NINETEEN FOURTEEN WAS TO BE A TERRIBLE year for France and all of Europe. For Marcel, Agostinelli’s flight was only the beginning of bad news. Two deaths struck close to home before the horror became universal. As a New Year’s gift Henri Ghéon derided Proust’s novel in an NRF review.1 Proust was particularly incensed by the critic’s opening remark that Swann’s Way was the result of years of leisure, during which the author obviously had all his time at his disposal. In a private letter to Ghéon, Proust disputed the assertion that his novel had no structure as a consequence of being written willy-nilly in moods of passive recollection. As he had in other letters and the interviews, Proust explained that the work had to be long to show the effects of time on a group of characters. He particularly enjoyed quoting Francis Jammes’s letter, which refuted perfectly Ghéon’s criticism. Jammes had praised Proust’s logic and his sentences “in the manner of Tacitus, showing great skill, subtle, well-balanced,” and compared Proust to “Shakespeare, Cervantes, La Bruyère, Molière, Balzac, and Paul de Kocq.” It was true that the last name on the list diminished the effect because the popular, often risqué de Kocq was not in the same exalted category as the other authors. At the end of his letter Proust pretended to agree with Ghéon’s assessment that “the entire book is very bad.”2
Ghéon and his colleagues at the NRF were on the verge of recognizing their enormous blunder in rejecting the Search. Both critic and writer were soon engaged in a game of diplomatic denial; the critic protested that his review had been laudatory, and Proust called himself “unforgivable” for having misread it.3 Perhaps Ghéon had in mind this sentence he had written about Swann’s Way: “With all its faults, it amounts to a veritable treasury of documentation on modern hypersensitivity.”4
In January, Proust was having the second volume typed but complained that he lacked the strength to correct the typos. Montesquiou sent his congratulations, but the count’s praise struck Marcel as being less than unqualified. He characterized Swann’s Way as a “book that contains many books; and as they are all interesting, there is profit for the reader, as for the author.” He, too, compared Proust favorably to Balzac for his creation of the Verdurins and other characters. The count liked the overall title, about which the author still had reservations. Then Montesquiou, in a dramatic gesture, bade farewell to Proust, predicting that they would never meet again due to “divergent predilections” and “adverse friendships.”5 Although Proust told Lucien that the count’s letter was “full of reservations,” he had been touched by its “extraordinarily friendly and sensitive” nature.6 Marcel replied immediately to Montesquiou, thanking him for the “splendid things” he said about Swann’s Way. He attributed his alleged neglect of Montesquiou to wretched health and reminded the count about the times he had set out for Le Vésinet, only to be thwarted. Marcel expressed his great hope of seeing Montesquiou again, although he gave no clue as to when.7
The most remarkable letter Proust received came from Gide: “My dear Proust, For several days I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it. Alas! why must it be so painful for me to like it so much?” Then Gide made a statement and a confession: “The rejection of this book will remain the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF—and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most bitterly remorseful regrets of my life.” Gide admitted having formed a false image of Proust, based on a few encounters in society that went back twenty years. For Gide, Proust had remained the “man who frequented the houses of Mmes X, Y or Z, the man who wrote for the Figaro. I thought of you—shall I confess it?—as belonging to the Verdurin clan: a snob, a dilettante socialite—the worst possible thing for our review.” Proust’s offer to pay for the publication of his novel had only confirmed Gide’s impressions. As for Proust’s manuscript, Gide admitted to having glanced at no more than a couple of sentences, the one about some tea and, a few pages later, the “only one in the book that I don’t understand very well—up to now . . . in which a forehead with vertebrae showing through is mentioned.” He would never forgive himself, Gide said, but he had written to “alleviate my pain a little” while “begging you to be more indulgent towards me than I am myself.”8 Gide had made a rare gesture, one certain to win Proust’s forgiveness and affection: he had frankly and graciously admitted his mistake and apologized for it.
Proust replied immediately: “My dear Gide, I have often found that certain great pleasures are conditional on our having first been deprived of a lesser one, which we deserved, but without the denial of which we could never have known the other, greater pleasure.” The “joy” of receiving Gide’s letter “infinitely surpasses any I might have felt from being published by the NRF.”9 He told Gide that he should feel no remorse, “for you have given me a thousand times more pleasure than pain.” Proust now had what he had wanted: to be read and respected by the group of men he considered his peers.
