" It was my article that had finally appeared "

This article plays a central role in " the invisible vocation of which this book is the story ", as the narrator puts it. He is looking forward to its publication : every morning, when he wakes up, he looks for his text in the daily newspaper that Françoise brings him. The passage where he discovers it on the first page can in many ways be seen as a primitive scene in the novel. Proust's early notebooks contain numerous versions, each more developed, of the scene, which is organized roughly according to two scenarios : in the first, the narrator's mother puts Le Focus on his desk in his room on waking, and she does so so hastily that he immediately understands that his article has appeared ; in the second, he opens the newspaper on his own and doesn't immediately identify his text. This essential experience is staged at length in La Recherche. Proust blends together the various versions sketched in the  manuscripts: the narrator's mother carelessly puts down the newspaper, but the narrator no longer immediately understands the meaning of the ruse and begins to read his article without recognizing it. The rest of the novel recounts his disappointment : while he had hoped to be read all over Paris, thanks to the thousands of copies of the newspaper, a veritable daily bread that miraculously multiplies in every Parisian household, he discovers that this fantasy of diffusion is nothing but a delusion. When he went to see the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes to check on the impact of his article, he discovered that no one had read it. This disappointment, which echoes the narrator's anxieties expressed in the drafts of Le Contre Sainte-Beuve, where he doubted the visibility of his text, highlights the problem posed by publication in the press : because it depends fatally on readers and the impression it makes on them, the article has no existence in itself. The trial of the newspaper is the same as that of the conversation : it is nothing until it enters the circle of worldliness.

The moral of the episode is that you shouldn't write for the press, not only because you run the risk of not being read, but also because the test of recognition is all the more painful because the text is always reduced and studded with typos, so that " the few stumps that remain [of the original version] no longer have human form ". This negative view of journalistic publication is confirmed by Bergotte's counter-example. His destiny is the mirror image of Proust's : while the latter stopped publishing in the press to devote himself to writing La Recherche, Bergotte's collaboration with Le Figaro was a sign of his literary decadence. The episode involving the Figaro article illustrates the writer's distrust of the newspaper : it is " un dessert d'esprit ", a variant of the causerie, just as damaging as excessive erudition.