“Clothed by You in the Bridal ­Gown” the Alliance of the Artist and the Amateur in the Life and Work of Marcel Proust

Proust reproaches Balzac for confusing life and literature and for equating a beautiful marriage with a great book, social success with literary success. If he himself is not a “bachelor of art”, one of those “unwilling and sterile amateurs” that he denounces, it is probably because he too has entered into an alliance: À la recherche du temps perdu is born of the fruitful union of an artist and an amateur, an aristocrat and a commoner, a poet and a novelist.