During the first half of 1914 Proust paid for a number of ads and reprints of favorable reviews to run in newspapers. Sometimes these ran free of charge. On May 1, for example, the Mercure de France, fulfilling Proust’s request to Alfred Vallette, reprinted most of Jacques-Émile Blanche’s laudatory article. Along with the generally good reception of his novel, Proust was enjoying better health. Whatever the reasons for his alarming weight loss of the previous year, his appetite had returned. On January 21 he reported to Reynaldo that, despite the onset of a cold, he had consumed “macaroni, a liter and a half of milk, roasted veal, three croissants and an enormous raspberry tart.”10
Proust always enjoyed exchanging stories with Montesquiou about the unintended insults writers received from well-meaning friends, and now had new ones to tell about Swann’s Way. Without mentioning Jeanne de Caillavet’s name, he quoted her recent letter: “I constantly re-read the passage . . . about First Communion, as I experienced the same panic, the same disillusionment.” As the count knew, of course, there was no First Communion in the book. Proust also reported that “Albufera . . . can’t remember whether or not he has read Swann. ‘If I received it,’ he told me, ‘you can be sure I read it, but I’m not sure I received it.’”11
Proust soon heard from another member of Gide’s group. Jacques Rivière, one of the founders of the NRF, had assumed, at age 27, the duties of editor when Copeau left. The most brilliant critic of his generation, Rivière immediately recognized Proust as a great writer: “I shall never forget the wonderment, the depth of emotion into which I was at once plunged.” Rivière was to devote himself to defending and promoting the Search. When Proust received a letter in which Rivière expressed his admiration and his sense of the work’s overall design, he wrote back: “At last I find a reader who has grasped that my book is a dogmatic work with a structure. And what a stroke of luck for me that this reader should be you.” He then explained in more detail his strategy in the novel: “I thought it more honorable and tactful as an artist not to let it be seen, not to proclaim that I was setting out precisely in search of the Truth, nor to say what it consisted in for me. I so hate those ideological works in which the narrative is a constant betrayal of the author’s intentions that I preferred to say nothing. It’s only at the end of the book, when the lessons of life have been grasped, that my design will become clear.” Proust explained that the end of Swann’s Way was the “opposite” of his conclusion, a “stage, apparently subjective and dilettante, on the way towards the most objective and affirmative conclusion.” If he “had no intellectual beliefs, if I were simply trying to remember the past and to duplicate actual experience with these recollections, ill as I am I wouldn’t take the trouble to write. But I didn’t want to analyse this philosophical evolution abstractly, I wanted to recreate it, to make it live. I’m therefore obliged to depict errors.”12
The depiction of errors was, of course, a staple of literature, especially, perhaps, of quests like the one on which Proust’s Narrator had embarked. These errors included various manias, such as snobbery, obsessive jealousy, and confusing eros and art—for example, Swann’s reducing Vinteuil’s music to his and Odette’s “song” and believing that she was a Botticelli woman. All these mistakes, if not overcome, prevent one from becoming a creative person. A creative person is, by definition for Proust, an altruist, someone who learns how to make his egotism useful to others.13 This conversion of lost time into time regained had become Proust’s sole occupation.
In an early March letter, Proust told Gide that he was incapable, “perhaps from fatigue, or laziness, or boredom, of recording anything which hasn’t produced in me an impression of poetic enchantment, or in which I haven’t somehow perceived a general truth.”14 Most of these general laws, especially those regarding the creative process and his purpose in writing the Search, were not revealed until Time Regained, when the Narrator discovers them.
During the months Proust defended Swann’s Way, the man to whom he had dedicated the work launched a political offensive. Calmette’s conservative newspaper waged a heated campaign against Joseph Caillaux, a former prime minister and head of the leftist Radical Party.15 These sustained attacks, often libelous and personal, reached a low point on March 13, when Calmette violated an unwritten code among Paris newspapers by publishing an item from the politician’s private correspondence, a letter to his former mistress signed “Ton Jo” (Your Joey). This latest blow was perhaps the most intolerable for a Frenchman, who abhors, above all else, ridicule. On March 16, at six in the evening, Caillaux’s wife, Henriette, came to Calmette’s office and asked to see him. Paul Bourget, who had just concluded a meeting with Gaston, advised him not to receive her. But Calmette, displaying those manners Proust found so admirable, remarked that he “could not refuse to receive a woman.” When Mme Caillaux entered, the editor noticed that she was elegantly dressed in a gown, as though for a soirée, and wearing a fur coat, to which was attached a large fur muff. Before Calmette could speak, she asked if he knew why she had come. When he replied, “Not at all, Madame,” she drew a Browning automatic from the muff and rapidly fired six shots. Calmette fell to the floor, mortally wounded.
During the night, Proust wrote to Mme Straus, who he knew would be as devastated as he was by the brutal murder of her dear friend. “I’m desperately sorry about Calmette’s death.” He told her how, on hearing the news, he had rushed “to the Figaro with a feeling of dread and the need to see once more that corridor along which he escorted me so often and that frightful woman followed him.” He shared his grief with Robert Dreyfus and Jacques Bizet and his wife, who had come on Mme Straus’s behalf. Proust later contributed three hundred francs for a bust in Calmette’s memory.16 The editor’s murder was the harbinger of this annus horribilis.
Meanwhile, Proust’s prospects for establishing his reputation as an important writer could not have been brighter. Two of the publishers who had rejected Swann’s Way now sought the right to publish the remaining volumes. A few days after Calmette was killed, Proust received a letter from Gide, who had heard that Proust was not bound to Grasset by “any definite contract” and therefore not obligated to let Grasset publish The Guermantes Way and Time Regained. Gide could hardly believe such an opportunity existed: “Would it be possible, really?” Gide then made Proust the offer that had been voted the previous day, he said, unanimously and enthusiastically, at the editorial meeting. The NRF was prepared to “defray all the costs of publication, and to do its utmost to ensure that the first volume is reunited with its successors as soon as the present edition runs out.” Gide told Proust that he had come back from Florence for the sole purpose of attending this important meeting of the editorial board regarding the Search.17
Proust replied the next day, saying that he would answer Gide’s offer as soon as he was well enough to rise from his bed and look for his contract, whose terms he claimed to have completely forgotten. He mentioned that Fasquelle had recently approached him indirectly with a similar offer that he had not even considered, because he did not want to leave Grasset. Being published by the NRF was a different matter; it was the honor he had most coveted, and he asked Gide to thank his friends. Should he accept their offer, there would be one absolute condition: he must bear entirely all the costs of publication.18
Proust consulted Émile Straus in his capacity as lawyer to find out whether his Grasset contract prevented his giving the second volume to another publisher. Although his contract with Grasset had not anticipated a third volume, Proust did not want to take advantage of such a loophole. He asked Straus to keep the matter confidential, for he had not said anything to Grasset. Did Grasset suspect what Proust was considering? He may have learned of the approaches being made by Fasquelle and the NRF, because on March 26 Grasset wrote Proust, suggesting the second volume be published at the end of May or the beginning of June, a date the publisher must have known was impossible.19 Grasset may have wanted to signal his eagerness to proceed with the remainder of the Search.
