“Style,” observed Daumal, “is the mark of what one is on what one does.”²⁰⁸

Proust falls upon Sainte-Beuve with a flaming sword: it is the absolute literature of Baudelaire, of Flaubert, of Proust himself that reaps its vengeance on the man who had preferred to kowtow to some representative of the Noailles family or some other ministerial power rather than devoting a further word to Baudelaire. As an avenging angel, Proust has no doubts, but justice suddenly blinds him. Just as Sainte-Beuve had looked with sour suspicion on any claim by literature to be absolute, almost as though it were breaking the rules of the game, so Proust ended up accusing Sainte-Beuve of a conception that, by tortuous ways, brought him close to that of the Recherche. “At no moment in his life does Sainte-Beuve seem to have conceived literature in a truly profound way.²⁰⁹ He places it on the same level as conversation.” And indeed “his books … have the atmosphere of a series of rooms where the author has invited various interlocutors who are questioned about the people they have known, who bring their own accounts aimed at either contradicting others and, with it, to show how there is also much to criticize in the man one tends to praise, or otherwise at putting anyone who contradicts into another category of spirits.”²¹⁰ Here, at the very point where he seeks to demolish Sainte-Beuve’s “method,” Proust was revealing its secret, which was much akin to his own. Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries, accumulated Monday after Monday, but also his Chateaubriand and even his austere Port-Royal, if seen from a distance and in their sequence, turn out, thanks above all to the use of conversation, to be an immense hallucinatory serial novel, packed with voices, allusions, fragments of recollections, gossip, fleeting images, recurring sounds and echoes. And everything flows into one single, slow, relentless current that becomes lost in Sainte-Beuve himself, in his way of living, always fearful, as the last delicate soul. His “method,” which “consists of not separating the man and the work,” certainly didn’t claim to have any theoretical substance.²¹¹ But it was an excellent pretext for enabling him with impunity—while keeping up appearances, sometimes exaggeratedly—to describe hundreds of lives, rooms, landscapes, encounters, elegiac pleasures, flashes of mischief that Sainte-Beuve continued silently dreaming about in his studio. That insidious kind of literary criticism “is almost incompatible with Christian practice,” Sainte-Beuve admitted to himself in his Cahiers, which were for him “the bottom drawer of the desk, a piece of furniture for inner rooms, not to be put on show.”²¹² But not so much because it obliged him constantly, against the biblical precept, to “judge, always to judge others!” (Here the slight hypocrisy that he often practiced even followed him to his secret rooms.²¹³) It was, instead, a constant temptation, an irresistible temptation, to “reproduce the other, to transform myself into him, as I often do: a basically pagan operation, an Ovidian metamorphosis.”²¹⁴ But at least once we come across a frank admission: “There are certain people who take my articles on authors as literary criticism and are upset that these absorb me so much; they do not realize that the criticism in such articles is a very secondary aspect, that I regard them as a portrait, a depiction, the expression of a sentiment; they do not realize that, compelled as I am to write for journals, I have found, and in a certain way invented, the manner for pursuing there, under a somewhat disguised form, the novel and the elegy.²¹⁵ But three-quarters of readers, all those of a vulgar mind, don’t even notice it.”