MARCEL LEFT HIS MOTHER IN HIS father’s care at Trouville and returned to Paris to prepare for a trip to Amsterdam. There he planned to see an unprecedented Rembrandt exhibition that brought together 125 of the great master’s paintings.1 Le Figaro’s art critic, Arsène Alexandre, had heralded the show with great enthusiasm, saying that never again would one have the opportunity to see so many Rembrandts.2 Little is known about Proust’s brief trip to Holland, except that he stayed at the Amstel Hotel and saw the Rembrandt paintings.
Although the trip to Holland was short and left Marcel’s heart untouched, the paintings he viewed had inspired some thoughts about creativity. Back in Paris he continued working on the Moreau essay and began one on Rembrandt. In the Rembrandt essay Proust evoked some of the paintings that he had presumably seen in the Amsterdam exhibition, The Woman Taken in Adultery, Esther, and Homer, as well as others that he knew from the Louvre: The Slaughtered Ox, Christ at Emmaüs, and The Good Samaritan.3 He observed that “these are not just the things that Rembrandt painted, they are things that appealed to him.” It is the discovery of his true subjects that leads an artist to create his unique world. Once Rembrandt had found what was “real to him,” he strove to “convey it in its entirety,” rendering all such subjects “in a sort of golden medium, as if they had all been painted in similar light.”4 Rembrandt’s discovery of his own light in the domain of the true self was accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy that he then conveyed to the viewer, enabling him or her to see the world through Rembrandt’s eyes: “The light that bathes his portraits and his pictures is in some way the very light of his thought, the kind of personal light in which we view things when we are thinking for ourselves. One cannot doubt that he had realised that this was his own proper light, and that when he saw by it, what he saw became full of riches for him... and that then he felt the joy which portends that we are nearing some high event, that we are about to create.”5
In preparation for the Moreau essay, Proust visited that artist’s house on a day when he was “feeling out of my element, and disposed to hearken to inner voices.”6 On his death at seventy-two, Gustave Moreau had left his home and its contents of some eleven thousand paintings, drawings, and watercolors to his country.7 Noted for his fanciful treatment of mythological and biblical subjects, he filled his canvases with exotic flowers and jewels and depictions of violence. Proust, who could have seen Moreau’s paintings in either the Straus collection or that of Charles Ephrussi, was drawn to Moreau’s depiction of young men of androgynous beauty.
In the Moreau essay, which contains a variation on the theme of the unique world that each artist makes visible, Marcel shows the artist at labor, like a spider, driven by an irresistible force of nature. Proust observed that when artists “inhabit their inner souls—they act by virtue of a sort of instinct which, like an insect’s, is reinforced by a privy knowledge of the magnitude of their task and the shortness of their days, and so they put by every other obligation in order to create the dwelling where their posterity will live . . . and that being done, are ready to die.”8 Already deeply discouraged during the period when he wrote these lines, Proust could hardly know that by the time he began spinning in earnest his own enormous, intricate web, another decade would have passed. Once he finally undertook to write the Search, the presumed “shortness” of his days and the “magnitude” of his own chosen task forced him to race against time.
The Muse of History required Marcel’s attention again when on November 24 Picquart, “accused of forgery and violation of the espionage law,” appeared before the war council for his court-martial.9 Proust and a number of his friends had signed a petition supporting Picquart that ran in L’Aurore: “In the name of flouted justice, the undersigned protest the measures taken against Colonel Picquart, the heroic artisan of revision, just as revision is going into effect.”10 When the petition appeared in the newspaper without his name, Proust wrote to the publisher to complain: “I know my name will add nothing to the list. But the fact of figuring on the list will add to my name; one doesn’t miss an occasion to inscribe one’s name on a pedestal.”11 Proust apparently did not mail his letter in time to make the second list, which appeared on Sunday, November 27, but one who did was “Reynaldo Hahn, musician.”12 In Le Siècles Sunday supplement, another petition on Picquart’s behalf had been signed by Comte Mathieu de Noailles and some of Marcel’s closest friends: Robert de Flers, Fernand Gregh, and Léon Yeatman.13 Proust’s name finally appeared the following day in L’Aurore’s third list of petitioners. The petitions had no effect on the government; Picquart remained incarcerated until the following June, when Esterhazy could no longer deny that he was the real spy.
Shortly after December 25 Proust wrote to Marie Nordlinger in England to thank her for her Christmas card.14 In his meditative letter Marcel touched on topics that preoccupied him and were to form the philosophical underpinnings of his future work: the soul and its material encasement in the body, the passage of time and through time, the slow, unconscious accumulation of memories, largely ignored by the superficial, egotistical, social self. As Marcel sounded the depths of his being, he perceived only a faint echo indicating the unknown treasures that might lie buried beneath the sands of time. The scent of tea and mimosa furnished the sesame that opened, at least briefly in 1898, the door to the treasure trove. He spoke first about Christmas cards and other symbols and why we need them:
If we were creatures only of reason, we would not believe in anniversaries, holidays, relics or tombs. But since we are also made up in some part of matter we like to believe that it too has a certain reality and we want what holds a place in our hearts to have some small place in the world around us and to have its material symbol, as our soul has in our body. And while little by little Christmas has lost its truth for us as an anniversary, it has at the same time, through the gentle emanation of accumulated memories, taken on a more and more living reality, in which candlelight,... the smell of its tangerines imbibing the warmth of heated rooms, the gaiety of its cold and its fires, the scent of tea and mimosa, return to us overlaid with the delectable honey of our personality, which we have unconsciously been depositing over the years during which—engrossed in selfish pursuits—we paid no attention to it, and now suddenly it sets our hearts to beating.
The text, along with the one in Jean Santeuil in which Lake Geneva recalls Beg-Meil, a passage that cannot be dated with any certainty, is the first known attempt by Proust to elucidate what became a key moment in the Search: the experience he later called involuntary memory.15 Is it mere coincidence that another major Proustian talisman appears at the end of this letter to Marie? “I shall be very happy to renew acquaintance with your rare and precious wit and your grace as fresh as a branch of hawthorn.”
The texts written in 1898 and 1899 for Jean Santeuil, just before he abandoned the novel, indicate that he now thought the key to his work lay submerged in the past. Proust recognized the importance of the insights expressed in the letter to Marie and transposed them for a scene in Jean Santeuil.16 There they are inspired by another of his muses, the young and beautiful poet Anna de Noailles, to whom he gave the fictional name Vicomtesse Gaspard de Réveillon. Proust attempted to sketch and state the inspirational importance of such intoxicating, fleeting episodes, like the one evoked by tea and mimosa:
Poems being precisely the commemoration of our inspired moments which in themselves are often a sort of communication of all that our being has left of itself in moments past,... the concentrated essence of ourselves which we exude without realizing that we are doing so, which a perfume smelled in that past time, a remembered light shining into our room, will suddenly bring back so vividly, that it fills us with . . . intoxication, so that we become completely indifferent to what is usually called “real life,” in which it never visits us unless that life be at the same time a past life, so that freed for a moment from the tyranny of the present, we feel something that spreads out beyond the actual minute.17
In the Search, Proust was to turn this around, as hinted here, and say that such moments of vivid, spontaneous memory and their conscious application in the creative process are the real life and that our usual daily life in its habitual and vain actions is a sham existence, a life lived on the surface, and hence, a life lost. In the continuation of the same passage from Jean Santeuil, he transposed the experience described to Marie, maintaining the holiday season and its atmosphere, but replacing the scent of mimosa with that of tangerines.
