ON JANUARY 13, 1910, Proust learned that Mme Arman de Caillavet had died at age sixty-six. Along with a huge wreath, Proust sent four sympathy letters to her son Gaston, his wife Jeanne, their sixteen-year-old daughter Simone, and Anatole France. In his letter to Gaston, Proust evoked memories of twenty years earlier, when they had become friends at the salon of Mme Arman, whom “no one loved more, admired more, and knew . . . better than I.”1 In the letter to Jeanne, Marcel asked her not to tell Gaston that he was ignoring his advice and drugging himself in order to attend the noonday funeral. He also told her that he was writing a “long novel” that he would have been eager to show Mme Arman.2
Mme Arman’s death had made Anatole France, also sixty-six years old, despondent. He wrote Marcel that he no longer wished to live.3 France’s despair, as Proust soon learned, was not caused solely by grief. A year earlier, during a long voyage to South America, France had begun an affair with the actress Jeanne Brindeau. His infidelity had so upset Mme de Caillavet that she considered suicide, going so far as to consult a friend who had attempted to kill herself with a firearm. In late August, when France returned from his voyage and found Mme Arman gravely ill, he immediately broke with the actress. Five months later Mme Arman died.
Proust’s grief over Mme Arman’s death initiated an exchange of letters with Jeanne de Caillavet and Simone, who was the same age that her mother had been when Marcel had been infatuated with her. Writing to Simone, Proust requested her photograph, as he had her mother’s so long ago without success. He explained to Simone the importance photographs held for him: “I shall think of you even without a photograph but my memory, exhausted by drugs, is so feeble that photographs are invaluable to me. I keep them as reminders and don’t look at them too often so as not to exhaust their potency. When I was in love with your Mama I went to fantastic lengths in order to get her photograph from some people in Périgord with whom I made friends only in order to try to get hold of that photograph.”4 This photograph showed Marcel kneeling at Jeanne’s feet and strumming a tennis racquet as though serenading the vivacious girl.
Marcel soon received a packet from Jeanne. To his delight, it contained a number of photographs, among them the long-coveted picture taken at the Neuilly tennis court. Jeanne, who had been made miserable by Gaston’s many infidelities, may have taken some satisfaction in gratifying the wish of a suitor who had made her husband jealous. As for Marcel, he was grateful and touched: “What emotion! What sweet joy mingled with such a sad sentiment! How many years of my life are brought together in the dear envelope.” Opening the package had made him tremble, but then he had realized that so many things had changed since the day the photograph was taken that it could no longer affect him as it would have when he was young and in love with Jeanne Pouquet. At the end of the letter thanking her, he referred obliquely to the rumor he had heard about the profound unhappiness Mme Arman had suffered in her final months, which only increased his grief.5
Paris suffered its worst flood in modern times on January 21, as the Seine overflowed its banks and kept rising. The Figaro reported that the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was not far from Proust’s home, was inundated by water from a broken drain as well as from the flooding river. By January 29 the water, still rising by a centimeter an hour, overflowed the lake that had formed on the west side of the train station and turned boulevard Haussmann into a rushing river. Marcel, writing to Simone, said that he would answer her mother’s letter, although he would “probably have drowned in the meantime.”6 Much of central Paris remained closed to traffic until February 2, when the waters receded. Clocks and elevators that depended on forced air stopped working, as did the pneumatic mail service. Many buildings were without gas and electricity. At the Comédie-Française the curtain remained up and actors performed on a stage lit by acetylene.
On Sunday, February 13, Proust must have felt an even closer kinship with Noah when he emerged from his apartment to attend the gala dress rehearsal at the Opéra of Reynaldo’s new ballet La Fête chez Thérèse. The performance was being given as a benefit for flood victims. Proust described Hahn’s work to Lauris as a “delicious thing,” predicting that if the other performances matched the première,—during which spectators had frequently shouted “Bravo!”—the ballet would enjoy a grand success.7
The flood had serious consequences for Marcel, as he explained to Lauris in mid-February, when his basement was still soaked. Although he dared not complain, given the great misfortunes suffered by all, the methods used to dry out and disinfect the building provoked unremitting asthma attacks. And of course there was a substantial amount of renovating to be done in the basement, where workmen had already begun ripping out the soaked floorboards. Later the boards were replaced, as were those in the nearby shops, the elevator, and so on. Proust wrote Montesquiou that the hammer blows and all the extraordinary noise caused by the endless renovations required him to take daily doses of “Veronal and opium, etc., and since I have some albumin, that brings on a thousand ills.”8
In April, Proust was asked to intervene again in the Louisa-Albu-Gangnat triangle. A new crisis erupted when Gangnat accused Louisa of having an affair with a “well-known” artist, whose wife, claiming to have proof of the liaison, demanded a divorce. This affair set off a flurry of telegrams. Apparently, Gangnat contacted Albu to inform him of the situation. Marcel and Albufera feared that Gangnat would finally abandon Louisa, as he had threatened to do many times. Proust rose from his bed and went to Louisa’s apartment to urge her not to abandon the stable situation she had with Gangnat and Albufera as her protectors, but she was not in. He sent a note, hinting mysteriously that he thought she was in danger and being spied upon. Louisa ignored Proust’s warning and his letter. The actress, always a lavish spender, had recently asked Albufera for additional money and had requested that that year’s Christmas present be cash.9 She was sensible enough not to abandon sources of good income and remained with Gangnat.
