SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN :>.67Narrator's life by causing him to fall in love with Gilberte. A
second obstacle, after many years during which he longs inter-
mittently for Venice, is his life with Albertine, in spite of which
he has decided at last to abandon her and go, only a moment
before F ran<;oise announces: "Mademoiselle Albertine has left."
His desire is fulfilled only after Albertine is dead and forgotten.
In Proust's own life, however, there is little trace of longing for
Venice before the summer of 1899,1 when he thought of going
there from Evian, 'supposing I can find a companion', and was
prevented partly because Coco de Madrazo happened to be in
Rome and could not come, but mostly because of his sudden
decision to return to Paris, read Ruskin in the original, and visit
cathedrals. The Narrator's thoughts ofltaly--ofVenice, Florence
and Padua-are splendid anachronisms, coloured solely by
Proust's experience of Ruskin in the summer and autumn of 1899.
The passages which the Narrator as a boy repeats to himself in
his enthusiasm, without giving their source--'Venice is the school
of Giorgione, the home of Titian', 'a city of marble and gold,
embossed with jasper and paved with emerald', 'men majestic and
terrible as the sea, wearing armour with glints of bronze beneath
the folds of their bloodred mantles', 'rocks of amethyst like a coral
reef in Indian seas'-are all quotations from Ruskin.^2 The
Narrator's visions of Florence, which Proust was never to visit,
were similarly derived from Ruskin, partly through La Sizeranne,
partly from his own impressions of Mornings in Florence in the
original. When he visited Venice it was in continuation of the
same plan, less than a year old, which had dictated his winter
pilgrimages to the cathedrals of France.
1 There is only the view of inaccessible Italy from the Alp Grfim in 1893
(but Venice is not mentioned), and the conversation with Douglas Ainslie
about Ruskin, Pater and Saint Mark's in 1897. Even at Evian his longing
was divided between Venice for Ruskin's sake and the Italian lakes for. Stendhal's-'-'I dream of the journeys I haven't made, which is one way of
making them,' he wrote to Chevilly in October 1899 after his return to
Paris, 'pending the accomplishment-by the law which always makes the
vague hopes of our youth come true in later life, and which brought me to
Thonon this summer-of our less unlikely pilgrimages to the shores where
Fabrice del Donga revelled.' He was never to see the Italian lakes.
- I, 391-3' The first three come from Modern Painters, vol. 1. pt. 9, ch. 9,
perhaps borrowed from La Sizeranne, pp. "5-16. The last is from The StoMs
o/Venice, vol. 2, ch. I, §I, presumably read in the original, since La Sizeranne
does not quote it.