Proust’s words do not convey the fervor of such ecstasy because he does not fully comprehend its importance and relation to the story he is trying to tell. The transfer of his own intense emotions and deeply felt insights to a third person and minor character like the poetess would not succeed; the current work had no structure or plot solid enough to support such revelations. Proust’s creative vision would not come into sharp focus until he realized that his hero and spokesman must be himself, disguised somewhat but endowed with a remarkably seductive and intimate voice through which he would speak directly to the reader, pouring into the listener’s ear the rich music of his enchanting, nocturnal musings.18
If the past lay concealed in material objects—whose tastes, textures, smells, or sounds provoked in him the ephemeral but intense reliving of past moments where they had been encountered before—what was the nature of this phenomenon and how could it be used in telling a story? The answer did not become apparent for many years.
Proust started the new year, the last of the century, in his usual fashion by writing to his friends. He congratulated Montesquiou on yet another book, Les Autels privilégiés (Privileged altars), for which Proust had written a brief publicity notice under the pseudonym Fantasia. He began thinking of the role he might play when the increasingly prolific count’s new collection of poems, Les Perles rouges (The red pearls), appeared in the spring.19
Marcel thanked France for sending an inscribed copy of L’Anneau d’améthyste (The amethyst ring), the third part of his Bergeret chronicle, recently published in book form.20 Proust, fulsome in his praise, compared this work favorably to Balzac’s Comédie humaine and Saint-Simon’s memoirs, two monuments of French literature, which were to be important models for his own future saga of life during the Third Republic. Then he compared France’s humor to that of Molière and Cervantes, “relished by simple folk” and by “the sophisticated as well.”21
Long an avid reader of British and American literature, Proust now became interested in the process of translation itself. On February 2 he wrote to Robert d’Humières, Kipling’s translator, to thank him for the French version of Kipling’s story “The Kidnapping of Mowgli,” which had just appeared in the Revue de Paris. Marcel told d’Humières that the translation had given him one of the greatest literary joys he had ever experienced.22 He then peppered d’Humières with questions about Kipling’s life, the origin of his rather special preoccupation with wild beasts, kidnappings, and treks on the backs of elephants and monkeys and panthers. Marcel peered, intoxicated, into the exotic wilds of English literature—a refreshing, if brief, escape from concerns about the cannibalistic political crisis at home. The Dreyfus case was about to receive another twist of fate, one that encouraged to some degree those who sought to exonerate the prisoner on Devil’s Island.
On the afternoon of February 16 Félix Faure retired to a back bedroom in the presidential suite with his mistress, Mme de Steinheil.23 Around 5 o’clock the guards on duty heard hysterical shouts coming from the presidential suite. They rushed in and found Faure lying unconscious on the bed. His nude mistress was quickly wrapped in a blanket and hurried out a side door.24 Faure’s doctors arrived quickly, but there was nothing they could do for the stricken president, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died that evening.
Faure’s successor was Émile Loubet, a man proud of his humble origins and said to be a Dreyfusard. Because the late president had taken an essentially anti-Dreyfusard stance, the anti-Semitic press quickly charged that the Jews had killed Faure.25 The reaction of Proust and his parents to Faure’s death went unrecorded, but they must have grieved the loss of their old friend and pitied his wife and daughters, Antoinette and Lucie, while deploring the humiliation the family had suffered.
In February, Léon Daudet sent Marcel an inscribed copy of his novel Sébastien Gouvès. As Marcel read Daudet’s novel, his second since their 1896 stay at Fontainebleau, where they had compared ideas about the books each would write, he wondered whether he would ever finish his own ambitious novel on which he had concentrated nearly all his literary efforts since the summer and fall of 1895. In his letter thanking Léon for sending the novel, Marcel, generous as always in his praise, compared Léon to Tolstoy, Goethe, and Balzac. He found in Daudet’s character Mercier a portrait of evil that he would not have found believable until recently, because earlier he “absolutely” did not believe in evil. “Now I’ve had experience of it.” His conversion to belief in evil had resulted from all the despicable acts committed by trusted public servants blinded by bigotry in their condemnation of an honest man. Not only had the Dreyfus Affair made Marcel see the veracity of a character like Mercier, but it had made accessible to him books that he had not understood before. Now he grasped for the first time, he told Léon, many of Balzac’s, Shakespeare’s, and Goethe’s characters who incarnate evil. Marcel was strikingly candid in using the principal culprits in the Dreyfus case to epitomize evil in a letter to Daudet, who shared all the prejudices and hatreds of those men and who saw them first as heroes and, at worst, as victims of an international Jewish conspiracy. The bond of friendship that bound Marcel and Léon was impervious to the tensions of their radically opposed political and racial views.
Proust may indeed have understood evil after the Dreyfus Affair, but he would never portray evil that dark. His true vein was to be that of a comic, satirical moralist. Contrary to what he wrote to Daudet, his faith in goodness, notwith-standing his relentless satirizing of petty vices, remained unshakable. Proust saw too clearly the beauties of the world and the dignity of the human spirit, expressed through creativity, to dwell on the hideous face of evil.
Amid the rash of duels being fought over the Dreyfus case, in late February, Gaston de Caillavet challenged a critic to a sword fight after reading a theatrical review he judged offensive to his mother. Gaston had adapted France’s novel Le Lys rouge (The red lily) for the stage, and it had premièred at the Théâtre du Vaudeville with Réjane and Lucien Guitry, two of Paris’s best actors. Pierre Veber had written an acid review in La Vie parisienne about the play. Gaston and Pierre crossed sabers on the Île de la Grande Jatte and wounded each other slightly—Gaston on the hand, Verber on the arm—before their seconds stopped the fight.26
Marcel went immediately to Mme de Caillavet’s home on avenue Hoche, hoping to find Gaston there. Because Marcel had once had a crush on Jeanne, he usually thought it best, out of discretion, not to call on Gaston at home. Having just missed his friend, Proust wrote to “My dear, my good Gaston,” expressing his concern and complimenting Gaston on his conduct: “so fine, so perfect, so ‘superb’ (in the Latin sense).” He asked Gaston to convey to his wife the humble respects of her old admirer.27 Marcel still enjoyed the illusion that he had been a serious suitor to Jeanne.
After the première of Gaston’s play, Marcel attended a light supper given by Mme de Caillavet in honor of the novelist France. The hostess invited the cast of the play, Madeleine Lemaire, the rising newspaper publisher and political star Georges Clemenceau, and the writers Paul Hervieu, Marcel Prévost, Robert de Flers, and Tristan Bernard. Marcel, who seemed to enjoy better health in the late winter and early spring, devoted a fair amount of his time and energy to such artistic gatherings during the first half of the year. In April he became producer, stage manager, impresario, and host for a dinner party celebrating Montesquiou’s latest outpourings from the muse, Les Perles rouges, a collection of ninety-three sonnets inspired by Versailles.
On April 15, in a rare burst of organizational zeal, Marcel wrote to Montesquiou to plan the rehearsal schedule with actress Cora Laparcerie and to compile the guest list for the dinner Marcel would host on Monday, April 24. On that occasion Laparcerie would recite poems by the writers Marcel knew best and whose works he tirelessly championed: Montesquiou, France, and the new, promising poet whose verses he admired, Anna de Noailles. The prickliest problem, as always, was the guest list. On that point no one in all of Paris, perhaps in the world, proved more difficult than Montesquiou. He had a long list of prominent Parisians who he believed had offended him, or who simply had been insufficiently adroit in showing their appreciation. Once the host had winnowed out the undesirables, there remained the problem of establishing whom to invite to the reading but not the dinner afterward, where space would be limited.
Among the most distinguished dinner guests was Gabriel Fauré, but his presence complicated matters because he would have to slip out for fifteen minutes and run over to the Salle Pleyel to be present at a performance of one of his compositions. Proust asked the count to be so kind as to send the names of those proscribed, because he was making out his invitations as he thought of people he would like to include and did not want to inflict on the poet “the fastidious torture” of consulting him about each name. Marcel promised not to take his eyes off the “fatal circle” that enclosed those in disgrace.28 Nervous about Montesquiou’s own intentions, especially if he were displeased about the guest list, Proust reminded the count that he was expecting him and Yturri on Monday for dinner at eight.
