15 The Only Honey of My Life

IN FEBRUARY 1905 MARCEL WROTE TO Marie Nordlinger to thank her for sending him a copy of the English original of Whistler’s Ten O’clock: A Lecture. She had been traveling with the American railway tycoon Charles Lang Freer, an art collector and a friend of Whistler’s.1 Marcel told Marie that he had begun translating Of Queens’ Gardens, which he had decided to add to Sésame et les lys. During her absence his “old and charming English scholar . . . will act as my ‘Mary.’”2 The scholar was apparently Charles Newton Scott, who had been a friend of Ruskin’s.3 He reminisced about the one time he saw Whistler: “I made him say a few kind words about Ruskin! and appropriated his handsome grey gloves which I’ve since lost.” Marcel asked Marie to tell Mr. Freer about his interest in Whistler: “In my intentionally bare room there is only one reproduction of a work of art: an excellent photograph of Whistler’s Carlyle in a serpentine overcoat like the dress in his portrait of his mother. The more I think about the theories of Ruskin and Whistler the more I believe they are not irreconcilable. Whistler is right when he says in Ten O’Clock that Art is distinct from Morality. And yet Ruskin, too, utters a truth, on a different plane, when he says that all great art is morality.”4

On March 1 Les Arts de la vie published the first part of Proust’s translation of the first lecture from Sesame and Lilies: Des trésors des rois (Of kings’ treasuries). The review published the remaining installments on April 15 and May 15. The complete translation, containing Proust’s preface and the second lecture, retitled Des jardins des reines (Of queens’ gardens), was not published until May 1906.

In early March, Proust planned a dinner party, chiefly to invite his aristocratic friends. Because of a number of complications, he decided on a tea instead. His mother was still in mourning and felt that an afternoon tea would be more appropriate. That would also simplify the guest list, for more people could be invited. As usual, Mme Straus’s name was at the top of the list of those Marcel most wanted to see. Worried that her nervous disorders might prevent her attending, he wrote, urging her to come and offering a remedy for every unpleasant situation she might fear: “You can eat or not, you can drink or not, you can talk or remain silent, and if you get bored you can come with me into another room. And if I bore you I shall leave you on your own.”5 It was no use; she could not come. Marcel and Mme Straus, perhaps the two most thorough neurasthenics in Paris, could rarely meet. At the tea, on March 6—the last such gathering at 45, rue de Courcelles—Reynaldo and the comtesse de Guerne, who often sang together, delighted the guests with their performance, primarily selections from Mozart, always Hahn’s favorite. Later in the spring Marcel would thank Mme de Guerne by praising her voice in an anonymous article in Le Figaro. But not all the sounds heard on the day of the tea party were as harmonious as Mozart’s. The party somehow caused a brawl among the Proust servants and the abrupt departure of their cook Marie.6

That evening, after the party, Marcel went to the Vaudeville Theater to see Louisa perform. When he returned home, he found an alarming message from Montesquiou. Propped against Marcel’s candlestick, the envelope was addressed in the count’s unmistakable, large, ornate hand and postmarked Paris. Proust had not invited the count, as he pointed out in the letter he immediately wrote, because Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre and Lucien had told him that he was away at Artagnan. And Marcel remembered that Montesquiou had said that he would not return until the spring: “All these thoughts go through my head on seeing your envelope post-marked Paris, thoughts of pure rage, the predominant fury of the host cheated of his glory.”7

On March 10 Proust attended a small supper party given by Reynaldo and Harry Fragson, a celebrated music hall singer who was known to be homosexual. Marcel, as he wrote Louisa at 7 o’clock the next morning, regretted her “strange silence,” because he would have liked to bring her to the party. “And I think you would have enjoyed yourself. Because Fragson is charming when seen at close quarters, and sang without stopping.” When Marcel was forced to leave the party at 3:30 A.M. because of a terrible asthma attack, Fragson was still singing at the top of his lungs.8

When Marcel heard that Mme Straus had left the confines of her home, he expressed his “joy” at the news. Believing that her problems were purely psychological in origin, whereas his own nervous disorders resulted from genuine physiological maladies, he encouraged Mme Straus to believe herself cured. As for himself: “Unfortunately I’m going to be obliged to retire to a sort of sanatorium for three or four months, but I think I’ll put it off until after my hay fever.” He told Mme Straus that he loved her “to a point which makes me feel your pain like a torture and sing with joy metaphorically (since I can’t open my mouth) at your recovery.”9

Proust kept Mme Straus informed of his progress as he worked on the preface, notes, and translation of Sesame and Lilies. In the spring he told her that a “very small piece” of his would appear in the Renaissance latine on June 15. Marcel’s reappearance in the review’s pages marked the full reconciliation between him and Constantin. This “small” piece, “Sur la lecture” (On reading), was in some ways his most important publication so far. Before concluding the letter, he attempted to distract his melancholy friend by relating some amusing remarks overheard after a recent concert. He warned that what followed was not “very proper but then we’re both invalids.” The lady in question was Mme de Saint-Paul, who, according to Proust, made “unintentionally obscene remarks” every time she opened her mouth. He had overheard her talking to a society hostess: “My dear, say what you like, Madeleine likes good cooking. I prefer to give you good music. Madeleine likes it in her mouth, but I prefer it in my ear. Each to her taste, my dear, it’s a free country, after all.”10

As his work to complete Sésame et les lys intensified, Marcel began making serious efforts to avoid at all costs Montesquiou and his emissary Yturri, who sometimes came with a message from the count when Marcel was asleep. The count seemed determined to complicate his life by tormenting him, interfering with his work, and occupying time that Marcel preferred to spend with his mother. Marcel knew that on April 21 the count was to lecture on Hugo’s La Fin de Satan, an event he intended to miss, even though he feared Montesquiou’s wrath at his absence. Shortly before that date Marcel left his mother a note asking her to leave the house only when she absolutely felt it necessary to take some fresh air. He wanted her “to organize an inexpungeable defense” against the count and his factotum.11

On the day following the lecture, the absent but unrepentant Marcel received from Montesquiou a letter even angrier and more sarcastic than anticipated: “I know that you are ill. But why do you recover when it’s a question of the La Rochefoucauld orangeade. . . . Montesquiou isn’t ‘small beer’ either. ‘He’ of whom I spoke yesterday would have laid his hands on you, through my voice.” Because Marcel had refused divine Hugolian intervention through the mediumistic Montesquiou, the count concluded, not unreasonably, that Marcel should be given some other kind of treatment. Remembering Marcel’s frequent talk of going to a sanatorium, the count urged him to go: “Anything would be better than your present state and that sequestered room!”12 Montesquiou’s accusations had stung Proust because they were, for the most part, accurate. Claiming to be “worn out by letters from Montesquiou,” Marcel complained to Mme Straus about their mutual friend’s treatment of him: “Every time he gives a lecture or throws a party etc. etc. he refuses to acknowledge that I’m ill, and beforehand there are summonses, threats, visits from Yturri who wakes me up, and afterwards, reproaches for not having gone.”13

In his fury Montesquiou compared his own handwriting to Solomon’s and Proust’s tiny, nearly illegible scrawl to an ant’s.14 When Marcel wrote to Montesquiou to chide him for taking the beau rôle, the count retorted, “Where do you get the idea that I take the beau rôle. I don’t have to take it, I already have it.”15 Then Montesquiou announced that in order to “console” the “ant” for having missed Solomon’s lecture, he intended to give a reading chez Proust “at nine o’clock in the evening on the day of publication of my book, if that would amuse you, in the presence of two or three of our friends, male and female, on the choice of whom we can agree together. And if you consider that it would be another case of me taking the beau rôle, at least this time we would be sharing it.” Anticipating all Proust’s excuses and objections, Montesquiou proposed “an audience of only three! At the head of the list: Madame Straus.”16 The count’s announcement, so solemn and categorical, terrified Marcel and prevented him from sleeping.

