NINETEEN-TWENTY-TWO BROUGHT no relief to Proust’s many ailments. He complained of difficulty speaking, and he continued to take dangerous adrenaline injections. Now he felt that he needed such stimulation not just for extraordinary efforts but simply to go out for some air while Céleste and Marie cleaned his room.1 In a note to Tronche thanking him for the New Year’s gifts, Proust described the “terrible days I have spent, an infinite mental distress combining with physical suffering. It’s useless for the doctors to be clever at dodging the difficulties because my awful clairvoyance sees right through their contradictions and deprives me of any hope. How unfortunate that doctors must be ‘conscientious’ and that instead of ‘treat me’ you cannot say to them ‘kill me’ since they are unable to cure you.” This was at least the second time, since the previous year’s wish for a cyanide pill, that Proust expressed an eagerness to die. He no longer knew moments of repose; he vacillated between the highs and lows resulting from the strange mixtures of drugs he took and the unknown quantities of his will and appetite for life that occasionally surfaced. On January 8 he went to the Ritz for dinner and, finding himself in the midst of a noisy crowd arriving for a ball, “fled” upstairs to a private dining room where he “devoured a leg of lamb.”2 How Proust treated his body and the sad results had become predictable, yet his mind remained lucid when he revised his pages.
If he seemed no longer able to rescue himself from the downward slide, Proust still went to no end of trouble to help his friends. On learning that Clément de Maugny and his wife were destitute to the point of not knowing when they went to bed whether they would have enough to eat the next day, he attempted to find them a situation in Paris. Though fond of Clément, Marcel considered Rita an “angel a thousand times superior” to her husband.3 Maugny was another friend whose financial security had been undermined by the Russian Revolution and the war. His deceased mother’s inheritance was tied up in Russia. Commiserating with Clément, Marcel told him that Reynaldo was forced to spend each winter wasting “his energy and his talent... as musical director of the Casino Théâtre de Cannes.” In his determination to assist the Maugnys, Proust wrote letters throughout the spring to friends in diplomatic and official circles, such as Paul Morand, Robert de Billy, and Mathieu de Noailles, who had connections with the recently founded Société des nations. At one point, Proust even thought of engaging Maugny as his secretary, but he wrote Clément that he had not dared suggest this, even if his friend were able to adapt to the “slum where I now live.”4
Although Proust continued to have periodic suspicions of Gallimard’s actions and motives—largely because Morand kept telling him stories about Gaston’s lack of competence or goodwill—on occasion he felt sympathy toward his publisher over the enormous burden of bringing out the Search. He was also touched by Gallimard’s repeated offers to assist with the proofreading, offers that Proust continued to decline. In mid-January, fearing that Gaston might somehow regret having undertaken the publication of a novel whose “proportions were somewhat vast,” Proust offered to free the publisher from his contractual obligations. If Gallimard wanted out, he should not fear “hurting my feelings”; while “no longer being one of your authors, I would remain your friend.”5
Gaston replied that he had “never thought for one minute that publishing the Search was a burden.” Not only was he “satisfied to publish” Proust’s books, but he “wished it would never stop and that there would be many of them and that I will always have the opportunity to prove to you my devotion and my admiration.” He assured Marcel that he was “of all the authors published by the NRF the most beloved and the most admired.” If Marcel were able to attend the receptions Gallimard gave for his authors, he would see that the other writers considered him their “maître.”6
Proust’s solicitous attitude toward his publisher lasted less than a week. Fearful that Gallimard’s proposal to bring out Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, in three volumes—and thus at an increased price—would reduce the number of readers, Proust sent him another list of accusations. Proust’s letter is missing, but the charges are clear from Gallimard’s letter defending himself and asking that he be allowed to confront his accusers. Proust seemed to have revived every old grievance, from Gaston’s negligence during the years when he was in New York with the theatrical troupe, to his ineffective launching of Within a Budding Grove, to his inadequate response to the opportunity presented by the Prix Goncourt.
Trying once again to placate Proust, Gaston said that if the author thought that agreeing to three volumes would be a “new capitulation,” then two it would be. He also guaranteed that if Proust sent him part 3 (eventually called The Captive), Gallimard would have it set immediately and publish it in October. In the postscript, Gallimard, who suspected that Morand was behind all the complaints, asked Proust’s permission to speak directly to Morand.7 Proust asked Paul to talk to Gallimard, but the diplomat entreated Proust not to identify him as the source of any remarks critical of Gallimard. Morand claimed that he could not remember making such comments, but if he had “it must have been terrible because I am so blunt.”8
On the evening of January 28 Proust made an effort to go out, despite feeling “much sicker,” to celebrate his niece’s eighteenth birthday. Although Suzy (as Adrienne now preferred to be known) had turned eighteen on November 25, Robert and Marthe had postponed the big party until after the holidays. As Proust explained to Gallimard, Suzy knew that he had attended the Beaumonts’ gala New Year’s Eve party, and she might hold it against him if he did not put in an appearance. He feared that all he would accomplish would be to “catch cold between three and four in the morning.”9 Proust performed his avuncular duty and, as he noted in a letter to Morand in the early hours after returning home, the party had been the first such “medical” gathering he had attended at which there had been no “smell of iodoform.” He trusted that his “presence as a resurrected Lazarus had not cast too great a chill” on the party. He was ready, however, “to return to the tomb.”10
By February, Proust had grown discouraged about all the work remaining for the forthcoming volume and what he viewed as the printer’s refusal to produce the proofs in a timely manner. He expressed to Gallimard his doubts that the book would be ready May 1. If not, he would rather wait another year, for he believed that October would not be a good time to publish.11 A few days later Proust wrote again, complaining that the late arrival of proofs meant that he had less time to complete his work. He resented being treated like a “machine that one can regularly oil so that it will work to maximum capacity,” but he would continue to work hard as though May 1 were the “real date,” convinced though he was that the book would not be published until May 1923. That would be a “disaster” because by then “the characters of May 1922 will be even more forgotten.” This disaster loomed because Gaston had “no authority over your printer. He’s making fools of us.” But in the same letter Proust suggested that he wanted more time and was even considering further expansion of the Search: “I have so many books to give you that if I die will not be published (À la recherche du temps perdu has hardly begun).” Proust conceded that because he was making additions to Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, perhaps three volumes would be appropriate after all. He would leave the decision to Gallimard.12 His hesitation about the desirable publication date and his reference to “so many books to give you” indicate his inability to make firm decisions regarding the definitive shape of his novel.
Gallimard promised Proust that the book would appear in May 1922; if not, Gaston would pay him a heavy forfeit. Frédéric Paillart agreed to let two typesetters work full time on the book. Furthermore, if Gallimard received the definitive text of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 3, in May, he would guarantee its publication for October 15, which was “as good a date as May 1.” He gently rebuked Proust for having recently hurt his feelings again by another allusion to Gallimard’s rejection of Swann’s Way. Gallimard had repeatedly explained that he had nothing to do with that decision. “Once I was in charge, my first step was to contact you.” Proust was pleased with Gallimard’s initiatives and guarantees. He took an additional step: he instructed Gallimard to offer the printer on Proust’s behalf a one thousand-franc bonus for finishing the job by May. Gallimard assured Proust that such a reward was unnecessary, but he did “not dare contradict” the author.13 Proust kept his word; in early April, when the volume was printed, he sent Paillart one thousand francs.14
In spite of his chronic health problems and hard work, Proust went out relatively often in the first months of the year. Twice in early February he attended parties given by Mme Soutzo in her apartment. At the first, Proust asked Mile d’Hinnisdaël to show him some of the latest dance steps. Céleste recalled that Mile d’Hinnisdaël intrigued Proust because her family, “although still very formal, stiff, and traditional as they were despite the changes in postwar society, couldn’t help accepting people and things they wouldn’t have tolerated in the old days.” Proust was amazed at how naturally and “with exquisite gracefulness” Mlle d’Hinnisdaël performed the latest and most popular “1922 dances,” while maintaining her aristocratic bearing.15 The party must have been a fairly wild affair. Writing to Mme Soutzo afterward, Proust recalled the moment when “you dragged me over to Mme [Wanda] Landowska who was biting Mlle [Hélène] Vacaresco’s buttocks.” (No doubt this is not to be taken literally, but Proust says nothing more about meeting the famous Polish pianist, composer, and teacher.) Marcel feared he had made a terrible gaffe in addressing Mme Scheikévitch by that name rather than as Mme Vial. He was relieved to learn that he had made no blunder; she had divorced Vial and was indeed once again Mme Scheikévitch.16
In late February, Proust wrote Robert de Flers to congratulate his old friend on becoming director of the Figaro. Proust had canceled his subscription months before, when the newspaper had become “something unmentionable,” but now he renewed it. Proust mentioned his own “odious existence” and said that he awaited someone whose specialty was simplifying all matters: “Her name is death.”17 Flers, like most of Proust’s old friends, had no particular reason to take alarm at such pronouncements of doom. Marcel had been complaining about his health and claiming to be at death’s door for as long as any of them could remember. The note to Flers was dictated to Proust’s new secretary, Odilon’s niece Yvonne, whom the author described as “a pretty Lozèroise from Monjézieu.”18
Proust still felt indebted to Léon Daudet and announced his intention to write an article about him. Léon urged Marcel to abandon the idea and spend his time and energy on the Search. Daudet did not need a tribute to appreciate Marcel’s profound friendship, which was reciprocated. Writing to Marcel and thinking about his health had made Daudet, who had long ago abandoned medicine for journalism, “feel more like a doctor than ever. But you would never heed my advice, which would be, in your eyes, extremely upsetting.”19
Proust did take someone’s advice regarding a shield against contagious diseases. This step had been prompted by the concierge’s young daughter, who often brought Proust’s mail to his apartment and who seemed to be constantly sick with infectious childhood diseases. Proust’s germ phobia, which had become even more marked, made him fear that, in his weakened condition, touching the envelopes that the child brought up in her unclean hands might give him the measles or whooping cough. He instructed Céleste to buy a “long metal box and put formol in it to disinfect the letters before he opened them.” Proust would not take an envelope in his hands until it had been exposed to the formaldehyde solution for two hours.20
On April 7, in anticipation of the Schiffs’ visit to Paris, Proust drafted a letter for Rivière to send Sydney upon his arrival in Paris. The letter, to be written as though from Rivière to Schiff, explained that Proust, due to illness and other distractions, had failed to forward in a timely manner Schiff’s novel for Jacques’s consideration to publish in the NRF. Proust had forgotten Schiff’s pseudonym (Stephen Hudson) and the book’s title (Elinor Colhouse) and asked Jacques to supply them if he knew them. In the postscript “Jacques” invited Schiff to stop by for a visit at the NRF offices. Rivière, after going to a fair amount of trouble, even having Schiff’s novel translated into French, rejected the manuscript. Elinor Colhouse was later published by Schiff’s friend T. S. Eliot in his new review The Criterion.21
Rivière was not having a good year. He had spent January in Luxembourg, where he finished revising his novel Aimée. Jacques, whose health was declining but whose ambitions for himself and the NRF remained strong, found it increasingly difficult to work and concentrate. When Schiff met Rivière at the NRF’s offices in early May, he thought the editor looked “very sick, to the point of dying.” Schiff reported his impressions to Proust, including Jacques’s desperate practice of taking arsenic and strychnine injections just to get through the day.22
The Schiffs proved to be difficult guests, especially for two men whose lives were as complicated by literature and illness as were Proust’s and Rivière’s. The visit began badly when the Schiffs changed hotels even before arriving but neglected to inform Proust. They decided at the last minute to go to the Hôtel Foyot, known for its excellent restaurant and accommodations. Certain that his English friends would be staying at the Ritz, Proust took his various fortifying shots and waited in vain for them to arrive at the hotel. When Proust learned what had happened, he sent a letter to the Schiffs, saying that he did not know whether he would be able to rise again soon.23
During part of the Schiffs’ two-month stay in Paris, Violet felt ill. Sydney was often reduced to lunching and dining alone at the Ritz, where he hoped that Proust, who found all other hotels unacceptable, would join him. Sleeping poorly and coughing through the night, Schiff soon became fatigued. A nervous man under normal conditions, Sydney resorted to his usual médecine in stressful situations: he began to drink too much champagne. He later admitted to Proust that the excessive wine only made him “stupid as well as deafer.”24
Proust had little time for the Schiffs because he was occupied with preparations for the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. He was eager for Rivière to publish an article, as part of the publicity campaign, in which Camille Vettard compared Proust to the physicist Albert Einstein. Proust believed that Jacques was reluctant to print the piece because readers might be put off by the comparison to the scientific genius, but Marcel saw the comparison as “the most immense honor and the keenest pleasure one could grant me.” In fact, Rivière hesitated because of the highly personal tone of some passages in Vettard’s piece.25 Once those were cut, the essay appeared in NRF.