To Marcel’s relief the party turned out to be a great success. Those present included one of Montesquiou’s favorites, Comtesse Emmanuela Potocka, and, among others, Mme de Brantes, Madeleine and Suzette Lemaire, the Strauses, the newspaper editor Léon Bailby, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Marquis Boni de Castellane, Prince Giovanni Borghese, Jean Béraud, and Charles Ephrussi. After Mile Laparcerie read a few of Montesquiou’s sonnets, the poet himself favored the guests with several more Perles rouges.29
When Marcel read the papers the next day, disaster, so often at hand when he attempted to ingratiate himself with Montesquiou, had struck again. Le Figaro’s account of the brilliant soirée did not mention the count or the publication of his Perles rouges, thwarting, from Montesquiou’s perspective, the main purpose of the dinner. The newspaper had also created a major social crisis for the Proust family by printing that the “elite of the scientific world” had been invited. Adrien’s colleagues must have wondered about their sudden demotion. Proust dashed off a letter to Montesquiou, deploring the omission, saying that the newspaper “deprived me of the pleasure and pride I would have drawn from this honour. . . . I was obliged to spend my day with Charles Ephrussi on the one hand and Bailby on the other, looking for ways of remedying this state of affairs.”30 Ephrussi, a man of humble origins as a Polish Jew, had become a scholar, art critic, founder and director of La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and an extremely well-connected Parisian. He was just the sort of person Marcel needed to help straighten out the social mess created by Le Figaro. On April 26 the newspaper ran the desired rectification, twice mentioning Montesquiou’s triumph as author and “exquisite reciter” and trumpeting his forthcoming book.31
If Proust had published no new books, he could still give away copies of an old one, especially because the publisher of Pleasures and Days had a large stockpile of unsold copies. The latest recipient was Vicomte Clément de Maugny, whom Marcel now considered one of his best friends.32 When he sent the inscribed book to Clément in July, he included a letter in which he said that their “lives have been so affectionately mingled in these last two years that you have a kind of retrospective title to the thoughts and imaginings of my previous life.” Marcel called his volume a likeness of himself when younger: “One often shows a photograph of oneself as a child to a friend who has made one’s acquaintance later. So it is with this book, which introduces you to a Marcel you did not know.”33 He spoke of the era during which he wrote the pages collected in the volume as belonging to the past; new sorrows had replaced old ones: “What makes us weep changes, but the tears are the same. It seems to me that close as you have been to the wellsprings of my joys and sorrows during the years when you were my confidant and friend, you must, in reading these pages, feel more keenly than would anyone else, what remains in them of storms that will never return.”34
Proust’s attention soon turned to the political winds now rising again over the Dreyfus Affair. On August 7 Dreyfus’s new trial began in Rennes. Having heard, after the first several days, that things were not going well for the revisionists at Rennes, Proust wrote to Joseph Reinach, inquiring whether this was true and requesting information about the retrial. In the early morning of August 14 a would-be assassin fired a shot at Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori, injuring him slightly. Proust sent a telegram to Labori, expressing his relief that the “good invincible giant” had escaped serious injury.35
For the fall vacation Marcel decided to accompany his parents to Évian-les-Bains on the French shore of Lake Geneva. Jeanne and Adrien had booked rooms or themselves at the Splendide Hôtel, a new, fashionable resort. Knowing that the best hotels would be filled during the high season, Marcel began to worry about whether or not he could find accommodations suited to his particular needs. A number of his wealthy and titled friends owned or rented villas and châteaux around the lake near Évian. These included Vicomte Clément de Maugny, whose ancestral château was near Thonon-les-Bains, and Constantin de Brancovan, whose family owned a large lakeside estate, the Villa Bassaraba, at Amphion-les-Bains. In mid-August, Marcel wrote to Constantin and involved the gracious prince in a complicated search for the perfect lodgings.
Marcel was considering a hotel at Amphion; it needn’t be sumptuous, only clean. The advantages he sought in hotels were “solitude and silence,” not easy to come by in popular resorts at the height of the season. The most important consideration was that the hotel not be completely booked, so that he could have an isolated room where he could sleep as late as he wished without hearing anyone walking in the room overhead or those adjoining. As Proust struggled over the years with insomnia, his noise phobia worsened. He asked Constantin, as someone familiar with the area, for information about hotels, rooms for rent, or even apartments, if they were not too expensive. Marcel’s parents would arrive in Évian before him and his mother would scout the area with the same mission. He also engaged Clément to investigate hotels in the vicinity of Thonon. To no one’s surprise, Marcel seemed hesitant about the trip, but he told Constantin, at the end of his letter, that if he did come to the lake he would be very pleased to see him from time to time when the prince had nothing to do. In the postscript he returned to the problem of the hotel, saying that he would be very interested to know whether it had shutters and thick curtains on the windows, so that when they were shut in the daytime the room could be made as dark as night. And whether the hotel staff was amiable.
Constantin, in an admirable example of noblesse oblige, replied quickly in such detail that Marcel thanked the “dear prince” for having provided the information with the “minutiae of a mother and the intelligence of a doctor.”36 Constantin had even gone so far as to invite Marcel to stay at the Villa Bassaraba, where, in addition to the château, there were several other guest houses on the large estate. Marcel said that his asthma would be the deciding factor. If he had difficulty breathing at the lakeside, he would leave after two days. But if not, he might remain indefinitely. Amused at the thought that Constantin, on reading these words, would be saying to himself in great terror: “He’s coming to stay at the Villa!” Marcel reassured his friend that he sought only repose, not delightful company. But he would be greatly pleased if he were allowed to visit often.
The following week Marcel’s mother inspected the hotels near Évian and thought that Marcel would be lodged more “silently” in the annex of the Hôtel Beaurivage in Évian. Marcel still hesitated, finding it nearly impossible to commit to the journey. Should he come to Évian, he asked Constantin to see him, if possible, soon after his arrival, because the first evenings in a strange place always made him profoundly sad.
By late August or early September, Marcel arrived in Évian-les-Bains where he joined his parents at the sumptuous Splendide Hôtel, an establishment whose name seemed fully justified. After Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie inaugurated the thermal spa in 1856, Évian-les-Bains rapidly became the place for the wealthy to take the waters. Jeanne, who always went to spas in the late summer and early fall, had decided this year to try the new hotel, whose amenities included a library, first-class cuisine, and a celebrated wine cellar. The city, eager to attract those tourists who liked to gamble, had recently opened a casino.37
From the hilltop hotel Marcel admired the magnificent vistas of pristine blue water and snow-capped mountains, whose lower slopes were dotted with châteaux and villas. He was delighted with the charming, spacious suite his mother had chosen for him in the hotel, where, after close inspection, he found no traces of humidity on the wallpaper or anywhere else. Dampness, he had concluded, precipitated asthma attacks and other ills. He enjoyed taking his meals in the spacious dining room, whose long façade of conservatory windows, especially when lit and seen from the exterior at night, reminded him of a huge aquarium in which rare creatures swam and fed.