Montesquiou attributed Marcel’s “sourness” and inaccuracies merely to aegri somnia, “the futile visions of a sick man.”17 Proust yielded and replied, graciously and mendaciously, quoting Racine’s Phèdre, “‘You cannot read what lies within my heart’ if you thought you detected ‘sourness’ in it. . . . It has nothing but gratitude and admiration for you.” The involuntary host even suggested writing an article about the new book but left himself an escape route: “It’s sad that I don’t do any literary criticism in a newspaper, as I should very much like to write about it.”18

Proust still led the life he had described in the preface to Pleasures and Days nearly a decade before when he compared himself to Noah, confined to his ark while gazing at the world outside. Writing to Albert Sorel in May, he said that his health had accustomed him “to do without nearly everything and to replace people by their images and life by thought.”19 To Robert Dreyfus, during the same period, he confided that he “led a very quiet, restful life of reading and very studious intimacy with Mama.”20

As he wrote the final drafts of his preface to Sésame et les lys, Marcel lacked confidence in his new style. He repeated to Mme Straus and others his lament: “Ah, if only I could write like Mme Straus.” He particularly envied her “lucidity, that delightful equilibrium that makes your sentences so enchanting.”21 As though his self-doubts were not enough to contend with, he had to undergo the “favor” Montesquiou was bestowing upon him by coming to his home for a private reading. He was at a loss as to what he should tell the select few whom the count had allowed him to invite. Montesquiou advised him: “Say what is the case: that I am doing you the kindness, since you don’t go out, of going to your house to read a (short) chapter of my new book; and that this chapter being the portrait of Mme Aubernon, the guests have been chosen among those who knew her.”22 Montesquiou called the chapter read at Proust’s “La Sonnette” (The bell) because Mme Aubernon was famous for using that instrument to moderate the conversations of her dinner guests.

The reading chez Proust on Friday, June 2, was attended by the loyal Yturri, weary from complications resulting from his diabetes. As he listened to Montesquiou read, Marcel compared his own recollections to those of the count. It was in Mme Aubernon’s salon that he had met, among others, the outrageous, effeminate Baron Doäzan, who, with Montesquiou, was a primary model for the baron de Charlus.

Shortly after June 2 Marie Nordlinger returned briefly to Paris and paid Marcel a visit. She found him in bed, of course, “his eyes ablaze, with his pale face framed by a thick, black beard.” He asked her to embrace him once and told her that she had often been in his thoughts. Then he wanted to know whether she had seen any beautiful things in America.23 They worked for a while on Sésame et les lys, but Marcel had relatively few questions to ask her. “After she left,” he wrote in a note to his mother, “I worked alone and perfectly.”24 But as soon as Marie returned to England, Marcel realized that he needed her assistance more than he had thought. He wanted to publish a generous acknowledgment of Marie’s aid in the translation, but she insisted that he express his gratitude more discreetly.25

A Silkworm or an Earthworm?

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”26 Thus Proust began the preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies, published in the Renaissance latine on June 15 and dedicated to the princesse de Caraman-Chimay. Books were for him more than words on paper; those he had known and loved in childhood held the power to evoke the places in which he had first read them: “If we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.”27

Readers of the Renaissance latine cannot have known—nor could Proust himself—that they were being given a foretaste of Combray, one of the major landscapes of the Search.28 The preface does not mention Illiers, but Proust evoked aspects of the little town, many of which he had already sketched in Jean Santeuil: the ruins of medieval towers near the river, the general topography, the uncle who loved gardening and cooking.

A distinctive aspect of Proust’s mature style is its richness in presenting multiple perspectives or a string of analogies that dazzle by their aptness and their brilliance. The following humorous sketch of family life, from the preface, is an early example of this technique. In the family, someone who took the time to write a letter “was the object of a particular deference” and was told: “You have attended to your ‘little correspondence,’ with a smile in which there was respect, mystery, prurience, and discretion, as if this ‘little correspondence’ had been at the same time a state secret, a prerogative, a piece of good fortune, and an ailment.”29 Proust’s presentation of multiple views of the same object or action was to be one of several narrative strategies used in the novel to render life in its full richness.

This preface, like the later drafts of Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve), his last sketchbook before the full-scale novel, contains a narrative followed by a critical essay. In the last section of the preface and its notes, Proust makes observations about structure in Ruskin’s writings. These thoughts would be important to his own slow elaboration of a structure for the Search.

In the first note to his translation Proust wrote about the retrospective, organic unity he had found in Sesame and Lilies and noticed in other Ruskin works. Ruskin had used as the epigraph a quotation from Lucian, “You shall each have a cake of sesame,—and ten pounds.” Proust showed that the word sesame “projects like a supplementary ray of light that reaches not only the last sentence of the lecture,... but illuminates retrospectively all that preceded.” In his extensive note, he listed the various meanings of sesame that Ruskin drew upon in his lecture, creating not only a structure but a layering effect that was to become a distinctive element of Proust’s style: “It is precisely the charm of Ruskin’s works that between the ideas of one book and among various books there may be links he does not show, which he hardly lets appear for an instant and which he has perhaps woven as an afterthought, but never artificially, however, since they are always taken from the substance, always identical with itself, of his thought. The multiple but constant preoccupations of this thought, that is what assures these books a unity more real than the unity of composition, generally absent, it must be said.” Proust saw that Ruskin’s method was to go “from one idea to another without apparent order. But in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound affinities [,] which in spite of himself impose on him a superior logic. So that in the end he happens to have obeyed a kind of secret plan which, unveiled at the end, imposes retrospectively on the whole a sort of order and makes it appear magnificently arranged up to this final apotheosis.”30 If Proust is correct regarding Ruskin’s following his fancy, his own unifying elements were to be more conscious, but the themes and their orchestration (it is no accident that Proust describes Ruskin’s style in musical terms) were to be organic, growing out of his own vision, tastes, predilections.31 His sesame would be the word time, occurring first and last in his long, circular narration.

As for a writer’s vocabulary and knowledge of literature, Proust maintains that “a great writer knows his dictionary and his great writers before writing. But while writing he no longer thinks of them, but of what he wants to express, and chooses the words which say it best, with the most power, color, and harmony.” The words come from the well of a writer’s being, from an inner necessity, from the organic requirements of the narration when “his erudition gives way to genius.” As he writes, “his language, as learned and as rich as it may be, is only the keyboard on which he improvises.”32 These lines, suggesting that the writer enters a trancelike state, in which he seeks and finds the right “notes,” indicate the decreasing importance Proust places on intelligence and erudition. These elements are important, even vital, but for Proust they are no longer primary.

In the preface Proust refuted Ruskin’s thesis that “the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most cultivated men of past centuries who have been their authors.”33 The translator, who found “this kind of fetishistic respect for books unhealthy,” argued that “the essential difference between a book and a friend is not their degree of greatness of wisdom, but the manner in which we communicate with them, reading, contrary to conversation, consisting for each of us in receiving the communication of another thought, but while we remain all alone, that is to say, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power we have in solitude, and which conversation dissipates immediately, while continuing to be inspired, to maintain the mind’s full, fruitful work on itself.”34

We find budding here flowers from the seeds that were sown as far back as Pleasures and Days, when the writer warned against the dangers of society, a warning repeated in 1905: “All these compliments, all those greetings . . . we call deference, gratitude, devotion, and in which we mingle so many lies, are sterile and tiresome.” In Proust’s experience “these agitations of friendship come to an end at the threshold of that pure and calm friendship that reading is.” Friendship and social exchanges encourage not profound meditation but vanity—“we speak for others, but we keep silent for ourselves”—and snobbism, which Proust again condemned as “the greatest sterilizer of inspiration, the greatest deadener of originality, the greatest destroyer of talent.”35 Ruskin had presented reading as an end; Proust saw it as a means: “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” Reading, meditation, and creativity, the highest forms of activity, were possible only when one withdrew from the social whirl and plumbed the depths of one’s profound being. There were, of course, many obstacles to finding one’s true self. Among those Proust listed were an indolent mind, lack of will, diseases of the nervous system, and cases in which “a kind of laziness or frivolity prevents one from descending spontaneously into the deep regions of self where the true life of the mind begins.”36

Proust had begun to question the method of the distinguished French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in the preface, and in the notes he observed that “while Anatole France judges his contemporaries admirably well, one may say that Sainte-Beuve did not appreciate any of the great writers of his time.” He quoted Sainte-Beuve on the duty of the critic: “Everyone is able to pronounce on Racine and Bossuet. . . . But the sagacity of the judge, the perspicacity of the critic, is proved mostly with new works, not yet tested by the public. To judge at first sight, to divine, to anticipate, that is the gift of the critic. How few have it.”37 Proust later decided to prove that Sainte-Beuve had failed to meet the criteria he had set for himself and others. This detour by Sainte-Beuve’s way was to be the last of the circuitous routes that would lead the novelist to the right way, the way that lay beyond reading and translating, beyond polemics and parodies.