Before the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, Proust gave excerpts to two reviews, apparently in the belief that exposure to different audiences increased his readership. In April, Intentions published an excerpt about the “strange and sorrowful reason” for which the Narrator intends to marry Albertine (“Étrange et douloureuse raison d’un projet de mariage”). At the end of the month, “Une soirée chez les Verdurin” (An evening at the Verdurins’) appeared in the April-May issue of Les Feuilles libres.
On April 26, Gallimard reported to Proust that copies of the volume should be delivered to bookstores by Saturday morning, April 29, “exactly as you wished.” He enclosed the press list and invited Proust to mark the names of those he wanted to receive a copy directly; Gallimard would bring him the others to sign. At the end of his letter, Gallimard expressed concern about Proust’s condition: “It seems to me that this year has been difficult enough for you so that you must try everything to get better.”26
Proust did make sporadic attempts to improve his health, or at least to eat more. Sometime in late April he wrote a note to Céleste, asking her to “warm up a little bit of Vichy water” because the water in his glass was flat. He had decided not to request any potatoes, because the “horrible tart” had made him nauseated. “I’m freezing. Is it warmer in the kitchen than here? Do you have any croissants, I’m afraid the potatoes will take too long. How much time for the noodles? Forgive me for ringing so much.” If Proust listed so many things that he might eat, it was because he had no appetite and nothing appealed to him.27
On the last day of April, Mme Straus sent her “dear little Marcel” a melancholy note, in which she said, “Life is passing by—especially mine—and we are still kept apart by sleep!” She doubted they would see each other again “in this world, and I am hardly counting on ‘the other’ to facilitate our friendship.” She was eager to read his new book before she was “completely dead.” Mme Straus urged him to rise early—around eight in the evening—and come dine on a “sachet of caffeine.” Failing that, she asked him to send the “beautiful Céleste” to report when she might “read, even in proofs, the desired volume.” If Marcel waited too long and she went “up there,” she certainly would not be able to receive Sodom and Gomorrah. “I was the first to know and to love you. Furthermore I still love you tenderly.”28 Mme Straus’s apprehensions proved true; she and Marcel never saw each other again, but he was the first to leave. Proust, who spent time with his new friends, apparently had no particular desire to see his oldest friends. He seemed happy to see those, like Reynaldo and Lucien, who called on him, but he made no special effort.
On May 1 Proust was amazed to find himself surrounded by the “pile of volumes” that Gallimard had sent. “Apparently, this is my book,” he wrote Binet-Valmer. Indeed, it was one hundred copies of the three-volume edition of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. Strapped for cash, as always, Proust complained to Gallimard about the publisher’s “restrictions,” by which he meant the clauses of his contract. It was clear from what he wrote Gallimard that he was tempted to sell another long episode from the Search in order to earn extra money: “Being able to give from time to time an unpublished episode” to Les Œuvres libres “would have made my life easier from a monetary point of view and would have caused me no fatigue.” Forgetting all the extra work required to provide a separate novella for Fayard, Proust thought only of the extra money he could earn from such a publication.29
The day proved fateful for Proust. His carelessness with drugs resulted in another accident, one with permanent consequences. Although he did not feel like going out, he agreed to accompany the Schiffs to the Ritz for dinner. His note to Schiff said that he had not slept for a week and that he was having his worst day in a while. He described himself as “a misshapen and staggering thing.” No matter: he agreed to be ready at eight o’clock, when Violet was to call for him in a car. But the visit must be short because he was exhausted. He included instructions for the staff at the Ritz: Olivier must close all the windows in the restaurant and the gallery. Schiff received Proust’s message at four and soon reported that he had spoken to Olivier and arranged everything as requested.
While signing his books, Proust decided to take some dry adrenaline in a very strong dose. He neglected to dilute it sufficiently, and when he swallowed the powder, it severely burned his digestive tract. He dropped his books and howled in pain. For three hours he suffered a “veritable martyrdom.” Once the worst pain subsided, he decided to meet the Schiffs anyway. When Violet came to pick him up, his eagerness to go out was apparent; as Proust later described to Sydney, he had “jumped” in the car. A few hours after Proust returned home, however, he came down with a high fever. Although he described himself as “very well cared for” by his servants and doctors, he endured weeks of fevers during which he could take no solid food. He sent Odilon to the Ritz every night to bring back ice cream, “the only thing I can swallow.”30 From that time on Proust ate and drank little other than ice cream and iced beer from the Ritz.31
In the days following the accident, the doctors considered washing out his stomach but abandoned the idea. Instead, they put plasters on his stomach in an attempt to heal the ulcerations. Proust’s discomfort was so great that he found it difficult to turn over in his bed. He assured Sydney that if the Schiffs remained in Paris, as soon as he was able to leave his bed, “my first visit will be for you.” There are indications that by mid-May, Proust was giving serious thought to entering a sanatorium. He advised Maurice Duplay to use the NRF address when writing him because he might leave for a clinic.32 By the last week in May, though, Proust was able to go to the Ritz for the first time since the accident.
During his latest health crisis, Proust heard from friends who had read Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. Morand wrote to say that the publication had gotten off to a good start: the volume “was in all the bookstores, very much in view, and everyone is talking about it,” even the foreign press. Morand referred to the critic J. Middleton Murry’s article in the Times of London. Writing about French literary taste, Murry cited Proust’s success with the Search as an example of an author who appeals to the “general public despite his rare qualities.” According to Murry, French readers had purchased forty thousand copies of each of the five volumes to date of this “remarkable and demanding story.”33 In August, Léon Daudet sounded the same theme, calling Proust a “popular” author whose books “sell thousands and thousands of copies, [one] who is read, reread, interpreted, admired in every milieu.”34 Although Murry’s figures are inflated, he and Daudet had observed correctly: the Search did sell well, especially given the demands it made on the reader’s attention and pocketbook.
There was surprisingly little reaction to Proust’s having populated his novel with a high percentage of characters who engage in homosexual acts. François Mauriac did tell Proust that he had gone too far in depicting so many homosexuals. “Your cursed cities lack the ten righteous men that, it’s true, God did not find therein. Without the ten righteous men,” Mauriac, like other readers, felt the proportion was out of balance and that “Sodom and Gomorrah were becoming one with the Universe. A single saintly figure would have sufficed to set everything right.”35 Walter Berry, however, approved of Proust’s frank talk about sexuality; Berry wrote a friend that the volume was “terrific . . . nothing like it outside of Krafft-Ebing.”36 The book predated by nearly three decades the first scientific surveys, such as the Kinsey reports, which validated a number of Proust’s observations about human sexual behavior, many of which involve bisexuals or individuals whose sexual orientation changes with time. Proust was the first novelist to present what Dr. Alfred Kinsey later described as the continuum of human sexuality.37
Mme Straus sent her congratulations on the new volume, which absorbed her so completely, she wrote, that she did not even hear the servant call her to dinner. She expressed her regret that she might never see Proust again and thanked him for the “immense joy” his book had given her. The daughter of Fromenthal Halévy had been very touched by Proust’s quoting an aria from the composer’s most famous opera, La Juive.38
Proust performed a remarkable nonliterary feat in honor of the Schiffs: he entertained in his apartment during daylight hours so that the Schiffs could meet his sister-in-law and niece. Marcel received his guests in the small living room, where he stretched out on a chaise longue. During the visit, Suzy saw how much Mr. Schiff idolized her uncle. After their return to London, Violet, without consulting Proust, wrote directly to Suzy and invited her to visit them in England. Suzy felt that her Uncle Marcel was “violently opposed” to her accepting the invitation. Violet may have had this impression also, for she later wrote to Proust and apologized, only to have him tell her that there was no cause. Suzy later learned that the Schiffs hoped to marry her to their nephew.39
On May 15 Schiff sent Proust a note to congratulate him on his book. Sydney mentioned that he and Violet planned on Thursday to attend the première of Stravinsky’s new ballet Renard. After the performance, they were hosting a supper party for the composer, Diaghilev, and some members of his troupe at the Hôtel Majestic. Schiff had rented a private salon at the Majestic because the Ritz allowed no music after 12:30. If, “by some miracle,” Proust could attend, he would find the party “on the ground floor around 12:3o.”40 Schiff listed the other guests, including Picasso and his wife.41 A guest not mentioned by Schiff was the Irish writer James Joyce, whose sensational novel Ulysses had been published only two months earlier in Paris. Marcel, whose fever had subsided, went out for the first time since his accident to the Schiff’s party at the Majestic.
Joyce, who arrived before Proust, apologized to the Schiffs for being late and for not having dressed; at that time he had no formal clothes.42 The Irish author began drinking heavily to hide his embarrassment. Suddenly, the door opened and Proust appeared, wearing a fur coat. Eager to meet Proust, Joyce followed the Schiffs to the door and attached himself to Proust for the rest of the evening. Perhaps geniuses attract, or perhaps Joyce, underdressed and slightly drunk, felt more comfortable in the company of a fellow practitioner of his craft. Neither writer knew the other’s work. In October 1920 Joyce had mentioned Proust in a letter to Frank Budgen: “I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.”43 The creators of Leopold Bloom and Charles Swann had little to say to each other. Nonetheless, there are many versions of the meager exchange. The variations in the tale apparently resulted from Joyce’s relish in retelling the encounter, remembering it differently each time. Proust, presumably unimpressed with Joyce, never related the encounter to anyone who recorded it. According to William Carlos Williams, Joyce complained about headaches and his eyes, while Proust bemoaned his poor digestion. But Joyce told Jacques Mercanton that “Proust would only talk about duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.” Violet Schiff remembered that the party broke up when Proust suggested that the Schiffs accompany him to his apartment in a taxi. Joyce, very tipsy, climbed into the taxi with them and promptly opened the window. Schiff, knowing Proust’s deadly fear of drafts, immediately closed the window. When they arrived, Proust, in a polite gesture that also served to get rid of Joyce, urged the Irishman to let the taxi take him home. Joyce lingered, eager for more drink and badinage. Proust fled to his apartment, leaving the Schiffs to persuade Joyce to return home on his own.
Joyce wrote Sylvia Beach in October, saying, with typical Joycean wordplay, that he had “read the first two volumes recommendés by Mr. Schiff of À la Recherche des Ombrelles Perdues par Plusieurs Jeunes Filles en Fleurs du Côté de chez Swann et Gomorrhée et Co. par Marcelle Proyce and James Joust.”44 Nothing more is known about his opinion of Proust; apparently, Joyce continued to see “no special talent.”
Around the time of the Schiff party Proust received a letter from a woman who was outraged because she recognized herself as Odette. Without naming Laure Hayman, Proust lamented his situation to Gallimard: “A woman I loved thirty years ago wrote me a furious letter to tell me that she is Odette and I am a monster. Such letters (and the replies!), that’s what kills all work. I am not speaking of pleasure. I renounced that long ago.”45
Proust answered Laure, expressing his astonishment that she had found any resemblance between herself and Odette: “Odette de Crécy is not only not you, but your exact opposite. This seems to me overwhelmingly obvious in every word she speaks.” Proust chose to overlook the fact that he had given Laure’s address in the rue La Pérouse, behind the Arc de Triomphe, to Odette de Crécy. He cited the example of a woman, whom he did not name but who belonged to high society and whose flowers he had described for Odette’s apartment. The lady had thanked him “without believing for a second that she might, therefore, be Odette.” The flowers in question were Mme Straus’s “guelder-rose snow-balls.”46 Using the tactic he had employed to throw Montesquiou off the scent, Proust named other courtesans, such as Clomesnil, who had inspired a particular dress worn by Odette. He paraphrased for Laure a passage in Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, that had been published in Les Œuvres libres, in which he remarked how silly society people were for believing that “a book is a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once ‘put in’ the people he meets.”47 In such cases, society people “generally choose a person who is exactly the opposite of the character.... Alas, did I overrate you? You read me and find yourself resembling Odette! It’s enough to make one give up writing books.” He knew that society women had no idea of what literary creation is, except those who were “remarkable. But remarkable is just what you were in my memory. Your letter has disillusioned me. I lack the strength to go on, and in saying good-bye to the cruel correspondent who writes only to cause me pain, I place my respects and my tender memory at the feet of her who used to think better of me.”48 In his charming, ingratiating, and perhaps convincing way, Proust had maneuvered from offender to innocent victim.