During the season a number of Marcel’s friends and acquaintances populated the lakeshore. The Brancovans were staying at their Villa Bassaraba just west of Évian at Amphion-les-Bains. Princesse Rachel Bassaraba de Brancovan had invited her son Constantin, daughters Anna and Hélène, and their husbands. Constantin’s two beautiful sisters had married well; Anna’s husband was Comte Mathieu de Noailles; Hélène had wed Prince Alexandre de Chimay. The Brancovan family occupied the château, chalet, and pavilion, while their guests were lodged in quarters known as the Farmhouse. On rainy days a carriage called at each lodging to bring family members and guests to the main house for meals and festivities.38
Princesse Bassaraba invited the prince and princesse de Polignac, fellow music lovers who were, in Marcel’s opinion, “delicious” company for all, but especially for the hostess, who devoted her time to playing the piano works of Chopin and Haydn.39 Marcel later wrote his mother that Princesse Bassaraba, in addition to her musical talent, was noted for excessive nervousness, kindness, and loftiness of spirit. She was so excitable that her new son-in-law M. de Noailles, on witnessing her frequent extravagant behavior, could only “smile disdainfully and say: what do you expect, she’s nervous.”40
The princess’s other guests included Prince Antoine Bibesco, a Romanian diplomat, and Abel Hermant. Shortly after arriving, Marcel wrote to Bibesco, requesting that he and Constantin call him by his first name. Antoine, a Brancovan cousin six years younger than Marcel and destined to become one of his closest friends, apparently did not remain long at Villa Bassaraba. It is likely that he returned to Romania to complete his military service. Abel Hermant, a satirist and drama critic for Gil Bias and Le Figaro, was on excellent terms with the younger Brancovans, who enjoyed his endless stories about what went on behind the scenes in the theaters and drawing rooms of Paris. Geneviève Straus considered Hermant one of the best additions to her salon, but her nephew Daniel Halévy, who could be rather severe, wrote in his diary that Abel’s conversation was an endless stream of insolent gossip.
A group photograph taken at the villa shows Marcel, perhaps thinner than he had been in recent years, standing in the back row next to Constantin. Just in front of them are the prince de Polignac, Mme Bartholoni, and her daughter Jeanne, standing next to Léon Delafosse, the Bartholonis’ guest at Coudrée. Marcel’s favorite Bartholoni daughter, the mischievous, vivacious Kiki, had apparently not accompanied her mother that day. Seen in the foreground of the picture are the princesse de Polignac, then Anna de Noailles and Hélène de Caraman-Chimay. Perched next to the sisters is Abel Hermant, looking elegant in spats and bow tie, and sporting a perfectly groomed handlebar mustache. The picture captured the aristocratic, cultivated, and artistic society that Marcel loved.
The Villa Bassaraba, with its music and poetry lovers, became the central gathering place for Marcel and his friends. On fine days the guests wandered through the gardens that sloped gently down to the lake. Over the years the princess had planted many Asian trees and plants, including rose bushes from Japan and other exotic or tropical specimens, like orange trees in tubs, magnolias, palm trees, and cedars. The Oriental garden theme included a pond where carps swam beneath a grotto. Guests could also play tennis, though the court seemed more often a meeting place for troubadours than for athletes. Anna, who loved being the center of attention, frequently recited her poems to the youngish crowd gathered there on fine days to hit an occasional ball or catch the poet’s latest rhymes amid the festivities.41
In past years the Brancovan yacht, the Romania, had waited at its pier to ferry guests on their social rounds up and down the vast lake. Unfortunately for Marcel and his friends, this year the yacht needed repairs and could not be sailed. Marcel especially regretted the boat’s disrepair when he calculated the expense of visiting his friends while striving to remain within the spending limits set by his mother.42 Each visit to the villa set him back ten to twenty francs, depending on the required combination of carriage, train, and ferry. When possible, he went on foot to meet friends or took transportation to a point nearby and walked the rest of the way.
There were many friends to call upon or who might join him at the Splendide for dinner. Pierre de Chevilly’s family owned the château of Montjoux, one kilometer from Thonon-les-Bains. One year younger than Marcel, Pierre was another of his friends who later entered the diplomatic service. On a hill near the Chevillys’ stood the austere château de Maugny, which belonged to Clément de Maugny’s family. The ancient, fortresslike castle, built in the fifteenth century, reminded Proust of the one described by Théophile Gautier in a favorite novel of his childhood, Le Capitaine Fracasse. The Maugnys had constructed a more modern château, lighter, in the Renaissance style, at Lausenette. During his stay at Évian, Marcel had occasion to call on Clément in both his castles. Not too many kilometers westward from the Chevillys and Maugnys, Marcel’s friends the Bartholonis were staying in their château de Coudrée. Léon Delafosse, whom Montesquiou had hoped to banish from high society, had eagerly accepted an invitation to spend September with his friends. While staying with the Bartholonis, the pianist entertained his hosts by performing works by Beethoven and Chopin that he was preparing for a concert in Geneva.43
The first part of Marcel’s stay at Évian passed quickly, the time consumed with visits to his friends, especially to those closest by at the Villa Bassaraba. Then on September 9 the dreaded day arrived: it was time for his mother to leave him and return to Paris with Adrien. While biding her farewell on the hotel terrace, Marcel engaged in a series of wrenching embraces that embarrassed his parents and infuriated his father, who could not refrain from making a few critical remarks. After she left his side and climbed into the carriage, onlookers noticed how distraught Marcel appeared. Soon after his parents left, Marcel walked past the casino, where he saw a poster announcing the verdict in the Rennes trail. Dreyfus had been found guilty by a vote of 5 to 2, with “major extenuating” circumstances, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In the letter Marcel wrote his mother the next day, he told her about seeing the “shameful verdict posted at the Casino to the great joy of the entire Casino staff.”44
That evening Marcel went to the Villa Bassaraba for dinner. He had decided that fumigating with his antiasthma powder before sitting down for dinner would alleviate or perhaps prevent the onset of his asthma. Constantin, with customary hospitality, offered Marcel the use of his pavilion. Just as Marcel was going in to fumigate, he heard sighs and turned to see the “little Noailles girl (the poetess) passing by, sobbing as though her heart would break, and crying out between sobs: ‘How could they do such a thing? How did they dare go and tell him? What will the foreigners think and the whole world? How could they?’” Marcel, who had not always been kindly disposed toward Anna, was so moved by her distress over Dreyfus that he began to have a better opinion of her.
The precise nature of Proust’s initial reservations about Anna, who was to become a trusted and admired friend, is not clear. He had not known what to make of this strange, beautiful young woman who held such promise as a poet. Perhaps he thought her flighty, too much her mother’s daughter with her high-strung, nervous nature. At times her speech could be shocking, as when in a parlor game at the Brancovans’ she answered a query about Alphonse Bertillon, the handwriting “expert” in the Dreyfus case, by saying “I don’t know. I never slept with him.” Constantin found his sister’s answer quite amusing and repeated it to Marcel, who had been surprised that a young woman of her class would make such a remark in company.45 He soon became one of Anna de Noailles’s most ardent admirers.
Relationships among the Brancovans at the villa, as with the French everywhere, continued to be strained by the Dreyfus Affair and the retrial.46 Some members of the Brancovan family considered Anna’s husband, Mathieu, guilty of class betrayal for having signed the pro-Dreyfus petition. On hearing the Rennes verdict, the prince de Chimay fled the villa to go hunting, leaving behind his gorgeous young wife, Hélène, and, much to the satisfaction of Constantin and Abel, his new motorcar. Marcel explained to Jeanne that the reason for the prince’s departure was the Affair: “though quite moderate he doesn’t see eye to eye with the rest of the family and they would make life impossible for him.” Marcel, who thought Hélène one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, told his mother that the prince would not likely “bag any game that comes up to his wife.”47
Marcel worried about the demoralizing effect the Rennes verdict would have on his mother and whether or not she could control his volatile brother, who sometimes, especially during the worst moments of the affair, threatened to commit rash actions. She should tell Robert not to behave like a hothead, and he urged her not to be “too sad about the verdict. It’s sad for the army, for France, and for the judges who have had the cruelty to ask an exhausted Dreyfus to make another effort to be brave. As to the verdict itself, it will be quashed juridically. Morally it already has been.”48
Proust found it difficult to follow his own advice. A week later, with Dreyfus still incarcerated, Marcel asked his mother to find out through Adrien’s colleague and friend Dr. Samuel Pozzi whether it was true, as rumored, that Dreyfus was dying. Events soon proved Marcel’s initial optimism well founded. The government offered Dreyfus a pardon, which he accepted—though with some bitterness, for to do so implied guilt. But the once-robust captain was in frail condition and needed to end the long season in hell for himself and his family, who now must find the strength to fight for the restoration of his good name and reinstatement in the army.
