ON JANUARY 4 LE FIGARO PUBLISHED “Le Salon de la comtesse d’Haussonville” by “Horatio,” in which Proust evoked the memory of his visit to Coppet. Four days later he attended the funeral of Princesse Mathilde, who had died after a long illness. Through stories heard in Mathilde’s salon, Proust had collected vivid anecdotes of writers, artists, and personalities reaching back to the waning days of the Romantic era and the writers who came after them, the most important of whom for Proust were the critic Sainte-Beuve and the novelist Flaubert, as a master of prose style.
During the holidays Antoine told Marcel about his plans to go to Egypt and then travel on to join Bertrand in Constantinople. Jeanne had begun to encourage Marcel to embark on a long voyage without her. She feared that Adrien’s death had provided Marcel with an even stronger pretext for spending most of his time with her, further undermining any serious attempt on his part to lead an independent life. Marcel, who was probably no longer capable of undertaking such a trip, remembered his and Antoine’s aborted plans to travel together a year earlier and doubted whether Antoine would actually embark. Nonetheless, Antoine departed on January 9. It is unlikely Marcel would have accompanied him in any case; relations between Lecram and Ocsebib had recently reached a low point when they had quarreled, each accusing the other of betraying confidences. Marcel denied categorically that he had ever “violated tombs” and warned that on Antoine’s return from Egypt he intended to have it out with him once and for all.1 When Antoine returned in late March, Proust kept his word. In an accusatory letter he blamed Antoine for certain indiscretions and for having said a number of “truly odious things.” Then he announced, “In the true sense of the word I am no longer your friend.” He ended by offering Antoine the opportunity to maintain a cordial if more distant relationship, explaining that “since the core of my nature is sympathy, I recreate more readily in myself the tendencies that unite me to people than those which separate me from them forever.” If he could ever render any service to Antoine, he stood ready to do so and asked him “to remember that in this exceptional and precise sense I remain Your devoted and grateful Marcel Proust.”2 Such breaks were more dramatic than real and almost always short-lived.
Writing to Anna de Noailles in early January, Marcel shared with her the memory of how his father used to bring him his mail, using a method of which his mother disapproved: “When Papa, who was as active as I am lazy and went out every morning, brought up the mail, he would say to me, knowing my joy: ‘A letter from Madame de Noailles,’ and Mama would scold him, saying: ‘Don’t spoil his pleasure by telling him in advance.’ And I assure you it was a very touching comedy... the air of supreme indifference Mama would assume when she brought up a letter from you, as if to say: there’s nothing but trivial papers, so that my pleasure would be unalloyed.”3 This little scene of an endearing parental disagreement of how to treat their pampered son was later adapted for the Search, in which the Narrator leads an existence not dissimilar to Proust’s own.
In his letter to Anna, Proust turned to matters of serious discord and expressed his annoyance with her brother Constantin, who had broken a promise. Constantin had offered Marcel a regular theater column in the Renaissance latine but had reneged and given the assignment to Gaston Rageot. Constantin had written Proust “insidiously” that “the decision to deprive me of the critic’s appointment” had “been taken in my interest.” Although Constantin would be happy for Marcel to contribute as frequently as possible to the review, he believed it would be better for Proust not to take on the responsibility of a regular column, certain to give him a great deal of fatigue and boredom. If Constantin were so concerned about his well being, why, Marcel asked Anna, did her brother not have the same scruples in September when he offered Proust the column?4
Anna took Marcel’s side against her brother: “I am distraught, appalled, you are prodigiously right, and Constantin’s thoughtlessness is so overwhelming that I seem to feel it covering me a little, giving me a sort of mask.” She went on to say how “very sad” she was that he would not be writing a regular column for the Renaissance latine, because of the joy it would have been for her to read on the fifteenth of every month what he alone could write, that “marvelous mixture of irony and sweetness, like two opposing rivers gliding close to one another.”5 Even though Constantin’s decision deprived him of the opportunity to contribute regularly, La Renaissance latine did, two years later, publish one of Proust’s first pieces in which his mature voice is heard.
During the period when Proust was writing the society pieces for Le Figaro, he began to practice in a systematic way the difficult art of parody. On January 18 Le Figaro published his account, signed Horatio, of a party at Montesquiou’s Pavillon des Muses, “Fête chez Montesquiou à Neuilly.” Proust described the “feast” as though the account were written by one of his favorite authors, the duc de Saint-Simon, the prolific memorialist of life at Versailles under Louis XIV. Proust even gave his pastiche the subtitle “Excerpts from the Mémoires of the duc de Saint-Simon.”6
Nothing could have pleased and amused Robert de Montesquiou more than a favorable comparison to the Sun King. As Proust playfully mixed personages of the final years of Louis XIV and Regency with those of his contemporaries, he showed Montesquiou playing the sovereign, merciless in drawing up his exclusive guest lists of the best and the grandest, dispensing rare favors, and casting offenders into disgrace. Many of Marcel’s aristocratic friends—the ducs de Luynes, Noailles, and Gramont, the duchesse de La Rochefoucauld—could be depicted as their real ancestors. Proust used Saint-Simon’s interest in genealogy to explain the connections between the Clermont-Tonnerre, Gramont, Guiche, and Greffulhe families, while paying compliments to each. He especially singled out Anna de Noailles, about whom he, in the guise of Saint-Simon, promised to say much more later, as though what he said here, in passing, did not suffice: “the finest poetic genius of her century and probably all the others, and who has renewed and . . . increased the miracle of the celebrated Sévigné.”
The portrait of Montesquiou, as a grand seigneur, was flattering. Although the count was forty-nine, “Horatio” wrote that at forty, he appeared twenty, and, among other qualities, possessed the most brilliant mind and graces that were uniquely his. Proust included a remark that could have provided the count a clue to Horatio’s identity. So superior was Montesquiou that “it was as hard to resist imitating him as it was difficult to succeed in doing so.” The parody delighted Montesquiou, who suspected Proust was the author. When the count asked whether he had written it, Proust denied authorship. Was Montesquiou fooled by his denial? In a March letter to Anna, Marcel told her silence tomb that he had lied to Montesquiou about being Horatio. “But what do you think Montesquiou has done: he told me that, not having been able to find the author, he had had the article privately printed in a slim volume, making a few corrections to it, merely to the punctuation, he said. I didn’t say a word, for fear of giving myself away if I protested, but what do you think of this coup? Tomb, tomb, tomb.”7
During January, as Proust hurried to finish La Bible d’Amiens, he consulted Marie Nordlinger by letter and in person on a number of thorny translation matters. She usually came to his house, for it was difficult for him to dress and be at her apartment before eleven in the evening. Growing weary of the enormous task of translating Ruskin, and unable to find help in any dictionary or from any English speaker about the meaning of certain obscure words and phrases—such as “Iron-ach, recalling the Thuringian armorial bearings of old”—Proust told Marie, “This old man is beginning to bore me.”8
Writing to Marie later in the month to set meetings to finish correcting La Bible d’Amiens proofs, he mentioned another Ruskin project, indicating that perhaps he had not yet had his fill of that old man. He had worked intermittently on the preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies, the first part of which was about what and how to read. He told her that he had totally redone the draft she had provided, but he was being so scrupulous about his work that it would take him ten years to finish—not a pleasing prospect.