Fortunately, not all reactions to his book put him on the defensive. Henri Bidou, whose articles on the war Proust had found superior, praised the novel. Being with Proust’s characters, the critic wrote, was like “being in a lively crowd.” The Search was much more than a reading, it was a “presence.”49 Cocteau sent a note saying that next to Marcel’s books all others seemed “boring.” Among the pages Jean particularly admired were those on Céleste, “which are of a celestial poetry.” Proust paid tribute to Céleste and her sister, Marie Gineste, in a humorous passage in which the two meet the Narrator at Balbec, where the sisters are staying in the servants’ quarters, performing the service of messengers. “I had very soon formed a mutual bond of friendship, as strong as it was pure, with these two young persons, Mile Marie Gineste and Mme Céleste Albaret.” Proust evoked the sisters’ home in central France, describing them as products of that particular landscape. Françoise, the fictional servant, is favorably impressed on learning about the marriage of Céleste and Marie’s brother to the niece of the archbishop of Tours. Céleste and Marie taunt the sedentary Narrator about being spoiled and playing the prince. Proust ended the passage with a moving portrait of Céleste, in which the Narrator teases her about reproaching her husband for failing to understand her, “and I myself was astonished that he could put up with her. For at certain moments, quivering, raging, destroying everything, she was detestable.” He compared her humors to the elements and to the “rhythm of her native streams. When she was exhausted, it was after their fashion; she had literally run dry. Nothing could then have revitalised her. Then all of a sudden the circulation was restored in her tall, slender, magnificent body. The water flowed in the opaline transparence of her bluish skin. She smiled in the sun and became bluer still. At such moments she was truly celestial.”50
In late May, Edmond Jaloux, now Grasset’s literary editor for novels, invited Proust to dinner with Middleton Murry and his wife, the writer Katherine Mansfield, at the Bœeuf à la Mode. Jaloux was certain that Proust knew “how much they admire you.”51 The previous December, Mansfield had written Schiff from Switzerland to express the couple’s intense admiration of the Search: “We lived Proust, breathed him, talked and thought of little else for two weeks.” Proust was unable to accept the invitation.52
By late May, Proust, ready to try solid food, communicated with Céleste by note. “You could always buy some asparagus and prepare them right away. I will have them or not have them. Wait until I ring to bring them.” Proust ate the asparagus but found it indigestible. Three nights later he ordered a “monstrous dinner” from the Ritz and had it delivered to his apartment. Whether he ate any of it is unknown. He complained to friends about the huge tab he was running at the Ritz because of his constant need for ice cream and iced beer.53
Shortly before the Schiffs were to return to London, Proust took Sydney to Le Cuziat’s brothel. Apparently, Schiff did not enjoy the experience, for Proust later wrote to apologize for having “inflicted” the visit on his English friend. Marcel caught a cold during the outing, which apparently prevented his seeing the Schiffs again before their June 1 departure.54
On June 4 Lucien wrote and asked to visit Marcel “one evening when you can receive me without tiring yourself too much.”55 Lucien found Proust “even paler than usual, with deep black circles around his eyes.” As they talked about the old days, something reminded Lucien of the little ivory box Marcel had given him. “God!” Proust exclaimed, “How could you have kept that box? Surely it’s very ugly? Is there not something prettier that you’d like to have?” Lucien replied that nothing could rival the box. When it came time for him to leave, the past overwhelmed Lucien, the “memory of the little box moved me to tears, and I tried to embrace him; he drew back in his bed and said to me: ‘No, don’t embrace me, I haven’t shaved,’ then I quickly seized his left hand and kissed it.”56 When Lucien went through the door, he turned and looked at Marcel, who was staring at him. It was the last meeting of the two friends.
That week Antoine Bibesco, his wife, and Princesse Marthe Bibesco came to Proust’s apartment.57 Antoine was in Paris for summer vacation and had wanted to see Marcel before going on to Romania, where the three would stay through the fall. Proust, weary and unkempt, allowed Antoine to come to his bedside for a visit, while Céleste entertained the ladies.
He also received Rivière in an emotional meeting. Proust demonstrated his great friendship for Jacques, whom he wanted to encourage and aid. He asked Rivière to take leave from the NRF and devote himself to revising the remaining volumes of the Search, but Rivière felt that he could not leave the review. Though moved by Proust’s kindness and affection, Rivière was upset by one remark. He wrote Proust afterward: “Why do you despair of finishing your work? I am certain you will finish it.” So “great was the need” everyone felt for the book that Proust could not “leave it unsatisfied.”58
On June 10 Proust wrote Berry about his intention of going to Mme Hennessy’s party the following week. Because she had no doubt “invited hundreds of guests whose heat will revive me . . . I could risk this exception. But yesterday after eating ice cream and drinking iced beer in my bed, where I was too hot, I developed a sore throat and I don’t know if, between now and Monday... I will be recovered.” He told Berry he had already spent “850 francs this month for ice cream, which I find excessive.”59 Proust did attend the Hennessy party, where he met Marie de Benardaky, now the “white-haired Princesse Radziwill.” According to Céleste, when Proust offered to take Marie home and she declined, saying, “Another evening, perhaps,” he said that he would never see her again.60
A few days later, Proust told Lacretelle that he had “eaten nothing in the last ten days and had hardly slept three hours in all” during that time. “Every day I try a new remedy,” and while he no longer expected to be well, he would at least like to “go out and above all to work again.”61 Proust’s biggest problem apart from his health was his need for money. Gallimard contacted Proust with what sounded like a possible opportunity to obtain needed funds. Jacques Doucet, renowned couturier and collector, who was amassing documents for the creation of an important library that he intended to leave to the state, had offered to buy Proust’s manuscripts. Proust first set the figure at seven thousand francs, which Gallimard thought was too high, observing that Gide’s manuscripts had sold for a third as much.62 The negotiations continued into the fall, with Proust alternately raising and reducing the price. Finally he rejected an offer of ten thousand francs from Serge André for the manuscript of Sodom and Gomorrah.63 Pleased that the offer showed how prized his manuscripts were, Proust nonetheless hesitated to sell them. As he explained to Schiff, he dreaded the notion that when Doucet’s library became state property “anyone (if anyone still cares about my books) will be allowed to go through my manuscripts, compare them to the definitive text, and reach conclusions, which will always be erroneous, about my way of working, on the evolution of my thought, etc.”64
Meanwhile, in London, Violet Schiff posed for a drawing by Wyndham Lewis. Sydney wrote Proust that after Lewis finished Violet’s portrait he would draw one of him. If they turned out well, Schiff would send the drawings to Proust. “Lewis is our Picasso but a difficult person, hard and without charm.” Schiff said that Proust was the “only man I like and I don’t intend to like any other.” His intense admiration for Proust led him to inquire, “Would you allow Picasso to draw you if I ask him to portray you for me? Just a drawing—it would only take an hour.” Schiff had also been thinking about the English version of the Search and had concluded that his “sympathetic intuition, literary taste and mental faculties” made him the “only one who could do this translation.” He added: “I often think about this. Would I not do better to put my own work aside and undertake the translation of the entire Search?”65
In the summer the Schiffs sent the charmless Wyndham Lewis to call on Proust and make a drawing. Lewis, who had the wrong address, did not reach Proust until near the end of a brief stay. By the time Proust received Lewis’s note asking for an appointment, he felt too unwell to see the painter. He wrote Lewis that he regretted the missed opportunity, for being portrayed by him “would have been my only chance to be remembered by posterity!” Later in the summer, Schiff sent Lewis to call on Proust again, but nothing came of the proposed drawing.66
Proust invited Edmond Jaloux to dinner in his apartment on June 23 but had to postpone the meeting after experiencing “malaises” that made Dr. Bize believe he might be suffering from uremia. Bize intended to come the next day and draw blood to send to the laboratory for analysis. Until the results were known, Proust could make no plans. It seems likely that his only serious problems stemmed from excessive self-medication. The evening after Proust canceled dinner with Jaloux, he felt well enough to receive Gide. During the visit, Gide, though by that time somewhat estranged from the NRF, declared that Proust’s “unfairness and ingratitude toward the NRF were revolting.” Proust denied the charge.67 Gallimard had written that day, asking when Proust would send “the remainder of ‘Sodom’ for typesetting.” Gaston hoped to take advantage of the vacation lull to print the next volume, even if Proust chose a later date for publication.68
Perhaps inspired by Schiff’s interest in translating the Search, Proust asked Gallimard whether his book had been or was being translated into English. Proust apparently remembered none of the earlier details Gaston had supplied or the translation copy sent for approval. He informed Gaston that although he had both the manuscript and the typescript of the next two volumes, The Captive and The Fugitive, the “revising of the typescript, where I am making additions everywhere and am changing everything, has hardly begun.”69
Gallimard reminded Proust that he had negotiated with Chatto and Windus of London for rights in England and America and had written him when the contracts were signed. Gaston probably learned from Rivière that Proust had decided to give excerpts from the next volume to the Revue de France, and he wanted to make certain the NRF was not slighted: “You know my detestable jealousy concerning you. So if you must give excerpts to the Revue de France, I would be greatly saddened if the NRF did not receive its share.”70 Proust also heard from Rivière, who expressed his displeasure with the decision. Rivière said he did not deserve such treatment and, “moreover, the Revue de France was in steep decline and . . . had no right to present itself to you as a better embarkation than the NRF. You can ask any bookseller; I am confident about the answer you will receive.” Proust consoled and reassured Jacques, telling him that there was no one he “liked, esteemed and admired more than you. And I always manage, by my clumsiness, to vex you, even, you tell me, to ‘discourage’ you, you the person to whom I would most love to give additional encouragement.” He insisted that Jacques was not to worry; Proust had no formal agreement with the Revue de France.71
As Marcel’s friends began to leave for vacation, he envied their freedom. He bemoaned his sedentary, isolated, nocturnal existence in a letter to Jaloux, saying that he had not been able to “leave Paris even for an hour in eight years. I see no reason why this year should be different.” But he did not even see Paris, “only the awful walls of his room, never illuminated by daylight.”72
When Proust did not receive his royalty check at the end of June, he waited a few days before sending a polite reminder to Gallimard. The author attributed the delay to Gallimard’s needing a little more time to calculate the royalties for the previous volume. This was an indirect way of saying that he had not yet received the advance royalties on the first three thousand copies of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, as stipulated in the contract. But because he had agreed to monthly payments, he was not entitled to receive any more than the usual amount.73 Proust probably saw matters otherwise, given the large sum that Gallimard owed him and his own pressing need for cash. He told Gallimard that he could announce the next two volumes for 1923, but he was not certain that they would be ready. He did not want to give Gallimard “botched work, but the best possible given my limited abilities.” Proust also believed his public was somewhat “sated” from the three most recent volumes and it might be a good idea to let his readers “catch their breath a little and let their appetite return.” There was a new factor regarding the titles. Another publisher had just brought out a book by Rabindranath Tagore whose title had been translated as The Fugitive. Therefore, Proust said, no Fugitive and no Captive, for the titles were clearly in opposition.74
Gallimard replied that Proust had not received the regular monthly check because Raymond Gallimard, who had taken Tronche’s place as business manager, had been away. The publisher ignored the hint about the advance on royalties. So far as the forthcoming volumes were concerned, it was better to announce books even if they did not appear, rather than the other way around. Gallimard had received a request from the American magazine Vanity Fair to publish a photograph of Proust in its monthly “Hall of Fame” column. Gaston had on file the Nadar photograph of Proust at sixteen, which he intended to send to the magazine.75 In January 1923 Vanity Fair published the column with an 1896 photograph of Proust, apparently the first to appear in the American press.