As he had in the preface to La Bible d’Amiens, Proust used the example of Montesquiou, again unnamed, for a fresh condemnation of idolatry, in this case books or words used as fetishes rather than as sources of enlightenment and inspiration: “Our contemporary idolater, to whom I have often compared Ruskin,... at times places as many as five epigraphs at the beginning” of a text.38 Ruskin, who had originally placed “five epigraphs . . . at the beginning of Sesame,” had done so, Proust believed, because he “delighted in worshipping a word in all the beautiful passages of the great writers where it appears.” A great writer, as opposed to those of a lesser order, like Montesquiou and Ruskin, would not make a fetish of words in themselves but would see them as a means to reach a larger purpose, the creation of a powerful new vision of the world.39

Proust ended the preface with an example of how reading can revive past impressions, a major Proustian preoccupation: “How many times, in The Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare, have I known that impression of having before me, inserted into the present actual hour, a little of the past, that dreamlike impression which one experiences in Venice on the Piazetta, before its two columns of gray and pink granite ... the columns ... reserving with all their slender impenetrability the inviolate place of the Past: of the Past familiarly risen in the midst of the present.”40

Proust’s preface “On Reading” concludes with this passage in which the past is restored “familiarly” to the present by those ancient Venetian columns.41 This resurrection of bygone days by means of a present sensation—here through books and monuments—is, of course, the basis for Proust’s famous theory of involuntary memory. In this and other texts Proust wrote over the next several years, he seemed to have gathered all the elements needed to launch his novel, to take the leap from reader to writer. Yet his lack of will and inspiration tormented him. And the thread. Would he ever find the thread? What was the story?

Anna de Noailles and other friends marveled at Proust’s essay on reading. She wrote immediately to express her admiration: “My dear friend, I only see people who are dazzled... touched... by the dear, divine pages you have written.” She told him that people were quoting extensively from his article and that she, André Beaunier, and Henri de Régnier had passed his preface back and forth, describing to each other his sentences that were like “adorable threads of silk.”42

Was he really a silkworm? He refused to believe it. Accustomed as he was to showering the most lavish compliments on his friends’ mediocre writings, he could not believe that their words were sincere. He answered by “beseeching” Anna to “stop being so nice . . . for I cannot bear it any longer; the burden of happiness, gratitude, emotion, stupefaction is too overwhelming and I might die of it. There is also the fear that the whole thing may be a joke, for nothing can penetrate the armour of my sadness, my conviction that all those pages are execrable, a sort of indigestible nougat which sticks between one’s teeth.” He professed to believe that she had always hated “everything I write.” He had wanted her “to read a few pages of this (infinitely worse written than what I used to do before being ill)”—a reference to his more subdued style in Pleasures and Days—“so that you could see that after all I did think a bit and wasn’t quite so sottish as people say.” Her words of praise had moved him so that he was “in a state of shame and confusion beyond words, enhanced by the Beaunier piece, which I strongly suspect you dictated.” Beaunier had hailed “M. Marcel Proust the incomparable translator of Ruskin,” whose preface the critic found “charming, moving and often marvelous.”43 Beaunier had taken particular delight in the style: “These long sentences, encumbered with all the details and circumstances, have a strange and delicious charm,” which came, Beaunier said, from their “meticulous truth.”44 Writing to Mme Straus, Proust worried that his “indigestible nougat” of an essay might be dangerous for his languid friend to read and urged her to avoid it: “Don’t read it, it’s a failed effort and horribly wearying to read, with sentences that take up an entire page” of the kind “that Dr. Wiedmer [Widmer] would particularly forbid you to read.”45

By the end of the month, consumed with self-doubt, Proust had written to Gregh inquiring whether his friend had read the essay in the Renaissance latine—if not, he would send him a copy—and asking him to evaluate his prose. He told Gregh that he had “unique confidence” in his friend’s taste and would like to know, in all frankness, how Gregh judged his writing, whether he had progressed or regressed since Pleasures and Days and the preface to La Bible d’Amiens. He even requested a “grade,” as though he were still writing compositions in school. “And, if it’s not asking too much, corrections in the margins.”46 Proust received no answer because Gregh misplaced the letter before reading it.

There were signs that his mother was not well, though she continued to hide her true condition. Marcel sensed that she might need medical attention, and on several occasions he urged her to consult Robert. Marcel knew that she was often unable to sleep, but she showed no other symptoms of being ill. He may have attributed her insomnia, and the resulting fatigue, to her deep mourning for his father. On Monday evening, June 19, believing that she was sleeping soundly, he left her a note: “My dear little Mama, it’s a boon for me, greater than that of having you near me, to sense that you are resting a little. Can I say that you are mending? Can normal sleep suffice to repair so many sleepless nights?”47

Writing to Louisa in midsummer, he confessed that he was miserable and felt his life sliding past. He must finally resolve the question of whether he could change the way he lived: “Shall I continue to the end of my days to lead a life that even invalids who are gravely ill don’t lead, deprived of everything, of the light of day, of air, of all work, of all pleasure, in a word of all life? Or am I going to find a way of changing? I can no longer postpone the answer, for it’s not only my youth but my life that’s going by.”48 By the end of the summer Proust showed major resolve in attempting to change his life.

On June 24, instead of going to bed after dawn, he stayed up in order to see the Whistler exhibition. He wrote Marie that he had braved “death” and almost met it when “at the hour of my bedtime, utterly exhausted, I took a cab and went to look at the Whistlers. It’s the sort of thing one wouldn’t do for a living person.” Although Blanche had expressed reservations about Whistler’s accomplishments, Marcel had none: “If the man who painted those Venices in turquoise, those Amsterdams in topaz, those Brittanies in opal . . . and above all the sails at night belonging to Messrs Vanderbilt and Freer . . . is not a great painter, one can only think there never was one.”49 He then turned to their collaboration and asked whether he could send to Marie in Manchester “my copy of Sésame, in which I’ve put crosses and underlinings wherever I was in doubt?” He assured her that his queries “never apply to more than one or two words at a time. Does this seem feasible to you?” As usual, Proust sought to make corrections after publication.

Marcel complained about new ailments, some of which were troubling. He confessed to his mother in late June that while at Larue’s he had, without paying attention, consumed “many cups of extremely strong coffee and become somewhat rabid!” He had begun the dangerous habit of alternating stimulants and depressants that was to continue the rest of his life. On more than one occasion he admitted that his memory had been “half destroyed” by the numerous drugs he took, whose effects he claimed made proofreading especially difficult for him.50 Another ailment came from severe eye strain. While hard at work translating Sesame and Lilies, writing the preface, and then correcting proofs, he complained that his eyes ached from the many hours spent under an electric bulb with no shade. Anyone else would have quickly obtained a shade to protect his eyes, but not Marcel, who seemed unable to deal with practical matters. In July he wrote Marie that his eyes hurt so much that he could not read his own words as he wrote. This was but one factor contributing to his nearly illegible writing (ant trails, according to Montesquiou), which plagued his friends, editors, and typesetters.

He still expressed doubts about his writing and sought advice from friends in whose literary talent and experience he had some confidence. Now that he had nearly developed his mature style, it frightened him. As adept as he was at recognizing the individual song of other writers, he did not recognize his own voice. Could such a style be applied to a novel or to any literary genre? He had hesitated, he told Dreyfus, to send him a copy of “On Reading” because he was “so disgusted with it” that he “no longer dared. I felt that you who know how to say so much in half a line would be exasperated by sentences that run to a hundred. Ah, how I should like to be able to write like Mme Straus! But I must perforce weave these long silken threads as I spin them, and if I shortened them the result would be little fragments rather than whole sentences. So that I remain like a silkworm and indeed live in the same temperature, or rather like an earthworm (‘in love with a star,’ that’s to say contemplating the unattainable perfection of Mme Straus’s concision).”51 If he had such reservations about his new style, how could he expect anyone else to like it? In any case, he had no ideas for stories, only for characters and scenes that haunted his imagination. He remained at an impasse.