To express his gratitude for her aid, Marcel gave Marie his copy of Whistler’s book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. The volume, richly bound in gold-stamped leather, was one that Robert de Montesquiou had given Marcel. Rather than grant Marie’s request to inscribe the book’s fly-leaf—“It really is the book of too great a man to tolerate a name like mine”—he sent her a long poem, “a bit of nonsense,” to slip inside the front cover.9 Proust’s admiration of Whistler, whose name he never managed to spell correctly in his letters, was genuine. When he was ready to create his fictional painter in the Search, Proust invented the name Elstir, in whose syllables one hears the clear echo of the way the French pronounce Whistler.
Even while struggling to finish La Bible d’Amiens for publication later in February, Proust found it hard to resist working on Sesame and Lilies. He fretted that he had found only a few of the missing notebooks containing his earlier work on Sesame. He sent these to Marie, explaining that the underscored words were those he was uncertain of, the ones left blank those he had not understood. “As for the nuances we will see later.”10
Soon he wrote Marie again regarding Sesame, saying that he had been working exceedingly hard on the translation, redoing the entire beginning and first notebook. “I’ve written comments on several passages in this first notebook, comments intended to serve either for a preface or as notes. As soon as I’m in a fit state to receive you, I shall write, for I’m all on fire for Sesame—and for you.”11 Did Marie believe Marcel was declaring his love or passion for her?12 If so, she was to be disappointed. In August, when she hinted that she was unhappy, Marcel showed concern and sent his wishes for her better days: “I feel that your letter itself is a charming trellis woven over something dark that I cannot see. Dear friend, I want you to feast on life . . . and not weep sadly beside an urn containing nothing but regrets.”13 The following month, when Marie had the opportunity to travel to America, he encouraged her to go, if the idea amused her and the financial arrangements were favorable. Surely, even if Marie had misread his “fire” for her and Sesame, she must have seen that Marcel had no romantic intentions toward her.
La Bible d’Amiens finally appeared on February 27, dedicated with tender affection to the memory of Adrien Proust, “stricken while working” on November 24, 1903. On the dedication page Proust quoted a Ruskin passage that seemed appropriate for his father: “Then comes the time of labour; . . . then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short.”14 Marcel and his mother imagined the pleasure Adrien would have taken in seeing this work at last in print as an homage to his memory and as proof of his son’s erudition and perseverance. Proust had worked hard to complete the unabridged, annotated translation. In the preface he warned readers about Ruskin’s at times difficult style and used it as a caveat and excuse for any errors his translation might contain. Although Proust’s purpose in translating Ruskin’s book on Amiens had been modest—to give readers “the desire to read Ruskin and revisit a few cathedrals”—the supplementary material was impressive.15 Ruskin’s own preface occupied five pages; Proust’s took up ninety-two, most of the material coming from the articles he had published on Ruskin in 1900.
In addition to the preface, Proust contributed 190 original notes.16 Sometime in 1903 he added a postscript to the preface in which he took issue with some of Ruskin’s basic tenets.17 It was a debate that he was to continue, in a more original form, in the preface to Sésame et les lys. Proust labeled Ruskin’s fault idolatry. To make his meaning clear to his readers, he chose an example close at hand, whose name did not need to be mentioned: “To have done with idolatry, . . . I would like . . . to call upon one of our most justly famous contemporaries . .. who in his conversations, not in his books, shows this defect carried to such extremes that it is easier to recognize and show it in him without further need to take such pains to magnify it.” Proust was speaking about Montesquiou, whose exhibitions of idolatry included his fetishes for objects that “belonged to Baudelaire, to Michelet, to Hugo,” objects the count would enshrine “with a religious respect.”18
Proust could have given as an example of idolatry his own gesture when he took and kept a pair of gloves that Whistler had left behind at a party one evening. But Proust portrayed himself to the readers of his preface as someone untainted by the temptations of idolatry: “No, I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn . . . because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it.”19 In order to “find this fragile part” in his “otherwise absolute admiration” for Ruskin, in order “to reproach Ruskin thus,” Proust had “had to reach the utmost limits of sincerity” toward himself. Although his admiration for Ruskin remained profound, Proust made certain in his future writings to warn readers against confusing life (objects as fetishes) with art. He did so by showing characters who exhibit idolatry and thereby delude themselves. One of the most striking examples occurs when Swann notices the resemblance between Odette and a woman in a Botticelli painting. He then places a photograph of Odette on his desk and gazes at her as though she were a Botticelli. Making love to her, Swann believes, allows him to comprehend the great painter’s art.
Once he received his copies of La Bible d’Amiens, Proust began immediately to inscribe the books for his friends. The inscription he wrote to Reynaldo thanked him on Ruskin’s behalf for having composed a memorial elegy: “And it is I who thank you, O my little Reynaldo, O my greatest affection in life; you know that this little book was desdicated to you, as long as my little Papa was still alive. But he so wanted to see it appear that, now, I’ve decided to take it back from you to offer it to him.”20
Marcel wrote to Lucien to explain why the dedication he had written in his copy of La Bible d’Amiens might seem more distant than he would have liked. Marcel still remembered how he and Lucien had been accused of being lovers by Lorrain eight years earlier. “I signed your copy of Ruskin at the same time as those of Mme Daudet and of Léon. I didn’t put the word admiration in yours, for fear that, since you don’t write, it might appear m. g. in the eyes of imbeciles.” These initials stand for mauvais genre (bad form), but in the usage of Proust and Daudet meant “homosexual.”21 In the postscript he mentioned that his mother had returned from the “country yesterday, still very poorly.”22 While Marcel continued to worry about his mother’s health and morale, she did her best to hide her illnesses from him. He later learned that she had been sick with renal colic caused by a kidney stone.
In Louisa de Mornand’s copy Proust used biblical language and the etymology of her name to suggest the carnal attraction he felt for the young actress. The first sentence indicated that the inscription was not for all eyes: “Dedication not to be left lying around.” Proust declared that for men who have seen Louisa, but have had no success with her—that is to say everyone—other women ceased to be attractive. “Whence this couplet: He who Louisa cannot win / Must be content with Onan’s sin.”23 Proust employed the archaic French verb morner, which meant to blunt a lance or to render it harmless by fitting a ring to its tip, a clear allusion to copulation. Proust’s innuendos suggest that because Louisa refuses to “blunt mens’ lances,” they must resort to Onan’s sin, masturbation.24
Sometime in early April, Louisa invited Marcel to her apartment, where he watched her read in bed before she fell asleep. Was he conducting research or engaging in vicarious fantasies or both? Louisa sent Marcel an autographed photograph from “The Original who is so fond of little Marcel. Louisa. April 1904.” To express his gratitude for the photograph, which he was “mad about,” he sent her a poem of thirty-three lines, in which he evoked the vision of her in bed.25
One recipient of an autographed copy of La Bible d’Amiens was a Mrs. Higginson, without whom, Proust wrote, he “never could have done the book.” It was she, Proust informed Montesquiou, who had given him his first English lessons.26 Referring to an earlier conversation with the count, Proust regretted a remark that may have led Montesquiou to conclude “that my translation wasn’t mine alone. On the contrary I did it entirely on my own. I asked d’Humières for advice here and there, but the whole thing is mine, and rewritten twenty times.”27 Proust had, of course, received a great deal of assistance. The list of collaborators, if he were to include all those he consulted on various matters, would be quite long, with his mother leading the list, followed by, among others, d’Humières, Marie, Reynaldo, and Robert de Billy.28 And yet, considering the definitive text, the preface, and Proust’s own notes, there was some justification to his claim, the immodesty of which was not typical. Did he fear Montesquiou’s ridicule or that the count, whose literary output was extraordinary compared to Marcel’s, would spread the word in literary circles that Marcel could not even produce a translation on his own? Having heard that Yturri was quite ill, Marcel sought to reassure Montesquiou about his friend’s health: “I remember that several years ago my poor Papa found him very ill. And you see how he recovered. I believe he would be wrong to worry, and you too.”29 Yturri’s condition, the result of severe diabetes, was far more serious that Proust believed.