Proust received a letter from Schiff that he apparently threw away because it revolted him. One can judge its contents only by Proust’s response. Schiff had clearly committed two cardinal sins: he had spoken like a snob (or as though Proust wrote for snobs) and he had expressed a viewpoint that matched Sainte-Beuve’s. Marcel gave him a severe dressing down. He began by saying that if Schiff really read his book he would see that he cared nothing for society and had given it up years ago. “But you don’t read my book because like all socialites who don’t care for it, in Paris you are too nervous, in London you are too busy, in the country you have too many guests.” Proust blamed himself, or rather his book, “because if it were really a fine book it would unite spirits and calm troubled hearts. Yet from the day it was published, the book’s true friends read it. . . in the métro . . . oblivious to those sitting next to them and ride past their stops.” When Schiff reiterated his Sainte-Beuvian belief that “when one knows a person one does not need to read a book by that person,” Proust denounced the idea as “absurd” and explained his theory of the profound self: “Between what a person says and what he extracts through mediation from the depths where the integral Spirit lies covered with veils, there is a world. It is true there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books.”76
In early July letters to Schiff and Gallimard, Proust said that he was enjoying a sudden improvement in his health. His vertigo and speaking difficulties had all but disappeared, and he felt many years younger. Proust wrote Princesse Soutzo that he was once again dining nightly or nearly so at the Ritz. One wonders on what he dined, given his recent diet of ice cream and iced beer. He asked her to keep his reemergence secret, because he sometimes dined at the hotel when friends were expecting him for dinner. Proust’s return was a windfall for the Ritz staff. Having sent out for ices, beer, and beef vinaigrette during recent months, he now arrived to see “unknown waiters come out of the cellars and kitchens to assure me that they are the ones who made the raspberry ice cream or cut the meat.” He felt obliged, of course, to tip them all in the grand Proustian manner.77 Had Proust eaten the beef vinaigrette or ordered it for his bedside guests?
Le Bœuf sur le Toit had officially opened on January 10 in the rue Boissy d’Anglas. Its proprietor, Louis Moysès, had asked permission of Cocteau and Milhaud to use the title of their spectacle-concert for his new bar and restaurant. Cocteau and his entourage attended the gala opening of the Bœuf, which became an overnight sensation and favorite spot of the smart set. Cocteau later described the Bœuf as “not a bar at all, but a kind of club, the meeting place of all the best people in Paris, from all spheres of life—the prettiest women, poets, musicians, businessmen, publishers—everybody met everybody at the Bœuf.”78 Those present on July 15 could have met or at least seen Marcel Proust, who put in his first and only appearance as the guest of Edmond Jaloux and Paul Brach, a young poet and novelist who sometimes visited rue Hamelin. Brach and Jaloux had difficulty persuading Proust to forgo the Ritz for an evening. When Jaloux called for Proust, Céleste was knotting his dress tie for him. Jaloux observed in amazement how helpless Marcel seemed. When Proust complained that his cup of tea was lukewarm and not, as he had requested, boiling hot, Céleste seemed hurt. Sensing this, Proust praised the cup of tea, saying that, given his condition, Céleste had been right to serve it to him at that temperature. Jaloux noticed that “All this was said with infinite kindness.”79
On arriving at Le Bœuf sur le Toit, Jaloux sensed that Proust felt rather edgy. Soon, however, it was obvious that he felt completely at ease. When Jaloux left early to keep another engagement, Proust and Brach were joined at the bar by some of Brach’s inebriated friends. In fact, everyone at the bar seemed drunk except Proust, who later said he had nothing to drink. At the other end of the bar, where there was a noisy group of revelers, a brawl broke out between the party of Comte Charles de Maleissye-Melun and a group of men whom Proust took to be “unbelievable pimps and queers.”80 Proust had the impression that the bar’s proprietor Moysès sided with the “pimps and queers.” In the mêlée, Proust almost received a hot roast chicken and ice bucket on his head, leading him to conclude, punning on his host’s name, that this “Moses keeps tables that are not those of the Law.”81 The loud, violent scene stirred Marcel, making his natural adrenaline flow. He said afterward that he “had believed that the charming time of duels was going to be born again for me.”
The next day Proust opened the Figaro and saw Jean Schlumberger’s article, “À la recherche du temps perdu: Une Nouvelle Comédie humaine,” in which the critic compared Proust’s work to Balzac’s remarkable re-creation of French society from Napoléon through the Restoration.82 Proust wrote immediately to offer Robert de Flers his “tender admiration” and profound gratitude for publishing Schlumberger’s article. Proust expressed his amazement that Sodom and Gomorrah had caused “so little scandal!” Was it because France had been through the long trauma of the war, in whose aftermath society’s mores had grown more lax? Or was it because the prestige of the Prix Goncourt had sanctioned his enterprise? “Le Gaulois, where I know no one, has already done five articles on my last book, L’Écho de Paris is asking that I be given the Nobel Prize, the Revue de Paris, the Revue de France praise me as though I were as innocent as Madame de Ségur. Léon Daudet, who finds Hervieu putrid and Bataille fetid, celebrates in me a genius, alas, that doesn’t exist.” Proust apologized to Flers for his dreadful handwriting, “due to drug intoxication,” which made him fall with every step he tried to take and left his hand so twisted and stiff that he could hardly write, “and the most horrible thing about it is that it’s my fault.” Proust saw what he was doing to himself but lacked the willpower to stop.83
Proust compiled a mental list of Gallimard’s recent transgressions. Soon his letters contained hints that should have alerted Gallimard that a new crisis was building. It did not really matter if Proust were sick during the vacation season, because he had so little money that it would be difficult for him to “go on vacation, the first in eight years, and the first I could have really enjoyed.” For someone like him, even a ride around town in a closed car was a “voyage.” Gallimard soon received a reprimand for not having done a better job publicizing Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. All publicity, Proust maintained, had been arranged by himself and his friends. He wanted the Schlumberger piece to be placed as a paid advertisement in the Académie française’s Revue des journaux. Gallimard defended himself and assured Proust that he was neglecting nothing and had gone to no end of trouble to obtain Schlumberger’s article. Proust replied that Gallimard’s letter “touches me without convincing me.” He complained that there had been nothing in the NRF about the important article by the distinguished German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. In February, Curtius had published in Der neue Merkur “Marcel Proust,” the first of his several articles on the novelist. Here Proust was mistaken; Rivière had published a detailed notice of the Curtius review in the July NRF. Proust leveled another charge against Gallimard: other writers were paid more than he. If the better-paid writer were someone of Gide’s stature, he approved. But there were others that Gallimard himself judged third-rate who were “paid a great deal more than I.” Addressing his publisher as “Dear Gaston,” he told him that “this eternal question of all the money” owed him was what so often divided them. He hated to talk about “such vulgar matters.” Then, realizing that he had been a little harsh, Proust wrote in the postscript that “Someone who lives as I do and suffers endlessly is almost a monster.”84
Gallimard reassured him: “You are by far the highest paid author here.” Saying that he would “welcome the opportunity to prove” this, Gaston provided details about what others received and what Proust earned. He asked Marcel to name at once the mendacious “hidden enemy” who kept feeding the novelist’s discontent with falsehoods. Gallimard asked for sympathy: “You can well see that my life is not beautiful because . . . I must defend myself against calumnies and constantly justify myself to you, while you are assuredly the author I admire most, the friend whom I prefer.”85 Proust had little time for sympathy, and he did not believe Gaston’s protestations.
Rivière, whose spirits had been even lower than usual, waited until he reached his resting spot in Haute Savoie before rereading Sodom and Gomorrah. Afterward, he wrote to Proust and expressed his admiration: “My dear Marcel, how beautiful it is! It’s life itself.” Rivière had noticed for the first time Proust’s “relationship to the Cubist movement” and his “profound immersion in contemporary aesthetics.” Jacques explained what he meant: “Never have things said to be the same been shown in so many different lights—to the point... where they seem to be coming apart, where they would come apart if the movement, the implacable continuation of your narrative did not guarantee their reconstruction.” He then talked about Charlus, who was “prodigious!” Charlus was “greater than Balzac’s Vautrin because “he was better analyzed.” Jacques regarded one aspect of this characterization as nearly “miraculous.” After having first shown Charlus “in circumstances that were quasi-repugnant,” Proust made him “progressively likable.” As the reader learned more and more about Charlus, “one discovered . . . his bond with normal humanity. It’s magnificent!” Regarding the Narrator’s infatuation with Albertine, Rivière found “the way in which you study the generation of love by jealousy . . . admirably new and profound.”86
In spite of such praise, Proust feared that if the next two volumes were shorter than the earlier ones, his admirers and detractors might conclude that he was falling off. He wrote Gallimard on July 22 that he would soon send the manuscript of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 3 (The Captive), in order to have proofs made that he would then greatly rework. He was eager to see whether The Captive would be short enough to publish at the same time as The Fugitive, because if it was “certain that short books sell better, in my case, since I have managed until now not to fall into a slump, I would like to avoid, even if I publish a work that is not as long, having people say: ‘He is really declining.’” He hoped to rest for two weeks and resume work with renewed vigor.87
At Proust’s urgings, Gallimard placed ads in newspapers. One in a woman’s magazine, Eve, warned that Sodom and Gomorrah was “Not for young ladies”; an ad in Le Gaulois recommended Proust’s books “For Vacation Reading.” Because Proust had complained so bitterly about the lack of publicity, Gaston pleaded once again for a résumé, which he described as indispensable, and for photographs for American magazines. As for giving the impression that Proust was in a “decline,” Gallimard did not see how anyone could believe that; just one of the volumes of Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, seemed more substantial than many complete works by others.88
By the end of the month the improvement in Proust’s health began to wane. One evening, after dispatching Odilon to the Ritz for iced beer, Proust wrote Brach and described how miserable he felt. If he remained in bed too long, he began to sweat so profusely that every fifteen minutes he had to get out of bed and change pajamas while Céleste put fresh sheets on the bed; each time he arose from the bed and stripped, he suffered chills. His neck ached from a new crick. Proust now viewed his life, he told Brach, as a kind of “horror.” He managed to distract himself somewhat in the evening by giving history lessons to Odilon and his “charming family to whom I teach night school.”89 Céleste remembered one occasion near the end, when Proust, up at an unusually early hour for him, came home around six or seven in the evening. Odilon and Marie were also present and Proust’s “look embraced us, and he added, smiling with heartrending tenderness: ‘I love you all so much.’ Then, more gently still: ‘You are my children.’”90
Proust heard from Schiff, who, though “tired and depressed,” wrote to say how much he admired Proust’s work “as much for its philosophical erudition as for precise knowledge, and as a literary and artistic encyclopedia.” Schiff praised him as “the equal of the greatest authors of the past; your works will have a permanent, definitive place in the literary history of Europe above everyone else since Balzac. Therefore, your manuscripts, your proofs will have historical value.” Schiff, convinced that the manuscripts would end up in some museum, offered to buy them. He announced that as soon as he finished his “little book,” he and Violet would come to Paris for three days and stay at the Ritz, solely to see Proust.91
T. S. Eliot contacted Gallimard and Proust, requesting an excerpt from the next volume for The Criterion, the first issue of which would appear in October. Gallimard consulted Proust, who replied rather vaguely that the most practical solution would be to send Eliot an excerpt from a volume that had been published but not translated.92 Gallimard pressed Proust to make certain that he wanted to give Eliot an excerpt. If so, the publisher would find out how much the American would pay. This time Proust remained silent, and nothing came of the proposal.93
The NRF finally published Camille Vettard’s article “Proust et Einstein” on August 1. Although Proust told Gallimard that Vettard “flatters me too much,” the novelist was delighted by the comparison.94 Vettard had found, among other similarities, that Proust and Einstein “have the sense, the intuition, the comprehension of the great natural laws.” Eager to proceed with the hard work that remained for The Captive, Proust engaged Yvonne Albaret again as a typist. During the next ten weeks she typed three successive versions.95
On August 9 Proust went out in the daytime and returned home early in the afternoon. This unusual occurrence most likely was the result of relentless insomnia. He sat down immediately, without shedding any of the heavy clothes he wore even in summer, and wrote Paul Brach. Proust apologized for not being able to meet Brach in the grill room at the Ritz because he had already been out and expended all his energy. He had been looking forward to their meeting and to seeing the grill room, which was, he told Brach, the only part of the Ritz he did not know. Proust related that he often accompanied waiters late at night to the icebox, where their sudden arrival made the roaches run for cover. He boasted that he even knew how to work the showers at the Ritz.96 Proust thanked Brach for having sent a magazine clipping that showed James Tissot’s painting Le Balcon du Cercle de la rue Royale en 1867. Proust knew three of the men in the painting: Charles Haas, Edmond de Polignac, and Saint-Maurice, all eminent society figures of the Second Empire, the epoch depicted in Swann in Love. “But what a pleasure to see them again.”97 Having evoked the ghosts of Napoléon III’s court and models for his characters, Proust returned to reality, which, for him, had grown somewhat grim. It was now two in the afternoon and, as he wrote Brach, he still had on his hat and overcoat. When would he be able to go out again? He knew that Brach was preparing to leave on vacation and seemed resigned to being left alone in Paris: “That’s all very well, one thinks of people and one gets by without them so easily. I had something to ask you but I can no longer remember what. I am beginning to say a little less often: ‘I will drown you in an ocean of shit.’”98 What Proust meant by this last sentence is unclear. Had he resigned himself to his status as a permanent invalid, someone who could not take a vacation or enjoy the company of friends? Had Proust lately been giving free expression to scatological outbursts—a tendency he shared with Montesquiou and which he gave to Charlus? Or was the frequent use of such language the “return to a very infantile anal stage, which also characterized his sexuality”?99 Gide, to whom Proust had spoken so frankly about his homosexuality, did not record the use of such language.
