1. Textes retrouvés, 123.
2. See SL 1: 332–33. There is no indication that Antoine ever helped with the proofs.
3. “Quoted in English, and drawn, except for the first four words, from The Bible of Amiens, ch. iv.” SL 1: 333, n. 3.
4. Corr. 3: 347.
5. SL 2: 9, n. 7. Montesquiou’s scatological diatribes inspired those of the baron de Charlus.
6. Corr. 3: 355.
7. Corr. 3: 378–79.
8. See Corr. 10: 397, and Corr. 3: 398, n. 2.
9. SL 1: 339.
10. Lauris, “Quelques années avant Swann,” 45.
11. SL 1: 340.
12. Corr. 3: 464.
13. Corr. 3: 379.
14. Adrien also quoted from Baudelaire’s Le Cygne, Sully Prudhomme’s Les Vieilles Maisons, and Leconte de Lisle’s Midi.
15. SL 1: 347, n. 1. See Lauris, À un ami, 23.
16. See SL 1: 342–46.
17. SL 1: 347, n. 4. Ferry’s “laws” or “decrees,” sponsored by Jules Ferry (1832–93), then minister of education, and promulgated on March 29, 1880, called for the dissolution of the teaching order of Jesuits.
18. Corr. 7: 333.
19. SL 1: 348.
20. Gregh, Amitié, 89.
21. SL 1: 348, n. 1.
22. In the Search, Swann and the Narrator respond in similar fashion whenever Odette and Albertine became readily available and thereby lose, even temporarily, their evanescent natures. At such moments Proust would compare the formerly desirable “winged creatures” to “burdensome slaves.” Search 5: 500–501.
23. SL 1: 350. Marcel does not say why Antoine was angry with him.
24. Corr. 3: 393.
25. Corr. 3: 393. Jeanne conveyed the information about his sadness by quoting from La Fontaine’s fable “Les Deux Amis,” “Vous m’êtes en dormant un peu triste apparu” (While I was asleep you appeared before me somewhat sorrowful). Corr. 3: 394, n. 2.
26. SL 1: 349.
27. Apparently, Adrien and Jeanne left around the time of Marcel’s arrival. Adrien selected Aix-les-Bains, where he arrived on September 3. We do not know where Jeanne continued her vacation. See Corr. 3: 413 and 414, n. 4.
28. The details about the trip are from Proust’s letter to Georges de Lauris. See SL 1: 351–52.
29. SL 1: 353, n. 2.
30. See “Le Salon de la princesse Edmond de Polignac: Musique d’aujourd’hui, échos d’autrefois,” CSB 5: 464–69.
31. This text is in “Dante Gabriel Rossetti et Elizabeth Siddal,” CSB 5: 470–74. Proust signed the article M. P.
32. Kolb notes that Proust cites the epilogue of Modern Painters, in which Ruskin, like Proust after him, writes “Chamouni” for Chamonix. See Corr. 3: 426, n. 2.
33. SL 1: 353.
34. Proust’s review of John Ruskin und sein Werk by the German scholar Charlotte Broicher appeared on January 2, signed M. P. See CSB 5: 478–81. SL 2: 241, n.2
35. Corr. 4: 430, n. 2.
36. Corr. 16: 395.
37. In the Search the Narrator’s grandmother suffers a mild stroke in the public toilets adjacent to the Champs-Élysées. This attack marks the beginning of her decline and leads, within a relatively short period of time, to her death.
38. Corr. 3: 439–40.
39. Robert Proust’s only child later chose to be called Suzy.
40. In the novel, the scene is used as an analogy for a misunderstanding. Search 6: 281–82. The Narrator’s parents do not die in the novel. Once their essential narrative functions have been fulfilled (primarily in the good-night kiss drama and other scenes from childhood), they fade into the background.
41. Marie-Nordlinger, “Fragments d’un journal,” BMP 8 (1958): 526–27.
42. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 141.
43. From Maurice Bariéty’s eulogy, reprinted in Christian Péchenard, Proust et son père, Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993, 255, 260.
