Virgin. 'Bourges is the
cathedral of hawthorn,' he wrote, and quoted Ruskin: 'never was
such hawthorn; you would try to gather it forthwith, but for fear
of being pricked.' But Ruskin told him no more about Bourges, or
the still prouder cathedral near IIIiers, which he also revisited at
this time; 'the stones of Chartres and Bourges left unanswered a
host of questions which I ponder unceasingly,' he lamented in his
Figaro article of 13 February 1900.
On 20 January 1900 Ruskin died at Brantwood, his house on
the shore of Lake Coniston. He had written his masterpiece
Praeterita from 1885 to 1889, in the last level light of his declining
genius, during the intervals between fits of violent mania; his last
journey abroad was to France, Switzerland and Italy in 1888.^2
Thereafter he sank into lethargy and silence. His white prophetic
beard grew ever longer, now he had ceased to prophesy; he neither
1 He failed to find it, and no wonder; for there is no point on the banks
of the Somme where the cathedral appears t~ the right of the river (and
therefore east of the viewer) and Saint~Leu to the right of the cathedral, as
shown in Ruskin's illustration, which in this respect is an imaginary view.
2 Proust's vivid description in Contre Sainte-Beuve, 382-5, of seeing
Ruskin at a Rernhrandt exhibition at Amsterdam, presumably during his
own trip to Holland in October 1898, is totally fictitious. Ruskin was entirely
confined to Brantwood at this time; and Proust also seems to have forgotten
the Master's lifelong dislike of all Dutch painting.