That Silent Faubourg St. Germain: Ruskin and the Realms of Reading

On December 6, 1864, John Ruskin delivered at Rusholme Town Hall in Manchester a lecture entitled Of Kings\u27 Treasuries. Little more than a week later, he delivered in the same venue Of Queens\u27 Gardens, both of which he would publish the following year under the single title Sesame and Lilies. Seven days after his death on January 20, 1900, an obituary article appeared on Ruskin in a Parisian paper, authored by Marcel Proust, who would devote much of the next five years to a close study of Ruskin\u27s works and, though he knew very little English, to translating two of those works into French, The Bible of Amiens (1885) and Sesame and Lilies. As a recent biographer has claimed, This intense involvement with the works of Ruskin, entailing the study of French history, geography, architecture, and the Bible, was to prove crucial to the development of Proust\u27s own style and aesthetics (Carter 292). Indeed, the central idea of his Against Sainte-Beuve, an essay that evolved into what we know today as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time, restates one of the chief claims of Ruskin\u27s Of Kings\u27 Treasuries, that we should come to a work with no idea whatsoever of either our own preconceptions or anything we might know or assume about the author, that we will acquire the old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors to the treasuries of great literature only by putting ourselves always in the author\u27s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his (30)