Will and Indolence: Proust, Reader of Baudelaire

In the last pages of À la recherche du temps perdu, the Narrator, as he is going to a matinée hosted by the Guermantes Princess, is subject to a series of events “supplied by chance” that suddenly wakens slumbering remembrances. “Not at all bothered” by this interruption, he calls to mind, as he steps into the living room, a lineage of writers he feels related to, or in whom he observes “analogous traits” in the way of conveying “genuinely aesthetic impressions” through a particular use of memory. While Nerval and Chateaubriand seem to reassure the Narrator in his belief that one must wait until chance, offering incidentally the appropriate elements, impels you to write, Baudelaire’s position stands on its own. Slowness, indolence, choice, deliberation: these are the terms that Proust singles out when he thinks of Baudelaire and the art of remembering. The “lesson” is somewhat odd: what has deliberation or will to do with this, in a passage that is precisely dedicated to the celebration of involuntary memory? What kind of deliberation is Proust talking about, and what part does indolence play in it?