In the weeks following publication of La Bible d’Amiens, Proust sought to obtain as many press notices and reviews as possible. He instructed Anna de Noailles that if she should see Abel Hermant, who had recently rejoined Le Figaro’s staff, she should ask him to slip into the newspaper a word or two about Marcel’s book. He further coached her to say that such a mention would give Marcel “great pleasure, for it might sell a few copies in which I have no financial interest but I should like the generous action of my publisher in bringing out the book not to be too disastrous for him. Since I produce a book every ten years, Hermant need not fear this precedent.”30
On April 3 André Beaunier, writing as Le Masque de Fer (The Iron Mask) on Le Figaro’s front page, praised Proust’s translation and referred to Marcel as “a young, talented writer,” a category that must have pleased the author, who saw himself, at nearly thirty-three, as prematurely old and in danger of an early death.
Maurice Barrès was so impressed with Proust’s Bible that he apparently urged the author to pursue a career as translator and suggested the works of Walter Pater. Proust wrote Barrès to dismiss the idea, particularly because he still intended to translate Sesame and Lilies and a volume of Ruskin’s selected writings.31 “As for Pater, I shall certainly not be the one who translates him. I still have two Ruskins to do, and after that I shall try to translate my own poor soul, if it doesn’t die in the meantime.”32 It was nearly two years since he had complained to Antoine about failing to heed the call of “a thousand characters for novels, a thousand ideas” urging him to bring them to life, a dream he seemed no closer to realizing.
Henri Bergson wrote to thank Marcel for his copy of La Bible d’Amiens and expressed “the great pleasure he took in reading the preface. . . . It is written... in a language full of charm.” In late May, Bergson delighted Proust by presenting to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques a short paper about La Bible d’Amiens, whose preface the philosopher called “an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin.” Bergson said that Proust’s style was “so lively, so original, that one can hardly believe one is reading a translation.”33
Late in the year Georges Goyau, the historian and critic, and Lucie Faure’s husband, published anonymous positive reviews of La Bible d’Amiens in the Revue des Deux Mondes and Le Gaulois. Writing to thank Goyau for the article in Le Gaulois, Proust described the responsibility he bore Ruskin: “You know how much I admire Ruskin. And since I believe that each one of us has a responsibility for the souls he particularly loves, a responsibility to make them known and loved, to protect them from the wounds of misunderstanding and the darkness . . . of oblivion, you know with what scrupulous hands—but pious too and as gentle as I was able—I handled that particular soul.”34
Handling that particular soul had also benefited Proust. While accepting many of Ruskin’s aesthetic ideas and contesting others, he had honed his own. While writing the preface and notes, he had begun to develop an intermediate style between the sparse neoclassical writing of Pleasures and Days and the untamed lushness of Jean Santeuil. In the preface to La Bible d’Amiens is for the first time heard clearly, though intermittently, the timbre of the full and unique Proustian voice. His former history professor Albert Sorel had heard this sound and wrote about it in an article on Proust’s translation.
One Sunday evening Marcel was leafing through J. M. W. Turner’s book The Rivers of France when a friend arrived with the issue of Le Temps that contained Sorel’s review of La Bible d’Amiens. Marcel wrote immediately to his former professor and expressed his gratitude and disbelief that “the great historian I so admired” had written a “whole big article about a modest translation by the most obscure of his pupils.”35 Sorel’s description of Proust’s style still stands: “He writes, when he is cogitating or musing, a prose that is flexible, floating, enveloping, opening on to infinite vistas or colors and tones, but always translucent, and reminiscent at times of those artefacts in glass in which Gallé encloses the intertwining tendrils of his lianas.”36 The voice that Sorel and others heard in Proust’s prose was unique and remarkably rich. But Proust himself held serious reservations about this style, which seemed so unwieldy, if not useless, for the purpose for which he would most like to use it: the creation of a work of fiction.
In April, with spring in full bloom, Marcel reminded Marie Nordlinger that he could not dare venture out in the daytime—as though his friends thought this likely—because pollen always aggravated his asthmatic condition. This was why he had missed her the other day when she called. He had been sleeping when he heard the door bell ring, and “in the first stupor of wakening” had not asked who was there. By the time he learned that it was Marie, she had already gone.37 Because Marcel could not go see the flowers, Marie found a clever and harmless way to bring a bit of springtime to his bedroom. She had gone to a store that sold Japanese imports and discovered tiny packets containing dried paper pellets that, when dropped into water, blossomed into flowers, houses, and doll-like figures.38 Marie’s Japanese garden delighted Marcel, who thanked her for “the miraculous hidden flowers which have enabled me this evening to ‘make a spring of my own,’ as Mme de Sévigné says, a fluvial and inoffensive spring. Thanks to you my dark electric room has had its Far Eastern spring.”
He also thanked her for the “splendid” translation of Sesame and Lilies, which he would “go through carefully” and alter with “affectionate respect.” He told her that she spoke and wrote French better than a Frenchwoman, but when she translated English “all the original characteristics reappear: the words revert to their own kind, their affinities, their meanings, their native rules.” However charming this “English disguise of French words,” might be, “all this life will have to be cooled down, gallicized, distanced from the original, and the originality extinguished.”39
Marie was an artist, not a literary person. She was learning a lesson that had taken some time to register with Proust himself, later recognized as the modern master of the French language: translation is an incredibly difficult proposition. Ruskin’s books were often lectures that had been published; these texts were thus written in a spoken style and often contained obscure terms. Rendering Ruskin’s words in their French equivalent in a gracious, fluid style made Proust see more clearly the distinct and varied resources of his own language.
On May 13 Le Figaro published another society piece by “Horatio”: “Le Salon de la comtesse Potocka,” reputed to have been one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century. In this piece Proust quoted a number of his favorite authors— Saint-Simon, Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire; he parodied Heredia and evoked a number of his contemporaries, including Barrès, Bourget, Montesquiou, Forain, Fauré, and his friend Reynaldo.40 Comtesse Potocka, Proust soon learned, was displeased with his portrayal of her. He wrote to the countess, identifying himself at once—so that she would not think him cowardly—as the unintentional offender and promised not to reprint the salon in a collected volume until she revised it to her satisfaction.41
Marcel, usually the most sensitive person in the world regarding the feelings of others, seems to have been tone deaf when it came to this hostess, who was, of all those about whom he wrote, the one he knew least well. She had likely taken offense at the lines describing her “disdain for humanity” when she moved to Auteuil to devote herself entirely to taking care of her dogs, including the “poor, crippled strays that she took in.” “Horatio” made the absurd claim that her love of the animals she adopted was so strong that “in order to care for them, she had not gone to bed for a year.” Although the salon contained a number of Proustian compliments, the countess no doubt resented being portrayed as a misanthropic eccentric.
