ABSTRACT
In the long history of exhortations to truthfulness and condemnations of lying, the social function of trust is a common argument. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time displays a contrarian relish for flouting and contradicting these fondly held beliefs about the value of trust and the virtue of truthfulness. Proust proposed 'les intermittences du coeur' as a collective title for the Search in an October 1912 letter to the publisher Eugene Fasquelle, and published a section of Sodome et Gomorrhe in the NRF under this heading in October 1921. Episodic trust, appears almost as a practical counterpart for the new sociological theories of modern trust being developed around the same time, the art to their science. For Tarde, the image of society as a network of reciprocal possession entails a breaking down of the unitary cogito into a set of properties, notably including one's relations, however mediated, with an expanding circle of 'fellow citizens'.