Proust answered Grasset, saying that he had heard “very upsetting things” about “our book.” What Proust meant by “upsetting” is unclear, but he told Grasset that Fasquelle had made a very attractive offer to publish the remaining volumes, as had the NRF. He then repeated to Grasset what he had told Gide: Fasquelle’s offer did not interest him, but the NRF’s did because its directors were writers by whom he wanted to be read and respected. Lest Grasset think the decision was motivated by financial gain, Proust told him about his condition of paying the publishing costs. Regarding a publication schedule for volume two, Proust told his publisher that it would be difficult for him to have the book ready before October.
When Proust’s letter arrived, Grasset was in bed with a terrible cold. What he read cannot have made him feel better. If any doubts remained in Grasset’s mind about the literary value of Proust’s work, the offers from Fasquelle and the NRF erased them. He instructed Louis Brun to write Proust at once, explain that he was ill, and tell him that Grasset wanted very much to publish the second and third volumes of the Search. Grasset would have done well to stop there, but in a subsequent letter he made a serious tactical mistake by mentioning contractual obligations. Proust shot back immediately: “You evoke our contract (and speak of constraint—this word, which you underline, ‘is harsh to my ears’). . . . Your letter was unnecessary since I consulted you only about your wishes and you had already made them known to me some days ago.”20
Grasset immediately understood his mistake and tried to make amends: “I must have expressed myself very badly,” he wrote, for Proust had interpreted his letter “exactly contrary to my intentions.” Observing that their contract called for Grasset to publish the entire work, he nonetheless admitted that Proust certainly retained ownership of In Search of Lost Time. Then Grasset wrote the magic words: he proposed putting the contract completely aside; he wanted to remain Proust’s publisher for the sequel, only if “you give me your total trust.” And summing up, the publisher said that Proust should not consider himself bound in any way, that Grasset released him from everything in their first agreement that might constitute “the slightest obligation.” Proust, he insisted, was entirely free to choose.21
Proust cannot have been happy to read Grasset’s words, for they were the very ones that would bind him more tightly to the publisher than any contract. Proust wrote to Gide a few days later, saying that he was “defenseless against such magnanimity.” He would give the NRF as many excerpts as they liked, but he would stay with Grasset for the remaining volumes, at least in their first edition.22 Then Proust informed Grasset of his decision: Grasset would publish the first editions of volumes two and three, but future editions would be reserved for his “friends at the NRF.”23 On April 30 Grasset offered a new contract whereby the publisher would pay the publication costs, print three thousand copies, and give Proust sixty-five centimes per copy sold. The author’s only expenses would be for revisions.24 Grasset, who now understood this author and his methods of creating prose that readers and critics had begun to recognize as extraordinary, knew that Proust’s revisions would be extensive and the costs in time and labor high.
Robert Proust was pleased with the reception of Swann’s Way. At last, Marcel, who had been so unhappy and apparently so foolish in many regards, had shown himself capable of producing a remarkable work. Dr. Proust, meanwhile, had established his own reputation as an eminent surgeon. In the spring he and Marthe sailed for New York, where he was to read a paper on April 9 at a meeting of the American Surgery Association. In his paper, quoted in the New York Times, Robert described how he had successfully performed open-heart surgery on a young man who had been shot. By the summer Dr. Proust’s surgical skills were to be put to tests he never imagined.
Proust wrote Jacques Rivière, who planned to publish long passages from the forthcoming volumes of the Search, telling him that he had been touched by Rivière’s letter and wanted no other newspaper or magazine to publish his excerpts. Rivière proposed, rather naïvely, that the NRF print Proust’s entire volume. The writer was wise enough not to accept the generous offer: “I fear that the publication of the whole volume (which will be at least as long as the first, if not longer), even with cuts, would clutter up your review dreadfully.”25 Rivière would publish long excerpts of nearly fifty pages in both the June and July issues. Grasset endorsed Proust’s decision to give excerpts to the NRF, saying that he considered this review the most “interesting artistic manifestation of our day, and I admire it while being somewhat jealous of it.”26 Grasset could afford to be magnanimous; he had kept the prize.
In early May, Proust contacted Hauser with the urgent request to sell enough of his Royal Dutch shares to raise roughly ten thousand francs. Hauser phoned and left a message with Nicolas, reminding Proust that he had already sold all his Royal Dutch shares held by the Warburg Bank. Proust, mortified, apologized for his confusion.27 It is unclear why Proust needed so much cash in a hurry. Did he need to cover his speculation debts or to replenish his cash account, or was he accumulating liquid assets for the final attempt to lure Agostinelli back to Paris? By month’s end, Proust dangled before his former secretary one of the most generous offers ever made to a runaway.
Because of his reckless way with money, Proust soon proclaimed himself ruined. He wrote Robert de Flers, Calmette’s successor at the Figaro, that he was broke and looking for work. He would take any column, he told Flers: the weather, gossip, music, theater, or the stock market—one can imagine the results of making Marcel Proust financial adviser to readers of a major newspaper—or even the society page. Proust assured his friend that such an opportunity would delight him, and Flers would “see that I’m capable of abstaining myself from literature and being brief and practical.”28 Flers soon made such an offer, but by then Marcel had changed his mind and proposed instead that the Figaro publish a long novella, Odette Married, pieced together from forthcoming sections of the Search. Proust had apparently already forgotten the wish expressed to Rivière that the NRF be the exclusive outlet for excerpts. Flers, who must have recognized his extraordinary good luck, accepted the proposal, but circumstances interfered to prevent publication.