In letters to Montesquiou and Lauris, Proust complained of a new ailment: angina pectoris. The palpitations he experienced frightened him enough to make him temporarily reduce his caffeine consumption, “the only thing” that brought him any relief from asthma.10 To make matters worse, his sleep had recently been disturbed by strange noises coming from a wall in his room. He informed the servants, who came to listen and, hearing nothing, suggested that his imagination had tricked him. Finally a chimney-sweep was summoned, and he discovered an enormous pigeon that had come down the chimney and into the wall.
Lauris proposed to the woman with whom he had been in love for some time: Mlle de Pierrebourg, who had finally divorced Louis de La Salle, rumored to have a mean streak. Marcel, writing to congratulate Lauris, teased him: “I was told on the same day that you are to wed Mlle de Pierrebourg and that you have a ravishing mistress. I thought that one of the two (I don’t know which) must not be true at the same time, although such simultaneity is currently very well accepted, by wives at least. Because mistresses like it less.” Then Proust reminded him: “You never answered me” about the name Guermantes.11 Lauris, whose manuscript Proust had twice pored over so diligently, ignored this simple request.
Proust sent Hauser a letter proposing certain stocks for investment, but left his financial adviser to act as he saw fit. Although Proust’s message sounded fairly conservative, it revealed that he had purchased Para stocks through another agent, despite Hauser’s reservations and refusal to buy them for him. Proust was to regret ignoring Hauser’s warnings, as he continued to suffer large losses because of his reckless approach to investing.12
Writing to Mme Straus on April 24, Proust expressed his one wish: “If only I can keep death at bay until I have fulfilled the principal wishes of my intellect and my heart! For I have no others. Or no longer any others.” Once he had finished his long work, he would “choose the folly that appeals to me the most and I shall do it. And it will probably be to try and see you constantly.” The long work he was finishing was the first draft of the Search, entitled “Combray.”13 “Finishing” for the moment meant expanding and enriching, a process that occupied the coming months, while Proust continued to believe that he would soon complete his novel.
In a late April letter to Lauris, Proust worried that he had alienated Calmette, “the man who has shown me the most exquisite kindness,” and spoiled his chances of serializing his novel in the Figaro.14 Five months had gone by since Beaunier passed the manuscript on to Calmette. Proust maintained that he was not impatient for his book to be serialized, for he had “always been hostile to this serialization and only considered it on Calmette’s extreme insistence.” What he deplored was having disregarded Calmette, who had done so much to publish and advance his work. Gaston had not only promised to serialize the novel but had offered to approach Fasquelle as a possible publisher for the work in book form. Proust feared he had lost his only sure ally.
In 1909 Serge Diaghilev brought from Saint Petersburg to Paris dancers who were on summer leave from the Imperial Ballet. Among the exceptionally talented choreographers, dancers, and composers who came with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes were Vaslav Nijinsky, Ida Rubinstein, and Igor Stravinsky. Parisians, amazed at the freshness of the program and the lavish costumes and scenery, eagerly awaited their return in the summer of 1910. On June 4 Proust, Hahn, and Jean-Louis Vaudoyer attended a program that included Borodin’s Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.15 These ballets featured dancers soon to become legendary: Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, and Rubinstein. The story from The Arabian Nights had always been one of Proust’s favorites, and the Ballets Russes brought it to life with some of the most sumptuous costumes ever created for the stage.
A week later, Proust accepted Mme Greffulhe’s invitation to attend another performance by the Russians: “I feel that the prospect of attending La Sylphide in the stage-box of the Sylphide herself, and Cléopâtre in the company of the Queen who leaves the Queen of Egypt so far behind her, will give me the elasticity of a Russian dancer to enable me to spring from my bed . . . as far as the Opéra.”16 The ballets enchanted Proust, who in the Search was to describe the arrival of the Russian dancers: “[This] charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of critics protested, infected Paris . . . with a fever of curiosity less agonizing, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused by the Dreyfus case.”17
Soon Hahn and Frédéric de Madrazo began to collaborate on a ballet with an exceptional young man who had just been introduced into Proust’s circle of friends: Jean Cocteau. It is likely that Proust met Cocteau in March at the Strauses’. It was apparent to everyone who met the twenty-year-old Cocteau that he was a phenomenon. He proved to be one of the twentieth century’s most versatile artists: poet, novelist, playwright, designer, painter, and filmmaker. Cocteau, already well known to Diaghilev and his troupe, would, with Madrazo, write the book for Hahn’s new ballet for the Russians.
Diaghilev saw ballet as Wagner had seen opera, as a synthesis of the arts: “Perfect ballet can only be created by the fusion of dancing, painting, and music.” In addition to the extraordinary talent Diaghilev brought with him from Russia, he collaborated with many of France’s finest composers, writers, and artists, such as Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Hahn, Gide, and Picasso, as well as Cocteau. Such collective efforts by writers, artists, composers, dancers, musicians, costumers, and decorators surpassed even Wagner’s dreams.18
In June, Proust reported to Lauris on his lack of progress with the novel: “I still can’t send you my exercise-books as I can’t work, but when I can it will go very quickly.” In the same letter he mentioned that he had just reread Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (The charterhouse of Parma) and asked whether Lauris had a copy of Balzac’s preface to the same novel. And he reminded Lauris yet again that he had never answered his query about the name Guermantes.19
In early July, Marcel sent Reynaldo a charming humorous drawing of a stained-glass window, detailing his daily activities. The window consists of eighteen panels, each with a numbered legend. In the first panel Proust-Buncht lies in bed listening to Fauré’s setting of Verlaine’s Clair de lune. In the second, Hahn-Bunibuls on the other side of the door plays the overture to Die Meistersinger. In another, Céline, in the kitchen, cooks a sole for Buncht. In the last panel Proust-Buncht dies and is buried in a tomb beneath “flowers, trees, hawthorns, and the sun,” now that they are no longer harmful.20
Marcel had read Lucien Daudet’s book of four stories, Le Prince des cravates, and recommended it enthusiastically to Max Daireaux. He also congratulated a new author, Albert-Émile Sorel, son of his former history professor, on his first novel, Le Rival. Comparing Sorel’s book to his own work in progress, Proust observed a fundamental difference: “I would never know how to submit to the kind of novel that describes so objectively a thousand details from daily life. But perhaps it’s a weakness and a lack of talent on my part. . . . The path you have taken is the one the greatest writers have followed.”21 Proust sought to capture—perhaps more lucidly that any other writer—impressions and perceptions, and to reveal psychological laws that explained human behavior. He also wanted to raise readers’ sights high by revealing the true life, attainable through careful observation, meditation, and creativity, rather than the humdrum affair for which we usually settle. His reinvention of the genre was to confuse some of his early critics.
