Proust: 'A photograph," proclaims the Baron de Charlus in Within a Budding Grove, "acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist." Robert O'Byrne reviews The World of Proust as seen by Paul Nadar.
In which case, Paul Nadar's photographs of Parisian society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries should be documents of exceptional dignity, as the world they commemorate no more exists today than does that of Imperial Rome two millennia ago. But for all their potential fascination, these pictures have never had to be our primary source of information about fin de siècle Paris, dignified or otherwise; that function was deliberately taken on by Marcel Proust. Just as Joyce once said that were Dublin to be destroyed, it could be reconstructed from a reading of Ulysses, so the French capital's social structure of 100 years ago survives forever in Proust's prose.
That Proust was fascinated by photographic images is well attested. From childhood onwards, he collected pictures of the people he held in high regard. Early in his novel, the youthful narrator describes stopping at a stall on the corner of the Rue Royale to buy a photograph of Berma, the fictional actress presumed to be based on Sarah Bernhardt. And in her memoirs, his servant, Celeste Albaret, remembered that Proust had a chest of drawers filled with such pictures "of his mother and of friends and of relations but also of women he'd known and sometimes admired . . . He often asked me to get them out for him".
The objects of Proust's admiration did not always reciprocate his feelings. The Comtesse Elizabeth Greffuhle, customarily taken as the primary inspiration for the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes in A la recherche, would announce in old age that she found the writer's "pestering" her for a photograph irritating. "He was tiresome," she said of Proust, insisting that "in those days, photographs were private and intimate. One didn't give them to outsiders."
Many of the comtesse's portraits were taken by Paul Nadar, owner of a commercially successful studio inherited from his father. The latter was one of the great pioneers of 19th-century French photography, an artist of the camera who took portraits of many of the period's key cultural figures, including Victor Hugo, Manet, George Sand and the brothers Goncourt. The younger Nadar's approach to the task was altogether more mundane; competent and efficient, he operated at a time when professional photography still remained a complex business, much in demand if only because of its relative novelty.
Nadar had a few rivals - the most important, Otto, is mentioned by Proust as having taken pictures of Odette de Crécy - but his status is demonstrated by a substantial group of photographs taken to record the costumes worn by guests at a fancy dress ball given by the Princesse de Léon in May 1891, an occasion of such magnificence that it was said to have netted the retailers of Paris a profit of three million gold francs. The Prince de Léon is named by Proust in The Captive and his entire novel contains an abundance of real people such as the Queen of Naples who, after the novelist's death, found herself described in his work as coming to the defence of an imaginary cousin at a party which never took place. "It's odd, I never knew this Proust," the Princess would later declare, "but he seems to know me very well, because he has made me act precisely as I think I would have done."
Is the roman fleuve therefore also a roman- à-clef, as has so often been proposed, particularly by George Painter, whose 40-year-old biography of Proust constantly moves between fictional and real persons and attempts to unite the two? If such should be the case, the reader's response to these Nadar portraits may well echo that of Robert de Saint Loup after he persuades the narrator to show him a photograph of Albertine Simonet. "What," Proust has Saint Loup privately exclaim, "it's for this that he has worked himself into such a state, has grieved himself so, has done so many idiotic things!"
Were these rather ordinary people recorded by Nadar really responsible for provoking Proust's imagination so magnificently? After studying these pictures it has to be asked: how could the Comtesse Greffuhle have been perceived as the most stylish woman of her time? And where, in the rather strained expression of Mme Strauss's features, is evidence of the wit and warmth for which she was renowned?
Taken in Nadar's Rue d'Anjou premises, these photographs have the same stiffness and artificiality as the Faubourg Saint-Germain society to which Proust sought admission. Much as he may have admired such portraits - and the people who had sat for them - the writer was nevertheless conscious of the work's spurious character; three times in the course of A la recherche he mentions that Charles Swann greatly prefers a casual snapshot of Odette taken in Nice to the formally composed pictures she has commissioned from a professional photographer's studio. In Nadar's work, the subjects never failed to look their studied best, a process aided by the extensive retouching process undertaken before any prints were issued.
The artifice is inevitable because these photographs drew their primary inspiration from the painted portraits which had commemorated previous generations in a manner devoid of spontaneity. From Francois Clouet in the mid-16th century onwards, French portraiture was characterised by a high degree of stiff ritualism. For a more unpremeditated impression of Parisian society at the beginning of the last century, the best source are the pictures taken in the Bois de Boulogne and at Longchamps by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Proust also understood the value of this kind of photograph and movingly describes its effect on him when he writes of the novel's narrator watching his grandmother while she is unaware of his presence.
"The process that automatically occurred in my eyes," he says of that moment, "was indeed a photograph."
Robert O'Byrne's Hugh Lane 1875-1915 was published by Lilliput in 2000. He is currently writing a book about Dublin for publication next year
The World of Proust, as seen by Paul Nadar, edited by Anne-Marie Bernard. MIT Press, 158pp. £23.50