After his mother’s departure from Évian, Marcel took stock of his clothes and accessories and consulted her about his needs. Since unpacking he had not been able to find any tiepins. Had Eugénie, he wondered, put any in when she packed his things? If not, should he buy some? And white ties? He decided not to bother Eugénie about this; he could probably find some in the unlikely event that he needed any. “I forgot to tell you that I still don’t have any sponges. Should I buy some?”49 But the wardrobe question that worried Mme Proust most was the matter of hats. Marcel had not arrived at the lake with a suitable chapeau for calling on smart people. To his mother’s chagrin, he had brought only a warped boater— unsuitable for the cold, windy, rainy days of fall by the lake—and a dirty gray trilby that should have been discarded. Marcel told his mother that Mile Kiki Bartholoni shared her opinion about his appearance: “She would like me to be better dressed and says she’s amazed that I can’t manage it with Eppler in the house.” M. Eppler, a gentlemen’s tailor, had his shop in the courtyard at 9 boulevard Malesherbes, where the Prousts lived.50 Marcel enjoyed flirting with Kiki and even claimed to be “a little in love with her.”51 As for the boater he continued to wear at Évian, Marcel would be happy to follow his mother’s instructions, but he tried to convince her that the drenching rain, in which he had been caught while returning from visiting Clément at the château de Lausenette, had worked a miracle on his hat, straightened the straw and made it as good as new.
In the daily letters to his mother, Marcel reported on the weather (generally unfavorable), his health, sleep, appetite, bodily functions, thoughts, anxieties, encounters, gossip, outings with friends, work (of which he did little), readings, and, as his cash dwindled, his expenses. She had hardly left Évian when he began worrying about how much he should tip the servants (chambermaid, valet, and waiter) and whether he should move to less expensive quarters. Even though far away, Jeanne influenced his every move.
On September 12 he confessed to her, knowing that she would be displeased and alarmed, that he had taken some Trional. He offered a number of excuses for his action: successive and fatiguing conversations with guests at the villa; a walk with Mme de Polignac, who had gotten them lost on the road, causing a longer walk than planned, during which they encountered Princesse Brancovan, a “combination of nervous twitches and Oriental extravagance.” At that point Marcel, to his great dismay, was seized by an uncontrollable fit of laughter in front of the princess. Then he had spent another nearly sleepless night and, to top it off, “this morning the noise of the omnibus at half past six was exceptional.” He had seen no other solution except to take a little Trional, which produced a restorative sleep. He reassured his mother that this latest incident was an exception and that, quoting her admonition, “we are not backsliding into medicines.” He reminded her that he had not taken any Trional for twelve days.52 A week later, he reassured her again in a postscript, “Still no Trional (that’s understood).”53
Sometime before his stay at Évian, Marcel had befriended a man several years his senior, a roofer’s son by the name of Pierre Poupetière, who had fallen on hard times and appealed to Marcel for financial assistance.54 Marcel, who in turn depended on his mother’s generosity, informed her from Évian that he had not given Poupetière any money for months and wanted to discourage his solicitations. He expressed his sympathy for the roofer and wondered how well they, who enjoyed the advantages of wealth, would have fared had they been in the unfortunate Poupetière’s place, without money and a position in society.55 In spite of his sympathetic philosophizing, Proust intended to end the relationship and instructed his mother to send Poupetière “25 francs in your name.” Marcel would write him a stinging letter, encouraging him to pull himself together and look after himself.56 His mother followed the instructions, an act that caused Marcel, he wrote her, “great joy,” primarily because he knew the unfortunate man had at least received some money.57
Pierre Poupetière may have been the first in the long line of servants and members of the working class whom Proust would attempt to aid with cash gifts or by helping them to find better situations. With some of these future waiters, valets, chauffeurs, and male secretaries, his relationships may have gone beyond philanthropy. But what inspired him to assist them in the first place appears to have been genuine concern for their well-being and his ability—which was to serve him well as a writer—to identify with the misfortunes of others.
Sometime during this vacation Proust met Pierre de Chevilly’s twenty-three-year-old sister Marie, whom he found “ravishing.”58 Marie had been eager to meet Marcel, about whom she had heard much. She knew that he had already acquired a certain reputation as a much sought-after social butterfly, a strange, hypochondriacal man with exquisite manners. Marcel and Marie met when Pierre planned an excursion for the three of them to visit the Bartholonis at Coudrée. Pierre hired a rickety old carriage, something of a local institution, to call for Marcel at the Splendide and then circle back to Montjoux, where he and Marie would be waiting. When the carriage arrived in Montjoux, Marcel alighted to meet his friend’s sister and to see what features nature might have borrowed from her brother to create Marie. Although it was a hot day, Marcel arrived with a wool scarf wrapped twice around his neck; he apologized for the strange garment, saying that he feared chills that might trigger his asthma or hay fever. For the ride to Coudrée, Pierre insisted on taking the jump seat so that Marcel and Marie could sit in the back of the carriage. Pierre, normally reticent about matters he considered intellectual, listened to his sister and Marcel talk about poems they liked. Marie recited recent verses by Anna de Noailles and lines from Victor Hugo’s “Booz endormi,” one of Marcel’s favorite poems. Then Marcel, struck by the sensations of crossing the countryside in an ancient carriage next to an attractive young lady, quoted lines from Vigny’s La Maison du berger, in which the poet, accompanied by a beautiful woman named Eva, crosses meadows in a shepherd’s wagon.
At the Bartholonis’ the lady of the manor welcomed them. Léon Delafosse was present, but not Marcel’s favorite, Kiki. As Marie listened in astonishment to the conversation between Marcel and Léon, she realized that if a stranger heard the two men talking he might suppose that Marcel was the musician and Léon the writer, so well informed was each about the other’s art. But Delafosse’s comments, she noted, were more technical and learned than the spontaneous, impulsive remarks that seemed to spring from Marcel’s heart.
The afternoon passed quickly for the little group as they listened to Mme Bartholoni’s recollections of life at the court of Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie, where, as a lady-in-waiting to the empress, she had won distinction for her beauty and wit. As their hostess evoked this vanished era, Marie noticed that Marcel appeared more eager to listen to the others than to exhibit his own knowledge. Mme Bartholoni’s reminiscences about the imperial court had fired Marcel’s imagination. On the return ride to Montjoux he kept the conversation focused on the Second Empire. He had been particularly impressed by the harmony that reigned between Mme Bartholoni, her Empire style furniture, and the memorabilia of the period with which she had surrounded herself.
Marcel found Pierre’s sister charming, and Marie felt the stirrings of an “intense friendship.”59 Marcel was much less enchanted with the father. On one visit to the Chevillys’, as Marcel reported to Jeanne, he had to listen to M. de Chevilly complain about the invasion of Jews at the Splendide, a circumstance that the old man assumed made his guest miserable. Marcel chose to ignore the remark, espedally because he knew that Pierre was sick about the Dreyfus verdict. Realizing that Chevilly senior was an “old fool befuddled by La Libre Parole,” Marcel thought that he would be doing his family a favor by avoiding an argument, and so he replied: “I have no idea who is at the hotel, everyone keeps to himself.” M. de Chevilly urged Marcel to stay at Thonon next year, where the clientele was “more French, not so cosmopolitan.”60
Marcel had a literary assignment he needed to complete, one he already regretted having accepted, but for which he had received a five hundred-franc advance. He had agreed to collaborate with Robert de Flers on an epistolary romance to appear in installments in the newspaper La Presse. In mid-September, just as his first letter was about to go to press, Marcel received a wire from his editor, Léon Bailby, who was in a panic because he had lost the titles and other information for the series. Marcel, annoyed at the expense of sending a long, complicated wire to Bailby, told his mother that if the newspaper lost his copy again, his five hundred francs would be gone.61
On September 19 La Presse published Proust’s first letter, in which Bernard d’Algouvres must struggle to hide his suspicions when Françoise, the woman he loves, is away with a group that includes a man Bernard knows she finds attractive. Not only did the precious, rarefied names Proust used in Lettres de Perse et ailleurs (Letters from Persia and elsewhere) recall those he had used earlier for the frivolous snobs in Pleasures and Days, but so did the setting of drawing-room romance. Marcel, uninspired as Bernard, took bits from Pleasures and Days and even some of the scenes he had drafted for Jean Santeuil and pieced together the first letter. Robert de Flers’s reply appeared the following day. A week after publication of the first letter, Marcel was still complaining about the “stupid collaboration.” La Presse published Proust’s (Bernard’s) second letter to Françoise on October 12, after which, all parties, apparently, were happy to let the series end.
