ABSTRACT
This chapter examines seduction in the context of reading from two perspectives: that of commercial bills or posters and that of gifts or loans of books. It turns from the public sphere of the commercial poster to the private sphere of personal relationships, and examines the offering of books as gifts in À la recherche. The context of the reading of the posters is thus the Narrator's reading world in general. Proust's evocation of categories of text characteristic of everyday urban life in Third-Republic France links him with developments in the visual arts in the early twentieth century, and in particular with the Cubist works of Picasso and Braque. The offering of books as gifts is a narrative motif which Proust uses to represent the strategies of social life, aspects of sexual love, and his Narrator's literary vocation. It is noticeable that the evocation of the posters is embedded in a series of references to other kinds of texts.