44. Roger Duchêne, L’Impossible Marcel Proust, Paris: Laffont, 1994, 464.
45. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 56.
46. Duchêne, L’Impossible Proust, 464–65.
47. SL 1: 358, n. 1.
48. SL 1: 360.
49. SL 2: 84.
50. SL 1: 358.
51. Corr. 3: 459–60, 16: 395–96.
52. SL 1: 361. In the Search, the portrait of the father was softened in comparison with the rather harsh and at times caricatural portrait that Proust created in Jean Santeuil.
53. SL 1: 359–60.
54. Corr. 3: 453–54.
55. Tadié sees Marcel’s letter as proof that Adrien had been Laure’s lover and refers to the same relationship between Dr. Cottard and the cocotte Odette, to whose portrait Laure contributed a number of elements. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 35.
56. SL 1: 361–62.
57. Ferré, Collège, 41.
58. Corr. 11: 138.
59. Jaloux’s story was “Le Triomphe de la frivolité,” which he sent along with his letter. See Corr. 3: 458, n. 2; Edmond Jaloux, Avec Marcel Proust, suivi de dix-sept lettres inédites, Paris: La Palatine, 1953, 14–16.
60. Corr. 3: 457. In the Search, Proust developed a similar image, that of a rare insect alone able to fertilize a particular plant, applying the analogy to Charlus’s chance encounter with Jupien, his exceptional and ideal homosexual partner.
61. Corr. 3: 462–63.
1. See Corr. 4: 6–7.
2. SL 2: 34–35.
3. SL 2: 8.
4. SL 2: 10–11.
5. SL 2: 12.
6. See Textes retrouvés, 140–43.
7. SL 2: 29.
8. This letter was written at the end of January. The meaning of Ironach had plagued Proust for some time. He would ultimately mistranslate Ruskin’s “Thuringian armouries” as armoiries, French for “armorial bearings. See Corr. 4: 48–49, and SL 2: 14, n. 3. As Proust began to discover and elaborate his own beliefs by questioning Ruskin’s, he often expressed his growing frustration with the Englishman’s writings: “The old fellow’s a nuisance,” or “he’s beginning to bore me,” or even, “I haven’t a notion what he means and I couldn’t care less.” See Nordlinger, Lettres à une amie, 10.
9. SL 2: 18–19.
10. Corr. 4: 55–56.
11. SL 2: 20.
12. Kolb believed that Marie expected a proposal from Marcel. Corr. 4: xvi.
13. SL 2: 79.
14. On Reading Ruskin, 3.
15. “Journées de pèlerinage: Ruskin à Notre-Dame d’Amiens, à Rouen, etc.,” CSB 5: 76.
16. These notes are the equivalent of another thirty full pages. The calculations of the length of Proust’s additions to Ruskin’s text are from Jean Milly’s article, “Proust traducteur de Ruskin,” in Acclimater l’autre: La Traduction littéraire et son contexte culturel, Budapest: Editions Balassi, 1997, 82.
17. Corr. 3: viii.
18. On Reading Ruskin, 55–56.
19. On Reading Ruskin, 57. For Proust the beauty of a work of art depends on the artist’s vision, as he demonstrates in the Search through his fictional painter Elstir, whose beliefs embody impressionistic doctrine.
20. Hahn had composed in 1902 and dedicated to Proust Les Muses pleurant la mort de Ruskin. See SL 2: 20–21. “Desdicated” and other such words in the letter are part of the private language Proust and Hahn often used when writing to each other. See SL 2: 21, nn. 3, 5. In 1906 Proust dedicated the translation, Des Trésors des rois, the first part of Sésame et les lys, to Hahn. See Corr. 4: 67, n. 3.
21. SL 2: 23, n. 6.
22. SL 2: 22–23.
23. SL 2: 23–24.
24. See SL 2: 24, n. 3.
25. SL 2: 37–38 and n. 4.
26. See Corr. 20: 621 and n. 4. Almost nothing is known about Mrs. Higginson; she and her sister Miss Mary Dutton were friends of Mme de Brantes’. See Corr. 2: 206 and nn. 2, 6.