While at Évian, Marcel tried to write two articles on Montesquiou’s recent volumes, but his heart was not in lavishing praise on the insatiable count. There was little he did care to write about now, as another piece written about this time shows. In the draft of an essay on the decline of inspiration, Marcel deplored his current stagnation. He would gladly abandon all the uninspired pages he had written for “one minute of the mysterious power” that came during moments of genuine creativity. The words no longer rushed out of him in waves, “a single idea no longer gave birth to thousands.”62 His inkwell and his pocketbook had both nearly run dry.
Alarmed at what he had spent during the first half of his stay, he began to refuse dinner invitations to the more distant villas. The weather had shifted to a more turbulent pattern, changing from bright, sunny days to sudden downpours and cold winds. He attributed his sore wrists to these meteorological shifts that had perhaps brought on a touch of rheumatism. Dr. Jules Cottet put Marcel’s arm in a sling, which prevented him from making movements that would have hurt him during sleep, but it made dressing and undressing awkward. Then, the solicitous doctor, after trying a cold spray, had massaged his wrists with morphinated iodine ointment.63
Marcel admitted to his mother that Jules Cottet was paying him a great deal of attention: “I will make no secret to you of the fact that Dr. Cottet seems to have gone quite overboard about me. Does he spend the winter in Paris? You realize (and I only add this stupid remark because of my mother’s imagination) and I say overboard in a good sense, so don’t go imagining that it’s an evil connection, great gods!!!!!!” Apparently, his mother had reason to fear men who were overly solicitous of her son, always susceptible to exhibitions of tenderness.
During the days that followed, Marcel bought quantities of thermogene wadding, which he put on fresh every morning and evening, wrapping himself in the material, in a vain attempt to keep warm. Other guests began to depart as the season ended and colder weather set in, but not Marcel. Once he became accustomed to a place and its people, it was as difficult to convince him to leave as it had been to persuade him to come in the first place. He asked his mother how large a tip he should give to the waiter, the “pale Raphael,” who served him at lunch and dinner. Because many guests had already left, Raphael now served lunch to no one but Marcel.
Marcel soon made another request. He had received a letter from Reynaldo, informing him that Dr. Pozzi had operated on Anatole France and removed a worrisome cyst. For some reason Proust believed France was not doing well and asked Jeanne to check daily on the writer’s condition.
If any of Marcel’s friends had happened to pass by the Splendide Hôtel in the early afternoon on Friday, September 22, they would have beheld a rare sight: Marcel sitting outdoors in the bright sunlight, writing his daily letter to his mother.64 He gave her an account of the literary pilgrimage he had made with Constantin and Abel the day before to the château of Coppet, whose current proprietors were the comte and comtesse d’Haussonville. The comte d’Haussonville was the great-grandson of one of France’s most distinguished women of letters, the baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817), better known as Mme de Staël, to whom Coppet owed its literary fame. Essayist, novelist, and one of the great precursors of French romanticism and comparative literature, Mme de Staël had lived in her family’s château at Coppet during the Revolution. Later when Napoléon exiled her from Paris because he considered her meddlesome and outspoken, she returned to the family château on Lake Geneva. Her love affair with Benjamin Constant inspired him to write Adolphe, one of the most acclaimed of French novels. Proust was naturally curious about the daily life of such a talented writer.
The weather had been perfect for the excursion. Constantin and Abel decided to make the trip in the prince de Chimay’s motorcar. To spare Marcel the constant exposure to the cold wind he would have suffered had he accompanied them all the way from Évian in the automobile, they suggested that he take the train as far as Geneva. His two friends met him there at the station for the drive out to Coppet.65 This is the first known instance of Proust’s riding in an automobile, an experience he found fascinating and exhilarating. As the blur of trees against the blue backdrop of the lake flew past his astonished eyes, he thought of his brother’s passion for vehicles of speed. He told his mother: “In the motor car everything struck me as amazing, and I’d like to describe every one of the chauffeur’s movements to Dick, who would no doubt say: ‘Why, of course.’” Proust became—health and schedule permitting—an avid motorist and wrote some of the first texts describing how the car altered notions of time and space, influenced fashion, and even changed the way we view art and architecture. As the prince’s car raced toward Coppet, Marcel strained his eyes to take in the impressions that seemed to be speeding away from him in all directions.66
On their arrival at Coppet, the three motorists learned that the comtesse d’Haussonville had gone to Geneva for lunch. Marcel took advantage of her absence to search for Mme de Staël’s ghostly presence, viewing each room in great detail. Leaving Coppet, Marcel and his friends drove to Prégny, where Mme Adolphe (Julie) de Rothschild was also out. Marcel told Jeanne that, having forgotten his calling cards, he had signed his name on the cards Constantin left for both ladies. From Prégny the motorists returned to Geneva, and Marcel boarded the train for Évian, arriving late. Before turning in, he went to say good-bye to Jules Cottet, due to leave the next morning. The doctor, who lived nearby at Féternes, occasionally returned to visit his fascinating patient.
During the excursion, Constantin and Abel had made remarks that greatly annoyed Marcel. Thoughtful in their attempts to make the trip to Coppet as comfortable for him as possible, they had not hidden their opinion regarding his condition, a diagnosis, he was furious to learn, that his own father had influenced. Fuming about the matter in the letter to his mother, he told her that when his friends attempted to persuade him to ride in the motorcar with them, “Constantin said I just imagined that cold air was bad for me, because Papa told everyone there was nothing wrong with me and my asthma was purely imaginary. I know only too well when I’m awake in the morning here that it’s quite real and I wish in your next letter you’d say something like: ‘Your father was furious about your riding in a motor car. You know very few things are bad for you, but that nothing is worse for your asthma than cold air.’”67 Marcel wanted to show her letter to his skeptical friends, who on this point found Dr. Proust more persuasive than Marcel. Even Reynaldo had recently attributed Marcel’s condition to “nervous asthma” that made it impossible for him to fall asleep until 8 or 9 A.M.68
Had Dr. Proust misdiagnosed his most famous patient: his son? His refusal to see Marcel’s condition as a physiological disease may have been the origin of the writer’s profound distrust of doctors, source of the satire to which members of the medical profession are subjected in the Search. Adrien’s error may have encouraged his son’s practice of self-diagnosis and treatment.
