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E.M. Cioran’s ideas about disappointment illuminate the role of deception in the aesthetics of Marcel Proust. With reference to the narrator’s experience watching the actress la Berma, I show that the desire to know is at the heart of deception in both writers, and that disappointment is not a failure but rather a necessary step on the way to lucidity. This initial despair-laden lucidity then yields, in both writers, to a second kind of lucidity that, in the pessimist tradition, seeks passion in life within a fiction that can modify our expectations so that a non-deceptive and undespairing lucidity arises within the domain of the aesthetic.