In late May, Marcel wrote Marie about the family’s plan for a memorial to Adrien: “Mama would like, for those who come after us and who may wonder what my father looked like, to have a bust in the cemetery which would answer them as simply and accurately as possible.” Jeanne intended to “ask some gifted and amenable young sculptor to be good enough to try, on the basis of photographs, to reproduce in plaster or bronze or marble the shape of my father’s features. . . . Would you care to be this sculptor?”42 Marie accepted the commission to produce the bust. She ultimately created a bronze medallion that seems to have satisfied no one completely, including the artist herself. Marcel also informed Marie that “Our Sesame will appear in Les Arts de la vie as soon as it is ready, but when will it be ready? I’m re-doing it from top to bottom! I haven’t asked how much we shall be paid but I don’t think it will be too bad for this review.” This project could advance now because he had found all six of the missing notebooks in which he had kept detailed notes for Sesame and Lilies. He was thinking of dispensing with Ruskin’s preface, which had been written as a general preface to the volume, whereas Proust intended to translate only the first two books.43
In June the prolific Anna de Noailles published a novel, Le Visage émerveillé (The enraptured face). Enraptured by her prose, Proust wrote immediately, citing a number of images of “perfect beauty,” with which every page was covered. The following day, still bewitched by Anna’s prose, he wrote again with more praise. Using Anna’s novel as the lens through which to examine a novelist’s craft, he had made an important discovery regarding a characteristic of major works of literature: one could hear in the author’s words a particular sound or, using a painterly analogy, a certain varnish that distinguished an authentic and great literary narration. Proust called this unity of vision “the varnish of the Old Masters.”44 He had identified a quality with which he was to endow his novel, whose “unity” would be so “transparent” that a number of critics would claim not to see it. In one of the frequently quoted aphorisms from the Search, the Narrator says, “Style . . . is a question not of technique but of vision.”45
He thought he recognized in Anna’s writings what he had not yet found within himself, although there were soon signs that he was approaching his goal. A short time later he wrote to her again and identified what he had heard in Le Visage émerveillé and even more precisely in her poems: “And if the novel has the inimitable accent of your speech, where else but in your poems do we find the inner music of your soul?”46 As he wrote his own preface to Sésame et les lys, distancing himself even further from Ruskin, Marcel began to hear, in the words he chose and arranged, bits of exceptionally rich music that would later be called Proustian, although for several years he remained skeptical about the quality and usefulness of his new style.
On June 7 Proust made one of his rare daytime sorties to the Durand-Ruel Gallery, where there was an exhibition that he “absolutely must see.”47 The irresistible temptation was a collection of thirty-nine paintings by Claude Monet, among which was Londres sous le soleil et le brouillard. In the coming years as he elaborated the Search, the affinities between Monet’s and Proust’s visions became apparent. Proust took advantage of being out of bed and dropped by the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, where there was an exhibition of excellent paintings of Venice and Dieppe by Walter Sickert, for whose catalog Blanche had written a preface that Proust admired.
In late June, Louisa learned of Albufera’s engagement to Anna Masséna d’Essling de Rivoli, daughter of wealthy Prince Victor d’Essling. Le Gaulois heralded the match as uniting “two of the most distinguished families of the Empire nobility.”48 Albu’s engagement complicated his relationship with Louisa, who responded to the news with a mixture of wild emotions: despair, jealousy, depression, and outrage. Marcel stepped in and attempted to befriend Albufera and his unhappy mistress. Louisa, who found her new role extremely difficult, did not understand that she must become accustomed to seeing Louis much less often. Albu wanted to marry well and secretly keep his mistress, while making certain that Louisa did not cause a scandal that would threaten his marriage. The three friends spent a strained Sunday evening together, during the course of which Louisa displayed her usual tactics when Louis’s jealousy had been aroused. After Marcel returned home, he sent the actress some advice about how to behave in a changing relationship: “When, as this evening, Louis has an unjust suspicion in mind . . . instead of... letting him think what he likes, not deigning to justify yourself, or worse still, amusing yourself by anchoring him in his misconceptions, show him clearly, gently, kindly, tenderly, that he is absurdly imagining things, that he is unjust, absolutely on the wrong tack.”
Marcel told her that in the past when the lovers had been needling each other, he had kept silent because “it wasn’t my business, and besides, lovers’ quarrels are of no consequence, and your relationship with Louis was in no danger of being affected by it. Now things are entirely different.”49 The tempestuous scene Marcel had witnessed at dinner between Louisa and her protector was like many he had seen before. Observing these lovers—Louisa with the speech and manners of a cocotte, always performing whether on the stage or in the bedroom, and Albufera, an eligible, wealthy aristocrat whose life was spent in drawing rooms or at balls or in his château or in the regiment for the annual reserves training—provided Proust with many details that were to nourish the characters of the marquis de Saint-Loup and his mistress, the prostitute-cum-actress Rachel, in the Search. In that relationship, as in so many depicted by Proust, with substantial variations on the theme, obsessive jealousy played a prime role.
Marcel soon wearied of trying to explain and justify Louisa’s and Louis’s behavior to each other. In midsummer he wrote Louisa and explained that he found his role as mediator intolerable: “Allow me to no longer involve myself with matters that don’t concern me, where I understand nothing, and where I am not free to give my opinion freely because each of you would blame me.” He asked to withdraw, to return to the shadows from which he never should have emerged.50 Marcel was to find it difficult to maintain his declared neutrality between the feuding lovers.
During the summer Marcel attended a number of parties to celebrate the engagements of Albufera and Armand de Guiche. One of the parties he had most wanted to attend was a dinner on July 14 at Vallière, the vast nineteenth-century château that was the Guiche country estate at Mortefontaine, north of Paris. But how would he get there? The twenty-five-minute train ride might provoke a severe asthma attack. This could be avoided only if he were willing to accept “unheard-of complications” and travel by automobile, which he feared would be just as lethal in a different way. As usual, Marcel shared his anxieties with his friends while seeking their advice, which he then ignored.
