Abstract

Readers of Proust will no doubt have in mind the page from Finding Time Again in which Marcel compares his book with a dress, and a cathedral. [1] Thanks in part to Luc Fraisse’s L’Œuvre cathédrale. Proust et l’architecture médiévale, we know that Proust’s concern with cathedrals goes back to the years when he was planning and writing Jean Santeuil, and so precedes his translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens by a few years. We may even want to agree with Fraisse’s claim that “for the writer, the study of cathedrals is a way of conjuring the failure of Jean Santeuil, which occurred as an excess of dispersion and fragmentation