On July 9, having learned that Yturri was gravely ill, he sent his mother to Neuilly to inquire about his condition. When she arrived, she learned that Yturri had died three days earlier. Jeanne returned home but dared not give Marcel the news immediately because she feared the shock would be too great. After she told him, later in the evening, Marcel wrote Montesquiou that he could not console himself for not having seen Yturri again. Then Marcel spoke about Yturri’s great affection for Montesquiou and his pride in the count’s many achievements. Montesquiou replied that Marcel’s words touched him more than those of his other friends, who spoke to him only about his grief rather than about Yturri and their mutual affection.

Marcel resolved to seek treatment for his own health problems. On July 28, when he attended the funeral of Guiche’s mother, the duchesse de Gramont, he took advantage of being out in the daytime to see Dr. Brissaud. Marcel described the doctor to Anna de Noailles as “more handsome and more charming than ever,” and just as reluctant to discuss medicine.52 Brissaud finally recommended Dr. Paul Sollier to him. Knowing that Anna had recently undergone similar treatment at Sollier’s sanatorium, Marcel wrote that he was eager to discuss the doctor and his clinic. Then he announced, “I am going to write a book about doctors.” In an August letter to Montesquiou he mentioned that he had been many times on the point of leaving Paris for a “comforting church” or an asylum, but had each time become too ill to undertake such an ordeal.53 Did Marcel fail to see the irony in this remark? Montesquiou must have smiled at his impossible friend’s notion of how to seek treatment.

In July or August, Marcel sent Antoine a letter that provided a list of all the noble families mentioned in Saint-Simon that were extinct, omitting those that Balzac had used. Proust was apparently providing information that Bibesco had requested, though to what purpose is unclear. Did Antoine have a new play in mind? Proust’s extensive list proves how well he knew Saint-Simon and Balzac. Whether inspired by Antoine or not, Proust made good use of this knowledge when he began writing the Search.

Louisa, who wanted to spend the summer on the Normandy coast, received these observations from Proust: “Trouville is extremely ugly, Deauville frightful, the countryside between Trouville and Villers uninteresting. But on the heights between Trouville and Honfleur is the most wonderful landscape you could possibly see, beautiful open country with superb sea views.” After providing more details, he explained his willingness to discuss the area: “I’m telling you all this because I’m in love with that idyllic region.”54 In August, Louisa mounted a horse and went for a ride in the hills overlooking Trouville. As she rode toward Trouville, the horse threw Louisa, who suffered several nasty contusions and a mild head injury. Marcel sent the shaken actress a get-well message, urging her to heal quickly her “beautiful bruised cheeks and if you have to go to Trouville, take the train!”55 In spite of his apparent flippancy, Proust knew that such accidents could be extremely dangerous and even deadly. Perhaps he remembered Louisa’s fall many years later when writing of Albertine, the girl who, having fascinated and tormented his jealous Narrator, dies after a fall from a horse.

On August 15, in Les Arts de la vie, Proust published a signed article on Montesquiou, the title of which indicated one of the count’s primary roles for those who knew him well: “Un Professeur de beauté.”56 Proust praised the count’s extraordinary gifts as an art critic and a writer, his command of the language, his knowledge of flowers and their depictions in literature and paintings, his keen perception of nuances in color and fabric, and the skill to make these distinctions vividly in his writings. Proust said that Montesquiou and Ruskin possessed the ability “to see and to know” more completely than any others. Although he had warned that such erudition could become a form of idolatry, its virtues, when used properly, more than compensated for the dangers. To illustrate Montesquiou’s expertise Proust quoted two of his remarks, one about a variety of pears, another about a particular shade of gray trousers the count called “Balzacian.” Proust later attributed both remarks to Charlus, who shared Montesquiou’s erudition.57

“Steeped in every sorrow”

On September 6 Marcel and his mother left for Évian, where they were to meet Mme Catusse. He had planned the trip in the anticipation that better days lay ahead for both of them. He hoped that the baths and rest by the lake would improve Jeanne’s health and that she would begin to recover from the period of intense mourning that had lasted nearly two years since his father’s death. He had at last made a major commitment to improve his own health. After accompanying her to Évian, he would cross the lake and enter a clinic, presumably that of Dr. Widmer, to whom Mme Straus had spoken about Marcel.

All Marcel’s plans began to fall apart soon after he and his mother checked in at the Splendide Hôtel. Jeanne become violently ill with nephritis, suffering severe nausea and dizziness. Apparently believing that stoicism and a brave face would pull her through this crisis, Jeanne insisted on dressing and going down to the hotel salon the next morning, though it took two people to keep her from falling. Marcel immediately telephoned Mme Catusse to inform her of his mother’s illness. Jeanne, feeling wretched and confused, tried to disguise her distress from Marcel. She could not decide whether to have her photograph taken; she wished, he later concluded, to leave her son a last image of herself, but she was afraid that she looked too sorrowful to be photographed.58

Although Mme Proust’s condition was pitiable, the serious nature of her illness was not confirmed at Évian. Both her sons were eager for her to return home and receive the excellent care available there. Robert rushed to Évian to bring his mother back to Paris. Mme Catusse went to the station with Marcel, Robert, and Jeanne, who was “dragged along” by them to the train.59 Marcel did not board with them because his mother insisted he stay and proceed with the treatment he had postponed for so long. Marcel agreed to wait at the Splendide for a telegram from Paris. If the news was good, he would go on to the clinic. The alternative was unthinkable. He wrote Marie Nordlinger to inform her of his mother’s condition and ended on an optimistic note: “I hope all this will vanish like a bad dream.”60

But the nightmare did not end. Marcel returned to Paris when his mother showed no signs of improvement. Her attitude bewildered him. He now knew that she had left for Évian very ill with uremia, had refused to have her urine analyzed once she had arrived, and had become even sicker. She was no more cooperative about accepting treatment in Paris. Robert called in Dr. Ladislas Landowski, a former student of Adrien’s, in whom he and Marcel had great confidence. But Mme Proust scarcely allowed the doctor to look at her. Marcel explained the predicament to Mme Straus: “Mama who loves us so much does not understand that it’s very cruel of her to refuse treatment.”61 Jeanne would not accept food or medication. Had she lost the will to live or had she decided that her condition was hopeless?

In addition to her servants, a nun who specialized in nursing came to look after Jeanne. Around September 23 Dr. Landowski informed Marcel and Robert that he thought he saw a slight improvement in their mother’s condition. Marcel was skeptical, convinced instead that his mother knew she was dying, which in turn caused her terrible mental anguish because she worried about how he would survive without her. But she remained so calm that he could not know “what she thought and what she suffered.”62 On Sunday, September 24, she began to suffer from the effects of the disease, experiencing paralysis and aphasia. The end came on Tuesday morning, around eleven o’clock. Mme Gustave Neuburger, “Aunt Laure,” was by Jeanne’s side when she died; Marcel waited in an adjoining room.

On September 27, Marcel wrote to Anna de Noailles and described his mother in death: “She has died at fifty-six, looking no more than thirty since her illness made her so much thinner and especially since death restored to her the youthfulness of the day before her sorrows; she hadn’t a single white hair. She takes away my life with her, as Papa had taken away hers.” Marcel explained that because his mother had not given up “her Jewish religion on marrying Papa, because she regarded it as a token of respect for her parents, there will be no church, simply at the house tomorrow Thursday at 12 o’clock . . . and the cemetery. . . . Today I have her still, dead but still receiving my caresses. And then I shall never have her again.”63 Reynaldo Hahn, whose memoirs are strangely reticent about his famous friend, recorded this scene of Marcel grieving by his mother’s body: “I still see him by Mme Proust’s bed, weeping and smiling through his tears at her body.”64

Jeanne Proust’s surprising rejuvenation in death inspired the description of the Narrator’s grandmother on her bier:

A face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which pain had carved on it over the years. As in the far-off days when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features, delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a dream of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.65

The funeral took place on Thursday, September 28. Marcel and Robert and their Uncle Georges Weil led the procession that followed the ambulance, barely visible beneath all the flowers, to Père-Lachaise, where Jeanne took her place beside the husband she had adored. A large crowd of friends from the medical community, government, business, high society, and the arts attended the ceremony, including Mme Félix Faure, Henri Bergson, Comte and Comtesse de Noailles, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, the marquis and marquise d’Albufera, Baron Robert de Rothschild, and Francis de Croisset. Reynaldo Hahn and Lucien Daudet, Marcel’s oldest and most intimate friends, understood better than any who followed the cortège the depth of Marcel’s grief.