Marcel did attend the party at Vallière, along with approximately thirty other guests, including the comte de Cholet, who had been Proust’s superior officer in the military. Marcel later said, as he often did after such exploits, that the trip to Vallière had “killed” him.51 It had been worth the trouble, though, for not only did he enjoy himself, he collected a number of savory anecdotes, one of which he later used in the novel. He relished sharing these amusing stories with his friends, especially Fénelon, to whom he wrote shortly after the party: “When I arrived the Duc de Gramont asked me to sign the visitors’ book which had already been signed by the other guests... and I was about to append my signature underneath a tiny Gutman followed by an enormous Fitz-James and an immense Cholet, followed by a tiny Chevreau and an equally small Mailly-Nesle-La Rochefoucauld, when the Duc de Gramont, filled with anxiety by my humble and confused demeanor (in addition to the fact that he knew I wrote), addressed me in a tone at once imploring and peremptory these lapidary words: ‘Your name, Monsieur Proust, but no thoughts.’”52
The next story involved a trait of Marcel’s, whose friends knew he enjoyed chatting with servants, concierges, and waiters. “Guiche’s sister, Mme de Noailles, told me she was like me and loved chatting with ‘inferiors,’ her housemaid, her concierge,” Proust wrote. “One day when she was speaking about this to her cousin Mme Léonino (Jeanne de Rothschild) she added: ‘I feel I have the soul of a concierge. I don’t know where I get it from. I must have had a skivvy ancestor.’ And Jeanne Léonino, slightly hurt, replied: ‘On the Gramont side, perhaps; but on the Rothschild side I can assure you no!’”53
At times the thought of all his friends who had married or, like Albu and Guiche, were about to, caused Marcel to reflect on his own life and his lack of a mate. In a letter to Antoine he noted that although he was seeing a lot of Guiche, Albu had been coming around “even more often than before if that’s possible and is adorable to me. But I’m well aware that whatever he may say it cannot stay the same afterwards. Still I’m too fond of him to consider his marriage purely from my point of view.”54 Marcel wanted to be happy for his friend’s sake, but he knew that he, like Louisa, would have to adjust his expectations and enjoy far less of Albu’s time and companionship. He also wrote to Georges de Lauris that summer, remarking about how many of their friends were getting married and wondering whether he and Georges should follow their examples. His own answer was decidedly negative: “I have no taste for it.”55 Proust remained intensely curious about beautiful young society women but sought no romantic attachments with them.
At a dinner party at Anna de Noailles’s, Marcel committed a blunder that he thought profoundly humiliating. He later described the incident in a letter to Antoine. Proust had scarcely arrived when he made a sweeping gesture with his hand and knocked over Anna’s “finest Tanagra figurine,” which fell to the floor and shattered.56 Proust was mortified and vowed that he would never return to avenue Henri Martin until he had replaced the figurine, thus imposing on himself an exile that lasted nearly a year. The countess, with a poet’s divining nature, preserved the broken pieces.57
Marcel also brought Antoine up to date on his health news, “since you’re interested in medical matters and also like to think I’m a bit mad.” He had consulted Dr. Pierre Merklen, a heart and lung specialist, who was considered the best in the field. The doctor told Marcel that his “asthma had become a nervous habit and that the only way to cure it was to go to an anti-asthmatic establishment somewhere in Germany where they would (for I probably won’t go) ‘get me out of the habit’ of my asthma just as they ‘demorphinize’ morphine addicts.”58 This diagnosis, which certainly cannot have been one that Proust welcomed, seemed to confirm the opinion of his father and Dr. Brissaud.
Having reported his many recent social engagements to his friend, he feared that Antoine might have the impression he had done nothing recently except attend dinner parties. Quoting Ruskin in English from The Bible of Amiens, he told Antoine that his social life was but “the apparent life,” while “the real life is underneath all this.”59 This concept of a superficial social self, the one visible to one’s friends, hiding a private self with rich subterranean fields, was one that more and more occupied his thoughts.
In August he exchanged several letters with Marie, who had rented a summer house in Auteuil, about the medallion of his father. She had already brought the heavy object to the house on one occasion, but he had been unable to rise from the bed. Now that he was about to leave on a yachting trip with Robert de Billy and his wife’s family, he suggested that she come on August 8 at 9:30 A.M. with the medallion, if that was not too difficult. His mother would see her back to Auteuil and he would “get up for five minutes to shake hands with you.”60
Sometime in August, Marie gave him a small watercolor, painted at Senlis in 1898, of a landscape he had admired. He hung her picture by his bed, where it reminded him of one of the “prettiest things I have ever seen... once in the country... a patch of sky and landscape with a carefully chosen clump of fraternal trees.”61 Proust’s fascination with trees and flowers, which he seldom saw except in pictures and drawings, was to provide him with key elements for the Narrator’s quest.
While his mother vacationed at Étretat on the Normandy coast with Robert, his wife, and baby Adrienne, Marcel accepted Robert de Billy’s invitation to go sailing along the northern coast of Brittany on his father-in-law’s yacht Hélène. Just before leaving for Le Havre, Marcel received the proofs from Le Figaro for his article “La Mort des cathédrales.” In his usual predeparture stricken state, Marcel returned the proofs without bothering to read them. At Le Havre, Marcel’s host, M. Paul Mira-baud, met him at the station and took him by cab to the harbor. Mirabaud, governor of the Bank of France, struck Marcel as being in excellent health. In his first letter to his mother he described the banker as an imposing figure, “magnificent, a huge and powerful Saxon god” with the bluest eyes.62 Marcel was apparently the only male guest on board. The other passengers were Mme Fortoul, “extremely nice,” Mme Jacques Faure, “very pretty,” Mile Oberkampf, who merited no description in the letter to Jeanne, and Mme de Billy “who is charming to me and charming in general.”63
After a tour of the large, steam-powered yacht, Marcel settled into his cabin at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. An asthma attack prevented him from sleeping; he felt so miserable that he did not even undress. Even a dose of Trional at 3 in the morning brought no relief; still awake at 5, he arose and went up on deck, two hours before the yacht set sail. Once they were under way, he improved. Marcel took breakfast, and his asthma eased as the Hélène headed out into the calm sea in fine weather. The sea air seemed to increase his appetite, enabling him to enjoy a “big lunch at 12:30,” which seemed to make his asthma subside even more. After twelve hours of sailing, at 7 P.M. the boat arrived off Cherbourg. Although the next day “turned out fine again,” Marcel missed “the charm of sailing” once they were anchored. He considered leaving the sailing party and taking the train to Paris the following morning, with stops at Caen and Bayeux, to visit the medieval churches described by Ruskin.
