Abstract

Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck’s work has to be regarded as a true commonplace. Scholars were able to collect a huge amount of Proust’s loci (not only in the Recherche) where it is easy to meet with the sound echo of Maeterlinck’s pieces and poems. An additional number of hidden references to Maeterlinck was detected in Proust (and in this case mostly in the Recherche) by scholars working about the cultural context underlying the genesis of Proust’s novel. The philosophical side of Proust’s indebtedness to Maeterlinck, however, didn’t until now undergo a careful scrutiny. Through a comparative analysis of the relevant chapters of Maeterlinck Le Temple enseveli and of the last pages of the concluding section (Le Temps retrouvé) of the Recherche, the paper aims to show how such a scrutiny seems to be unavoidable and highly fruitful, in order to clarify Proust’s ideas concerning not only time and memory, but – and above all – Self and moral life.