Toward the end of his stay Marcel, who had already bemoaned his lack of enthusiasm and motivation for working on his novel and essays, grew weary of society. He told his mother that he wished to avoid contact with his friends through letters as well; he asked her not to reveal that the pain in his wrist had vanished so that he would have an excuse to “shirk troublesome letters.”69 At times Marcel felt that the beautiful expanse of lake and valley and mountains from Évian to Geneva constituted not one of nature’s great landscapes but an endless series of drawing rooms and social obligations. In a letter written twenty years later to Clément de Maugny’s wife, Rita, he spoke of the first summer visits to Évian with genuine nostalgia, but at the time he knew that he was allowing his social duties to postpone the day when he would begin to work in earnest. In the Search, he remembered the little train, transferred from the shores of Lake Geneva to those of the Normandy coast. As the Narrator waits on the platform, he has the impression that many of those who meet the little train at its various stops to chat with its passengers have walked from the manor to the nearest platform “simply because they had nothing better to do than to converse for a moment with people of their acquaintance.” These platforms had become “a setting for social intercourse like any other,” and “these halts of the little train, which itself appeared conscious of the role that had been allotted to it, had contracted a sort of human kindliness: patient, of a docile nature, it waited as long as one wished for the stragglers, and even after it had started, would stop to pick up those who signalled to it.”70
By the third week in September, Marcel realized that his funds were nearly depleted. He had charmed the personnel, ingratiating himself with exquisite manners, treating them as his equals, if not superiors, and plying them with generous tips. But Marcel admitted to his mother that he felt uncomfortable handing out such tips because the funds were not his: “I feel as though I’m trying to look generous with your money.”71 The habit of tipping extravagantly each person who had served him as he left the Splendide was not only expensive but complicated. Marcel had already resolved that if he returned next year, he would “give a lump sum for all the tips so as not to have to begin again with each departure.”72 The hotel servants were not indifferent to Marcel’s largesse. The omnibus driver, to whom Marcel had given ten francs, came to thank him, telling Marcel that since he’d been working in hotels he’d never known anyone so kind to employees, a choice of words that Marcel characterized as “a charming euphemism.” Finally, the driver asked permission to shake his hand.73
While Marcel lingered at the Splendide, plotting ways to stay until the last possible minute, some of the staff departing for other posts on the Riviera were on the verge of tears when they appeared at his room to say good-bye. Even the hotel manager, M. de Ferrière, had been won over and had taken extreme measures to insulate Marcel from noise, ordering carriages for the departing guests so that the large omnibus, kept in a shed near Marcel’s room, would not have to be moved. Given the incredible demands he made on servants, Marcel worried whether he would have enough for the final round of tips, because he continued to spend large sums on thermogene wadding. He asked his mother to send a big packet of thermogene wadding and Espic cigarettes, along with the book on Ruskin by Robert de La Sizeranne entitled Ruskin et la religion de la Beauté.74 Marcel’s interest in Ruskin had become intense; he was eager to have La Sizeranne’s book because it quoted a number of passages in which Ruskin described the Alps and Italy.
Toward the end of his season on the lake, Marcel began to think of traveling to Italy instead of returning directly to Paris. By the end of September, still undecided about where to go after Évian, he wrote to ask his mother’s opinion. Writing in great haste because Cottet had come from Féternes to accompany him on a visit to Pierre, Marcel outlined what he considered the choices for staying on the lake or traveling. Reaching a decision had taken on a new urgency, for he had just learned that the hotel would close any day now. If he found a traveling companion, he could return home by way of the Italian lakes and Venice. He thought of Frédéric (Coco) de Madrazo, who had been interested in going to Italy, and asked his mother to see whether Reynaldo knew where to locate him.75
Although Jeanne had just sent him three hundred francs, as usual the “much more than needed” proved to be only half what he really required, though he did have a credit on his hotel bill. Then there was the matter of the two hundred francs he had borrowed earlier from Reynaldo and promised to repay by October 1. He proposed that she send a generous check for him to endorse and forward to Reynaldo.76 Marcel had found the ideal solution to his financial dilemma: his mother would provide all the money to pay his debts, then he would engage Hahn to reimburse himself with the funds from his mother’s check and use the balance to pay off his remaining debtors.
At the end of the letter he alerted his mother to be cautious should Anatole France approach her about Marcel’s being a suitable husband for his daughter Suzanne Thibault, now eighteen years old. “Apparently he has thought of me for his daughter and since I would never do it you must be prudent.”77 The idea of marriage horrified him. If nothing else, he could not imagine adding the complications of having a spouse to a daily routine that already overwhelmed him.
On Sunday, October 1, Marcel took a boat tour around Lake Geneva. The weather was magnificent, and Marcel came back to the hotel thrilled by the “beautiful excursion.”78 Jules Cottet had come to dine with him at the Splendide, where they chatted until after midnight. By this time, despite generous outpourings of cash and Proustian charm, he had exasperated the skeletal crew of servants, already overdue at their next jobs in Nice, who had remained at the Splendide solely to wait on him. By midweek, with time and money running low, Marcel informed his mother that he had taken the drastic measures of buying thermogene wadding himself and of posting his letters and wires.79 He thought he had enough money to tip the valet de chambre, Otto, and the Brancovans’ coachman. He had not abandoned hope of seeing a mountain, such as Zermatt or Chamonix: “It’s pointless to advise me to avoid risks since I don’t feel like climbing!” And naturally, were he to go to Italy, he certainly did not expect to stay in a palace like the Splendide, nor would he have the endless comings and goings in carriages across the countryside. She must know how eager he was to return home and see her, but if he postponed their reunion it was only because he knew his returns were always “definitive.” It is doubtful whether such assurances convinced Jeanne that Marcel could do anything thriftily.
Having spent hours planning a trip to Italy, dreaming of the mountains and Lake Como and Venice, Italian art and architecture, all to be seen through Ruskin’s lenses, Marcel finally decided to postpone the trip until the following spring and warmer weather. Realizing that he had stretched his stay and the patience of the depleted staff to the limit, he left the Splendide Hôtel in haste on October 8. During his stay he had made no progress on the novel that occupied his thoughts less and less. On the way home to Paris he caught a cold that lingered over the coming weeks.
Only a few days after his return from Évian, Proust went to the Bibliothèque nationale and starting reading works by John Ruskin. It is likely that Proust first became aware of Ruskin sometime in 1897 when he read Robert de La Sizerranne’s Ruskin et la religion de la Beauté.80 A Jean Santeuil draft alludes to a quotation by Ruskin from the book: “Ruskin tells us to describe everything, that we must not brush aside a certain object, because everything is poetical.”81
The first translations of Ruskin in French had appeared in Paul Desjardins’s Bulletin de l’Union pour l’action morale, to which Proust subscribed. Between 1893 and 1903 this review published short excerpts from Ruskin’s books on Venice (Saint Mark’s Rest and The Stones of Venice), and from Sesame and Lilies, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and Unto This Last.82 Earlier in 1899 Proust had begun exchanging books by Ruskin with an acquaintance, François d’Oncieu, whom he contacted again on his return from Évian.83 Oncieu began to call daily and often accompanied Proust on his research trips to the Bibliothèque nationale. The Ruskin work that initially fascinated Proust most was The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a chapter of which he first read in an 1895 edition of La Revue générale. Within a few months Proust claimed to know the book by heart. In 1899 George Elwall published the first French translations of complete works by Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Crown of Wild Olive.84
Following a practice that became standard for Proust, he soon engaged a number of friends in his quest for information and books, in English or French, about Ruskin. His mother remained his closest collaborator and factotum. Due to his strange hours, it was not always easy for the two translators to work together, even though they lived under the same roof. One October midnight, Marcel stood outside his parents’ room for fifteen minutes, wanting to give his mother instructions but afraid to enter because he heard his father blowing his nose, but not rustling the newspaper, a sign that Adrien was awake but might still be trying to fall asleep. Marcel left a note to his “dear little Mama,” asking if she would “be an angel tomorrow morning and translate for him on large sheets, preferably without writing on the back or leaving any blanks and squeezing it all in,” the passage he had shown her from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. He also requested that she translate another passage he had partly circled in blue pencil and that she keep the original with her copy. He reported the good news that he felt better, was fumigating less, and intended to go straight to bed without medication. He confessed to having uncorked the bottle of Vichy water. In a postscript he proposed an alternate chore if she did not have time to copy both passages. Would she send a sealed telegraph-card to François d’Oncieu, requesting that he come because Marcel had a little task for him to perform?85 Satisfied that he had instructed his troops for the next day’s engagements, Marcel went to bed.
