Marcel Proust describes an erotic dream

Moonlight illuminates a clean-cut face framed by long curls, a soft torso, smooth arms and knees. And feet in dainty leather sandals. One could almost think that there is a naked woman lying in the forest. But there is a male genitalia. It even sticks out at an amazingly acute angle from under the slightly bulging belly. But the scene has nothing spicy. The penis is not erect. It probably owes its orientation simply to the position of the youth, who is lolling on a panther skin.

Anne-Louis Girodet painted the painting «Endymion. Effet de lune», also called «Le Sommeil d’Endymion», painted in Rome in 1791. The androgynous youth is called Endymion. Various ancient poets report on him, among them Lucian of Samosata, to whom Girodet clearly refers.

In Lucian’s “Gods Conversations” Venus speaks to the moon goddess Luna about a rumor. She had heard rumors that Luna stopped over the Latmos Mountains on her nightly rounds to keep an eye on the beautiful hunter Endymion, who slept there under the open sky. It is even said that she should now and then leave her train and climb down to him. Luna doesn’t deny the rumours.

In fact, she could hardly get enough of looking at the young man when he was sleeping under her on his hunting coat, his right arm around his head and in his left some darts, which he was only holding very weakly. So she tiptoes down from the sky to meet him. . . But she didn’t want to talk any further. Venus can imagine what will happen next.

Proust writes a painting

Some of Luna’s confession can be found in Girodet’s picture: the fur on which the youth is lying, for example. Or the right arm wrapped around his head. And also the arrows, which have meanwhile completely slipped from his left hand. No doubt Girodet read Lucian’s version of the Endymion myth. And that should also explain why he depicts the lover of the moon goddess alone, without Luna. Girodet is believed to show the very moment when the goddess contemplates Endymion, just before descending to join him with the sleeping one. The moonbeams she lets fall on him represent her looks, so to speak. That’s how it will be. – Or maybe not?

Girodet’s paintings influenced many artists and poets, including Marcel Proust. In a passage from «La Prisonnière», which was published as a preprint two weeks before Proust’s death, on November 1, 1922, Marcel watches his beloved Albertine as she sleeps. Anyone who reads the pages thinks they are looking at «Sommeil d’Endymion» that has become a word.

One encounters Girodet’s image for the first time in Proust in a sentence in which Marcel says of Albertine sleeping under his eyes that the air she breathes is as soft as a west wind («zéphyr») and fairy-like as the moonlight («clair de lune»), which their slumber (“sommeil”) resembles. In addition to the moon and slumber, the French original of the sentence with zephyr also contains the winged god of the wind, who bends back the branches in Girodet’s painting so that the moon’s rays can fall on the slumbering youth.

But Proust goes much further. In fact, in addition to the words “lune” and “sommeil”, the expression “effet” also appears several times in the passage. Between the lines you think you can hear the two picture titles “Effet de Lune” and “Sommeil d’Endymion”. The latter, however, in a slightly different form. After Marcel has looked at the sleeping lover for two pages, he finally lies down next to her on the bed, strongly reminiscent of Luna, who first watches Endymion from above and then climbs onto him on the panther skin.

The section ends with the somewhat odd twist that Marcel has embarked on Albertine’s slumber. With the very last words of the paragraph, “le sommeil d’Albertine,” Proust puts the title, so to speak, under his linguistic picture, which he designed after Girodet’s “Le Sommeil d’Endymion.” And indeed, the preprint of the passage was originally intended to appear under the title “Le Sommeil d’Albertine”.

The next punchline follows a few lines further, where Proust also puts into words what the moon goddess would prefer not to say in her confession to Lucian. Then Marcel begins to hug and kiss the sleeping Albertine. He snuggles up to her and picks up her rhythm. Until he finally reaches his climax. Proust thus ends the Endymion myth with reversed gender roles, so to speak. He lets his male protagonist take on the role of the moon goddess so that he can experience a night together with the slumbering Endymion, who is portrayed by the sleeping Albertine.

Proust’s interest in the erotic dream

With his reinterpretation of the Endymion myth, twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, Proust provides, I contend, an astute interpretation of Girodet’s painting. It aims at the hidden meaning of the story depicted, which can serve as a prime example of the fact that ancient myths, even if goddesses and gods appear in them, mostly report on entirely human experiences. For example, the present myth explains what happens to a man in an erotic dream. Like Endymion, he also gets a visit from his beloved at night, who lies down with him while he slumbers.

Proust was interested in the phenomenon of the erotic dream from an early age. For him, as one learns in the overture to “Research,” a man who sleeps in a dream with a woman becomes a hermaphrodite, so to speak. The narrator reports that, like Eve from Adam’s rib, a woman sometimes came into being while he was asleep from a wrong position of his thighs. She was a shape of the lust that rose up in him, but he imagined this lust being given to him by her. His body, which felt its own warmth in hers, wanted to unite with hers. Then he woke up.

The passage from Proust’s opening novel, which went down in literary history as the “hermaphrodite’s dream”, already reads like a hidden commentary on the “Sommeil d’Endymion”. Ten years before the preprint from the «Prisonnière», it provides a possible explanation as to why Girodet gave his Endymion such feminine forms. For Proust, so goes my assertion, the painter shows the youth and the moon goddess of whom he dreams in one and the same figure, as it were as hermaphrodites. And the astonishingly acute angle at which the penis protrudes from under the dreamer’s belly also reveals what is being played out in Endymion’s dream.

Balzac’s inventions

Almost a century before Proust, Balzac was already working intensively on Girodet’s picture. In his novel «Sarrasine», which Proust knew, he gives the painting a spectacular history. If one believes Balzac’s novella, Girodet’s “Endymion” goes back to a clay figure that Balzac’s title hero, the sculptor Sarrasine, modeled in the mid-18th century based on a Roman prima donna – without knowing that there were no women in Rome allowed to stand on stage. The diva, whose clothes the sculptor thought of doing away with in order to knead them naked in clay, was actually a castrato. That is why, as the novella explains, Girodet’s «Endymion» has such an androgynous body. The young man changed his gender on his way from opera star to lover of the moon goddess.

Long before Proust, I am convinced, Balzac understood «Le Sommeil d’Endymion» as a veiled depiction of an erotic dream. This is indicated by a small but crucial detail that he finally changed in the background to Girodet’s picture, probably in order to cover up too much of a trace. In the first edition of the novella, Girodet paints a youth based on a copy of Sarrasine’s statue of a woman that he found in a Roman museum in 1791. He later used this as a template for his «Endymion».

Balzac’s fictional Girodet suddenly comes very close to the real painter, who also copied marble statues in Rome for his painting, completed in 1791. Especially in the Villa Borghese, where there was a figure at the time that Girodet would also have been interested in. The marble sculpture even had its own room in the museum, named after it. We are talking about the famous «Hermaphroditus Borghese».

The «hermaphrodite» lies face down on a mattress. He has almost entirely female forms. With one exception. The genitals protruding from under his belly could not be more masculine. His penis is erect. Is he having a “hermaphrodite dream”?

Girodet’s androgynous “Endymion” is strongly reminiscent of the Borghese hermaphrodite. He lies on his fur as if the ancient stone sleeper had just rolled onto his back. And after Balzac, Proust must have noticed that too. After both the sculpture and the picture had already come to Paris from Rome at the beginning of the 19th century, the two authors were free to visit the two closely related dreamers in the Louvre at any time. They inspired one of them, Balzac, to write what is perhaps the most beautiful novella in French literature, and the other, Proust, to the last section of his novel, which he was able to publish while he was still alive.

Ed Zollinger is a lecturer in French literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.