On July 12, at one in the morning, Proust went on a disheartening mission to the Figaro, “this house where I was formerly more pampered,” to retrieve the typescript of his novel.22 Though deeply disappointed, Proust did not realize how much this refusal was to benefit his novel, still several years from its full development. His intention to dedicate the book to Calmette did not waver, despite what he saw as their changed relationship; his decision to do so was based on genuine affection and gratitude and not because he expected something in return.
On July 11 Céline Cottin gave birth to a son, Antoine-André. Thanks to Marcel’s encouragement, she had been under Dr. Proust’s care. Eager to escape the noisy apartment, Marcel left abruptly for Cabourg on July 17. He again made arrangements for his bedroom to be lined with cork during his absence. He informed Reynaldo that he had brought along to Cabourg, in addition to the new father Nicolas, “innumerable and useless Antoines.”23 These were Antoine the concierge, his wife, known as Mme Antoine, and their son Antoine. Shortly after arriving at the Grand-Hôtel, the servants opened Proust’s bags and were astonished to find themselves staring at a lady’s hatboxes. Antoine senior had mischecked Proust’s bags, which had gone on to Brittany with the owner of the hats. For the next twenty-four hours, while Proust awaited the return of his luggage, he was unable to undress or go to bed. Then Proust discovered that Nicolas was drinking. He also worried that Céline might invite strangers to the apartment and asked Hahn, who would remain in Paris for a while, to drop in unannounced to see whether his cook had anything to hide. The Cottins, as his mother had warned, were proving to be less than ideal servants.
A few days after his arrival at the seashore, Proust received word that Albu had had an emergency appendectomy, and although the patient showed signs of improving, his condition remained serious. Fearing the worst, Proust wrote to Louisa, saying that he would “go mad” with worry. But then Marcel received a wire from his brother and Albu’s doctor saying that his friend was out of danger and should fully recover. Marcel informed Louisa that he still intended to return to Paris and visit Albu daily at nearby Bizy. Apparently, he then thought better of this plan and decided to remain in Cabourg.
In mid-August Proust wrote to a new acquaintance, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, a young art critic and poet, and a great admirer of the Russian ballet. Marcel had already sent him Pleasures and Days, for which Vaudoyer had expressed his admiration. Proust, who had begun to consider revising and reprinting his first book, told Vaudoyer that his praise of “La Confession d’une jeune fille” and “L’Éventail” had justified his plan. He then mentioned “the long novel” on which he was working. Vaudoyer’s curiosity must have been piqued on reading that “although the book is absolutely serious in intention, and almost too virtuous in certain parts, in others it has a freedom of tone which would be somewhat unsuitable in a review.” Proust would be eager to have Vaudoyer’s opinion of the new work, “which however imperfect seems to me nonetheless genuinely superior to what I’ve done up to now.”24
During September, Proust suffered what he described as a significant decrease in his vitality. He mentioned his weakened condition to Maurice Duplay: “I’m working one day out of ten on the novel... which is my supreme effort.” As proof of his decline, he observed: “Three years ago I was able to go out all day in a closed car; two years ago the car was no longer possible, but I went out on the beach. Last year I was no longer able to go out, but I went down every evening at about nine o’clock to the public rooms of the hotel (or the Casino which is in the hotel). This year I’ve only been able to rise from my bed and go downstairs for an hour or two every two or three days. But still that’s a great deal more than in Paris.”25
Proust, in his usual extravagant manner, and for no apparent reason other than a whim, had decided to give expensive watches to both the Alton girls, Hélène and Colette. Those he favored at Cartier’s cost four thousand francs ($13,000). Worried about paying this amount and the bill for the cork installation, he wrote to Hahn, now back in Paris, and mentioned the strain on his budget.26 Reynaldo came to his rescue through the good graces of his sister Maria, who took over the task of finding beautiful watches at a fraction of Carrier’s price.
Toward the end of September, Odilon Albaret drove Proust from Cabourg to Paris. The writer had spent nearly three months in Cabourg without walking once on the beach or calling on the Strauses at Trouville. He was improved enough in health by early October to attend a concert by Félix Mayol. Marcel wrote Reynaldo that he found Mayol “sublime.” On those occasions when Proust went out at night— usually once or twice a month—he often went to hear the effeminate singer, whose performances had two great advantages for Proust: he was talented, and he sang only at eleven in the evening.27 Then, turning to his health, Marcel told Hahn that he suspected the smell of the new cork was causing his current severe asthma attacks. He wanted to flee somewhere. But where and how?