Toward the end of the next letter to his mother, Marcel spoke about the special oneness he felt with her as he wrote, although he knew she was far away and would not actually read his letter until the following day: “I speak to you in my imagination a hundred times a minute and hug you no less often.” Since his father’s death, Marcel had worried even more about her health. Knowing himself to be helpless in that regard, as in so many others, he urged her to talk to Robert about her health whenever she had reason. Although Marcel lived “in close proximity” to her, it was with his “eyes closed.” He felt compelled to give her advice about consulting Robert because he knew that unlike him, she did not like to complain and might well “have pains, kidney troubles,” without his being aware of it at all. He reminded her that last winter she had been ill without his knowing about it. “So do at least put my mind to rest by always talking to Robert in detail about these things.”64
As for him, her love remained his surest remedy: “Since writing to you I’ve warmed up and no longer have any asthma. As in an opera, you were bending over me as I wrote, and the soothing effect of our conversation removed the last traces of oppression.” He had only wanted to send her one of “my usual bulletins in which I never tell you anything but the worst so that you know what curve I never went below.” He proposed to save the best stories from his trip, “all the beautiful sights to do with nature or people,” for their “cozy heart to heart chats, punctuated with kisses.”65
Marcel decided to stay on board a few more days. A photograph taken by Billy shows him sitting in a deck chair and engaged in conversation. He is wearing his gray overcoat, a boater, and a scarf. Billy remarked that Proust made a poor subject for a photograph because it was difficult to get him to stop talking long enough to take his picture.66 As luck would have it, M. Mirabaud, who had appeared so fit, became ill. The banker had recently suffered a heart attack and been resuscitated by Dr. Merklen, the specialist Proust had consulted. Mirabaud, wishing to be prudent, ordered the Hélène to remain at anchor for two days at Dinard while he rested. On Sunday evening, August 14, Marcel, having remained on board the yacht for the better part of a week, left and returned to Paris. Proust later described succinctly his yachting trip to Antoine: “Pretty boat, pretty sailing, pretty women.”67
Perhaps some of Le Figaro’s readers who thought of Proust as a society-page writer were surprised, when “La Mort des cathédrales” appeared on August 16, to find in him an able polemicist willing to engage in political debate.68 In May 1904 the French government had broken off relations with the Holy See and recalled its ambassador to the Vatican.69 In his article Proust stated his fear that “these cathedrals that are the highest and the most original expression of French genius” would become meaningless museums without the religious ceremonies for which they were constructed. Proust advanced a number of religious, aesthetic, and nationalistic arguments, appealing both to common sense and French pride. One can prefer another country’s literature, music, or painting, he argued, “but it’s in France that Gothic architecture created its first and most nearly perfect masterpieces. Other countries have done nothing but imitate our religious architecture, without being able to equal it.” If theaters and museums were subsidized by the state, surely the cathedrals merited as much. The liturgical ceremonies were of “such historical, social, artistic, and musical interest” that “only Wagner had approached its beauty, by imitating it in Parsifal.”
Proust, who had grown quite knowledgeable after years of studying Gothic architecture, the Bible, and French medieval history, explained the symbolism of the various Christian sacraments and showed how the architecture, including the stained-glass windows populated by biblical figures and medieval French citizens, related to Christian faith and daily life in the Middle Ages. “Never,” he observed, “has a comparable spectacle, has such a gigantic mirror of knowledge, of the soul and of history been offered to the eyes and intelligence of man.”70
After the article appeared, Proust was horrified at the misprints the piece contained and regretted the mistakes, about three per line, that he had not bothered to correct before leaving for Le Havre. As he unburdened himself to Georges de Lauris, Proust nearly disowned the article, which he had not sent his friend “because I thought it very bad.” He characterized it as inaccurate, ingenious, and “overloaded with spurious poetry.” Perhaps writing about cathedrals and Catholicism had made him consider religious beliefs and the question of eternal life. Immortality was clearly a subject that he and Lauris had discussed. Proust, unlike Lauris, found the prospect intoxicating: “Would it not be sweet to find again, beneath another sky, in the valleys vainly promised and fruitlessly awaited, all those one has left or will leave behind! And realize oneself at last!”71
In late August, Proust answered a questionnaire regarding the role of the state in supporting the fine arts that was sent to “personalities in the field of art, literature and politics” by the journalist Maurice Le Blond under the aegis of the review Les Arts de la vie. Marcel did not return the questionnaire to Gabriel Mourey, the review’s editor, because he believed that his answers would displease Le Blond, whose motives Proust found suspect. Mourey and Le Blond had a mission: the suspension of state funding of two institutions that taught the fine arts, the École des Beaux-Arts and the French Academy in Rome.72 Proust instead drafted a letter to Le Blond, which afterward he decided not to send. His remarks are interesting from two perspectives: that of the debate over the state’s role in subsidizing instruction in art and, on a more personal note, his opinion about an artist’s need for freedom and discipline. “Whether or not the State has ‘the right’ to subjugate artistic personality,... in no circumstances will it ever have the power to do so.” Then, although he did not mention Ruskin, he referred to his own long submission to the influence of the English writer, an apprenticeship he saw as positive: “What can subjugate the personality of an artist is . . . the beneficent force of a more powerful personality—and that is a servitude which is not far from being the beginning of liberty.”
In his preface to La Bible d’Amiens, Proust had attempted to explain why the time and energy he had spent on Ruskin had not been lost: “Mediocre people generally believe that to let oneself be guided by books one admires takes away some of one’s independence of judgment. ‘What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.’ Such an opinion rests on a psychological error” that will be dismissed by those who, having submitted to such influence, “feel that their power to understand and feel is infinitely increased” without ever paralyzing their critical sense. “We are then simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as our other senses, are strengthened. Therefore, this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of becoming aware of one’s feelings than to try to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.”73
Proust believed that an artist needed discipline more than any other attribute: “I believe we are indeed dying, but for lack of discipline not of freedom. I don’t believe that freedom is very useful to the artist and I think that, especially for the artist of today, discipline would be as entirely beneficial as it is for the neuropath.” Rather than the state, the great tyrant was love because “one imitates slavishly what one loves when one isn’t original. The truth is that there is only one real freedom for the artist: originality. The slaves are those who are not original, whether the State interferes with them or not. Do not try to break their chains; they would immediately forge new ones.” Writing to Gabriel Mourey in September, Proust referred again to the debate about government’s role in art, a question he found pointless to begin with, for he was convinced that “one produces the art of one’s temperament.”74
In September, Proust wrote to Dr. Georges Linossier, a friend and colleague of Adrien’s, who specialized in gastric disorders. Marcel’s original purpose in writing Linossier was to make a simple inquiry, intended as a substitute for a visit unless the doctor would be willing to examine him late in the evening. By the time Marcel finished he had written a twelve-page letter, whose length and details so “overwhelmed” him “with embarrassment at my importunateness” that he dared not mail it.75 Written in a straightforward manner, this statement is the fullest account we have of Proust’s self-diagnosis. It reveals a number of rituals, some of which he eventually gave to the famous comic character Aunt Léonie, a neurasthenic modeled on Proust himself. One such ritual was the consumption of Vichy water, about whose properties Linossier, who practiced at Vichy, should have been well informed.
First Proust wrote about his complicated case: “I am... from the medical point of view, many different things, though in fact no one has ever known exactly what. But I am above all, and indisputably, an asthmatic.” He then described the origin of his asthma in hay fever, that at first seemed seasonal but then bloomed into “a more or less all-the-year-round ailment.” Where Linossier’s knowledge might be especially useful was in analyzing the relation between his asthma and his diet, the bizarre nature of which had evolved as a means of controlling his asthma as much as possible: “I eat one meal every 24 hours (. . . two creamed eggs, a wing of roast chicken, three croissants, a dish of fried potatoes, grapes, coffee, a bottle of beer) and in between the only thing I take is a quarter of a glass of Vichy water before going to bed (nine or ten hours after my meal). If I take a whole glass I am woken up by congestion; a fortiori if instead of Vichy it’s solid food.” He then came to the second ritual, the need for his underpants to be tightly bound by a pin to prevent digestive problems: “Asthmatic breathlessness is my only form of trouble. That is the advantage of my strange diet.” He observed that when he used to eat several meals and drink between meals, he “constantly suffered dissension, wind, and other discomforts which no longer exist.”76 During the recent period when he had tried to reform, he had managed to take two meals a day. But his digestion operated so slowly that he “found it almost impossible to go to bed because of the number of hours (eight) I’m obliged to spend up (or on a chaise-longue) after a meal.” Such efforts also increased his breathlessness, sent more blood rushing to his head, and made him less well than when he followed his own strange regimen.