After the funeral Marcel, who intended to fulfill what he regarded as his duty toward his mother, tried to find the best clinic near Paris for treatment. Through Anna de Noailles, he asked her husband to write to him about the merits of Drs. Sollier and Dubois and the comfort of their clinics. He was particularly eager to know whether Dr. Sollier, whose clinic was located on the outskirts of Paris, would agree to pay house calls. He urged Anna not to ask Sollier directly because he already had so many doctors on his list that he feared entanglements.

Now it was Montesquiou’s turn to console Marcel, certain to have been devastated by the worst possible loss he could suffer. Marcel thanked Montesquiou in solemn tones and described his grief: “My life has now forever lost its only purpose, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation. I have lost her whose unceasing vigilance brought me in peace and tenderness the only honey of my life.” Not only had he lost her, but he must live with the knowledge that he had been the source of his mother’s greatest anxiety: “I have been steeped in every sorrow, I have lost her, I have seen her suffer, I can well believe that she knew she was leaving me and yet could not give me instructions which it may have been agonizing for her to hold back; I have the feeling that because of my poor health I was the bane and the torment of her life.” And yet leaving him “must have been a very great torture for her too.” Proust told Montesquiou that the nun who had nursed Jeanne until the end said that for his mother “I was still four years old.”66

Two days after Jeanne’s funeral Charles Ephrussi died. He had been a central figure in the Parisian art world, particularly as the director of the distinguished Gazette des Beaux-Arts. His obituary mentioned his extensive knowledge of art, his essay on Albrecht Dürer, and his “magnificent collection.”67 Proust, who had liked and admired Ephrussi, was saddened by his death. In a few years, when he began creating Charles Swann, Proust used Ephrussi, perhaps unconsciously at first, as a model for certain aspects of this major character. Swann, like Ephrussi, is a Jew and an art connoisseur and collector. Unlike Ephrussi’s essay on Dürer, Swann’s study of Vermeer is never finished.

Although Marcel’s admiration for his mother was boundless, he knew that he was better equipped to deal with life than she had believed. He understood, if he did not yet see it clearly, that he and she had lived in a cycle of mutual dependency— that, if he had been unable to break free, she, too, had been incapable of controlling the great maternal affection that so often spoiled and indulged him. Marcel, who had never known any other life, who had never wanted any other life, was now truly alone. In the questionnaire he had filled out at age thirteen, he had answered that his idea of misery was “to be separated from my mother.”68 That honest, simple answer held true for the rest of his life.

Marcel finally selected Dr. Jules Déjerine’s clinic for nervous disorders and reserved a room for three months. On the day in early December when he was to enter the clinic, Marcel hesitated. He contacted Mme Straus for advice and asked her to send Dr. Sollier to see him at home. Marcel still hoped that Sollier might treat him there. The doctor arrived and succeeded in persuading the patient to leave immediately for his clinic for nervous disorders, located just outside Paris at Boulogne-sur-Seine. Given his state of near collapse and unprecedented grief, Marcel dreaded the prospect of the treatment, which called for being kept in isolation in strange quarters.

Once at the clinic Proust was forbidden to write letters, instructions he ignored when he wished or used as an excuse when convenient. Sometimes he compromised by dictating. Marcel’s friends followed his treatment and hoped that its success would enable him to lead a normal life. Hahn wrote Montesquiou that he had heard good reports about Marcel’s progress. It is unlikely that these reports came directly from Marcel, who did not share Reynaldo’s optimism. Marcel invited Robert de Billy, soon to leave for an international conference, to visit him at the sanatorium and confided that, rather than improving, his condition was rapidly worsening, but that he “still wanted to extend the trial. Of course, don’t tell Dr. Sollier that I am not happy! Because he is charming.” In the postscript he also asked Billy not to tell any of their friends that Marcel had written him personally. “For the others I dictate.”69 Marcel’s confidence in Dr. Sollier was not enhanced when the physician remarked, rather smugly, about Bergson, “What a confused and limited mind.”70 Marcel became increasingly skeptical about modern treatments of nervous disorders; ultimately he had little or no faith in medicine, but if forced to choose, he preferred traditional medicine to treatments like Sollier’s. The stay at Sollier’s sanatorium confirmed the opinion he had expressed to Anna de Noailles before entering for treatment: “The ideal doctor according to my tastes,” he wrote Anna, “is the one at the cathedral of Reims” who is seen examining a vial of urine.71

While Proust languished in Sollier’s clinic, the legislature, on December 11, passed the law establishing the separation of church and state. Marcel spent a somber and ascetic holiday season.

A few of Proust’s closest friends visited him at the clinic, frustrating Sollier’s attempt to isolate the patient. Hahn and Albu stopped by whenever they could, and Robert de Billy found time to visit before leaving to represent France at the Algesiras Conference on Morocco. Lucien came to see him twice, though he seemed to be in a bad mood and said so many “disagreeable things” that Marcel wondered why he had bothered to come.72

102, boulevard Haussmann

Marcel’s isolation was also broken by an important business matter. On January 11 his brother Robert, accompanied by a lawyer, came to the clinic to sign the papers relating to their mother’s will. Each brother received half of the family fortune. After expenses, Marcel’s share came to 1,204,155 francs in capital, plus a quarter share in ownership of the boulevard Haussmann building, a share evaluated at 142,029 francs. Proust’s total fortune in late-twentieth-century currency would be approximately 23 million francs ($4.6 million), capable of earning, in today’s money, a monthly income of $16,000.73 Proust was a wealthy man, but his attitude about money remained unrealistic. He always thought his fortune was small and feared that he would never earn enough money to support himself. Yet this conservative outlook was to have no restraining influence on the tastes he developed for gambling and wild speculations on the stock market.

On January 24 or 25 Proust, feeling no better than when he had arrived and more skeptical than ever about psychotherapeutic treatment, left Dr. Sollier’s clinic and returned home to 45, rue de Courcelles. He had at least fulfilled one of his mother’s wishes, even though she would have been discouraged by the outcome. Proust was more convinced than ever that he was incurable. During the coming months Dr. Sollier saw him at home at least once, and Dr. Bize, in whom Proust seemed to have more confidence, saw him whenever the writer requested consultation.

In February, when Maurice Barrès was elected to the Académie française, Marcel sent congratulations. Later in the month, he wrote to thank Barrès for sending a copy of his book Voyage de Sparte. Proust paid the new “immortal” some compliments on his prose and then made some critical observations about sections of the book where he believed Barrès had become bored with his subject. Proust stated this belief regarding an artist’s work: “If I am convinced of one thing it’s that . . . enthusiasm is, for the artist as for the reader, the criterion of beauty, of genius, of truth.”74

Albufera had been encouraged not long before when Marcel, “although not doing marvelously well,” began to see his friends every day between 5 and 10 P.M. Marcel wrote Mme Catusse that he missed her, saying that his affection for her had increased, “if that were possible, since his mother’s death.” After returning from the clinic, he had been “so fantastically sick” that it had not been “physically possible” to see her. If she were willing to stop by between 5:30 and 7, however, perhaps she would find him up. He warned her that he would be dressed in flannels, for he could rarely tolerate clothes that fit.75

Reynaldo was acquiring an international reputation as a conductor, particularly of works by Mozart. In the spring he organized and conducted a Mozart festival in Paris that was a great success. He had accepted an invitation to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for two performances of Don Giovanni at the Salzburg Festival in August. Although Reynaldo remained Marcel’s most frequent and devoted visitor, his schedule was becoming that of an international star performer. In the fall he sent Marcel a postcard from Venice, where he had sung from a gondola to a large crowd gathered on the piazza.

