Marcel Proust’s Saint-Simon Classical language and decadence in À la recherche du temps perdu

The influence of Saint-Simon on Proust is grounds in this article to review the status of classical language within his novel, by showing first how Proust draws inspiration from the memorialist in his own evocation of the end of a world, and then how the novel contains the painting of a classical language that is both remanent and itself at a decadent stage.