On May 28 Proust arranged the sale of some stocks in order to raise enough money to buy gifts for Agostinelli.29 Two days later he wrote a long letter to his former secretary, telling him that he had spent twenty-seven thousand francs to buy an airplane for him. Proust began by thanking Agostinelli for his recent letter, from which he quoted a line later attributed to Albertine: “Thank you very much for your letter—one sentence was ravishing (crepuscular etc.).”30 Agostinelli had sent Proust a wire and a letter, whose contents are unknown, probably in reply to letters from Proust. Proust’s letter on May 30 to Agostinelli is the only one that survives. Proust had evidently written asking Agostinelli to cancel the order for the airplane and another, unnamed gift—most likely a Rolls-Royce—that Proust intended for him as well, both of which Agostinelli had declined.31 Without explaining why, Proust had thought it “indelicate” to ask Agostinelli to cancel the order for the unnamed gift. Exactly what Proust intended and what game he was playing here is not clear from the ambiguous remarks in the only extant letter. Perhaps he thought that Agostinelli would not have the will to resist such magnificent gifts if he had to cancel the orders himself. The cost of a Rolls (26,200 francs) in 1914 was almost the same as the price of an airplane (27,000 francs).32 If Proust decided to keep the airplane, he would have lines from Mallarmé’s poem that the young aviator admired inscribed on the fuselage: “You know: it’s the poem you loved even though you found it obscure, which begins: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel Aujourd’hui. Alas, ‘today’ is neither ‘virgin’ nor ‘vivacious’ nor ‘beautiful.’” Knowing how interested Agostinelli was in sports, Proust enclosed with the letter an article on Swann from a sports newspaper. As usual, he asked Agostinelli to return the letter, making certain that it was well sealed; Proust observed that his young friend had so far failed to follow these instructions.33
In early spring Agostinelli, aged twenty-five, had enrolled in the aviation school run by the Garbero brothers at La Grimaudière, near Antibes. He registered as Marcel Swann, in bizarre homage to his benefactor. After two months of training, during which he made rapid progress, Agostinelli was ready for his second solo flight. On Saturday, May 30, the day Proust sent his offer of regal gifts, Agostinelli was at the airfield taking flying lessons. Around five o’clock, the apprentice pilot took off in a monoplane.
Anna and Émile, Alfred’s brother, also an apprentice pilot, watched Agostinelli go through his maneuvers. Agostinelli’s half-brother, Jean Vittoré, was also in Antibes, though it is not known whether he was at the airfield. Elated by his success, Agostinelli ignored the warnings of chief pilot Joseph Garbero, left the designated flying area, and flew out over the Bay of Angels. Attempting a turn, the inexperienced pilot forgot to increase his altitude, and the right wing skimmed the water, pulling the plane into the sea. Anna, Émile, and the others watched in horror. Once Agostinelli recovered from the shock of finding himself plunged into the water, he noticed that the plane, though three-fourths submerged, seemed to be floating. He stood atop the pilot’s seat and screamed for help. Those on shore quickly launched a boat and began rowing frantically toward the downed aviator. But suddenly the monoplane sank beneath the waves, taking Agostinelli with it. He was known to be a good swimmer, and his friends were later puzzled that he disappeared without a struggle.34 Some said that sharks had been seen in the area, while others claimed that the spot where the plane went down was known for its swift currents. Search boats plied the waters in the bay until darkness forced them back to port.
Proust learned of the tragedy that evening when he received a telegram from Anna.35 On Sunday morning a boat found the sunken plane, but the body had been swept away. The family provided newspapers with a description of Agostinelli’s clothes: a khaki one-piece flying suit, a brown rubber helmet, gray shirt, black pants, black shoes, and a signet ring with the initials AA.36 In addition to the heavy clothing, Agostinelli had on his person all his money, a considerable sum of about five or six thousand francs, apparently the remainder of what Proust had given him. Agostinelli’s father and brother quickly realized that if the body were found, all the money would go to Anna, whom everyone thought was the pilot’s legal wife. The Agostinellis allegedly turned against her and sent a wire to the prince of Monaco, telling him that she was only Alfred’s mistress.37
Jean Vittoré rushed to Paris, where a profoundly aggrieved Proust wept in his arms. Vittoré had come to entreat the author to hire divers to search for the body.38 The divers, who would have to come from faraway Toulon, wanted five thousand francs for their trouble. Proust was willing to help but realized that his debt payments alone would probably deplete all the cash Hauser had raised for him.39 Agostinelli’s body was found by fishermen eight days after the accident.
On June 1 the NRF published extracts from The Guermantes Way. Proust continued to receive proofs for the next volume, but he was too upset to work, and his inaction risked delaying publication.40 Soon Proust had Anna and Émile to worry about. Immediately after Agostinelli’s funeral, they had come running back to Paris, confident that Marcel would help them despite his earlier warnings that they would never receive a penny from him if Agostinelli died in a plane crash. As was his nature in such circumstances, Proust relented and did everything he could to help, trying to find them employment, enlisting the aid of friends such as Émile Straus on their behalf, and even writing to the prince of Monaco to support Anna’s claim, as Agostinelli’s widow, to any recovered property. A week after the accident, Proust, having just learned that Anna and Agostinelli apparently had not been legally married, sent a letter to Straus asking him to write the prince and apologize on Proust’s behalf for having unintentionally misled him about Anna’s marital status. He explained to Émile why Anna deserved to be designated Alfred’s rightful heir. Proust believed that while Agostinelli’s initial love for her was inexplicable, he knew that Agostinelli had “lived for her alone and would have left her everything he had.” Proust did not have a high opinion of the rest of the family, describing them as “not worth much.” But the business about fighting over money retrieved from the dead body did not strike him as behavior particular to their class: “This sort of thing, horrible though it is, happens every day among the La Rochefoucaulds or the Montmorencys whenever a question of pecuniary interest arises.” The Agostinellis, he observed, were no different.41