Proust’s days of exploring new geographical locations in the real world had ended long before, with the 1902 trip to Holland. His great journey now turned inward and, except for summer trips to Cabourg, he rarely ventured beyond the bounds of Paris. He grew accustomed to the sound-muffling presence of the cork, which, now fresh and new, soon darkened, like everything else in his room, from the daily “fumigations” of burning asthma powders.
In late October, when Robert Gangnat died, Proust sent his condolences to Louisa. He praised the love that she had awakened first in Albu and then in Gangnat as “perhaps the two purest, most chivalrous, greatest devotions that any woman has ever inspired.” He also reproached her indirectly for having neglected him: “I am one of those who are so forgotten that people only write to them when they are unhappy, and I no longer dare open a letter as there seem to be nothing but causes for unhappiness.” As his work on the novel increased, so did his isolation. He told Louisa that because of his poor health, he now rarely allowed his servants to enter his room. In a letter to Dreyfus earlier in the month, Marcel had said that only he and Reynaldo were permitted nocturnal visits.28 Proust, however, did not encourage Dreyfus to call often; Reynaldo remained the only friend who was always welcome and who could come unannounced.
Lauris hurt Proust’s feelings by not inviting him to his wedding on October 26, at which Bertrand de Fénelon was a groomsman. On November 1 Marcel wrote Georges to express his disappointment at having been excluded. As though to prove his worthiness, he cited the examples of Albu and Guiche, who had invited him to their weddings. Furthermore, each had paid him a call in the days following the ceremony. Quoting Mme Aubernon, Marcel placed himself in the category of guests the society hostess had described as “presentable” because “they don’t need explaining.” He warned Lauris, should he drop by or phone regarding this slight, not to say anything the servants might overhear about “my reproaches concerning the wedding. It would be too wounding to my pride.”29
By November, Proust was hard at work on the section of Swann’s Way known as “Swann in Love.” He asked Robert de Flers to help track down one of his “imbecilic” stories, L’Indifférent, written in 1893 for the Vie contemporaine, about a woman who falls helplessly in love with a mediocre man.30 In “Swann in Love” it is the superior man who becomes lovesick over a cocotte, who admires his intellectual prowess and fine taste, neither of which prevents his succumbing to her entirely for a long period of his life and eventually marrying this inappropriate woman.31
“Swann in Love” is the only part of the Search narrated in the third person, because it tells the story of Swann’s infatuation with Odette before the Narrator was born. Proust used the device of having someone tell the story to the Narrator. The inclusion of “Swann in Love” was one of Proust’s most brilliant narrative and structural decisions, for in many ways it represents the Search in miniature: the Narrator, who comes to know the Swann’s after their marriage and falls in love with their daughter Gilberte, will repeat many of Swann’s mistakes, with interesting variations, in matters of love, society, and even art.32 The section also gives the Narrator and reader a sense of history, of the span of time through which his characters lived. Proust later said that one reason he had written such a long novel was that he wanted to show the effects of time on a group of people. “Swann in Love” goes back to the days of the Second Empire; when the Search ends some four to six years after World War I, the Narrator is ready to loop back and write the story we have just read. Looking back through history and through the lives of the Swann’s and the Narrator and his family, the reader has shared the experience of several generations of characters.
Proust soon had occasion to comfort another grieving friend. In early November, Robert Dreyfus’s brother Henri died. While consoling Dreyfus, who had been especially close to his brother, Marcel urged him not to abandon his chronicles in the Figaro, which Dreyfus signed simply D. Proust had earlier expressed the enormous pleasure he always took, before putting out his light at night, in reading Robert’s column about current events. To encourage his grieving friend to persevere, Proust described the creative process in terms that applied as well to himself: “It was you who created D. But D. too, if not created, at least completed you, and has drawn from you many many things. . . . What your life has to give, everything real that it contains, it’s yourself, yourself that you will finish perfecting by writing.”33 Proust then used one of his favorite images, found in a number of variations in Time Regained: one’s inner being, the domain of the creative self, is a rich region that rewards exploration: “In continuing to live thus you will be living in a region of yourself where the barriers of flesh and time no longer exist, where there is no death, because there is no time and no body, and where one lives tranquilly in the immortal company of those one loves.” These remarks reflect to some degree the passages he was writing on time and involuntary memory, capable of recapturing the lost past in its true colors. The “all-powerful joy” such moments bring stems in large part from the sensation one has of having stepped outside of time: “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.”34
Marcel wrote to Mme Catusse, expressing his affection and eagerness to see her and evoking his mother’s great love for her and their terrible last days together in Évian. Because he wanted to finish his novel, he must postpone such cherished projects as seeing her again until his work was done—a task he saw stretching out before him while his energy diminished. As much as he wanted to see Mme Catusse, he would not write again, he told her, because he must concentrate his strength, “such as it is, on my book.”35
Proust continued to treat young Plantevignes as his protégé, seeking to present him to the finest society and to young writers in the spotlight, such as Jean Cocteau. In November, Plantevignes asked for assistance of a different kind. There was a young actress he wanted to meet. Proust obliged by having his concierge Antoine give Marcel the princely sum of two hundred francs, apparently for flowers and gifts to send the girl.
Toward the end of the year, Proust obtained from another source the information he had requested so many times from Lauris. François de Pâris told Proust that he could use the name Guermantes, a name that Proust intended “both to exalt and sully.”36 The last comte de Guermantes had died in 1800.37 With the story of Swann well under way, Proust had acquired the second great family name for his novel.