Rivière was preparing to leave for Pontigny in Burgundy in order to attend an annual meeting at which writers and philosophers from France and other countries gathered to debate philosophical and moral issues. The conference, held in an old abbey, had been founded by Marcel’s former teacher and friend Paul Desjardins. This meeting was the first since the war began. Jacques was to participate in the sessions on literature, along with André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, Edmond Jaloux, and Ernst Robert Curtius. On the eve of his departure, Rivière asked Proust for the passage “Albertine sleeping” for the NRF’s October issue. If Proust agreed, he should send the text before the end of August. Rivière later reported to Proust that everyone at Pontigny had been talking about his novel. When a foreigner would ask Rivière who was the greatest French novelist of the day, “I invariably answered: Proust.”100
During late spring and summer, Proust answered several surveys for newspapers and reviews. Le Gaulois asked three writers considered to be in the avantgarde for their thoughts on the work and influence of the Goncourt brothers. The paper described Proust as a Goncourt laureate who represented the “new psychology.” Proust, who did not consider the Goncourts accomplished writers, answered candidly that the brothers “took notes, kept a diary,” which did not make one “a great artist, a creator.” Nonetheless, he found the diary’s pages “delicious and entertaining.” Remembering his 1907 pastiche of the Goncourt Journal, he cited the parody as a “laudatory criticism.” Always eager to promote his novel, Proust alerted the newspapers’ readers to a pastiche that was to appear in Time Regained, in which the Goncourt diary plays an important role in the Narrator’s discovery of his own vocation as a writer. In the Search, the Goncourts’ superficial jottings about life among the leisured classes first cause the Narrator to despair; if their work represents good literature, he realizes, he cannot compete because it is impossible for him to write in that manner. Then he sees that his own observations not only describe the surface but probe more deeply to reveal the profound psychological causes of human folly and vanity.101
The survey from La Renaissance politique, littéraire et artistique allowed Proust to give a more straightforward answer. “Are we,” the review wanted to know, “in the presence of a renewal of style?” Proust replied briefly that “the continuity of style is not compromised but rather assured by a perpetual renewal.” Writers should not be concerned “‘with originality of form’”—Proust was quoting from the questionnaire—but “only by the impression or idea to be translated.” One must “look inward and force oneself to render with the greatest possible fidelity the interior model.” Vain attempts to “shine” usually spoiled everything.102 Proust was stating his conviction that each writer must find his own voice. A writer’s style results from the rendering in his voice what he alone has discovered and beheld. In the Search Proust defines genius as the ability to mirror, to make visible, new truths about the human condition. That is why the Narrator says that “style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision.”103
Proust’s succinct answer to the third and most poignant survey appeared in L’Intransigeant on August 14. Other than excerpts from his novel, this was the final publication of his life. The newspaper asked “A Simple Question: If the world were about to end, what would you do?” Proust gave the rather standard answer for which this question begged, but with Proustian touches. The awareness of an approaching catastrophe, he wrote, would suddenly make us want to surmount our habitual laziness. “If only we can be spared we will visit the new exhibition rooms at the Louvre, we will throw ourselves at the feet of Mlle X, we will visit India. The cataclysm does not occur,” and we quickly resume our normal routine, “where negligence dulls desire.” We should need no disaster to make us “love life today. We need only to remember that we are humans and death may come this evening.”104
A second accident that apparently contributed to Proust’s physical deterioration occurred on August 20, when the chimney caught fire, filling his room with smoke. He wrote Princesse Soutzo that he had to leave his apartment at three in the morning because he could not stand the fumes. Although Proust repeatedly mentioned the chimney accident and decried the menace of asphyxiation, Céleste denied that such an incident ever took place.105 Is this because Proust blamed her for the accident, for which she and Odilon may have been partly responsible if they failed to report a defective chimney? Proust was convinced that the noxious fumes aggravated his precarious condition.
On the day of the chimney fire, Proust informed Gallimard that he was thinking again about breaking not just his contract but his word. His need for money and his exasperation with Gallimard’s slow payments had brought him to this point. As a pretext Proust used the recent example of Paul Morand. In September Les Œuvres libres was to publish Morand’s novella La Nuit de Putney Common. Proust hoped this publication signaled an end to Gallimard’s misgivings about his authors’ works appearing in Fayard’s review. Marcel wrote that he was thinking of giving a large portion of The Captive to Les Œuvres libres before the volume was published by Gallimard. He stressed the advantages of being read by the “vast public” that subscribed to Les Œuvres libres rather than being read twice by essentially the same audience in the NRF and then in book form. If Proust did give The Captive to Les Œuvres libres, he assured Gallimard that he would offer Jacques other texts as compensation. Proust, who held his excerpts hostage while he negotiated, asked Gallimard to answer quickly because Rivière wanted texts for the October and November issues.106 The new dispute was essentially a replay of the previous year’s battle, with the same results.
Furious on reading Proust’s letter, Gallimard waited a week before answering. After reminding Proust of his pledge never to break ranks again, Gaston, as the “Administrative Delegate of the NRF,” reviewed the provisions of their contract. He concluded his letter, as he should have begun, by saying that “personally I have only one wish: that of pleasing you.” By ending on a note of personal affection and trust, Gallimard hoped to persuade Proust not to give his excerpts to Les Œuvres libres. Proust blamed him, however, for having spoken first as an administrator rather than as a friend and observed that “the interest alone” of what Gallimard had owed him since the publication of Within a Budding Grove was greater than the fee offered by Les Œuvres libres.107 Proust acknowledged that his contract required him to give the NRF half the ten thousand francs he would earn from Fayard.108 For good measure, Proust sent along a postscript reminding Gallimard of his promise to match any such offer. Then Proust emphasized the enormous amount of work that he had to provide because “I don’t want to give you books that are too bad. And I am starting over again for the third time my Captive, with which I am not happy, and I am having an infinitely difficult time trying to decipher the corrections and additions that I wrote on the pages of my typescript that otherwise would be very clear.” Proust was also having difficulty reading his proofs because he had broken his glasses a few weeks earlier and needed to buy new ones or find another pair in the stockpile Céleste had brought home. He described the ruined glasses as “a real drama for me.”109
In early September a contrite Gaston answered Proust’s letter, which “had pained him infinitely.” Gallimard offered to calculate the interest he owed Proust and pay him.110 With the publisher groveling at his feet, Marcel, having obtained everything he wanted, became charming again. He wrote Gallimard immediately, saying that the excerpts on “Albertine sleeping” that he had promised Rivière, were the “best things I have ever done.” And he “would not accept a penny for these excerpts in order to acknowledge your kindness.” Nor did he want Gallimard to hasten the settling of accounts; Proust had agreed to monthly payments and it would be better to leave things as they were. It was only his need for money that had made him raise the question of interest payments. If Proust had accepted the offer from Les Œuvres libres, it was because he had believed the NRF was unable to make him such an advance.111 Gallimard replied that it was “out of the question” that Proust not be paid for the excerpts. As for Les Œuvres libres, he asked Marcel to choose another title for the piece and to make cuts in it so that the “volume we publish will have its raison d’être.” He also wanted to know the approximate date for typesetting The Captive so that he could reserve time at the printer’s.112
On September 4 Proust wrote Rivière and promised him the passage “Albertine sleeping” and many other excerpts, “on condition you don’t say which volume they are from.” He confided to Jacques that his most alarming symptoms had returned: “I am suffering too much today (I fell down five times today from vertigo. Please don’t talk about this—to anyone).” A day or so later Marcel sent Guiche a letter and mentioned his deteriorating health, though in less specific terms than to Jacques. He observed that when he went out to dine at four in the morning, his symptoms seemed to vanish, which made him blame his troubles on the fumes emanating from the cracks in the chimney. But it was also possible that death was approaching. “That’s bothersome before my book is finished.”113
In Proust’s final months, Montesquiou threatened to return from the grave and haunt the novelist. Proust became somewhat obsessed with the fear that the count had attacked him in his memoirs, which were being prepared for publication. In the summer Proust raised the issue with Paul Brach. If Montesquiou attacked him, could Proust sue Dr. Paul-Louis Couchoud, whom the count had chosen as literary executor? Marcel asked Tronche to go to Grasset’s, where Montesquiou’s memoirs, Les Pas effacés (Vanished footsteps), were being edited, and discover what the count had written about him. Tronche apparently learned nothing. In mid-October, Jaloux, who had heard about Proust’s concerns, told him not to worry. Jaloux had not read the memoirs yet, but Grasset had charged him with editing them. Jaloux intended to cut any denigrating passages on Proust or other prominent figures—a condition he had set before agreeing to be the editor. But Proust wanted stronger assurance; he asked Jaloux to remove his name altogether, for if he succumbed to the strange illness from which he suffered, he would be unable to answer any attacks Montesquiou might have made.114
Of greater importance to the reputation of Proust’s novel was the publication in English of Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s Way. A native of Scotland, the translator had served as a captain in the Scottish Borderers during World War I. Before reading À la recherche du temps perdu, he had already made a name for himself as the translator of major French works, such as La Chanson de Roland (The song of Roland) and Stendhal’s two masterful novels Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. After the war he had served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe, in addition to being an editor at the Times of London. In January 1920 the thirty-year-old Scott-Moncrieff had resigned his post at the Times in order to devote himself entirely to translating La Recherche. In September 1921 Sir Edmund Gosse, the English poet and critic, wrote Scott-Moncrieff and attempted in vain to persuade him to abandon the idea of translating the Search because Gosse thought Proust’s work stood little chance of being remembered.115 Considered by many to be one of the most accomplished translators of modern times, Scott-Moncrieff combined a knowledge of French and a command of the English language that allowed him to render Proust’s complex style in a version that remained the standard over many decades for Anglophone readers.116
Proust was unaware of his good fortune in having such a translator; his misgivings were founded on a letter from Sydney Schiff. In London on September 9, Schiff read this announcement in the Athenaeum: “Messrs Chatto & Windus, as publishers, and Mr Scott-Moncrieff, as author, have almost ready the first installment of M. Marcel Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ in the English translation. The title of this initial volume is ‘Swann’s Way.’ “Schiff, who had long thought he was the only Englishman capable of translating the Search, abhorred Scott-Moncrieff’s titles. Schiff did not realize that the overall title came from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past...” In his letter to Proust, Schiff lamented the loss of the French title’s double meaning—time wasted and lost, with its “melancholy nuance, etc.”117 An even more surprising blind spot was Schiff’s total misreading of Swann’s Way, rendering it for Proust as the title “À la manière de Swann” (In the manner of Swann), as though that were its only possible meaning. Naturally, Proust, who knew something about the art of translation, was alarmed by Schiff’s misleading letter.