In appealing to his friends to help the Agostinellis, Proust stressed his former secretary’s intellectual gifts.42 In a letter to Gide, Proust spoke of his great sorrow over “the death of a young man whom I loved probably more than all my male friends[,] since it has made me so unhappy.” He maintained that although the unnamed young man was of humble origins, he was extremely intelligent and wrote letters like “those of a great writer.” It was only after falling in love with him that Proust discovered in him “those qualities that were so marvellously incompatible with everything else he was—discovered them with amazement, though they added nothing to my affection for him: I simply took pleasure in making him aware of them. But he died before he realized what he was, before he even became it entirely.”43
In the weeks following Agostinelli’s death, Anna tried several times to commit suicide, and Proust was afraid that if her situation grew desperate enough, she might succeed.44 Proust himself was not immune to death wishes. Later that fall, he confided to Lucien that in the days following Agostinelli’s accident he had longed to die: “After having put up so well with being ill without feeling sorry for myself, I found myself hoping, with all my heart, every time I got into a taxi that an oncoming bus would run me down.”45 Proust had not only lost someone he loved passionately, but he felt responsible for Agostinelli’s death. Had he not lavished money on Agostinelli, “Marcel Swann” probably could not have afforded to relocate in Antibes and enroll in the aviation school. Proust had tried at first to discourage Agostinelli from becoming a pilot, but later he had taken advantage of the young man’s passion for flying by promising him an airplane if he returned.46
In early June, Proust exchanged letters with Gide, who had read the excerpts in the NRF. Gide told him, “I am enchanted. Through the strange and powerful subtlety of your style I seem to be reading . . . my own memories and my most personal sensations.”47 Proust explained to Gide his conception of Charlus, infatuated with virility because, without knowing it, he was a woman. Proust readily conceded that Charlus was not the only homosexual type, but was one that had not been portrayed in literature. He paraphrased for Gide a remark the Narrator makes after having understood Charlus’s true nature. The Narrator believes that if Charlus is “so much more subtle and sensitive” than his rather boorish brother the duc de Guermantes, it is due to his homosexuality.48
Gide replied, expressing his admiration for Charlus but noting that Proust had “contributed to the habitual confusion between the homosexual and the invert.” For Gide, the homosexual, a man in love with another man, carried on a noble tradition dating from the ancient Greeks, whereas Charlus, who wanted to become a woman for another man, represented a modern, decadent variety. Turning to Proust’s concerns about his titles, Gide told him that he must on no account change them, calling them “excellent.” Gide believed that Proust was “ill-placed to know how familiar they have become to so many readers.” Gide ended by saying that he longed to see the sequel to Charlus.49 But Marcel questioned whether Gide or anyone else would see the sequel; since the death of his “poor friend,” he had not the strength to open a single one of the packages of proofs that arrived daily from the printers.50
June 28, 1914, was the day the Belle Époque came to an abrupt end. The event that triggered its demise happened not in Paris but in faraway Sarajevo, where the heir to the Hapsburgs, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife had come for a state visit. Earlier in the day Bosnian Serb nationalists had attacked the archduke’s car with a bomb, injuring two of his officers. Unintimidated, the archduke continued to city hall, where other Bosnian Serb conspirators waited in the crowd. After the welcome by the mayor, the archduke decided to visit a hospital. His driver took an immediate wrong turn down a narrow street and, unable to turn around, had to back up. Gavrilo Princip, armed with a handgun, stood watching from only ten yards away as the archduke’s car backed toward him. Princip stepped forward and fired two shots, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife.51
In Paris, in a phone conversation shortly before the assassination, Hauser uttered words that rang prophetically in Proust’s ears: “In the possible event of a European conflagration . . .” Proust began immediately to reduce his financial commitments by selling a number of stocks; but unfortunately, with a generally depressed market, he was unable to liquidate as much as he would have liked. Then came the “thunderbolt of the Austro-Serb incident.” Proust knew that he faced even greater losses, but that was of little consequence, he admitted, “amid the immense disasters it may well let loose upon Europe.”52
Proust’s efforts to put his finances in order on the eve of war required him to outline all his holdings and thereby confess to Hauser his foolish speculations. In the closing days of June, Proust received a check for twenty thousand francs from the Warburg Bank in Germany, which held an important portion of his remaining resources. He quickly had the bank sell another twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand francs’ worth of shares. Proust managed to cash the first check on the Warburg Bank but not the one for thirty thousand francs that he received on July 31, because all banking operations between France and Germany were suspended due to the threat of imminent hostilities.53
On the eve of war, Proust and many of his friends were outraged when the jury found Mme Caillaux not guilty for the murder of Gaston Calmette. Her crime passionnel defense had persuaded the jury not to convict her. A petition protesting the verdict ran in the Figaro on August 1, and Proust was among the many who signed.54 Events surrounding a much larger crisis moved swiftly, as military leaders urged their governments not to lose a second in the race to mobilize. On August 2 the French government ordered the mobilization of the army, and on August 3 Germany declared war on France. On hearing of the declaration of war, General Gérald Pau, a veteran of the humiliating defeat by the Germans in 1870, declared: “I have been waiting forty years for this day. It is the most glorious day of my life.” In Time Regained, after the war has ended, Charlus quotes General Pau’s statement as an example of excessive nationalism.55
Proust’s brother Robert was in the first group to be called up. Although Marcel and Marthe admired Robert’s courage, they were dismayed at his insistence on being sent to the front. At midnight on Sunday, August 2, Marcel accompanied his brother to the Gare de l’Est. Dr. Proust had been assigned to a place whose name would be associated with one of the longest and bloodiest episodes of the war: Verdun. Before boarding the train, Robert entrusted Marcel with two important missions. The first was to look after Marthe and his daughter Adrienne, now eleven years old; the second was confidential and involved the other woman in Robert’s life. Dr. Proust’s life, like that of millions of others, had changed in a matter of minutes; in preparing to leave for the front, he had not had time to inform Mme Fournier, his mistress of nine years, of his departure and destination. He asked Marcel to do so.56 Marcel promised Robert to do his bidding, but he was soon relieved of the duty to Robert’s family when Marthe decided to join many of her compatriots who sought refuge in Pau, in France’s southwest corner.