In January, 1911 Proust wrote Lucien to congratulate him on Marcel Ballot’s review in the Figaro of Le Prince des cravates. Although Lucien considered the review lukewarm, Marcel assured him that it would “make a considerable impact.” As for himself, he lived “suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in ... six days out of seven” between “life and death.” He reminded Lucien that he had started a book. “God knows if I shall ever finish it.”38
Proust relayed to Anna de Noailles a request from Cocteau for some of her poems. Anna, who was happy to copy them out, told Marcel that she believed the young poet had “a great deal of talent.”39 In his letter to Jean forwarding Anna’s verses, Marcel included advice about how to thank her. Cocteau should be effusive: “A frigid tone whereby out of discretion you said to her only the quarter of what you thought... would not impress her. She is at once divinely simple and sublimely proud.”40
Early in the year Proust subscribed to a new device that brought opera, concerts, and plays into the home. For a fee of sixty francs a month, the subscriber received a theatrophone, a large black ear-trumpet connected through telephone lines to eight Paris theaters and concert halls, including the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, the Concerts Colonne, and the Comédie-Française.41 Although the sound quality was often poor, the instrument was a great boon to someone like Proust, who loved opera and the theater but who rarely felt well enough to attend performances. He often listened, even when the sound was so bad that he could barely hear the words. Proust told Lauris that in such cases, if the opera was one of Wagner’s that he practically knew by heart, he could supply the missing words as he listened. Then he mentioned “a charming revelation,” whose power over him had become tyrannical. The piece he found irresistible was Claude Debussy’s opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s play by the same name.42
After the broadcast on February 21 Proust wrote to Hahn, whose musical tastes remained more conservative than his. At the end of a long letter Marcel finally dared to admit that he had been listening to two composers for whom Reynaldo had little admiration: “Nicens, I’m going to irritate you horribly by speaking about music and telling you that I heard on the theatrophone last night an act of the Mastersingers... and this evening... the whole of Pelléas. Now I know how wrong I am about the artistic arts ... however, as Buncht won’t punish me, I shall confess to an extremely agreeable impression. It didn’t seem to me to be so absolutely alien to Fauré and even to Wagner (Tristan) as it has the pretension and reputation of being. . . . I’m surprised that Debussy could have written it.” Perhaps fearing that he had ventured too far onto Reynaldo’s turf, Marcel told an amusing story about himself to prove his musical incompetence. “It’s true that . . . musical heresies which may get on your nerves pass unnoticed by me, alas particularly through the theatrophone, where at one moment I thought the rumblings I heard agreeable if a trifle amorphous until I suddenly realized it was the interval!”43
Proust, who had paid scant attention when Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande was first performed at the Opéra-Comique on April 30, 1902, had became totally enamored of the work. He confessed as much to Antoine Bibesco in late March, complaining of excessive fatigue because he had had the “misfortune of hearing Pelléas on the theatrophone and falling in love with it.”44 Proust kept the theatrophone right beside his bed, and every evening when that opera was on, no matter how sick he was, he placed his ear next to the black trumpet and drank in Debussy’s music. On evenings when this opera was not played, he sang Pelléas’s part to himself.
Hahn was working on a score, commissioned by Diaghilev, for the Ballets Russes. Stravinsky later said that the impresario needed Hahn because “he was the salon idol of Paris, and salon support was very useful to Diaghilev at that time.”45 When Hahn left in February for Saint Petersburg, he took along the piano score for his new ballet, Le Dieu bleu, for which Jean Cocteau and Frédéric de Madrazo had created the story.46 Diaghilev had invited Hahn to Saint Petersburg to be the guest of honor at a huge banquet attended by the city’s most prominent figures in the arts. Among those present were the composer Aleksandr Glazunov, director of the Conservatory, as well as members of Diaghilev’s company: Léon Bakst, who designed the sets and costumes, Diaghilev’s chief choreographer Michel Fokine, and one of ballet’s most sensational dancers, Nijinksy.47 Hahn and Baron Medem, a professor at the Conservatory, played music from Le Dieu bleu on two pianos. The evening ended in wild applause when Hahn sang, accompanied by Glazunov on the piano. Paris had to wait until the spring of 1912 to see Hahn’s ballet.
At Antoine Bibesco’s urging, Proust had subscribed to the NRF, which he called Gide’s review. Proust read Gide’s novella Isabelle in the review and wrote Lauris that he thought the work amounted to “very little.” At the end of the letter, he gave Lauris this bleak picture of his life: “I no longer sleep, I no longer eat, I no longer work, there are many other things I no longer do and those I gave up long ago.”48 The last deprivation referred to the complete absence of physical love in his life. Proust had likely reverted to his youthful practice of masturbation. If testimony given later by a male prostitute is accurate, masturbation may already have become his primary, and perhaps exclusive, method of sexual gratification.