Proust answered Schiff, indicating that he certainly did not intend to “let Du côté de chez Swann appear under the title you gave me. I knew nothing about this translation.” Of course, Proust did know—or should have known—about Scott-Moncrieff’s translation; the previous December he had declined Gallimard’s offer to inspect it. Proust, whose condition was worsening again, waited nearly a week before writing Gallimard about the translation. Now, he said, in addition to “falling with every step,” his speech troubles had returned. He then conveyed Schiff’s concerns about the translation to Gallimard. The author could not accept a title that meant “In the manner of Swann.” That was “intolerable.” He reminded Gaston that Du côté de chez Swann and Le Côté de Guermantes indicated the two separate walks at Combray. The English title was “nonsense”; surely it must be an error. Proust concluded: “I value my work too much to allow an Englishman to demolish it.”118
Gallimard replied that such a distortion of Proust’s titles was indeed out of the question, and he would do everything in his power to prevent it. Gaston soon received the advance copies of Swann’s Way in English. He had also found in the files for Proust’s inspection the contract with the English publisher and his own letter to Proust offering to let him approve Scott-Moncrieff’s translation. And Gallimard had some encouraging news: he had spoken to Victor M. Liona, his agent for America and England, “who knew English admirably well” and who assured him that Swann’s Way was not at all bad for the title; it was in fact “quite good.”119
In October, Proust, who did not live long enough to appreciate the excellence of Scott-Moncrieff’s work, exchanged letters with his translator: “I was very flattered and touched by the trouble you took to translate my Swann.” Because of his terrible health, Proust said that it was a miracle that he could thank Scott-Moncrieff. Although he had not read the entire volume, the author did have “one or two criticisms.” The first was to explain that the general title did not mean at all Remembrance of Things Past. Proust regretted the omission of “lost time,” which “is found again at the end of the work: Time Regained. As for Swann’s Way that can mean Du côté de chez Swann, but also Swann’s manner. By adding to you would have made it all right.” Proust’s second suggested correction seems to confirm his admission in the next sentence that he had forgotten all his English.120
Scott-Moncrieff’s reply, written on Saville Club letterhead, was modest and brief: “My dear Sir, I beg that you will allow me to thank you for your very gratifying letter in English as my knowledge of French—as you have shown me, with regard to your titles—is too imperfect, too stunted a growth for me to weave from it the chapelet that I would fain offer you.” After expressing his regret that Proust was so unwell, the translator continued, “I am making my reply to your critiques on another sheet, and by the aid of a machine which I hope you do not abominate: it is the machine on which Swann and one-third of the Jeunes Filles have been translated. Thus you can throw away this sheet unread, or keep it, or inflict it upon M. Gallimard. Charles Scott-Moncrieff.”121 The second sheet was discarded or lost, so we do not know how the translator justified his choice of the general title that Schiff and Proust were the first, but far from the last, to criticize.
In mid-September, Proust heard from Ernest Forssgren, his former Swedish valet, whose tenure had been so short. Forssgren was in Paris for a brief stay and hoped to see Proust before embarking for New York. Ernest had gone to boulevard Haussmann, only to find a bank where the apartment had been. He called at Dr. Proust’s house and left a note for Marcel, saying that he was staying at the Riviera Hôtel. Then one night, not having heard from Proust, Ernest “got swept away in the whirlwind of Paris” and stayed out until three in the morning. When Forssgren returned to the hotel, the owner told him that a distinguished-looking gentleman had come to the hotel at eleven and waited for nearly three hours, shivering in the hallway, despite being clad in a heavy fur coat.122 Finally, the gentleman asked for a piece of stationery and left a note to “Dear Ernest,” saying he was “terribly sorry to have missed” him. Forssgren should not come to his apartment, but should keep him informed of his departure date. “Write to me at the Hôtel Ritz, place Vendôme, please forward.” The note was signed “Marcel.”123 The rest of Forssgren’s memoir claims that he called at rue Hamelin and found Céleste and Robert Proust extremely distressed because of Marcel’s poor condition. Forssgren was told Proust had fallen critically ill after having stayed out until three in the morning in the course of a “mysterious visit.” No one at rue Hamelin could imagine anyone being so important for Proust to have taken such risks.124 According to Ernest, he felt so guilty and horrified at the thought that the illness had been his fault, even indirectly, that he dared say nothing. He left because Proust was too ill to receive anyone. This last part of Ernest’s story sounds like pure invention. It is fairly certain that Forssgren left Paris for New York on September 20—a month before Proust became seriously ill.
In the third week in September, Proust complained to Gallimard of terrible asthma attacks, saying that he found it impossible under such conditions to work on The Captive, which he was rewriting for the fourth time. Proust sent Rivière a note, along with the excerpt for November’s NRF; the titles for the piece would be “La regarder dormir” (Watching her sleeping) and “Mes réveils” (My wakings). Proust was so weak that the only way he had found the strength to work for an hour was to take an injection combining antiasthma medication and stimulants. When “Dr. Bize saw me killing myself on your excerpts he thought I was crazy to work in my condition.”125
Rivière read the passages and wrote back at once: “It’s admirable! I don’t know if you have ever written anything as moving.” Jacques expressed his heartfelt gratitude for the effort it had taken on Proust’s part. Tronche had seen Proust and told Rivière how sick the writer looked. “I am completely ashamed.” Jacques, however, knew no shame when it came to copy for the NRF; he still needed double the number of pages Marcel had sent to make the required twenty-five to thirty pages. For once Proust said no, he would not be able to send more copy. Were he to improve, the recovery would take a long time. Rivière had always asked him to reduce by half the copy he sent because readers preferred shorter texts. This time Proust said: “Alea jacta est and I’m not changing it.” In case Rivière was having second thoughts about using the excerpt, Proust insisted on a November 1 publication or he would withdraw the offer. “You know I have always been superstitious about certain months.”126 Rivière published the excerpt as agreed.
With the latest controversy over Les Œuvres libres settled, Gallimard resumed regular payments to the author in early October. Proust, who now had to file his income tax report for 1921, thanked Gallimard for the check and asked him to provide the figure for the total amount of royalties paid to date. Proust had earned thirty thousand francs—an impressive figure. Soon Proust had another complaint for his publisher. Friends had told him that they were unable to find copies of The Guermantes Way, part 1, or Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. “Is it possible,” Proust asked, “that these recent volumes are out of print?” He asked Gallimard to be extremely diligent because if this were true, such a shortage would be the source of severe distress. “Others . . . enjoy the entire universe. I can no longer move, speak, think, or simply enjoy the well-being of not suffering. Thus, expulsed from myself, so to speak, I seek refuge in my books, which I touch, being unable to read them, and I have for them the wariness of the burrowing wasp.” Like the wasp, and “deprived of everything, my only care is to give my [books], through their absorption by other minds, the expansion that is refused me.”127
Again Gallimard proclaimed his innocence: “I don’t know who told you Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2, was out of print.” But he did admit that The Guermantes Way was “temporarily” out. The publisher had been meeting requests by having new covers placed on three hundred returned and damaged copies. He assured Proust that he had ordered a reprinting of 4,400 copies, which would be completed by December. In a letter to Tronche, Gallimard was more candid: “The Guermantes Way has in fact been out of print since July and I have been meeting demands with the returned copies.” A few days later Gallimard informed Proust that Davis Erdtracht, director of the publishing house La Renaissance in Vienna, had written and requested rights for German and Polish translations of the Search. Gallimard, who had proposed to Erdtracht a 10 percent royalty on the retail price of each volume sold, sought Proust’s approval.128
On October 12, as Proust’s condition worsened, Rivière wrote to thank him for having returned the proofs of the passage “Albertine sleeping.” After saying how dismayed he had been to learn of Marcel’s illness, Jacques gave him good advice: “Let your brother do everything possible to treat you.” Rivière was convinced that Robert could set Marcel on the path to recovery. Thanking Proust again for the “magnificent passage,” Jacques could not resist adding, “whose only fault is being too short.” But the editor was pleased because Proust had promised him a longer excerpt for December on “The Death of Albertine.”129
As Proust’s bronchitis developed into pneumonia, he began having terrible coughing fits. Finding it nearly impossible to speak, he scribbled notes to Céleste on the backs of envelopes or any scrap of paper lying about; often those closest at hand were the papers he used to light his antiasthma powders. He continued writing these little notes to her until the day he died: “I have just coughed more than three thousand times and no longer have a back or a stomach or anything. It’s madness. I need very warm linens and woolens. Just remember one thing. All your linens have a pungent odor that provokes my coughing fits, which are so pointless. I hope you are going to follow my orders to the letter. If not, I will be more than angry.” After writing such a note, Proust would look up at Céleste and smile so that she could see both the importance of his orders and the humor of his threats. He considered his coughing fits useless because he never expectorated. Other notes asked: “Should aspirin be taken on an empty stomach? Why were the hot water bottles or ear plugs not warm enough?” In one note he wrote that his fever was so high he thought it would prevent “new coughing fits. What was that beer I drank two hours ago? I would like a hot water bottle wrapped in wool. (I already asked you for it.) I wrote some tender and pretty verses on you.”130 Teasing Céleste about being abrupt with him, Proust wrote a short poem to her in which all the rhymes end in -aigre (which suggests tartness); the last lines of which refer to her uncle by marriage Archbishop Nègre:
|
Tall, slender, beautiful, rather thin, |
|
|
Tantôt lasse, tantôt allègre, |
Now tired, now gay. |
|
Charmant les princes comme la pègre |
Charming both princes and riff-raff, |
|
Lançant à Marcel un mot aigre, |
Throwing Marcel a harsh word, |
|
Lui rendant pour le miel le vinaigre |
Returning him vinegar for honey, |
|
Spirituelle, agile, intègre, |
Witty, nimble, upright, |
|
Telle est la nièce de Nègre. |
Such is the niece of Nègre.131 |
Proust occasionally tried to eat solid food. One day he wrote Céleste a note to apologize for ringing so much. Although he had gone back to bed, he thought she had remained up for a bit: “I think despite my stomachache, the stewed peaches instead of pears would do me some good. And my box of bicarbonate of soda so that I can take some with it.”132
Léon Daudet came to see Marcel, who was too sick to receive him. Around October 21 Robert Proust wrote that he would like to see Marcel but had a bad cold and doubted whether he could come in the evening. Robert would do so, if Marcel requested it, but he would prefer the daytime. Robert reported that Bize had received the results from the analysis of Proust’s sputum: “It’s indeed pneumococcus. You should have Bize come back, we would all be very pleased. I embrace you profoundly. Your little brother.” Rather than consult Bize or even his brother, Proust took a circuitous and peculiar route. He had Jacques write his brother, Dr. Maurice Rivière, who practiced in Bordeaux, and ask him to explain what the presence of pneumococcus portended. Proust asked Jacques not to tell Robert that he had consulted another doctor. Dr. Rivière confirmed that pneumococcus is present in nearly all sputum from healthy individuals. His letter was scientific to a fault; he asked no questions and made no recommendations. Dr. Rivière’s letter may have encouraged Proust to believe that his body could cure itself.133
There are several theories of how Proust caught his final cold, which led to bronchitis, pneumonia, and death. Forssgren was convinced the writer caught it that night while waiting three hours for him to return. Céleste said that Proust caught his cold one October night when he went to a big party at the Beaumonts’.134 And Proust? He blamed Odilon and especially Céleste. Writing to Morand in the first half of November, Proust explained that he had not been well for a month: “Odilon had caught a cold that lasted only a day, but Céleste, refusing to put on any rhinogomenol, gave me the cold with a rapidity such that one would have thought she was in a hurry for me to catch it. For a little more than a month I have been reduced to coughing fits, fever, etc., asthma revived from my youth. Alas, youth itself has not revived.” Marcel gave Paul gossip about new divorces, including some humorous comments about Mme Scheikévitch’s brief marriage. Then he mentioned a recent obsession. He was worried that he had written Jean Giraudoux a “delirious” letter and feared that Giraudoux might read in it “a touch of Charlus.” Surely, it was mad to think that. He also worried about his tax form. Morand, seeking to relieve Proust’s mind, asked Giraudoux about the letter and was told that the playwright had received no such mail.135
Sometime around October 21 Proust’s asthma and coughing grew even worse. Dr. Bize told Proust that he had only “a slight attack of influenza” and that “camphorated shots” should “relieve the congestion of the lungs and bronchial tubes.” If Proust followed his advice and agreed to look after himself, as Bize suggested, he would be well in a week. Proust rejected the idea of any shots on principle, believing that they were ineffective and only prolonged suffering. He answered the doctor in a “gentle, rasping voice: ‘My dear doctor, I must and shall go on correcting the proofs. Gallimard is waiting for them.’” After the doctor left, Proust, as usual, instructed Céleste to buy the medication Bize had recommended, and, as usual, he took none.136
Dr. Bize, alarmed that pneumonia was about to set in, called Proust’s brother and asked that he try to persuade Marcel to accept treatment. His illness was reaching a critical point and if action was not taken soon, it would be too late. When Dr. Proust came that evening, Céleste witnessed a “painful” scene between the two brothers.137 Robert tried to convince Marcel that he should accept treatment at once, for his own sake and that of his work. When reasoning failed, Robert said in an exasperated tone: “Well, we will have to look after you in spite of yourself.” This remark greatly “offended” Proust, who exclaimed: “What! You mean to force me?” Robert denied any such intention and stressed the advantages of entering a clinic: “Just around the corner in rue Puccini there is a marvelous clinic, very well run, very well heated, with excellent doctors. You’d have a nurse to do all that was necessary.” If Marcel were to enter the clinic, Robert assured him, he would improve rapidly. Robert even promised that Céleste could have a room next to his at the clinic. Proust answered in an explosion of anger, sending Robert away. “I forbid you to come back here if it’s to impose anything on me.” And he ordered Céleste not to let his brother or Dr. Bize in again. She must promise to obey him on that point and one other: “Never let them give me an injection.” She protested that she had no authority over his doctors. “But still I promised.” Seeking to make things better, Robert had only made them worse, if that was possible.