By summer Marcel had resumed his “bad hours,” rising only after dinnertime, usually around ten P.M. His lack of fresh air and adequate nourishment made him weak and anemic. Proust’s spirits received something of a boost when Sésame et les lys was published on June 2. As with La Bible d’Amiens, Proust’s own contribution was substantial: in addition to his fifty-nine-page preface, he had added nearly two hundred original notes.76 Proust immediately began to inscribe and mail copies to friends. He was so unhappy with the way the Mercure had handled the task with La Bible d’Amiens that this time he did the work himself. He complained to Lucien that he was “exhausted” from having spent the last few days doing “a grocer’s job... with balls of string, wrapping paper and volumes of Tout-Paris,” the definitive address book of the Paris elite.77 He did not learn until December that the copy he had addressed to Marie Nordlinger in America had been lost in the mail. He sent a copy to his friend and former professor Paul Desjardins, who seemed likely to appreciate Ruskin’s Christian-based social reforming zeal, but Desjardins refused to read any of the books Proust sent him because he “abhorred society people,” among whom Desjardins numbered Marcel.78

Upon receiving Lucien’s acknowledgment of the book, Marcel thanked him “with all my heart for everything you say about Mama. She is absent from this preface, and I even replaced the word ‘My mother,’ which was in any case fictitious and didn’t apply to her, by ‘my aunt’ so that there should be no mention of her in anything I write until I’ve finished something I’ve begun which is exclusively about her. It’s terrifying how my grief has been transformed in the past few months, it’s even more painful now.”79 The remarks about “my mother” and “my aunt” show a conscious transposition into fiction of his recollections of family life at Illiers and Auteuil. It also raises the question: What was the unfinished piece that was exclusively about his mother? Did he finish and discard it? Or was it evolving into the drafts of Contre Sainte-Beuve, the final jumping off point for the Search?

In a March letter to Lucien, Marcel predicted he would die an early death: “I believe my illness will not last indefinitely, mon cher petit, and I will finally join my dear little Mama.”80 It is possible that his determination to write something lasting about his mother gave him a reason to live—at least until he had finished a memorial to her. According to Maurice Duplay, Marcel told him years later that he had considered suicide after his mother’s death. He decided against taking his life because he did not want to be listed as a suicide in the newspapers. Instead, he thought of letting himself waste away by not eating and sleeping—a solution that would require only a slight adjustment to his usual regimen. But then he realized that if he allowed himself to die, the memory he had kept of her “would disappear with him . . . and I would take her away in a second and definitive death and be committing a kind of patricide.”81

The response Proust received for Sésame et les lys should have sufficed to encourage any writer. At first, he responded with delight at the reviews, especially those in the Figaro. On June 5 he wrote Gaston to express his “great pleasure” over that day’s notice by André Beaunier, who described Marcel as “one of our most delicate, most subtle writers” and praised the quality of the translation.82 On June 14 Beaunier wrote another article for the Figaro’s front page on Proust’s book, calling it “the model of a well-done translation, a masterpiece of intelligent docility, an astonishing success.”83 Beaunier made what was apparently the first comparison of Proust’s manner and style to that of Michel de Montaigne: “Proust reads Ruskin in somewhat the same way that Montaigne read Plutarch: he ‘essays’ his own ideas by bringing them into contact with those of another.” Such a method, Beaunier noted, allowed Proust to see clearly his own beliefs. “It’s the game of a delicate moralist, irresolute because he has a fine mind (l’esprit de finesse) and sees the diverse aspect of things.”84

Was he then to become Montaigne’s successor? Was this to be his genre, Proust the essayist, capable perhaps of matching the distinguished inventor of the genre? Proust remained unconvinced of the suitability of this “voice.” Writing to Robert Dreyfus, who had also been “enchanted” by his book, Marcel expressed the opinion “that I write so much worse than during the era of Pleasures and Days.85 It was true that translation had increased his already impressive knowledge of words and their nuances; he had developed a style that, as he and others saw later, was extraordinarily supple and complex while remaining lucid and remarkably light. But his range had been far too narrow and lacked originality; how could he, at age thirty-five, be content with the modest reputation of a Ruskin specialist?

If Proust was not puffed up with pride from all the praise he was receiving, he did want his book to sell and his friends to take note of his accomplishment. He was astounded to learn how many of them, all regular readers of the Figaro, claimed not to have seen any of the articles. This confirmed his theory that no one read. In a letter to Lucien, Proust mentioned the long article by Beaunier. Lucien replied: “I saw neither the notice nor the article you mention.”86 Proust listed for Dreyfus those among his closest friends, all daily readers of the Figaro, who had not seen the piece: Reynaldo, Lucien, and Albufera. Albu, “whose whole family subscribes to the Figaro and who takes it himself, wrote to me to say how strange it was as I knew Calmette that the Figaro hadn’t mentioned Sésame. And when I said that on the contrary they’d talked about it too much, he said to me: “You must be mistaken, because my wife reads Le Figaro from beginning to end every morning and there was absolutely nothing about you.”87 Sésame et les lys did sell well; before the end of the year, it was in its fourth printing.88

Such diversions as favorable reviews and the success of his translation did nothing to lighten Proust’s mourning. When he was awake his conscious thoughts were directed toward his mother, and when he slumbered she was always present. Marcel wrote Lucien that because he took his sleep in intervals, he dreamed about her several times a day. “But almost invariably she is so sick and so sad that I feel infinite pain.”89

In June, Robert Proust, who was rapidly becoming a distinguished surgeon, left for America. During his journey he visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, then represented the Université de Paris at an international medical meeting in Trois-Rivières, Québec. He remained in America until July 20.

Meanwhile, in the week before Robert’s return, Proust and many of his countrymen watched the official dénouement of a national drama that summer. The Dreyfus Affair, which had begun so many years before, came to an official end. Those who had defended Dreyfus were at last fully vindicated. Anna de Noailles attended the session at the Chamber of Deputies on July 14, Bastille Day, a session she found “infinitely moving.”90 On Saturday, July 21, at the École militaire in Paris, France bestowed the cross of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur on the newly promoted Major Alfred Dreyfus. At the same time, Colonel Picquart, the officer who, at tremendous personal cost and risk, had defended Dreyfus, was reinstated and promoted. Marcel read the newspaper accounts of the ceremony with tears in his eyes.91 That evening he wrote to Mme Straus and, pensive over the resolution of the affair, drew a parallel to fiction:

It’s odd to think that life—which is so unlike fiction—for once resembles it. Alas, in these last ten years we’ve all had many a sorrow, many a disappointment, many a torment in our lives. And for none of us will the hour ever strike when our sorrows will be changed into exultations, our disappointments into unhoped-for fulfillments, and our torments into delectable triumphs. I shall get more and more ill, I shall miss those I’ve lost more and more, everything I aspired to in life will be more and more inaccessible to me. But for Dreyfus and Picquart it is not so. Life for them has been “providential,” after the fashion of fairy tales and serial stories. This is because our miseries were founded on truths, physiological truths, human and emotional truths. Their misfortunes were founded on errors. Blessed are those who are victims of error, judicial or otherwise! They are the only human beings for whom there is redress and reparation.92

In the same letter to Mme Straus, Marcel began to make inquiries about renting a house for the month of August on the Normandy coast, where a number of his friends would be staying in rented villas near Trouville. Now that his mother was no longer living, he turned to Mme Straus and other friends for advice and assistance. As usual, Marcel’s needs and instructions were endlessly complicated: the dwelling must be well constructed, not damp, not dusty, in the modern style and bare, not suffocating behind houses but either on the beach or on a hill, and costing no more than one thousand francs for the month of August. If such a structure could be found, he would take it—“perhaps.”93 Thus began a series of letters to friends he enlisted in the quest for a villa. Meanwhile, Proust, who often remained paralyzed by indecision, traveled vicariously by reading a “frightful” number of train schedules and travel brochures between “two and six in the morning on my chaise longue.”94

At the end of July, Marcel wrote Mme Straus and expressed concern about his uncle’s rapidly declining health. Georges Weil was slowly dying of the disease that had killed his sister: uremia. After that disturbing news, Proust resumed his endless volley of questions about seaside villas, for which he apologized: “Forgive me for bothering you and for asking you to provide the means of bothering you in person.”95 Proust accepted an invitation to share a villa with Albu and his wife. Did Albu intend to use Marcel as an excuse to be near Louisa, already on holiday near Cabourg with the man who had recently become her protector, Robert Gangnat? Proust’s plans to vacation with Albu fell through in late July when the marquis’s father-in-law, Prince Eugène Murat, was killed in an automobile accident in Germany. Marcel, whose doctors were pressing him to escape the lugubrious atmosphere of the apartment where he had seen both his parents die, resumed his appeals to Mme Straus to help him find the ideal villa. In August she pleaded exhaustion, and Marcel, accepting the blame for her fatigue, abandoned the idea of vacationing on the Normandy coast.