To Reynaldo’s annoyance Proust continued to talk about music, especially Wagner and Debussy. He wrote Hahn that Pelléas et Mélisande had cast a spell over him that he had not felt since his repeated evenings out to hear Mayol. He constantly requested the opera on the theatrophone as obsessively as he had gone to the Concert Mayol. Although Marcel said he liked best the parts where only music was heard, there were some lines—when Pelléas leaves the cave and sings, “Ah! je respire enfin”—which he found “impregnated with the freshness of the sea and the odors of roses wafted by the breeze.”49
The more important role music had assumed in Proust’s life was to be reflected in Swann’s and the Narrator’s remarkable meditations on music. Not only would Proust associate music with the sacred and profane themes of art and eros, but there would be comic scenes as well, satirizing the phony or reversed values of society snobs who use everything from sex to art to climb to the top of the social ladder, never realizing that the kingdom they conquer is, for all its glitter, a wasteland. The attributes Proust ascribes to such characters and their world are those indicating sterility and aridity. In Mme Verdurin’s salon, Vinteuil’s first great work becomes “her” sonata because she claims to have “discovered” the work, which, of course, can only be heard to its full effect in her salon. She also puts on a show of being so sensitive to music that listening to works like the sonata is a sort of aesthetic martyrdom, leaving her physically devastated. Dr. Cottard, one of the most faithful of her clan, must promise to be ready to assist her before Vinteuil’s piece can be played. Even then M. Verdurin suggests that his wife might be able to tolerate no more than the andante. This suggestion causes her to shriek: “Just the andante! That really is a bit rich! As if it weren’t precisely the andante that breaks every bone in my body.”50 Mme Verdurin’s guests are so witty—unlike the “bores” who frequent all the other salons—that once the doctor had to “reset her jaw, which had dislocated from laughing too much.”51 Proust’s great gift for comedy and satire, not apparent in his earlier works, is evident throughout the novel, but especially in Swann’s Way and in The Guermantes Way, the sections that deal most directly with society people.
In a March letter to Reynaldo, Marcel sent a short pastiche of the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, inviting him to sing along while reading.52 Debussy, who like Proust had been influenced by the symbolist poets and impressionist painters, had attempted to adapt Maeterlinck’s play while making as few changes as possible to the text. Debussy was forced to make cuts, but his version is far closer to the original than is usually the case when literary works are adapted to opera. Proust’s pastiche of Debussy’s version of Pelléas et Mélisande, published posthumously, pokes fun at some of the symbolist mannerisms. Marcel sent Reynaldo, along with his pastiches, a bit of gossip about two of their friends who had become extremely close: “The utmost intimacy . . . reigns between Lucien and Cocteau, who went to stay with him in the country.”53 Lucien had found himself a brilliant young lover.
Louis de Robert, who had written to Proust so long ago to express his admiration for Pleasures and Days, now entered his life again. Robert had just published a well-received psychological novel, Le Roman du malade (literally, The novel of the sick man). Proust wrote Louis that a book with such a title must have been intended for him. He knew that Robert had struggled with his own health, but “those who, like me, believe literature is the highest expression of life” would accept without anger inspiration even from illness.54 In December, Robert’s novel won the prestigious Prix Fémina-Vie Heureuse, which included a cash reward of five thousand francs. Lauris’s mother-in-law, the novelist Mme de Pierrebourg, presided over the awards committee. Proust began to confide in Robert about his novel; Robert was to provide advice regarding titles and divisions of the text, and assist Marcel in finding a publisher.
On May 21 Proust went to the Théâtre du Châtelet to attend the dress rehearsal of Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, based on a story by Gabriele D’Annunzio. Proust had been eager to hear the latest work by the creator of Pelléas et Mélisande. The occasion held great promise because many of the creators of the Ballets Russes had collaborated on the piece. Alas, Proust found the production “very boring.” Most of the audience must have shared his opinion because the show had a relatively short run.55 Someone who did not agree with this assessment was Montesquiou, who had sat next to Proust during the last act. Marcel had been grateful for the company, which relieved the tedium of the performance. He wrote to the count later: “I was so happy to be able to listen to you during the intermissions and to be beside you during that last act when, wired to your enthusiasm by the electrode of your grip, I was convulsed and transported on my seat as if it had been an electric chair.”56 But the enthusiasm had not been contagious.
Proust had been disappointed by the audience as well as by Debussy’s work. His remark in a letter to Mme Straus echoes the satirical portraits of society people he had begun to write about. The people he had glimpsed at the performance “seemed to have greatly deteriorated. Even the nicest of them have taken to intelligence and alas, with society people—I don’t know how they manage it—intelligence is simply a multiplier of stupidity, raising it to an unbelievable power and intensity. The only possible ones are those who have had the wit to remain stupid.”57
In the latter part of May, Proust wrote to Francis de Croisset seeking a position for Agostinelli’s wife, Anna, as an usher at the Théâtre des Variétés. Agostinelli must have remembered that Proust knew the playwright and requested his aid. Francis apparently obliged and a position was offered; whether or not Anna accepted the job is not known.58 Two years were to pass before Agostinelli reentered Proust’s life, with tragic consequences.
In the summer, Proust offered to hire, as a secretary, an unknown young man he had met one night at Constantin Ullmann’s. Nothing is known about the potential secretary, who apparently worked in a bank.59 Proust must have found the man attractive, for he wrote him two long letters, detailing all the disadvantages of working for someone with his bizarre schedule and yet encouraging him to accept the position. In his proposal Proust, who desperately needed efficient secretarial assistance, put kindness ahead of practicality. If the young man did not know stenography or how to type, Proust would dictate to him and let him take down the words in longhand. Proust’s description of his text left its genre ambiguous: “I am finishing a novel or a book of essays which is an extremely considerable work, at least by its mad length.”60 The novelist made it clear that he was willing to tolerate delays and other complications if the young man wanted the position. Perhaps Proust was lonely for an attractive male companion.