After leaving Marcel’s apartment building, Robert encountered Reynaldo, to whom he appealed as his last, best chance for assistance in persuading his brother to accept medical treatment. Hahn must have told Robert that for years Marcel had refused to listen to his advice regarding health. Nonetheless, the next day the composer typed a long letter to Marcel. In the first half he summarized his conversation with Robert, regarding Marcel’s condition and prognosis: “Here is exactly what he told me. ‘Marcel does not have anything serious, it’s a pneumococcus, that is, something which can be treated and easily cured. But you must treat it and Marcel refuses to accept treatment.’” Robert had admitted to Hahn that he had spoken to Marcel “too much like a doctor and I now realize I was quite wrong and I upset him.” Robert promised not to mention clinics, or nurses, or anything that might upset his brother, and he would stay away from rue Hamelin until Marcel invited him to return. But Robert had told Reynaldo, “It is very painful for me to see him refuse treatment when nothing would be easier.” If, while making his hospital rounds, Robert “met a patient in Marcel’s condition, [he] would say, ‘He’s a sick person who hasn’t been treated.’” Robert would like to be his brother’s “nurse and would do it in such a way that would not annoy Marcel or we’d find some arrangement that would work, but it’s not natural for me to leave him sick, with no care, when he is in great need of it.” Reynaldo explained Robert’s fear that Marcel would contract pneumonia if he did not receive treatment soon. Then Reynaldo spoke directly to Marcel: “I don’t need to tell you how much I regret not having the least influence on you; it pains me a great deal to think that you even refused to try and eat a little purée, as you had promised me, and persist in fasting, which cannot be good at this time. I know that no one can influence your decisions and I can do nothing I consider reasonable or beneficial for my dearest friend, for one of the people I have loved most in my life.” At the conclusion Hahn said: “I will do as you wish and I resign myself, since I must, to obtain nothing. With great affection from your Reynaldo.”138
Shortly after the scene between Marcel and Robert, all was forgiven. Soon Marcel had Céleste sending phone messages to Robert, who was again welcome at rue Hamelin, not as his doctor but as his brother. Dr. Bize also came to see him, but there was nothing he could do, given Marcel’s stubbornness. Marcel, son and brother of distinguished doctors, refused all medical treatment, trusting instead to his own and Céleste’s remedies.
Céleste, who wanted him to receive treatment as much as did Robert and Reynaldo, had no choice but to respect his wishes and prepare whatever food and drink he thought he might be able to digest. Most of her preparations went untouched. “He was always ringing the bell, either for a hot-water bottle, or a woolen, a book, an exercise book, a bit of paper to be stuck in.” When he wanted some stewed fruit, he expected it “right away.” If he asked Céleste for “some lime tea, he would just have one tiny sip and then put the bowl aside or hand it back to me. The same with the stewed fruit. He hardly tasted it. Probably because of the fever, all he fancied was cold beer.”139
As pneumonia set in, Proust wrote notes, because as soon as he tried to speak a coughing fit began. In one late October note he gave Céleste instructions regarding his typescript for The Captive. “You see my coughing fits recommenced because I spoke to you. Cut everything (except what we left in Albertine disparue)—up to my arrival in Venice with my mother.”140 A similar notation was made on one of the two copies of the typescript. The proposed cut would have reduced the typescript by 250 pages. Proust indicated a major change in the locale of Albertine’s death from a horseback riding accident: in the proposed short version she would die not in the neutral area of Touraine but at Montjouvain, scene of the lesbian trysts between Mile Vinteuil and her friend, whose presumed influence on Albertine had driven the Narrator nearly mad with jealous despair. Proust may have changed his mind about excising so many pages, but death intervened before he could make the many changes required by this cut or give more detailed instructions.
When Proust received the proofs for the excerpts on “Albertine sleeping,” he hated the way the passage ended. By the time he notified Jacques of his displeasure, the printing had already begun in Bruges. On October 24 Proust wrote Rivière to “wire Bruges” and stop the presses. Proust said that he would pay all the costs, but the excerpt “cannot end like that.” Jacques answered that he had followed Proust’s instructions and begged him to send the ending he wanted as rapidly as possible.141
The next day Proust sent Rivière the preferred ending. Then he asked Jacques to leave him alone; he was only “a wretched person who could stand it no longer and who, feeling better yesterday, had corrected an entire book for Gaston and written on your behalf for the Prix Balzac.” He blamed Jacques for having made him believe that corrections had been made in Sodom and Gomorrah, part 2. Proust was confused on this point, because he had instructed Georges Gabory, the young man the NRF hired to read the proofs, to look for duplicate passages, not typos and other errors. Now Proust told Rivière: “I no longer trust you.” The letter upset Jacques, who did not understand what he had done wrong. If, while only seeking to be agreeable, he had been maladroit, he asked to be forgiven.142
Toward the end of October, Proust received postcards from Antoine and Marthe Bibesco, who were enjoying their vacation on the family estate in Corcova. Antoine had encouraging news regarding Scott-Moncrieff’s translation: “Dear Marcel, You will no doubt be happy to learn that the translation is Remarkable. See you soon I hope, Antoine.” Marine’s postcard showed the irises of Mogosëa. If Proust had seen the irises, she wrote, surely he would have placed them with “the hawthorns and apple trees in blossom” that he had “immortalized at Méséglise and Balbec.” Under Marthe’s signature, Antoine again scribbled “See you soon.”143 Antoine’s assessment of Scott-Moncrieff’s translation was confirmed by many readers, including a number of distinguished writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, in a letter to his daughter, “Scott-Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself.”144
On November 1 Proust requested from Rivière a copy of the NRF to read that evening, “while I am lucid.” He said that earlier he had been a little delirious. It was regrettable, Proust wrote, that Jacques had not received the Prix Balzac.145 Gaston sent a note, inquiring when he might have the next volume. Gallimard would have stopped by to see him, but he feared exposing Proust to a bad cold that he had been unable to shake.146
Proust answered Gallimard, thanking him for a recent check for four thousand francs. Then he spoke of his own distress: “I think now the most urgent action is to deliver all my books to you. The sort of tenacious work that I have done for The Captive . . . especially in my terrible current state . . . forced me to set aside the following volumes. The Captive is ready but needs to be read again. (The best thing would be for you to make the first proofs that I will correct.) But three days of rest will be enough, I am stopping here, farewell dear Gaston.” In the postscript he wrote: “Letter will follow when able.”147 This was his last word to Gallimard. A few days later Proust had one typescript of The Captive delivered to Gallimard; that copy did not contain the notation prescribing the large cut.
On November 7 Gallimard acknowledged receipt of the manuscript for The Captive, which he was sending to be typeset. “I will send the proofs as soon as I have them.” Did the delivery of the complete typescript version indicate that Proust had changed his mind about cutting so many pages—a cut that may have been motivated by his eagerness to publish the episodes of Albertine’s death and the Narrator’s phases of grieving and forgetting? A year earlier, Proust had described these episodes to Gallimard as the “best” he had written.148 It was unlike Proust to discard material, especially pages he judged “aesthetically perfect.”149 The pages marked for omission include the Narrator’s investigations at Balbec regarding Albertine’s possible trysts with laundry girls, an investigation carried out with the assistance of Aimé; the first two stages on the road to indifference over Albertine’s death (the Venice episode begins with the third and final stage); and Mme de Guermantes’s changed attitude toward Swann’s wife and daughter after his death. The pages to be omitted contain many fine Proustian observations about love, jealousy, memory, death, and forgetting. Knowing Proust’s method of composition, it appears likely that had he made such cuts, he would have reworked some of this material back into the concluding volume. One can only speculate about the results. The standard edition, known and loved by three generations of readers, will probably endure.
On November 4 Jacques Bizet took his own life by shooting himself in the head. Bizet had long been tormented by his private demons as well as by a demanding mistress. If Proust learned the news of Jacques’s death, he was apparently too ill to send Mme Straus a letter of condolence. She had lost her only child and was soon to lose Marcel. When Robert Dreyfus did not hear from Marcel regarding Bizet’s death, he inquired about the novelist’s health and was told that it was very bad.150
In early November, Proust wrote a note to Céleste, saying that he would take a spoonful of vinegar and a bean salad, immediately. She had not given him enough vinegar before, he complained. He kept spitting everything up. In another note to Céleste, written about the same time, he said: “I don’t think I will have anything. But what if I were to ask (on condition that I might not drink it) for some café au lait that Marie could keep ready and be warned that what I want indeed is milk that has no odor.”151
When Proust’s copy of Aimée arrived, he was unconscious. Céleste read Rivière’s dedication: “To Marcel Proust, great portrayer of love, this unworthy sketch is dedicated by his friend J. R.” She wrote to thank Jacques: “M. Marcel Proust is aware of nothing, that’s why he does not know that you have sent him your book. But if he recovers, you may be certain that nothing will captivate him as much as reading your book Aimée, which he so much enjoyed reading on an earlier occasion.” Proust had taught her well.152
Schiff, unaware of Proust’s critical condition, wrote in mid-November, complaining that his last two letters had gone unanswered. He congratulated Marcel on “Albertine sleeping,” which was “a delicious fragment.” Sydney had kept all the clippings from the reviews of Swann in translation, and he assumed that Gallimard had done likewise. The press, he thought, had been good. Its effect on Schiff, however, was to make him “want to vomit when I read again the effusive praise heaped on your translator but I swallow them with the most grace I can muster, and while thinking of the advantages for you, I enjoy them in your place.” Schiff then revealed his tearful, emotional state, for which he seemed to blame Proust: “A letter from you would have been the prayer that my lips no longer lend themselves to sigh, the tears that my eyes are no longer willing to shed.” Was Proust still there? Perhaps he, like everything and everyone else except Violet, had “flown away and left the earth barren.” Schiff ended by sending Marcel “all my affection. Your S.”153 By the time Schiff’s letter arrived, Proust was barely conscious. In retrospect, Céleste realized that Proust “knew he was going to die, and I still thought he’d live to a fine old age.”154
On the last day of Proust’s life, Céleste broke the two promises she had made, but only out of desperation. The evening before—Friday, November 17—Robert had come around eight or nine, just as Céleste was preparing a meal for Proust.155 The patient had said that he did “not feel too bad this evening.” But Céleste had been urging him to eat, and he told her that he thought he could eat some sole. Robert asked to see Marcel before she served the sole. Céleste remembered that the two brothers were together for a long time before “M. Proust called me in and said: ‘I don’t think I shall have the sole after all, Céleste.’” When Robert came out he told her that he had examined his brother and thought his heart sounded weak. He expressed his relief that Céleste would sit all night with Marcel. Céleste later realized that she “was probably the only one still under the illusion that he would recover. It wasn’t that I rejected the idea of his dying—it simply didn’t enter my head.” Later she remembered signs that should have alerted her. He had asked her to send flowers to Dr. Bize, not “out of remorse,” as some later claimed, but “out of gratitude for the doctor’s care and kindness over many years.” Léon Daudet also received flowers to thank him for his recent article on Proust.