In anticipation of going to Normandy or Brittany, Proust had sent the art historian Émile Mâle a copy of “La Mort des cathédrales.” Although it was difficult for him to travel, he wrote that a word from Mâle about recommended sights of architectural or natural beauty would be enough to set him dreaming. Proust admitted that he generally found Romanesque architecture the most moving, but he believed from an article he had read that Mâle preferred the Gothic. Mâle suggested that Normandy would be best for a convalescent, because its medieval towns, like Bayeux and Caen, were not far apart and there were many convenient trains. This too would have to wait.

On August 6 Proust suddenly decided to leave for Versailles, where he settled in a “vast and splendid apartment” at the Hôtel des Réservoirs and immediately became ill. He feared going farther away than Versailles because of his uncle’s condition. The Hôtel des Réservoirs, which Proust described as “gloomy, dark and cold,” despite its sumptuous furnishings, had been the residence of Mme de Pompadour.96 Reynaldo, who sometimes retreated to the hotel to compose, may have suggested it to Proust. Because Marcel had not booked in advance, he had to suffer the inconvenience of switching apartments several times during his five-month stay to accommodate arriving guests with long-standing reservations. While at Versailles, Marcel occasionally invited friends to dinner. He particularly enjoyed the company of the playwright René Peter, who lived in Versailles six months out of the year. When Hahn, Lauris, or Billy passed through Paris, normally empty in August, they often made the short trip out to Versailles to visit their reclusive friend.

On August 22 Proust received word that Uncle Georges’s condition had become critical. He threw a fur coat over his nightshirt and took the train to Paris. When he arrived at the Weil home, it was too late to say good-bye; his uncle did not recognize him. Proust began to have a severe asthma attack and decided to return to Versailles immediately. On reaching the train station, he was so weak that he could not continue. Finally, after a difficult two hours, during which he consumed strong doses of coffee, he was able to board a train. During his distress, he was befriended by a kind railway worker whose name he forgot to ask. When Marcel arrived in Versailles, he learned that his uncle had died. The trip to Paris left Marcel so weak that it was impossible for him to attend the funeral.

In September, Proust suggested to René Peter that they collaborate on a play. Marcel described the proposed plot in a letter to Reynaldo: The main characters are a married couple who adore each other. On the surface, everything is perfect. The husband, however, has a hidden vice: He is sadistic and hires prostitutes, telling them horrible lies about his wife and instructing them to abuse her similarly. Five minutes later, he is heartbroken over what he has done. One day his wife surprises him during such a session; shocked and incredulous, she faints. She leaves her husband, who attempts to win her back. When she refuses, he kills himself. Proust had long been interested in such characters. He had sketched a sadist in “L’Inconnu,” one of the earliest drafts of Jean Santeuil.97 A character caught in a compromising position that is humiliating for a beloved family member was also the theme in “La Confession d’une jeune fille.” The project of writing a play with René never came to fruition, apparently because Marcel lacked the energy. Ultimately, this theme of “profanation” led Proust to create Mile Vinteuil, whose lesbian love affair involves a ritual in which she profanes her father’s photograph. Her scandalous behavior causes Vinteuil to die of sorrow and shame.

Proust’s lease on the rue de Courcelles apartment was to expire on September 30. He did not wish to renew it because the apartment was too big and too expensive for him, and he considered it a “cemetery,” having seen both his parents die there.98 Proust hired two apartment rental agencies and charged his friends, especially Robert de Billy, René Peter, and Georges de Lauris, to look at some likely apartments. He and his brother now each owned a quarter-share of the building at 102, boulevard Haussmann; the other half-share had been inherited by Amélie, Uncle Georges’s widow. Although it had been fifteen years since Marcel had seen the apartment, it held considerable appeal for him—despite its location in a noisy, dusty neighborhood—because it was a dwelling his mother had known. Proust asked his friends to compare each apartment under consideration to boulevard Haussmann. He wanted them to tell him how new each apartment was, its degree of “comfort, dust, silence.” Was there an elevator? Common sense told him that a new apartment would be more convenient and contain less dust.

To no one’s surprise, Proust chose 102, boulevard Haussmann. He told Mme Catusse that he remembered the apartment “as the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, the triumph of the bourgeois bad taste of a period still too close to be inoffensive! It isn’t even old-fashioned in the charming sense of the word.” Still, he was sure that she would understand the “tender and melancholy attraction” that had drawn him back to it, despite his “even greater horror of the neighbourhood, the dust, the Gare Saint-Lazare, and so many other things.”99 He had written to Mme Straus along similar lines, describing the apartment as “an interim arrangement.” “I’ve sub-rented an apartment... where Mama and I often came to dine, and where together we saw our old uncle die in the room I shall occupy. Of course I shall be spared nothing—frightful dust, trees under my window, the noise of the boulevard between the Printemps and Saint-Augustin! If I can’t stand it I shall leave.”100 The incessant noise was caused by, among other things, streetcars and other modes of transportation, some still horse-drawn, over the cobblestone streets.

Now that Proust had decided to move to a new apartment, he had to furnish it. He began a complicated series of letters to Mme Catusse, whom he had asked to advise him and help select furniture from the rue de Courcelles. In the coming months he would review with her, in a flood of mail, the furnishing of each room in his parents’ apartment, as he consulted her about which pieces to keep and how to decorate his rooms at boulevard Haussmann. Proust later told Mme Catusse that after their mother’s death he had wanted to take a small apartment that rented for 1,500 francs, but Robert’s refusal to take any of the furniture had forced him to look for larger and more expensive apartments. Marcel had let Robert know how much his refusal annoyed him; Robert replied that Marcel had only to sell what he did not need.

Proust soon complained to Lauris that his “housing problems” were growing “more and more complicated.” He had never had to deal with so many practical matters at once and on his own: “I have to write to the architect, the manager, the second-floor tenant, my brother and my aunt as the owners, the concierge, the telephone company, the upholsterer, etc. I must leave you for these graceless tasks.”101 A few days later he wrote to Georges again and listed a number of things that demanded his attention, including a lawsuit he was threatening to bring against the tenant from whom he had sublet the Haussmann apartment.

By the end of October, when the work he was having done in the new apartment was completed and Marcel thought that he was ready to move in, his brother and aunt had the “singular idea” of renting to Dr. Émile Gagey the lower apartment, which would require renovations. Proust decided to remain at Versailles, though he complained to his friends about the extra expense of staying at the hotel—it was cold and damp, and none of the doors and windows shut properly— while paying rent in Paris.102

Marcel postponed moving because of the new work on the house and his indecision regarding which pieces of furniture he should keep. Decisions that affected his health were quickly made. There were to be no tapestries in his bedroom, and the carpets and rugs there were not to be nailed down, so that they could be removed frequently and easily beaten. In late October he told Mme Catusse to begin by decorating his bedroom and the small living room. If work on the rest of the rooms was still in progress when he moved in, it would have to cease until he became accustomed to the new apartment. In any case, all work would have to be suspended when he arrived so that his lungs could adapt to the new apartment. His first encounter with new rooms, he informed her, always caused him to be “completely asphyxiated.” He wanted her to know that he was still attempting to persuade Robert to take some furniture, but all his brother would say on the subject was “It’s all the same to me, anything you do will be fine. The excess can be stored.” So Mme Catusse was to take all the furniture he had room for, “selected from the best.” Lest she think him “selfish” for taking the best pieces, he assured her that the brothers had an understanding whereby Robert would be compensated. Then, thinking about what to keep, he declared that he wanted no portraits in his room. He considered and rejected his mother’s 1880 portrait in oil by Mme Beauvais because he had never found it very lifelike; now that the portrait’s “vague resemblance had been made more precise” by his mother’s rejuvenation in death, Marcel feared that its presence in his room would only cause him pain.103