Proust left for Cabourg, in his usual haste, on July 11, the day following his fortieth birthday, which he seems not to have marked in any special way. From there he wrote to Marie Nordlinger to tell her how happy he had been to hear of her recent marriage to Rudolph Meyer Riefstahl, an art teacher.61 Shortly after his arrival, Proust learned that the Grand-Hôtel now had on staff a typist available to its clients for a fee. She was Miss Cecilia Hayward, a young Englishwoman, drawn like many of her compatriots to the beauty of the Normandy seacoast. Before hiring Miss Hayward, Proust wrote the second long letter to the unknown young man and repeated his offer. He even suggested sending the man extra money just for the trouble of considering the position and reading his letters. Proust proposed an attractive salary and per diem for meals. The mysterious applicant, who must have been confused and exhausted after trying to determine exactly what Proust did expect, declined the offer.
Miss Hayward, using the copy prepared by Albert Nahmias, began typing the first part of the Search—just over seven hundred manuscript pages.62 She must have understood Proust’s instructions in French, though it is unclear how well he communicated in English. Proust joked in a letter to René Gimpel that because his typist knew no “French and I don’t know English my novel turns out to be written in an intermediate language in which I hope you will find a certain savour when you receive the book.”63 Proust wondered, given Gimpel’s connections with the Japanese art world, whether he might “know the little Japanese . . . game that consists in soaking little scraps of paper in water which then twist themselves round and turn into little men, etc. Could you ask someone Japanese what it’s called, and especially whether it’s sometimes done with tea, whether it’s done with either hot or cold water, and in the more complicated ones whether there can be houses, trees, persons, or what have you.”64 Proust had returned to the image of tea and dry toast from the Sainte-Beuve text and had begun developing that passage on involuntary memory, adding the madeleine cake dipped in tea and expanding the metaphoric role of the Japanese pellets to explain this memory phenomenon and its resurrection of the past. He intended to place the scene in the Combray section of the novel, where it is the first such episode the Narrator relates to the reader.65 He was curious about the pellets’ capacity to form houses and people because when the Narrator bites into the tea-soaked cake, the sensations he felt evoked an entire little cosmos:
And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.66
This is a good example of a long Proustian sentence that seems to breathe quite naturally as it moves toward its conclusion. The spontaneous musicality of the original is not lost in translation. While at Cabourg, Proust also worked on passages for “Madame Swann at Home,” a section that ultimately became the opening chapter of volume two, Within a Budding Grove.67
In a late July letter Proust expressed his loneliness to Reynaldo: “Imagine, my Bunibuls, that every evening when the sun is setting and I have not yet turned on the light, I think about you somewhat sorrowfully in my little bed, and at that moment large women come and play, far down the beach, waltzes on French horns and cornets until night falls. It’s melancholy enough to make you throw yourself into the sea.”68
Proust was suffering from fatigue and loneliness, resulting from his poor health, peculiar isolation, and hard work on his book. These factors no doubt influenced an angry letter to Antoine Bibesco in which an expression of sympathy gave way to one of bitter estrangement. Proust received a note from Antoine requesting to see him and replied that he was so ill he might leave Cabourg, which made a visit “impossible.” Marcel had just read the obituary of Antoine’s father and, although he had hardly known the man, his death revived memories of Antoine’s mother, whom he “would remember . . . only with tenderness as having united me more completely with you and with Emmanuel”—then in mid-sentence, Proust’s words became wrathful and accusatory—“were it not that, as a result of a foul and inept lie which you believed because you repeated it to me, it put an end to our friendship, by preventing me from being able to continue truly to love people who took me for a hypocrite.” Proust’s rancor stemmed from all the jokes the Bibesco brothers had made at his expense about homosexuality. They must have taken him for a homosexual and a hypocrite, he wrote, because they had refused to take seriously his vigorous denials. Marcel then recalled the early days on the rue de Courcelles when their friendship was new and Antoine had visited so often when Marcel was too ill to go out. That year “was embellished for me by the charm of your first visits, of your friendship in which I then believed, in which I still hoped. How far away it all is. Your old friend.”69
While Marcel was in Cabourg, Reynaldo was vacationing with Sarah Bernhardt at Fort des Poulains, her estate on Belle-Île-en-Mer. Proust wrote to ask whether his friend had been awarded the Légion d’honneur and whether he had selected the dog that was to be his gift.70 He reminded Reynaldo not to let anyone in Sarah’s entourage know about their private language because ridicule—and perhaps worse—would be heaped on them. Reynaldo had not yet been awarded the Légion d’honneur, but he had bought a black long-haired basset hound from a gypsy at Versailles. Hahn named the dog Zadig, after Voltaire’s character who remains puzzled by the radical rises and falls that providence has in store for him.
On September 12 Reynaldo, back in Versailles, wrote Marcel to express his affection for Zadig, who “surpassed all that human imagination could have ever conceived in love, kindness, and Bunchtism. But he loves me too much and is wounded by anything he takes as a sign of indifference. As for me, I have been turned into a nanny, a nurse, a papa, a mama, and my life is nothing but an endless procession of humble and precise tasks such as cleaning Zadig’s ears, examining Zadig’s stool, washing Zadig, feeding Zadig.”71 Reynaldo had found a companion who needed and loved him, even if it was only a dog.