He also wanted advice about the kind of treatment Dr. Merklen had recommended. Was such a “psychotherapeutic treatment” really necessary “in order to modify” his “pernicious living habits”? He tried to imagine himself undergoing such treatment, which consisted of “isolating the patient, immobilizing him, feeding him up and curing him by persuasion.” He wanted to avoid a clinic whose practitioners held to the theory that “all gastric troubles are nervous in origin” and thus were unable to evaluate objectively a patient’s condition. Marcel then provided details to give Linossier a clearer idea of his arthritic condition. “My urine shows a marked excess of urea, of uric acid, and a diminution of chlorides. The analysis I had done added imponderable traces of albumin and sugar, but I believe this quite temporary. I have been urinating very little for several years. After twelve days on a milk diet I did not produce half a litre in twenty-four hours.”77
His bowel movements, Proust went on, were frequent but generally unsatisfactory, and he went “to the privy, always several times running.” He offered to have his stool analyzed if the doctor thought that would be useful, but in the meantime he provided a description, saying that his stool “varies according to his different states of health” and frequently contained mucus. Every two weeks he took a powerful laxative in the form of a cascara pill, downed in the middle of dinner, “which makes me go to the privy seven [or] even more times during the following twenty-four hours.” As for enemas, he had abandoned them “because they bring me out in the most unbearable sweat.”
A third ritual, not mentioned in the letter to Linossier, involved a process he called “cooling down,” a slow emergence from his bed that allowed his body to adapt gradually to room temperature. Marcel believed that this process prevented colds and the onset of asthma.
Marcel began rounds of conversations with friends and his mother about where to vacation in the fall, a decision that was more complicated than usual because Albufera and Guiche both had planned their weddings to take place during the fall holiday season. He consulted various friends about Dinard, Trouville, and other spots in Brittany and Normandy. In a letter to his mother he listed the advantages and disadvantages of each destination. Trouville was only a four-hour train ride; at Évian he would be more rested and feel more at home. But at Trouville he would find friends (Mme Straus and Charles Ephrussi) who had automobiles. He might consider going to Dieppe with his mother when she left on September 20. It was an easy train ride from Rouen, where there were frequent trains to Paris, but it would no doubt be overrun with English tourists. Paralyzed by indecision, Marcel remained at home.
Jeanne spent her first vacation alone in Dieppe at the Hôtel Métropole et des Bains. Although being at the seashore without a companion must have been a melancholy experience, she told Marcel only about the good exercise she took every day and how, despite the strong wind and unusually cold temperature, she enjoyed bundling up and making her daily rounds, stopping for little ten-minute breaks whenever there was a little sun. “But Dieppe is exceptionally well arranged for these healthy walks (for it’s very good for me to be forced to walk). By the time one has covered the length of that immense esplanade—visited the pier—been to the post—bought a newspaper—everything is so far from everything that my walk is done.”78
While Jeanne was away, Marcel tried again to reform his hours. Many of these attempts might appear comical had he not been seriously concerned about his condition and how miserable it made him. Recently, attempting to rise earlier than usual—that is, early in the afternoon—he had tried taking tea in bed at 3:30. The cook Marie, feeling ill, had retired to her room. Because he knew that his mother disapproved of Félicie’s staying by him, he got up to eat dinner. Having left his bed sooner than intended, he had not had time to cool off, and he ran into the dining room, hoping to keep warm. Alas, no fire had been laid, and he did not know where to go.
For whatever reason, “because of this coldness, fatigue from not having rested, an indescribable malaise set in, sore throat, despair, inability to move, unbelievable pulse, etc. etc.” Had he experienced a panic attack, or was this the onset of a real illness? In any event his barber François, whom he had summoned to cut his hair, saw that he was in no shape for a trim and left.79 Marcel apologized for giving his mother such a dreary report: “I realize how boring it must be to hear all this talk of health. I assure you that when you’re here I shall never talk about it again.” He changed the subject to a tragedy involving a friend, telling her in absolute confidence, “It was for Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld that Mme des Garets killed herself.” The lady, on hearing news of Gabriel’s engagement, had shot herself through the heart.80
He wrote his mother on September 24, marking the ten-month observance of his father’s death. It seemed like yesterday, he wrote, despite their “habit of constantly looking back to that day and to all the happiness that preceded it, the habit of regarding everything that has happened since as a sort of mechanical nightmare. . . . Such thoughts are less painful when we are near one another but when, as we two are, one is linked by a sort of wireless telegraphy, whether more or less near or more or less far one is always in close communion, always side by side.” He had some good health news; he had had his urine checked again and this time there was no trace of sugar or albumin.81
His mother replied to his apology for constantly talking about his maladies by assuring him that she could never be bored by anything he had to tell her: “You are wrong, darling, your letters are all charming, all appreciated by me as I appreciate my little pet from every point of view.” Then, vexed that he had dismissed his barber and often paid too little attention to how he looked, she gave him some motherly advice: “Do look after your appearance. If you have to get dressed in the daytime make sure your clothes are immaculate. But above all no more of that looking like a Frankish king—your hair gets in my eyes when I think of you. I hope by the time I finish this you’ll have had it done.”82 His mother received news a few days later from her son that he had a toothache, but because his asthma exhausted him, going to the dentist was unthinkable, nor could he consider having the dentist come to him.83
In the meantime Marcel had managed to inspect the “splendid column” that his mother had selected at an antique dealer’s and had made into an Empire lamp for him to give Albufera as a wedding present. The sight of this gift had “amazed, enchanted, overwhelmed” him.84
Marcel postponed treatment he considered indispensable in order to attend Albufera’s marriage on October 11, but he missed the ceremony because of illness. Three days earlier he had visited the home of Prince Joachim Murat, whose wife was the bride’s aunt, to attend the reception following the signing of the marriage contract. As a present to Marcel on the day of the wedding, Albu sent him a handsome cane inscribed with Proust’s initials, those of the bridegroom, and the wedding date. During the difficult period of the honeymoon, Proust resumed the role of the “post office” through which Albu and Louisa communicated. Albu had decided to combine honeymooning with a literary pilgrimage by retracing the journey from Paris to Jerusalem as laid out by Chateaubriand in L’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem.
Ten days after the wedding Louisa sent Albufera a wire in which she claimed that it was “beyond her strength to bear this voyage.” After accusing him of “having chosen the most terrible of separations for me,” she warned him “in all sincerity that life seems to me impossible to endure in these conditions.”85 Albu panicked and, perhaps picturing her already dead like Mme des Garets, alerted Proust. Marcel consoled, reassured, and advised both the abandoned mistress and the honeymooning Albu. While Albu and his bride journeyed toward Athens, Proust sent telegrams addressed to “M. Thecus,” an anagram of Albu’s family name Suchet.86 When it seemed obvious that the crisis had ended, he advised Albu: “At every moment of your voyage think only of making your wife as happy as possible. God will reward you for it.”87 The consolation Marcel offered Louisa was more down to earth: he sent her Trional with recommended dosages and offered to provide names of doctors she might consult.88 During the late summer and fall Marcel consoled Louisa, meeting her occasionally for dinner. He wrote a cameo portrait of her for Gil Bias and was instrumental in landing her a role in a play, Maman Colibri by Henry Bataille, to whom Proust had introduced Louisa.