At some point during the protracted furniture deliberations Marcel’s sister-in-law Marthe complained that Robert had given carte blanche to his bizarre brother, who seemed to want all the best pieces. Although she never dared confront Marcel directly, remarks made by Robert and Mme Catusse allowed him to guess her displeasure and her eagerness to be involved in the decisions. Marcel would have none of this; he insisted on dealing exclusively with Robert. Marthe was to have only the piece of furniture—one he knew she coveted—that he intended to give her as a New Year’s gift. This piece was one of several with exceptionally fine marquetry that had been gifts to Marcel from his mother. Marcel intended to give another of these to his cousin Valentine Thomson. He warned Mme Catusse about Marthe’s possible intervention: “If Robert were to offer my sister-in-law’s assistance in arranging the apartment (but he will certainly not!), refuse it!”104

During the first week of November, Robert and Marthe were distressed to learn that their three-year-old daughter Adrienne had diphtheria. Although the child never showed signs of being in grave danger, the disease was cause for real concern. Marcel reassured Mme Catusse that she should not worry about catching the disease through contact with the furniture. Meanwhile, decisions about the furnishings were being made. Robert agreed to take “Papa’s fine desk” and the superb portrait by Lecomte de Nouy of Dr. Proust in his academic robes. Marcel could not bear to part with the old desk in the “smoking” room that his mother had “always seen at her grandparents’.” He would keep it or give it to Félicie, at whose home he could go and see it from time to time. He spoke of the desk as “a very ugly old friend but one who knew so well everything I most loved.” He would also keep all the photographs in order to make a selection later, because he wanted to have with him “my grandparents and even their parents, whom I did not know, but whom Mama loved.” Proust found it nearly impossible to part with any object that reminded him of his mother.

In early December, Marcel informed Mme Catusse that he planned to keep everything in the drawing room, even the grand piano, for he still intended to have it adapted to function as a player piano.105 Soon Marcel wrote Mme Catusse again, expressing his nagging frustration over Robert’s reluctance to select furniture. He wanted her to know that Robert did not approve of Marthe’s displays of bad humor. Marthe, Marcel observed, was “very nice” despite moments of ill temper, which he ascribed to her health. This remark made him pause to assess his own behavior and admit that it was far from perfect: “It’s true that my faithful old Félicie maintains that I am, without being aware of it, as disagreeable as anyone could possibly be.”106

Toward the end of November, Marcel asked Georges whether he owned copies (in French translation) of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure that he might be willing to lend. If not, he asked Lauris to have them sent from Mme Paul Émile’s bookshop in the faubourg Saint-Honoré. In the postscript, he added a request for Gabriel Mourey’s Gainsborough, “which I badly need.” In his sudden move to Versailles, Proust had lost the copy he was to review for the Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, and he was way beyond his deadline.

In spite of his depressed state and wretched health, Marcel knew moments of élan and good humor during his Versailles stay. Such twinklings were usually expressed in letters to Reynaldo, to whom Marcel sent a half-dozen or so poems-including one of twenty-two lines, all rhyming in “-ac,” a sonnet, an energetic comic poem about streetcar stock investments, and another of twenty-eight lines just to request an address.107 Although he rarely left his apartment, he sometimes descended to the ground floor and watched René Peter and other friends challenge proprietor Henri Grossœuvre to a game of billiards.

Proust was delighted to hear finally from Marie Nordlinger and answered immediately: “Dear, dear, dear, dear Mary!” He told her about the copy of Sésame et les lys he had attempted to send to her in America. He explained that if she had not yet received any royalties for Sésame, it was because the Mercure would not pay royalties until more copies had been sold. He offered to send her an advance, assuring her that “nothing could be easier. . . . Alas, I no longer have to answer to anyone for the use I make of my money.” Then he asked whether she was working and indicated that his own lassitude and discouragement had brought him to a halt: “I’ve closed forever the era of translations, which Mama encouraged. And as for translations of myself, I no longer have the heart.”108

The brave, patient Mme Catusse must have been relieved when she received Marcel’s letter of December 10, saying that he wanted to have as “little furniture as possible, while still having a lot. So keep only the best, what is really of some quality. The rest can wait in a repository.” He expressed his pleasure that Robert had selected a desk that had been in storage since the days of the boulevard Malesherbes apartment. As for his own desk, he would take the one that had belonged to Uncle Louis, though he wondered why he would need a desk if he were no longer able to work.

During Proust’s stay at Versailles, Albu asked him to try and persuade Louisa to behave in a responsible manner. Louisa, while vacationing at Trouville, had rewarded Albufera’s appearance by sending Gangnat away to visit friends nearby. Albufera apparently approved of her being kept by Gangnat and did not want Louisa to spoil the arrangement. Instead, she threw away the money both her protectors gave her and attempted to obtain more. Louisa refused to stop flirting—and who knows what else—with other men, and when she bought an ermine coat that cost twelve thousand francs, Gangnat had had enough. He felt that she was making a fool of him in front of his friends, who had witnessed her flirtations and knew that he could not afford such a coat. Gangnat threatened to leave Louisa, which upset everyone except the actress. Her mother and Albufera consulted with Marcel, who agreed to intervene.

Responding to Albufera’s plea for help, Marcel had René Peter, a tactful and sensitive person and, as a playwright, someone Louisa should want to impress, bring her out to Versailles for a visit. The following day, to thank her for having gone to the trouble and made the “sacrifice” of coming to see him without wearing her perfume, Marcel sent her an immense bouquet of roses.109 Later in December, Marcel wrote to Hahn and asked him to invite Louisa to dinner with Gangnat and seek to restore harmony.

When Reynaldo visited Proust, he usually brought books with him. Among those he had recently given Marcel was the novel Le Chevalier d’Harmental by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Marquet. The hero, while waiting in Paris for a message from fellow conspirators, sees a girl from the window and falls in love with her. What may have caught Proust’s attention was the name of the street where this took place, la rue du Temps-Perdu (the street of lost time). In seclusion at Versailles, Proust, consumed with grief and nostalgia, may have been particularly sensitive to this name.110

By mid-December the choices for boulevard Haussmann had been made. The portrait of his mother would go in the drawing room, where he could see it when he wished but not too often. He had found another portrait of his father, by a M. Brouardel, that he would also place there. In the smaller salon he would hang his own portrait by Blanche. Perhaps it recalled for him those happier days when he had written the stories and poems for Pleasures and Days and he dreamed of a bright future. In his own room there were to be no paintings. Mme Catusse decided to give him for his bedroom the furnishings of the blue room that had been his mother’s. He agreed, saying, “It will be very painful for me.” He described for Mme Catusse the cloistered life he had led at the Hôtel des Réservoirs: “Would you believe that except for the first few days when I saw the last rays of the sun from my bed, I have never woken up before nightfall and I know nothing of the charms of the season or the hour. I’ve spent four months in Versailles as though in a telephone kiosk without being the least aware of my surroundings.”111

Suddenly, on December 27, Proust, in a “fantastic state,” sick with fever and asthma, decided to leave Versailles. He felt so much worse that he feared he might have to take to bed indefinitely, and if so, he would prefer to be in Paris.112 His unanticipated arrival at 102, boulevard Haussmann surprised concierge Antoine Bertholhomme and Proust’s manservant Jean Blanc, who were completely unprepared for a lodger with so many special requirements. In the first days he lacked many necessities. In the letter to Mme Catusse, informing her of his arrival, he mentioned having bought some “little things” at Versailles that he hoped she would accept as a gift. He was, he told her, in “ecstasy” over the “genius” that had inspired her decisions about decorating the apartment; some of the forgotten pieces of furniture from boulevard Malesherbes that she had “exhumed” had “released a symphony” of memories.113

He swore Mme Catusse to secrecy about his arrival in Paris. His terrible state required that he not be disturbed by any well-intentioned friends, other than the few he chose to inform himself. As soon as he moved in he began to complain about the noise made by the workers renovating Dr. Gagey’s apartment. At least a month’s work remained to be done, and the lost sleep was certain to aggravate his asthma. Still profoundly saddened by the death of his parents, sick, discouraged, and at a loss about what to do with himself, Proust intended to remain in seclusion. Marcel was no longer the same person who had set out with his mother on the train journey to Évian in September 1905, a journey that was to have culminated with his undergoing treatment at the clinic in Switzerland. Many years later, he told Céleste Albaret: “I loved my father very much. But the day my mother died, she took her little Marcel with her.”114