" Nice finds "

Nevertheless, Proust is sensitive to certain aspects of Sainte-Beuve's work. He was charmed by Sainte-Beuve's playful, anachronistic comparisons, noting, for example, the pairing of Royer-Collard and Danton, or Madame Récamier and Madame de Sablé. He also liked the way the author of Mes Poisons pinpointed the ridiculousness of particular men of letters, stigmatizing Lamartine's naive fatuity, " l'égoïsme de Cousin ", whom he detested, and Vigny's vanity. He also appreciates the skepticism and freethinking irony of Sainte-Beuve, who " knows how to read ". But what particularly interested him were what he called the " expressions bizarres " of the critic, in whom he detected an art of " déraillement charmant ".

Sainte-Beuve's use of the word rayon is one of these " belles trouvailles ", which Proust carefully notes. Making no secret of his admiration for the poem " Les Rayons jaunes ", which in his eyes is " what is still the best of Sainte-Beuve's work ", he notes the numerous occurrences of the term, always used metaphorically by Sainte-Beuve. For example, he evokes Chateaubriand's " l'étendue du rayon ", i.e. the scope of the light emanating from the writer ; or qualifies his harsh judgments of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who " tomb[é] sous le rayon " when writing Paul et Virginie ; or alludes to M. Cousin, who " a attaché au métier un rayon ". Proust was so meticulous in spotting these stylistic tics because he too was fascinated by the word, which he used repeatedly. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, he praises Balzac's genius in keeping the same characters in La Comédie humaine - - which Sainte-Beuve failed to recognize as original - : the process is like a " rayon " that runs through the whole of his work. In Sésame et les lys, he presents the epigraph that Ruskin added a posteriori as " un rayon " which " illuminates retrospectively all that has preceded " : this theory of retrospective unity will be evoked at length in La Prisonnière. Finally, the term makes an unsurprising return in Sainte-Beuve's pastiche in Le Figaro in early 1838. This circulation of the term rayon between the work of Sainte-Beuve and that of his younger brother illustrates the influence the former had on the latter. Proust's assessments of Les Lundis are therefore often ambiguous, with the latter showing himself to be sensitive to certain judgments - such as the judgment passed on Les Fleurs du mal, of which Sainte-Beuve speaks " in charming terms " - and to certain pleasures of expression that he would remember when writing his novel.