Marcel watched as the train pulled out of the station, carrying his brother and hundreds of men away into the night. He had no illusions about the hell that awaited them. The machines of war had, like all the others, greatly multiplied their power, speed, and efficiency. The arms used in the Franco-Prussian War, just before Marcel and Robert were born, now seemed primitive. And this war would have a new force: airplanes that would drop bombs onto battlefields and cities. Proust wrote Lucien that from the moment he accompanied his brother to the train station, he could think of nothing but the war. He began following the development of French strategy on military maps and reading seven newspapers a day to keep abreast of developments.57
After saying farewell to Robert, Marcel wrote Hauser, describing his brother’s departure. His own financial predicament, as complicated and onerous as it was, seemed “very unimportant when I think of the millions of men who are going to be massacred in a War of the Worlds comparable to that of Wells, because the Emperor of Austria thinks it expedient to have an outlet onto the Black Sea.”58 In his reply, Hauser asked that Robert be informed that Hauser’s brother-in-law Victor Schwenk had also been sent to Verdun. Hauser described Victor as “a very charming young man,” married for only a year and a half and the father of a little girl.59 Proust agreed to relay the message to his brother.
As late as August 16 Mme Straus remained in Trouville, but she was soon to join the other refugees in Pau. Marcel worried about her son’s safety, until he learned that Jacques had been attached to an ambulance crew. His servant Nicolas, Proust reported to Mme Straus, had made a wildly optimistic assessment of his and his country’s position on the day war was declared. Because he belonged to the territorial reserves, a group that had not been called up in the first mobilization order, Nicolas told Proust and Céleste the war would be over too quickly for him to worry: “They won’t call me for another fortnight, and by that time we’ll have killed them all and be in Berlin; I shan’t have to go, you’ll see.”60 Perhaps Nicolas had been drinking again. Two weeks passed; the Germans were in France, and Nicolas was in the army.
Nicolas’s departure left Proust alone at night, but soon he had another attendant. Because Odilon had been called in the first mobilization, Céleste soon moved into Proust’s apartment to avoid the daily trek from Levallois and back. Her assumption of some of Nicolas’s duties was meant to be temporary while Proust looked for another manservant. He considered it improper for a bachelor to keep a female servant under his roof, especially a young and pretty one like Céleste.
With his sister-in-law and niece safe in Pau, Proust began to consider leaving for Cabourg, despite the increasingly chaotic state of rail transportation. In a letter to Albufera written a day or so before his departure, Proust described a nocturnal stroll in Paris under a moonlit sky two or three days before the victory in the Marne, when the siege of Paris seemed imminent. He arose one evening and went out into moonlight that was “luminous, brilliant, reproachful, serene, ironic, and maternal, and on seeing this immense Paris that I had not realized I loved so much, waiting, in all its powerless beauty, for what seemed the inevitable onslaught, I could not hold back a sob.”61 Paris and so many other cities would find their beauty powerless to prevent the murderous transformations that the nations at war had decided were worth the gamble. The great city would endure four nerve-racking years under the threat of bombs, siege, and invasion by a hated enemy.
Proust later learned that two of his friends had been declared unfit for duty and assigned to the Red Cross. Lucien had been sent to Tours, where he was staying in the Hôtel Brunswick.62 Cocteau set out for the front as a volunteer male nurse, but not before adding a bit of chic to the terrible duty that awaited him: the astonishing Jean had gone off to war in a uniform made for him by the distinguished designer Paul Poiret.63 Reynaldo had been mobilized as soon as fighting began and sent to Melun, southeast of Paris.64 Marcel wrote him on August 30, saying that because he could not possibly come to Melun, he had decided to leave for Cabourg, if the trains were running. The war already seemed like a terrible nightmare from which he longed to wake: “How wonderful it will be to see each other again when these terrible days are over and if we haven’t too many friends to mourn. But in fact I weep just as much for the unknown. I no longer live.” He knew that Reynaldo was worried about the safety of his close friend Henri Bardac in the Marne: “I think you are wrong to be worried for if the absurd ‘No news is good news’ is true any-where it’s in war; because families are immediately informed of deaths or serious wounds.” In the great confusion of World War I battlefields, this axiom was to prove false, as Proust soon learned.65 Within a week Henri Bardac, an infantry sergeant, was wounded in the battle of the Marne.
Proust told Hahn about his futile search for a manservant. How could he find anyone suitable when all able-bodied men—and then some—had been called up? Frédéric de Madrazo had recommended one young servant, but when he arrived Proust found himself confronted with “Galloping Consumption in person.” This unpromising youth was soon drafted, to the author’s relief. Proust told Reynaldo that, given the circumstances, it seemed perfectly reasonable to take Mme Albaret to Cabourg. Céleste had even offered to dress in men’s clothes.66 Although Proust declined her offer, he was highly amused by her pluck and spirit of adventure. This young woman from nowhere—even Proust seemed confused about where Auxillac was, believing it to be in the Auvergne rather than Lozère—sounded like an excellent companion for a fiction writer. At the end of his letter Proust expressed his strong disapproval of Hahn’s determination to go to the front. He urged Reynaldo to remain at Melun or to seek a post in Bordeaux or Toulon, somewhere thought safe.
Proust considered vacationing in Nice, an area he had long wanted to visit, but a new friend, Louis Gautier-Vignal, had warned him that with the vast movements of soldiers and civilians fleeing south the trip would take at least thirty hours.67 Just before leaving for Cabourg, Proust interviewed a young Swedish manservant by the name of Ernest Forssgren. A tall, remarkably handsome Nordic blond, Forssgren looked the picture of health and sounded ideal. It seemed unlikely that a Swede would be drafted anytime soon. Proust hired Forssgren immediately. On September 3 Proust, Céleste, and Forssgren, as his new manservant, left for Cabourg.68 Céleste, able to look at Forssgren more objectively than Proust, said that the attractive youth was “so pleased with himself, as if he were the King of Sweden, if not God Almighty.”69
Proust had traveled to Cabourg for long summer stays every year since 1907. This visit, his last, proved difficult from the moment he and his servants tried to board the train, so jammed with soldiers and civilians that it was nearly impossible to sit down. Some passengers chose to ride on top of the cars. Instead of the customary four hours, the trip took twenty-two. Proust arrived to find the first two floors and the dining room of the Grand-Hôtel transformed into an auxiliary hospital and the casino closed due to lack of personnel and clients.
