Roland Petit made his fascinating and allusive ballet about Proust for his Ballet de Marseille in 1974. Then, as now - when it has just entered the repertory of the Paris Opéra Ballet - Les Intermittences du coeur evokes, with a wonderful sensitivity to nuance in feeling and manners, the world of Proust's sequence of novels.

Petit's procedure has been, as it were, to interrupt the flow of roman-fleuve at certain crucial or vehement moments, and to show us scenes where dance incarnates a perfectly natural and, indeed, inevitable series of images that come from the emotional depths of the text. There is absolutely no idea of narrative coherence, as such, and certainly no attempt to realise anything more than the fleeting effects of passion, of love frustrated or sexuality perverted, which are the concern of Proust's writing.