I
A universe enclosed in a pocket watch. A cork-lined room on Boulevard Haussmann, where he wrote and edited ad infinitum. An expanding cosmos, where every memory becomes a distant nebula, accessible only through the curve of a madeleine dipped in tea—that lime blossom tea that Céleste Albaret perhaps prepared for him during his sleepless hours. Proust, cartographer of the lost and surveyor of happy salons, traces his map with sensation and involuntary memory as his compass. His subject matter, of course, is Time. But what Time? That of physics, Einstein’s t, that relentless fourth dimension that dismantles the Newtonian universe with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker? Or that of Bergson, the durée réelle, the elastic flow of consciousness, saturated with the past, an echo of the philosopher’s own reflections, which Proust read with reverence and listened to on Parisian evenings? À la recherche du temps perdu does not take sides. It is a herbarium of moments, a narrative experiment—with its papers stuck together, full of additions and corrections, physical testimony to added time, to reminiscence that expands like a river delta—where Einsteinian and Bergsonian durations collide and coexist in an artistic miracle.
II
In this comparative table, Einstein’s time measures the erosion of bodies; that clock that Proust felt slipping away as he struggled to find the words to reveal the essence of a twilight over the sea at Balbec. It corresponds to the t in the equations, reversible in theory, indifferent to the trajectory of a hand reaching for a cup, or to the tremor of his hand as he holds the pen in his final days. In À la recherche du temps perdu, this physical chronology ages the characters: Odette, from cocotte to venerable lady; Saint-Loup, from radiant young man to tragic memory posthumously decorated. “Time, which is not usually visible, had found in her a way of manifesting itself” (Le Temps retrouvé), writes Proust about Odette’s transformation, marked by the inexorable march of the years.
This manifestation of time is also externalized in the matinée of the Princess of Guermantes, where the Narrator, after a long absence, encounters a parade of almost unrecognizable masks, as if objective Time had taken its revenge in a theatrical display. The once resplendent princess appears with her hair—once “shiny as silk”—which, “by dint of turning white, had acquired a matt woolen and straw color and looked gray like dirty snow that has lost its splendor” (Le Temps retrouvé). Likewise, the duke himself, once the epitome of haughtiness, is now a mere trembling shadow of his former self. Bloch, unrecognizable beneath his new appearance of bourgeois respectability, and Gilberte Swann, whose beauty has been transformed into something different, more earthly, are other trophies of the relentless advance of time, which makes everything equal.
Every social encounter in Proustian Paris—which he roamed at night, like an elegant owl, only to dissect his observations in the quiet of his bed—is a collision of frames of reference, an event whose truth depends on the observer. The Verdurins, beacons of their own ocean, emit judgments with the authority of a self-imposed meridian, but their simultaneity is a mirage, the light of a dead star that we still see. Proust’s narrative structure reflects this relativity: duration folds, events are narrated from multiple perspectives, and the reader, like an Einsteinian observer, reconstructs the novel’s chronotope. In the madeleine episode, the Narrator describes how “a delicious pleasure invaded me, isolated, without any notion of its cause” (Du côté de chez Swann), a moment where the present of the cup overlaps with the past of Combray, like a curved point on the strings of time.
III
If Einsteinian temporality provides the cold measure, Henri Bergson—a cousin by intellectual affinity (and distant family) of the Narrator—offers the durée réelle: a qualitative, heterogeneous interval that does not replicate the ticking of the clock in Françoise’s kitchen—that Françoise inspired by the maids of Illiers, with their rustic wisdom and peasant eventuality— preferring the living flow of consciousness. The past is not located “behind”; it resides “within,” like the notes of Vinteuil’s sonata or like the affection for his mother, Jeanne Weil, a constant anchor in his fluctuating existence.