Marcel’s poor health had caused him to miss Albu’s wedding; now his asthma prevented him from attending the openings of two plays by friends. Writing to Antoine Bibesco on October 5, when Le Jaloux was in its final rehearsals, Proust told him that an outing two days earlier had provoked a terrible asthma attack. Part of the portrait he had written of Antoine for the occasion was published in Le Figaro on October 8, the day of the dress rehearsal. In the postscript, he stressed again his deplorable condition: “I am at present extremely unhappy from every point of view, morally, physically, intellectually.” He asked Antoine to stop by and see him, but only in the evening.89
By late October he was busy correcting proofs for his translation of Ruskin’s Of Kings’ Treasuries, the first lecture in Sesame and Lilies, due to be published in 1905 in installments in Les Arts de la vie.90 In November he resolved again to reform his hours. He would attend Guiche’s wedding and take advantage, he wrote Lucien, of the rare daytime sortie to do a slew of “important and secret things” he had always postponed, chief of which was to see a doctor. “From that day forward my life will be settled one way or the other.” His outlook optimistic, he told Lucien that no longer would his friends have to see him “in a disagreeable manner that makes you go out at hours when you would prefer to remain at home.” He mentioned his wedding gift to Guiche, a folly because it cost so much: a revolver in a leather case that he had commissioned Coco de Madrazo to paint and inscribe with verses from the bride’s childhood poems.91
On the day of the wedding Marcel did attend to practical matters, but it is not clear whether he saw a doctor, as promised. He called at the Mercure de France, where he urged Vallette to publish Mme Peigné-Crémieux’s translation of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. The translator was a relative of Mme Proust’s. He may have also obtained information about the cost of having the family grand piano adapted to the Aeolian Company’s new device that would allow the instrument to serve also as a player piano. Marcel gave Albu instructions to have the necessary work performed, but for some reason the installation was postponed.
At the wedding Marcel chatted with the bride’s beautiful mother, Comtesse Greffulhe, who proudly recited to him some “sublime” lines from her daughter’s poems.92 Marcel informed Mme Greffulhe that Guiche “had envisaged” the marriage to the countess’s daughter “as a possible means of obtaining her mother’s photograph. She laughed so prettily that I felt tempted to repeat it ten times over.” Marcel hoped that his friendship with Guiche “might earn me the same privilege.”93 At the wedding he also saw Anna de Noailles for the first time since July 17, the day of the Tanagra figurine fiasco.
Proust soon received the sort of invitation that he had begun to dread: a summons from Montesquiou to attend his lecture on Japanese engravings. When Proust declined, using the proximity of the date to the anniversary of his father’s death as a reason, Montesquiou refused to accept his excuse: “I don’t think there can be a better way of celebrating [such anniversaries], and one more in keeping with the inclinations of those who are no more (or who, rather, are elsewhere), than not to turn one’s back on a new occasion to thrill with harmony.” The count was convinced that if Marcel had consulted his “good and intelligent mother, if you had opened your heart to her on the matter,” she would have agreed with Montesquiou’s opinion. Ruminating on Marcel’s transgressions while thinking of the profit Marcel or anyone might derive from hearing his voice, he reminded Marcel of how he used to imitate him in public: “You claim to possess all my vocal secrets. Allow me to disabuse you, or at least persuade you that a certain something will always be missing from these phonetic reproductions. An illusion which may perhaps give me some hope of seeing you again!” In his postscript, perhaps intended to threaten Marcel with extinction among the social elite, Montesquiou referred to noble relatives of high rank who were now “dead” because he had quarreled with them. Using the royal we in an example of hauteur worthy of Charlus, he remarked, “The death of Mme de Brantes grieved us very much in spite of everything. Whereas that of Mme d’Eyragues leaves us absolutely indifferent.”94
Pricked by Montesquiou’s goading, Marcel hastened to defend himself by providing the usual dismal status of his health, while making light of his past imitations, intended only as a homage to the count’s genius: “As for . . . my ‘Imitations,’ they were never more than scales, or rather vocal exercises, making no claim to convey a melody or anything of the genius of the original; better still, they were simple exercises and admiring games . . . naïve canticles in which a youthful admiration exercised and indulged itself.”95 Such admiration had disappeared long ago and was never to be revived.
In the days surrounding the first anniversary of his father’s death, Marcel spent evenings sitting up late with his mother. On November 25, the day before the anniversary, he went to Père-Lachaise cemetery and placed flowers on his father’s grave. He caught a cold and renewed his determination to see a doctor. He would continue, however, to postpone the visit, even after he became alarmed on reading in Dr. Brissaud’s book on asthma that each attack upsets something in the body and hastens death.
Sometime that fall Proust received an unexpected present from Bertrand de Fénelon in the form of “splendid reproductions which are doubly precious to me because of my admiration for Vermeer and my friendship for you.” He apologized for taking longer than intended to thank Fénelon, but assured him that he was “often in my thoughts.” Just the other day he had written and discarded a letter asking Bertrand’s advice, “but I was afraid you might think I was indulging in puerilities which are quite incompatible with my age and which you already found ridiculous when you were the object of them.”96 Who the object of these “puerilities” might have been is unknown. Marcel’s assumption that he had outgrown such childish infatuations was overoptimistic.
Proust mentioned a mysterious woman, the “mistress I most loved,” in a letter to Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld. He did so in the context of reviewing the manuscript of Gabriel’s novel, L’Amant et le médecin (The lover and the doctor), in which Proust objected to Gabriel’s psychology regarding jealousy:
With my particular temperament, my specific jealousy, what would have made me jealous at once is “Let’s just be friends,” which I’d have interpreted as an admission of satiety, a mark of indifference, a sign of repulsion. I shall never forget the day when those words were said to me by the mistress I most loved. If I acquiesced, after some resistance, it was from pride. But I considered that from that day onwards her desire for my body had been replaced by desire for another. It was the beginning of our rupture. For years afterwards, years of tenderness and chaste kisses, we never once alluded to that moment, to my caresses, to anything that might have come near to the forbidden spot, the painful scar on my heart. Now, all that has been succeeded by such indifference that I recently hazarded a jesting advance, and she said to me quite harshly: “Don’t do that, it’s wrong.”97
This is the most direct testimony we have about how Proust experienced love and jealousy. We do not know who the mysterious woman was, and, given Proust’s bizarre schedule and the many letters to friends in which he speaks about his affection, there is no credible candidate for this most beloved mistress. One cannot resist the suspicion that the person described here was not a woman at all but rather Reynaldo Hahn, or perhaps Lucien Daudet, because what we know about Proust’s relationships with both men fits the pattern described.98 His infatuations with Antoine Bibesco and Bertrand de Fénelon did not apparently reach the same degree of intimacy as his earlier attachments.