" Aimer Sainte-Beuve "

At the turn of the century, Sainte-Beuve was much in the news. In 1904, his last secretary published Le Livre d'amour, a sulphurous work evoking the critic's relationships with women, notably Adèle Hugo. Sainte-Beuve was also a subject of choice for polygraphers, such as Léon Séché, whose monograph on Sainte-Beuve's mind, ideas and morals is in keeping with an old-fashioned tradition of erudition. Gustave Michaud's thesis on Sainte-Beuve before the "  Lundis  " (1903) also marked his entry into academia.

Proust's interest in Sainte-Beuve should be seen in this rich context. The latter is the subject of a series of notes in the preface to Sésame et les lys. The first concerns the melancholy of the imperfect. Taking the example of a phrase by Lamartine about the Countess of Albany, quoted in Les Lundis, Proust underlines the author's wickedness in using " this cruel time which presents life to us as something both ephemeral and passive " to make his characters disappear at the end of the novel. The second note deals with the illness of the will, which he senses in Fontanes, whose " epicurean side " Sainte-Beuve noted in Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, a key volume for Proust. Fontanes embodies the prototype of the sterile genius, who sacrificed his talent to worldly pursuits, contrary to the work ethic to which Proust often returns. The third note deals with the central thesis of Le Contre Sainte-Beuve. Drawing on Séché's account of Sainte-Beuve's expedition to Utrecht, in search of archives to prepare the volumes of his Port-Royal, Proust distances himself from the intellectual comfort of the philologist, who makes truth a material pursuit, whereas it should be sought in one's innermost self. On this occasion, he puts the man of letters on trial for being anything but an archivist, which is precisely what Léon Séché criticizes him for. Another key note concerns critics' lack of understanding of contemporary literature. When Proust speaks of the great writers' preference for classic books, he takes the example of Sainte-Beuve, who, in his own words, " has ignored all the great writers of his time ". Sainte-Beuve is not alone in this criticism : throughout his work, Proust constantly catalogs the blunders made by authors - Ruskin, Goethe, Tolstoy, Barbey, among others - about the literary and artistic works of their time.

However, this does not mean that he takes a strictly negative view of Sainte-Beuve. Witness the note in Carnet 1, where he suggests the possibility of " [a]imer Sainte-Beuve ", a formula that is in fact a pastiche of the author of Les Lundis, he " who liked so much to define what it was to love someone ". Although he considers his talent " second-rate ", Proust is stylistically sensitive to the " derailment of expression ", which he describes as " charming ". His somewhat pedantic discussions of Sainte-Beuve with his correspondents also attest to his familiarity with his work. Although he constantly claims to be losing his books, forgetting what he has read of him - a posture that allows him to distance himself from the overly erudite methods of academic criticism - he has in fact engaged in a thorough reading of his articles.