SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 273In Alhertine Disparue the Narrator refuses to leave Venice with
his mother, in Comre Sainte-BeuviJ. Proust threatens to leave
without her: there is nothing to indicate which version is correct.
'I went downstairs;' he wrote in Comre Saime-Beuve, '1 had given
up the idea of going, but I wanted to prolong my mother's grief
at thinking me gone. I stayed on the quay-side where she could
not see me, while a boatman in a gondola sang a serenade to
which the sun, about to disappear behind the Salute, had stopped
to listen. I could feel the prolongation of my mother's anxiety,
the suspense became unbearable, but I could not find the resolu-
tion to go and tell her: "I'm staying." It seemed the singer would
never finish his song, nor the sun succeed in setting, as if my
anguish, the dying light and the metal of the singer's voice had
fused forever in a poignant, ambiguous and indissoluble alloy.
The time would come when, if I tried to escape the memory of
that bronze-like minute, I would not have, as then, my mother
near me.' But the remorse in which Venice ended and receded left
Proust determined to return, to enjoy pleasures of which the
presence of his mother and friends had deprived him, and which
were not mentioned anywhere in the works of Ruskin.
A few weeks before his arrival in Venice, on I April 1900, the
Ga,ette des Beaux-Arts had published the first part of his long
essay, John Ruskin, which was concluded in the issue of I August.
This was the study already announced in the Chroni'lue des Arts
et de la Curiosittf in January and in the Figaro article in February.
Proust had finished it early in February, soon after the visit to
Rouen with which it ends, and on the 8th he had written to Mile
Nordlinger: 'All my work on Ruskin is completed.' But it is
possible that the first half was written as early as the summer of
1899, before he had begun to read Ruskin in the original. All the
quotations from Ruskin in this section, with the exception of one
from The Bible of Amiens and another from The Seven Lamps,
which may have been added later, are borrowed with due acknow-
ledgment from Milsand and La Sizeranne, and this suggests that
he may have been writing at a time when he had no first-hand
knowledge of Ruskin.^2 In the essay as a whole Proust expounds
1 Pp. 123, 124
J Here, no doubt, is the article commissioned by Louis Ganderax for the
Revue de Paris, to which Proust alludes in a letter to J. L. Vaudoyer in '9u.
Ganderax, with his pathological inability to publish anything he could not