At some point during this period when his interest in Ruskin began to absorb him, Proust realized that he had to decide whether to continue working on Jean Santeuil or put it aside. He had been audacious, after the publication of Pleasures and Days, to abandon the short story form, in which he had shown promise, to attempt a long novel. In the draft of a preface for Jean Santeuil, Marcel wondered about the nature of the book he struggled to create: “Should I call this book a novel? It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life.”86 He saw, though not clearly, what he wanted to achieve, but did not yet know how to transpose the “very essence” of his life into a work of fiction. He had experimented with various genres and with first- and third-person narratives, but he had not been able to bring his story into sharp focus, nor had he found the narrative voice in which to tell it.
In such earlier stories as “Avant la nuit,” “La Confession d’une jeune fille,” “La Fin de la jalousie,” and L’Indifférent, Proust had confronted the problems of jealous passion and homosexual love, but in Jean Santeuil, these major themes, while present, occupy few of the surviving pages. Jean, as the jealous suitor who interrogates and spies on Mme S., forcing her to confess to a lesbian encounter, anticipates Swann’s mental torture of Odette and the Narrator’s similar treatment of Albertine. Proust also sketched the portrait of M. de Lamperolles, who abhors any sign of effeminacy in men. He is, like the future characters Charlus and his nephew Saint-Loup, obsessed by virility because he desires members of his own sex. Lamperolles ultimately commits suicide when a Polish violinist who had blackmailed him for the remaining two hundred thousand francs of his fortune elopes with a rich young woman. Lamperolles’s physical appearance and circumstances were closely modeled on those of Baron Doäzan.87 This first sketch of a male homosexual bears no traces of Montesquiou, as will the Search’s baron de Charlus. One of the most important undeveloped Proustian themes in Jean Santeuil is time. There are, however, hints of the importance that time will assume in the evolution of Proust’s thoughts and writings. Time, for Marcel, had not been lost.
In his preface notes, Proust wrote that Jean Santeuil consisted of parts that he had reaped from experience, without adding anything extraneous, a book that “had not been made but harvested” from life.88 He had identified a key problem: Jean Santeuil was the raw material for a book, but not the book itself; a book had to be made, not gathered up like so many scraps. The absent elements were the vital organs of fiction: plot, point of view, and structure.
“Am I a novelist?” The answer, he had decided, was no. But was he a writer? Yes. He refused to be one of those bogus writers who claim to be men of letters because they had found nothing else to do. Although Marcel had failed to prove to his father that he was a budding literary genius, he knew that he had to write. Nothing ever made him recant the notice that he had given his father after one of their many discussions about career choices: “I still believe that anything I do outside of literature and philosophy will be just so much time wasted.”89
Although deeply discouraged when he abandoned Jean Santeuil, Proust had learned more than he realized. He stood closer to his goal than he knew, but was unable to see, in the ruins of his discarded manuscript, the makings of the world the Narrator would inhabit.
By the time of Jean Santeuil and some of the essays, the Proustian palette is largely composed—he has the color, the nuances, the signature brushstrokes, and a myriad of details from which to draw. Even his drafts show the hallmarks of the mature style and manner. He excels in observations about how people behave, in producing multiple motivations for characters’ actions; he summarizes in maxim-like statements his laws, produces a wealth of examples to prove his points, examples drawn from his extensive readings and erudition, from conversations at home or in other learned environments or culled from the superficialities of salon chatter. Often his examples are from botany, biology, or zoology, as he studies intently the flora and fauna of his era. Included here is the servant class, absent from Pleasures and Days. Marcel seemed to know everything and to have it all at his fingertips. He had even amazed Alphonse Daudet with his extraordinary powers, causing the older writer to remark, “Marcel Proust is the devil.”90
How could one know as much at such a young age without having made a Faustian pact with old Mephistopheles? The one thing Proust did not know—and its absence tormented him, then and for years to come—was the story. What plot could he find sturdy enough to support the characters, scenes, images, moods, sensations that he wanted to describe? Could all he wanted to say be put into a book? How to find the harmony, the unification, the masterstroke to make all the disparate pieces work together and delight the reader?
Even in its fragmented, unpolished state, the manuscript of Jean Santeuil is, next to the Search, Proust’s most important text, because it represents his first determined effort to write a novel, and, when read in light of the Search, it contains many elements—themes, characters, situations—that he was to refashion in the mature work. This is not to say, of course, that when he began writing his great novel, it was simply a matter of returning to Jean Santeuil and picking up the pieces. But much of the raw material for the new work can be found in its drafts. Once a vision, anecdote, character trait, dream had caught Proust’s attention, he seldom let go of it. He would note next to choice bits in the manuscript: “Place this somewhere.” Like a master mosaicist, he abhorred tossing aside a beautiful, translucent piece of glass.
Jean Santeuil’s chief interest lies in the autobiographical details Proust selected to transpose, and in the drafts containing characters, themes, and episodes that point toward the mature work.91 In attempting to tell the story of Jean, Proust had begun to analyze the process of creativity and the discovery of self in those moments of illumination and joy that he called the search for the “true life”—not the daily humdrum of surface impressions and sensations, but life at its most plentiful, when the profound, inner self consciously connects with the mystery and wonder of being alive. The transcription of such experiences, he believed, was more important than the transcriber, and when he had written them all down, he would have no serious objection to dying.92
When writing the Search, Proust remembered his own dilemma as an apprentice novelist stuck in the tangled web of Jean Santeuil and depicted a discouraged Narrator vainly seeking a topic: “Since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps some malady of the brain was hindering its development.”93
Proust must have been amused when he discovered a decade later that his own failure at novel writing could be used as the story line: the search for a vocation or how to become a (great) writer.94 But for the present, he had to find a substitute for Jean Santeuil, something into which he could channel his ambitions and creative impulses, and something his parents would view as a worthy undertaking. He made what friends must have considered an odd choice—for he knew little or no English—a study and translation of the works of John Ruskin, a project he apparently chose with his mother’s encouragement.95
Through reading Ruskin, Marcel had become passionately interested in an art form from another era: cathedrals in the French style, but seen through the culture and language of a man who was not French. Since his youth Proust had felt a profound affinity with writers in English, whether British or American. “It’s odd,” he wrote, that “from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there’s no other literature that has a power over me comparable to English and American. Germany, Italy, quite often France, leave me indifferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to make me cry.”96
From the time he began Jean Santeuil until he wrote the Search, Proust’s intentions and method of composition never changed. He knew, as he had stated in the pages of the Santeuil story, that he must still attempt to write the book of his life, the essence and quintessence of the experience gleaned while searching for the truth.97 But he did not know how to shape all he knew and felt into a novel. Could he find in Ruskin and architecture a consolation for the failure of Jean Santeuil or the secret of how to succeed as a writer? Did Ruskin’s writings on certain cathedrals hold the key to construction, to architecture in the novel, while providing a treatise on aesthetics, perhaps the vast philosophical subject that so far had eluded him? Surveying the extensive ruins of his novel, it was as if Proust saw lying before him many key elements of a Gothic cathedral, but lacking the notion of such an edifice, he could not join the various pieces and make them rise from the ground as a marvelous structure.
By December 1899 Proust had determined to pursue his interest in Ruskin and Gothic architecture. Thinking of Marie Nordlinger and her great compatriot, he wrote to her about his miserable health and his lack of progress as a writer, then announced his new project: “I have not been very happy since I had the honour of seeing you. My health, which was none too good before, has got still worse. And unfortunately my imagination . . . seems to have been affected by my weariness. I have been working for years on a very long-term project, but without getting anywhere. And there are times when I wonder if I do not resemble Dorothea Brooke’s husband in Middlemarch and if I am not a collector of ruins. For the past fortnight I have been working on a little piece quite different from what I usually write, about Ruskin and certain cathedrals.”98
Out of this “little piece” on Ruskin and cathedrals grew the essays that make up the preface to Proust’s translation of The Bible of Amiens.