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In an often quoted passage, Proust expressed his nostalgia for the art of the painter:
The writer envies the painter, he would like to make sketches and notes, and if he does so, he is lost. Yet, in writing, there is not a gesture of his characters, a mannerism, an accent which has not impregnated his memory; there is not a single invented character to whom he could not give sixty names of people he has observed, of whom one poses for a grimace, another for an eye-glass, another for his temper, another for a particular movement of the arms. And the writer discovers that if his aspiration to be a painter could not be consciously realised, he has nevertheless filled his note-book with sketches without being aware of it. (Past Recaptured, p. 252).
Proust himself left no indication that such a substantial sketchbook was to be found in the margin also of his drafts. Yet, some hundred doodles, ranging from simple graphic annotations to more elaborated caricatures, are scattered through the margins, on the fly-leaves, on pages left blank in the body of the text, on the backs of written pages, sometimes superimposed on the text itself and often on the slips attached to the pages by a hinge, and Proust's famous bequets (those innumerable additions to the galley-proofs which were the despair of Gallimard's printers).
As noted, Proust's drawings are indeed “doodles,” “griffonnages,” “piscillatinos” (to use the French and Spanish terms). They are, to a large extent, creations which may be described, in the language used by analysts of Victor Hugo's “doodles,” as “veritable delirium of the hand and of the mind … mon