In spite of the ordeal of getting to Cabourg and the somewhat chaotic nature of life at the Grand-Hôtel, Proust remained there for nearly a month and a half. During his stay, two old acquaintances from the beau monde called to see him, counts Greffulhe and Montesquiou, but he was too ill to receive them.70 He corresponded with his friends, especially those who had loved ones at the front. Proust had been worried about the safety of Mme Catusse’s son Charles and was relieved to hear that he had received only a superficial wound. He wrote to her on September 15, saying that he hoped the wound would be slow to heal so that Charles would not have to return to the front. He told her that there were hundreds of wounded at Cabourg, whom he visited every day, bringing them whatever small items he could afford with his sharply reduced resources. The soldiers recuperating at the hotel were not seriously wounded, he told her. Each day as he watched the men eating, sleeping, walking, he hoped that her Charles was “doing as well!”71
On October 13 or 14 Proust left Cabourg to return home. Between Cabourg and Évreux, he suffered an unusually violent asthma attack. Céleste, not knowing that she must bring his medicine with them into the compartment, had packed it in the luggage now secured in the baggage car. Faced with a surly conductor who was unsympathetic to her employer’s extreme discomfort, Céleste was unable to talk her way into the baggage car. At the first stop she leaped to the platform and convinced a kinder railway employee to allow her to retrieve Proust’s antiasthma powders from the suitcase. Proust immediately began his “fumigation,” filling the compartment with smoke.72 The asthma attack was so severe that Proust could not write for several days.73 Forssgren left Proust’s employment shortly after the return to Paris. Apparently under threat of being drafted in the Swedish army, he emigrated to New York. He was to reappear near the end of Proust’s life.
Proust returned to Paris just in time to receive news from Marthe of his brother’s courageous actions under fire. Dr. Proust’s heroism, along with his promotion to captain in the Medical Corps, was mentioned in the dispatches.74 According to the military citation, Robert had shown remarkable courage at Étain by keeping his field hospital in full operation August 22–26, performing surgery on wounded soldiers while being fired on by the enemy. Shell splinters fell on the operating table while the doctor, forgetting his own safety, continued to save lives.75
Reynaldo had earlier expressed his concern that the trip to Cabourg might be painful for Marcel because of memories of Agostinelli associated with the difficult trip the year before and the first time they met at the seaside resort in 1907. Proust reassured Reynaldo, telling him that his thought had been “sweet,” that, to his “shame,” the return to Cabourg without Agostinelli had not been “as painful as I might have expected . . . and the journey marked a first stage in detachment from my grief. . . . At Cabourg, without ceasing to be just as sad and to miss him just as much, I found there were moments, perhaps hours, when he disappeared from my thoughts.” He told Hahn that he had really “loved” Alfred; more than that he had “adored him.” Why, Proust wondered, was he already using the past tense when he still loved Agostinelli? It was because in “feelings of grief there is an element of the involuntary and an element of duty which sustains the involuntary part and ensures its durability. This sense of duty doesn’t exist in the case of Alfred, who behaved very badly towards me; I give him the regrets that I cannot help but give him. I don’t feel bound to him by a duty of the sort that binds me to you, that would bind me to you even if I owed you a thousand times less, even if I loved you a thousand times less.” If during the few weeks at Cabourg, he had been relatively unfaithful to Alfred’s memory, then he should not be blamed for being “fickle.” The person to blame was Agostinelli, for having been “incapable of deserving fidelity.”76
Once Marcel was back in Paris, to his “great joy” the pain of losing Alfred returned. Proust then formulated for Hahn his theory about grieving, which was explained by his theory of multiple selves: “It isn’t because others have died that grief diminishes, but because one dies oneself.” This was a lesson Proust had already learned and, he confided to Reynaldo, described in the unpublished part of his novel: “For a long time now life has only presented me with events I’ve already described. When you read my third volume . . . you will recognize the anticipation and the unerring prophecy of what I’ve experienced since.” Marcel entreated Reynaldo to remain in Albi, where he had recently been transferred, far from the front. In his postscript Marcel, as he often did, compensated for what might have seemed too cold in the body of the letter. In spite of the distance he now felt between himself and Agostinelli, he would not hesitate to cut off an arm or a leg if such measures would bring his former secretary back to life.77
Proust’s regular physician, Dr. Bize, now a major in the Army Medical Corps, had also been posted at Albi. Reynaldo, worried that by some fluke Marcel might be declared fit for service by a military medical examiner, some of whom had the reputation of taking anyone with a beating pulse, asked Bize to produce a certificate testifying to Marcel’s unfitness.78 Proust was moved by Hahn’s solicitude but knew that such a document lacked official status.79 He was relieved that Hahn had been taken under the wing of Lt.-Col. Louis Cuny, commanding officer at Albi, whose sister was a singer at the Opéra-Comique.80 Although Marcel knew that Reynaldo could not be counted upon to take advantage of this connection, he hoped that Cuny shared his sister’s love of music and would frustrate Hahn’s efforts to be sent to the front. The musician seemed determined to fight. When his sister Maria and Marcel learned that he had put in another request to be sent to the front, they did everything possible to make him change his mind. Proust asked for Hahn’s permission to write his commanding officer and inform him about Hahn’s fragile bronchial tubes, frequent colds, and bouts of laryngitis. How, Marcel demanded, could his friend possibly tolerate the freezing trenches when he often caught a cold on leaving the opera and stepping out in the chilly air?81 Hahn, bent on discouraging such initiatives on Proust’s part, replied testily that he had lungs of iron and did not even know what a sore throat was.82