For Bergson, the intellect spatializes, becomes a unit of fossilization; intuition, on the other hand, immerses itself in the stream of being. In Proust, involuntary memory embodies this intuition: a stumble on the tiles of the Hôtel de Guermantes during the aforementioned ghostly party—perhaps evoking a scene from childhood, a vulnerability preserved intact beneath layers of worldly sophistication—unleashes a “happiness he had not felt since Combray” (Le Temps retrouvé), a temporal sphere where past and present coexist. There, the sound of a spoon against a plate, the feel of a stiffly starched napkin, or the reading of a passage from George Sand’s François le Champi become portals, offering “a little bit of time in its pure state,” freed from ordinary succession. These sensations, he writes, are “celestial,” for they annul the present and transport us to a point where past and present coincide, revealing a deeper and more essential identity of the self.
From the very first volume of the novel, the taste of a herbal tea, “as if all of Combray […] emerged from my cup” (Du côté de chez Swann), reveals itself—far from a point on a line—from a singularity that contains the essence of a life distilled into sensations. À la recherche du temps perdu includes this Bergsonian temporality, but does not adopt it blindly; it puts it in dialogue with the inexorable passage of age, which forced Proust to bribe the staff of the Grand Hôtel de Cabourg so that he could write until dawn.
IV
Meanwhile, outside the cork tower, the famous controversy of April 6, 1922, was brewing at the Société française de philosophie, where Einstein defended his equations and Bergson defended lived experience. Proust—who could spend a fortune on an oil painting by Moreau or on entertaining the aviator Agostinelli, his secretary and chauffeur, whose tragic death would inspire pages of jealousy and loss—had already reached a hybrid, sublime, and contradictory time. He alludes to the passing of time that marks the decrepitude of Charlus, whose “figure, once so arrogant, was crumbling into the dust of time” (Le Temps retrouvé), but also to the non-time of involuntary evocation, where the sound of a spoon or a perfume—that of the hawthorn flowers he loved so much—invalidate decades. This Proustian passing stretches out in the nights spent waiting for Albertine, contracts into years of social life, and breaks into epiphanies that, like faults in the temporal matrix, reconnect the Narrator’s fragmented selves.
V
And let’s not forget the “I.” For Einstein, the “I” becomes an observer in space-time; for Bergson, it resembles a constantly changing melody; for Proust, it comprises a succession of selves stratified like the geological layers of Balbec or the successive apartments he inhabited, each with its own aura and ghosts. “I did not recognize myself when I loved Gilberte as when I suffered for Albertine” (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), reflects the Narrator, separated by the physical time that transforms him and sometimes prevented him from recognizing himself in the mirror after a night of feverish writing. But spontaneous memory brings them together, revealing them as simultaneous presences in expanded consciousness. At the end of Le Temps retrouvé, this multiplicity is resolved in the artistic vocation: “My work, which was to fix those scattered moments.” The understanding gained at the Guermantes party solidifies this vocation: art is the only means of grasping the essence of these past impressions, of “translating that inner book of unknown signs.” Here is an artifact where eras coexist, a cathedral written with the tenacity of one who knows that his days are numbered.
VI
In the Belle Époque, time was a cultural battleground. While Einstein was reformulating the universe from his patent office in Bern and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were fracturing narrative linearity, Proust, from his Parisian bed, not only reflected these tensions, he fused them together. The Narrator, from the balcony of his inner self—as vast as the salons he frequented—contemplates a temporal parade where extinct emotions—those distant stars—illuminate the present with an intensity that the “now” rarely possesses. This Proustian experiment transcends science and philosophy. Einstein gave us the physics of the cosmos; Bergson, the metaphysics of consciousness; Proust, with his quirks, his nocturnal rituals, and his almost monastic devotion to the written word, bequeathed us a narrative universe where both times struggle and reconcile. À la recherche du temps perdu, far from solving the enigma of time, distills it into a perfume of lilies and a nebulae glow. In it, consciousness acts like a clock that, beyond telling the time, curves the past in its own firmament… And the balcony from which the Narrator contemplates this parade of time is not only found in his fragile inner watchtower: it happens in Bern, where equations measure the cosmos; at the Collège de France, where durée lets out its laughter; and, above all, at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where a man with almond-shaped eyes writes against the pendulum, right here and now, his own immortality.
