Marcel Proust wrote these two sets of texts with a difference of five years, three if we take into account the date of the last ‘salon’ published (1905) and the first ‘pastiche’ (1908), both of them presided over by a completely different idea. If the Salons belong to the world in which the author's early youth took place and in which his first book, The Pleasures and the Days (1896) was born, The Lemoine Affair is a gymnastics in the craft of writing, an exercise in the analysis of other people's styles through a case of chronicle of events: the swindling of a certain Lemoine from the world's top diamond company. In the Salons, we find a Proust as a flatterer, who reviews, under a pseudonym and in Le Figaro, social events in the aristocratic world with which he would later settle critical scores in different volumes of In Search of Lost Time, his major work - in The Part of Guermantes and Sodom and Gomorrah above all, and as harshly as in the viscontinental ‘Dance of the Heads’ in Time Regained. In The Lemoine Affair, the young man, dazzled by this outdated world, turns to what he wants his profession to be, and uses the event as the subject of a literary exercise and a way of channelling an innate disposition to imitate voices and gestures: narrating the case from the spirit, the forms and even the specific expressions of certain writers, some admired, such as Flaubert or Saint-Simon, others less so, and in some cases criticised, as in the case of the famous Sainte-Beuve, whose ideas he would deny or dispute throughout his life. These singular pages present a Proust who is at once different and recognisable, delicate or ironic, but always seductive, and who is at home in the lucidity and proverbial virtuosity of his prose.