By November, Marcel feared that none of his letters were reaching his brother, because he had not heard from him since he left for the front.83 He knew that Robert had little time to write, but it was unlike his brother not to try to contact him. On the home front, Proust was disgusted by the excessive chauvinism of many reporters, and—even more disappointing—artists he respected. In letters to Daniel and Lucien, Proust deplored what he called the “disarmament of intellects.” The press was filled with jingoistic articles referring to Germans as “Boches”—the disparaging French equivalent of “Krauts”—or, even worse, attacks on German artists and even the German language. Frédéric Masson, a historian and member of the Académie française, wrote an article in L’Écho de Paris that reviled Wagner and characterized anyone who liked his music as a victim of Wagneritis.84 Camille Saint-Saëns attacked the German composer in the Figaro. In his letter to Lucien, Proust asked what would have happened if France had been at war with Russia instead? Presumably, statements similar to Masson’s would have been made about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In another letter to a friend, Proust decried the “low standards in the press, what stupidity! Fortunately it can’t tarnish the heroism, but it will lessen the significance of victory.”85 Before ending his letter to Lucien, Proust may have encouraged the disarmament of intellects by praising Léon Daudet’s L’Avant-guerre, which the novelist thought was “confirmed and immortalized” by this war. Although Proust’s remark was made in a private letter, in which he states that he had not actually read Léon’s articles about the crimes allegedly committed by German-Jewish spies in France since the Dreyfus Affair, his friendship may have blinded him to the excesses of the elder Daudet brother, who remained as rabidly anti-Semitic as ever.86
In early September the poet and essayist Charles Péguy was killed leading his company at the battle of the Marne. Péguy had begun his career as a fiery anticlerical socialist but had evolved into a patriot and fervent Catholic.87 At forty-one, he had volunteered for military service. In late November, as the list of dead and wounded swelled daily, Proust expressed his admiration for Péguy’s heroism but not for his writings. He had the same criticism of Péguy’s style that he had at times voiced against Ruskin, who had a similar tendency to yield to the temptation of the “law of association.” Proust explained to Lucien: “As a rule an art . . . in which something is repeated ten times, leaving a choice between ten formulations none of which is the true one, is for me the opposite of art.” Proust still grumbled about his subscription years ago to Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, founded by Péguy and Halévy, in which Proust had found “an unbearable hotchpotch” of writing that had put him in a terrible mood.88
In a letter on November 21 Proust asked Reynaldo whether he had read about the death of the cellist Marcel Casadesus, killed by a shell on October 10 in the Pasde-Calais. Proust had heard him play on several occasions as a member of the Capet String Quartet.89 France, like the other nations, continued to lose its artists and writers to the war.
Proust had to worry about his own military status, primarily because he had committed a blunder. Because he had been released from all military obligation when struck from the lists in 1913, he was required to do nothing. Instead, knowing that he was unfit to serve, he had signed up for a medical examination to verify that condition. This led to a string of Proustian complications involving men whose time would have been better spent on other matters. On November 22 Proust wrote Joseph Reinach to thank him for having been so charming and kind when Frédéric de Madrazo approached him on the novelist’s behalf regarding the status of his military obligations.90 Reinach confirmed that being struck from the lists released Proust from “all military obligation without any doubt.”91 Proust had also been pleased at Reinach’s remark that the novelist was in “no way a shirker.” Proust informed Reinach that, in addition to his daily war column, signed “Polybe,” in the Figaro, Proust was rereading the statesman’s volume La Révision, from his great history of the Dreyfus Affair. Proust was eager for Reinach to know that he remained unswayed by nationalistic propaganda and had told Léon Daudet how he felt: “As I wrote to Léon the other day, I remain as Beethovenian and Wagnerian as ever, and I find the articles of Masson and Saint-Saëns idiotic.”92 Reinach’s family had suffered terrible losses in the opening days of conflict. Proust expressed sympathy for the death of Reinach’s son-in-law Pierre Goujon and his fervent hope for the safety of his son Adolphe, missing in action. This hope was in vain; Adolphe had also been killed.
Because men and lead were needed for meaner tasks than typesetting books, Grasset and other publishers ceased operations. Proust found himself without a publisher, a press, and a deadline. Nonetheless, he kept writing, expanding his novel, intent on creating the cycle of Albertine. He wrote far more than originally planned about homosexuality, enlarging its female branch. Proust ultimately chose Sodom and Gomorrah as the title of the Search’s fourth part, inspired by a line from Alfred de Vigny’s poem “La Colère de Samson” (The wrath of Samson): The women shall have Gomorrah and the men shall have Sodom.93 For Proust, Sodom indicates the world of male homosexuality, Gomorrah that of female homosexuality. He linked these themes, as he had the character of Mile Vinteuil from its original conception, to the Narrator’s search for a vocation. During the long period of waiting for publication to resume, Proust added the war years to the novel, including his observations of the changes in society. In the Search, reversing roles, Proust compares a general diverted from his battle plan to a novelist: “A general is like a writer who sets out to write a certain play, a certain book, and then the book itself, with the unexpected potentialities which it reveals here, the impassable obstacles which it presents there, makes him deviate to an enormous degree from his preconceived plan.”94 Agostinelli and the Great War had certainly presented such potentialities and obstacles for Proust, who was to write a much longer novel of greater scope than originally intended, although without changing the basic circular structure of his story, which is that of a quest.
By late December, Proust decided to simplify his existence by canceling the telephone, which meant that he would no longer have the theatrophone. Perhaps he felt that the player piano and its rolls were all he required for the moment. No telephone meant that Céleste had to cross the street to a little café, where she made calls for Proust whenever he had an urgent message for the outside world.
Proust was unaware that Bertrand de Fénelon, who could have fulfilled his obligation to his country by staying in his diplomatic post, had volunteered for active service. As of December, His Blue Eyes was missing in action. Nineteen fourteen had been, as Marcel wrote in a letter to Reynaldo, a hellish year.95