The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 15 July 2007
by William Howard Adams
photographs by Paul Nadar
Marcel Proust was a social climber extraordinaire in the closing decades of the 19th century. He strove to rise from his bourgeois beginnings as the son of a famous doctor (which isn't starting from too low), to enter the houses and salons of the wealthy and famous nobility of a France stripped of its royalty. He portrays this vanishing culture of gilded-age elegance in his epic novel In Search of Lost Time by using countless real people as models for the numberless characters in the book. It is one of the greatest works of literature in any language at any time for its infinite layers of culture and memory. Proust lived in a time when photography was still new. Paul Nadar, however, created a studio known for its penetrating and elegant portraits. Famous and wealthy people posed for Nadar and often at the insistence of Marcel, for he was fascinated with the medium and used photography as a metaphor throughout his novel. He begged certain people for their photographs at a time when a photograph was still considered a deeply intimate gift (unlike today, when people think you're nuts if you don't want your picture taken by any cell phone that happens to be handy). Some of his characters felt hounded by Proust on this account. He certainly comes of as a difficult and fawning acquaintance. Here, in this interesting collection, Adams has assembled a large number of Nadar's portraits from the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Proust's time. Most of the people portrayed here were models for one or more of Proust's characters. The portraits are direct and often quite lovely. They are accompanied by brief descriptions of the people photographed and most include quotes from Proust's novel in which the characters are described or introduced. The collection brings to life many of the people with whom readers of the Search have become intimate. And the photographs reveal much about the real people and how they saw themselves in an age that was fast disappearing. A valuable companion piece for any readers of M. Marcel Proust.