This thesis aims to clarify Proust’s aesthetics and ethics through both the character of the servant and the devotion theme, which is closely related to the former, by listing the author’s possible sources of inspiration and unravelling the “intertextual polychromy”. The first chapter attempts to measure the aesthetic importance peculiar to the servant found in language, the art of daily life or religion, which define the character, by examining the influence of Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, John Ruskin and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Secondly, the question of devotion, incarnated by the grandmother in À la Recherche, is treated, by a comparative reading with the Goncourt brothers, Paul Hervieu, and Alphonse Daudet, who explored the mother’s unrecognized sacrifice and tragedy, then with Pierre Loti and Charles Baudelaire, who dealt with filial love or culpability. This thesis concludes with a study of the enigmatic character of the Baroness Putbus’s chambermaid, antithesis of the image of the humble servant, by examining Anna de Noailles’ influence, in order to throw light on the ambivalence of Proustian desire.