After Robert left, Proust said to Céleste that she should settle down in the chair by the bed so that they could begin to work. “If I get through the night, I shall have proved to the doctors that I know better than they do.” Although it seems unlikely that Proust was in any condition to work, Céleste recorded that he dictated to her until about half past three, when he decided it would be less tiring to write than to dictate, “because of the breathing.” Then, after a few minutes, he declared himself too tired to continue but asked her to stay with him. (Dr. Proust later explained to Céleste that it was “probably then the abscess burst and septicemia set in.”) Proust wanted to write a letter to her, but she must promise not to read it until after he died. She protested, saying that he would live. Attempting to lighten the moment, she teased him by saying, “Women are inquisitive, monsieur. How could I resist?” Proust may have believed her or may simply have been too exhausted to move; for whatever reason he did not write the letter. Céleste realized later that he had wanted to leave her something.156
Toward morning Céleste noticed that Proust looked much worse: “His eyelids would sometimes flutter rapidly, and his breathing was very difficult.” Around seven he asked for some coffee, to please her and Robert. He would “have it hot, if it is ready and you bring it right away.” Proust drank a little and gave the cup back to Céleste. Then he asked to lie quietly for a moment and signaled for her to leave. She went out but was so concerned by the changes in him that she remained in the corridor outside his room as she had done once so many years before at boulevard Haussmann, when he went two days without ringing for her. This time he rang:
“What were you doing behind my door, Céleste?” he asked. She tried to deny she had been there.
“Céleste, Céleste, don’t lie.” She admitted wanting to remain near, in case he needed anything. He said nothing for a moment, and then: “You won’t switch off my light, will you?
“Monsieur,” she replied “It’s you who give the orders.”
“Don’t switch it off, Céleste. There’s a big fat woman in the room ... a horrible big fat woman in black. I want to be able to see . . .”
Thinking he was having a nightmare or was delirious, she reassured him: “Just wait—I’ll chase her away. Is she frightening you?”
“Yes, a bit. But you must not touch her . . .”157
While Proust spoke to her, Céleste noticed him “pulling up the sheet and picking up the papers strewn over the bed,” something he never did. She had never been with someone who was dying, but she remembered that in her village she had “heard people say that dying men gather things.” She became truly alarmed and thought for the first time that Proust might die. She broke her first promise by sending for Dr. Bize, then ran down to the baker’s to telephone Dr. Proust. Mme Proust said that her husband was teaching at Tenon Hospital, but she would send a “message to him at once.”
Dr. Bize arrived around ten. Earlier Proust had requested cold beer, and Odilon had left for the Ritz. Before the doctor entered Proust’s room, Céleste broke her second promise and begged Bize to save Proust by giving him an injection. The doctor responded: “But you know he doesn’t want it.” Céleste, nearly mad from exhaustion and fear, led the doctor into the bedroom. Although she thought it impossible to trick Proust, desperate measures were needed. Dr. Bize had been passing by, she said, and just stopped in to see how M. Proust was feeling. She had invited the doctor to come up, thinking that Proust would like to see him. Proust said nothing. Céleste recalled: “All he did was just look at me—so that I should see, once again, that one couldn’t lie to him.” He refused to acknowledge Bize’s presence, but when Odilon arrived with the beer, Proust greeted him affectionately: “Good morning, my dear Odilon. I am so glad to see you.” But Marcel did not touch the beer. Dr. Bize, very ill at ease, prepared the injection, then whispered to Céleste: “How am I going to manage?” She asked where he would give the injection. When he answered that it would be in the thigh, she volunteered to lift up the sheet. She did so “carefully, doing everything not to offend M. Proust’s modesty.” He was “lying on the edge of the bed with one arm hanging down over the side.” Céleste noticed the arm was “slightly swollen,” probably an indication of poor circulation. When the doctor leaned over to administer the shot, Proust “reached out his other arm and pinched” her on the wrist, crying out, “Oh, Céleste . . . oh, Céleste!” Her remorse was “all the greater” when she realized that “by then the injection was useless.” Bize left. When Dr. Proust arrived, she explained what she had done and how terrible she felt about it. Robert tried to comfort her by saying, “You’ve nothing to regret, Céleste. You did quite right.”
Robert saw that the situation was hopeless and left, promising to return soon. When he came back at around one, he asked Odilon to find some cupping glasses and Céleste to bring an eiderdown and more pillows. Robert raised Marcel as gently as possible while Céleste arranged the pillows.
Robert said: “I’m tiring you, my little Marcel.”
“Yes . . . yes, Robert dear.”
Odilon returned with the cupping glasses, which were to be placed on the skin and heated, in an effort to improve circulation by creating a partial vacuum. But they did not hold on Marcel’s skin and hence were useless. Then Robert sent Odilon for some oxygen cylinders. As Robert gave his brother a little oxygen, he leaned over and asked whether that felt “a bit better, my little Marcel?”
“Yes, Robert.”158
A short time later Robert sent for Drs. Bize and Babinski. At approximately four o’clock, the three doctors conferred in the bedroom while Céleste listened, fearful that Proust heard everything. Robert suggested an intravenous injection of camphor, but Babinski said: “No, my dear Robert. Don’t make him suffer. There is no point.” Then Bize left. When Céleste showed Dr. Babinski to the door, she made a desperate plea: “Professor, you are going to save him, aren’t you?” Babinski took her hands in his and looked into her eyes: “Madame, I know all you have done for him. You must be brave. It is all over.”
At approximately half past four, Céleste returned to the sickroom and stood beside Dr. Proust. No one else was present. She felt certain that Proust had never taken his eyes off them. “It was terrible. We stayed like that for about five minutes, and then the professor suddenly moved forward, and bent gently over his brother, and closed his eyes. They were still turned toward us. “I said: ‘Is he dead?’ ‘Yes, Céleste. It is over.’”
Robert asked Céleste to help lay out his brother. Céleste was so upset that she forgot Proust’s request to “entwine his fingers with the rosary Lucie Faure had brought back for him from Jerusalem.” Robert said, “He died working. We will leave his hands as they were.” She did remember that Proust had wanted Abbé Mugnier to come and pray at his deathbed. Robert asked Céleste to cut off two locks of Marcel’s hair, one for him and the other for her. Then he contacted Mugnier, but the priest was ill and unable to come.
Soon Hahn arrived and took charge of notifying Marcel’s closest friends. After phoning Lucien Daudet, Reynaldo sent a note by pneumatic mail to Rivière: “Sir, it is my duty to inform you that our dear Marcel Proust died this evening at 5:30. His brother and I wanted you to be one of the first to know. Marcel had a special friendship and esteem for you, and we know his death will aggrieve you deeply.”159 Léon Daudet arrived and wept for a long time by the body. Proust’s friends and acquaintances had heard him speak of dying so often that many could not believe the news.
Robert thought Marcel “looked so ‘well’” that he postponed the funeral until Wednesday, which would allow friends to pay their last respects on Sunday and Monday before the body was placed in a coffin on Tuesday. Reynaldo stayed through the night. Sometimes he sat with Céleste next to the body; sometimes he went into another room and wrote music.160
Among those who came to pay their respects were Anna de Noailles, Robert Dreyfus, Jacques Porel, Paul Morand, Fernand Gregh, and Jean Cocteau. Someone placed a large bunch of Parma violets on Proust’s chest. Céleste, weeping, asked Dreyfus whether he wished to see Proust one last time, but he did not feel up to it. He preferred to remember the Marcel of long ago when they had first become friends playing in the gardens along the Champs-Élysées.161 Porel did enter the bedroom because he had brought something for Marcel to carry with him on his final journey. Porel placed on Proust’s finger the cameo ring that Anatole France had given Réjane at the première of Le Lys rouge.162 When Paul Morand viewed the body, he told Céleste: “Sometimes when I came to see him he would say: ‘Forgive me, Paul, if I shut my eyes for a little. I am tired. But go on talking, please, and I shall answer. I am only resting.’ And he would shut his eyes, but he would leave one eye just slightly open to watch. Well, I don’t know if you noticed it, Céleste, but he is doing that still even now; one lid is just slightly raised.”163
Lucien later wrote that when he viewed Marcel’s body, he noticed all “traces of care and the black circles around the eyes had disappeared. On his solemn face, the candlelight showed an inkling of a smile that was neither bitter nor haughty, the smile that follows a hard-won victory: his rejuvenated features proved that Marcel Proust, after so much suffering and resignation, had finally discovered Eternity— and regained true Time.”164
In a passage toward the end of the novel, when the Narrator is obsessed by death, Proust makes this comparison: “In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier.”165 When Cocteau paid his respects, he was especially moved by the stack of Proust’s notebooks on the mantel: “That pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.”166 Proust had left his novel unfinished, yet, as he had predicted, somehow complete.
Sunday afternoon, around two, the painter Paul Helleu came at Robert’s request to do an etching. Those who called to view the body marveled at how beautiful Proust’s features and skin looked in death. Perhaps no one did so more effusively than Helleu, who had long wanted to depict Proust: “Oh! it was horrible, but how handsome he was! I have done him dead as dead. He hadn’t eaten for five months, except for café au lait. You can’t imagine how beautiful . . . can be the corpse of a man who hasn’t eaten for such a long time; everything superfluous is dissolved away. Ah, he was handsome, with a beautiful, thick black beard.”167 Helleu worked hard, afraid of botching the job, because his eyes had grown weaker with age and he was etching under an electric light, which reflected on his copperplate and prevented him from seeing clearly. The artist, who talked to Céleste as he worked, asked why Proust had spoken as he had about Montesquiou. Helleu was referring to the portrayal of Charlus. “It killed Montesquiou,” Helleu told her. Céleste amazed him by showing a kind of “fierce delight” at the thought.168 Two proofs were made of the etching. Robert Proust was pleased with the result; he kept a copy and gave the other to Céleste.169 That afternoon André Dunoyer de Segonzac drew a charcoal sketch of Proust.
With Robert’s permission Cocteau phoned Man Ray, an American artist and photographer, who had come to Paris a year earlier. Ray, severely depressed to the point of being suicidal, managed to pull himself together long enough to go to rue Hamelin and photograph Proust on his deathbed.170 It was impressed upon Ray that the photograph was for private use. The family would keep a print; Cocteau was to receive one, and Ray, if he wished, could keep a print for himself.171
On Tuesday, before the body was put into the coffin, Robert stayed a long time alone in the room; then he let Céleste go in to say good-bye.172 The next day, funeral services were held at noon in the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot. Military honors, to which Proust was entitled as a knight of the Légion d’honneur, were provided by a squadron of officers from central Paris. After the service, Maurice Barrès stepped outside the church, put on his bowler, and found himself standing next to François Mauriac. “Ah well,” Barrès said, “so that’s the end of our young man.”173 Unnoticed, apparently, by any of Proust’s friends, was James Joyce, who had come to pay his respects to the one author whose achievement in the novel rivaled his own.174
As the funeral procession set out on its journey across Paris to the Proust family plot in Père-Lachaise, Fernand Gregh’s little dog Flipot, who had been hiding under the hearse, ran out and disappeared into the crowd, never to be seen again by his master.175 Cocteau and a few friends slipped away from the long procession and stopped off at the Bœuf sur le Toit before taking a taxi to the cemetery.176 At last the procession reached the Proust family plot, where the likeness of Dr. Proust, as captured in Marie Nordlinger’s medallion, gazed out over Paris’s most famous necropolis. Marcel was laid to rest beside his parents.
Those dark, hypnotic, penetrating eyes were closed. But Proust had left behind, in the pages of his book, a new way of seeing. The Proustian lenses, which he urges the reader to throw away if they fail to improve his vision, invite us to take a marvelous, exhilarating trip: “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”177