That September, Gaston’s brother, Dr. Émile Calmette, rendered Proust a singular service by having him permanently removed from the active military service rolls.72 Marcel wrote Gaston to express his gratitude, observing that “if war were to break out, the service you have done me would be greater still, in preventing me from occupying a post for which I’ve been unable to prepare myself.” Should there be a war, he would want to serve as best he could, perhaps even as “a mere clerk . . . so as not to be the only one to remain idle while the others were making themselves useful.” But Proust was dreaming; even war, as he would discover, could not make him change his habits. At the end of the letter, Proust mentioned the book he intended to dedicate to Gaston and said that he had dictated a quarter of it to a typist. “And this quarter, or rather fifth, is already the length of a volume. May the whole achieve the stature of a Book. I can say like the butcher: I’ve put in the head and the innards, there’s no short measure.”73 No one would ever accuse Marcel Proust of short measure, and he would certainly present Gaston and the world with a Book. Miss Hayward and her typewriter had not been idle either; she had nearly completed typing what corresponded to the first three hundred printed pages of Swann’s Way.74
Proust returned to Paris at six on Sunday morning, October 1.75 That day he wrote a long letter to Maurice Barrès in which he mentioned his book, raising the questions of genre and his intended audience: “One wonders for whom one writes”—he said that he found the NRF more intelligent than other reviews, but admitted that its recent article on the novel had puzzled him.76 A critic by the name of Louis Dumont-Wilden had written that despite recent notable exceptions like Balzac and Flaubert, whose powerful geniuses had created a new genre next to that of the traditional French novel, French taste always returned to narratives that were “generally brief, tightly constructed and that go right to the point, where a few characters, whose traits are rigorously defined, or delicately nuanced, but always precise, develop their characters logically, bringing to light some moral problem.” Dumont-Wilden provided current examples for writers to follow, such as Barrès’s Colette Baudoche and Gide’s La Porte étroite, both books that Proust considered inferior. Furthermore, the critic wrote, novels should have no embellishments, should “seek only sobriety, solidity, rapidity, and precision. Such is the true style of the French novel.”77 If Dumont-Wilden’s piece contained the NRF’s criteria for manuscripts, Proust cannot have been encouraged by what he read, except for the part about bringing moral problems to light. On the other hand, if he possessed a powerful genius like Balzac and Flaubert, two authors he greatly admired, then French literature would have to make room for his book.
Proust was to reinvent his genre for himself, as must each authentic artist. Perhaps he had felt the kinship with Debussy as a lonely pioneer, risking all as he explores new territory. Debussy’s reputation was to grow until he became recognized not only as the greatest French composer of his era but as the “revolutionary who, with the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune of 1894, set twentieth-century music on its way.”78 Proust was to have an equally revolutionary effect on literature, but, as with Debussy and other original artists, the true scope and influence of his work was not evident for many years.
Proust, who never hesitated to write anyone with whom he felt a sympathetic connection, sent a letter to Reynaldo’s dog, Zadig, with whom he had found much in common: “My dear Zadig, I am very fond of you because you have a great deal of chasgrin and love through the same person as I have, and you could not find anyone better in the whole world.” Proust then expressed his disdain for intelligence, an attitude he could explain to Zadig because “I have been a man and you haven’t: This intelligence of ours only serves to replace those impressions which make you love and suffer by faint facsimiles which cause less grief and induce less tenderness. In the rare moments when I recapture all my affection, all my suffering, it’s because my feelings have ceased to be based on these false ideas and reverted to something which is the same in you and in me. And that seems to me so superior to everything else that it’s only when I’ve become a dog again, a poor little Zadig like you, that I begin to write and books that are written like that are the only books I like.”79 Proust’s attempts to recapture reality in words must be based on primary sensations he would transpose, not on rational deductions. A book or a painting serves no purpose, he believed, when it reveals what everyone can see. His credo resembled that of the impressionists, who, like his character Elstir, determined to paint what they saw, not what they knew.
Marcel had good cause not to trust his intelligence when it came to investments. At the end of November, Proust told Hauser that he had not a penny to invest. Then a few days later he bought, on Albert Nahmias’s recommendation, one thousand shares in the Spassky copper mines. Proust grew closer to Nahmias, whom he began to address as “my little Albert” and whose letters he began to sign “Affectionately yours, Marcel,” without his surname.80 At year’s end Marcel told Reynaldo to be thankful that he had not involved him “in my vast speculation, for the only thing vast that remains of it is the enormous loss it showed in the end.”81 While squandering one fortune, he was compiling another, whose shares were to remain solid over time.
Proust’s ventures into the normal, daytime world remained complicated and rare. When he went out now it was often with the purpose of acquiring material for his book by pumping friends for information or researching details regarding art or fashion. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance whom he had not seen for a long time confirmed a detail about a hat. Proust went with the art historian Lucien Henraux to the Durand-Ruel Gallery to view an exhibition of Chinese paintings, lacquers, and screens. While there he met Georges Rodier, a rich dilettante who had been a regular at Mme Lemaire’s salon. Marcel told Reynaldo that he had consulted with Rodier about the way courtesans used to dress: “As soon as I mentioned a black hat worn by Clomesnil, he exclaimed, ‘That’s right, a Rembrandt hat.’ In short, I was overwhelmed with joy.” He had found the perfect hat for Odette de Crécy. Proust, who had used Laure Hayman as one of the models for Odette, feared that he had revealed too much and Rodier might later realize she had been the inspiration for this aspect of the novel’s cocotte.82 Proust had also been struck at the exhibition by how old and nearly unrecognizable Rodier had grown, like so many people he now encountered. The ravages of time on the faces of people he had known when young always impressed him.
Everything had become grist for Proust’s mill—not only the past he hoped to recapture but present encounters with people who offered bits to enrich his text. Rodier had provided two: confirmation about Hayman’s Rembrandt hat and a remark that revealed his unawareness that he had spent his life pursuing the idle, but highly seductive, pleasures of the Belle Époque.