27. SL 2: 32.
28. The Bibliothèque nationale has notebooks containing, in Mme Proust’s handwriting, translations from Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, Sesame and Lilies, Mornings in Florence, and Deucalion. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 254, n. 1.
29. SL 2: 31–32.
30. Hermant did not oblige. SL 2: 29 and n. 4.
31. In 1906 Proust learned that Robert de La Sizeranne was preparing a similar volume and asked Vallette to release him from the obligation. After some hesitation, Vallette acquiesced. See Corr. 21: 608, 609, n. 2, and 612.
32. SL 2: 33–34.
33. SL 2: 44, n. 2; Corr. 20: 622; see Corr. 4: 138, n. 2.
34. SL 1: 124.
35. In his letter to Sorel, Proust referred to an article in which his former professor spoke a great deal about Mme de Combray, a real person who was a model for Balzac’s baronne de la Chanterie in L’Envers de l’Histoire contemporaine. This name was used by Proust not for a person but for an essential geographical spot in his novel. See Corr. 4: 178, n. 3.
36. See SL 2: 58, n. 6, and Corr. 4: 179, n. 6.
37. SL 2: 39.
38. Kuychiro Inoué, “Un Morceau de madeleine et des comprimés japonais,” BMP 22 (1972): 1347.
39. SL 2: 39.
40. See “Le Salon de la comtesse Potocka,” CSB 5: 489–94.
41. Corr. 4: 121.
42. SL 2: 46–47.
43. SL 2: 46–47 and n. 7.
44. See SL 2: 50; Corr. 4: 155–57.
45. Search 6: 299.
46. SL 2: 52.
47. To Lucien Daudet, from unpublished chronological information provided to the author by Philip Kolb.
48. SL 2: 56, n. 2; Corr. 4: 174, n. 3.
49. SL 2: 54.
50. Corr. 4: 192–93.
51. Corr. 4: 192.
52. Agénor, duc de Gramont, Guiche’s father, was a model for the duc de Guermantes. SL 2: 61–62 and n. 1.
53. Guiche’s sister was Comtesse Hélie de Noailles, née Corisande de Gramont. SL 2: 62, n. 3. The countess’s word for “skivvy” in the original is pipelette, from a character who is a concierge in E. Sue’s Mystères de Paris.
54. SL 2: 60.
55. Corr. 4: 206.
56. A similar incident occurs in the Search: Bloch, who is endowed with a number of Proust’s less endearing characteristics, knocks over and breaks Mme de Villeparisis’s vase. Search 3: 289. SL 2: 61, n. 16.
57. When Anna de Noailles’s memorabilia were exhibited at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1953, the broken figurine was item no. 84: “Tanagra broken by Marcel Proust.” SL 2: 61, n. 16.
58. SL 2: 60.
59. SL 2: 61, n. 12.
60. SL 2: 65.
61. SL 2: 65–66 and nn. 1, 2. In his will, Proust left her watercolor to Reynaldo Hahn.
62. SL 2: 68.
63. SL 2: 67.
64. SL 2: 68–69.
65. SL 2: 69, 71.
66. Billy, Lettres et conversations, 143.
67. Corr. 4: 224.
68. “La Mort des cathédrales,” CSB 5: 141, n. 2. See CSB 5: 141–46. In a note added some years later, he explained that he had written this “quite mediocre study” to fight one article in the law governing separation of church and state. If the law passed, Proust observed, after five years the government could convert the cathedrals into museums, lecture halls, or even casinos.
69. “La Mort des cathédrales,” CSB 5: 144, n. 1.
70. “La Mort des cathédrales,” CSB 5: 146.
71. SL 2: 87–88.
72. For the complete text of Proust’s reply to Le Blond, see SL 2: 76–78.
73. On Reading Ruskin, 60.
74. Corr. 4: 257.
75. The letter was found among his papers after his death. SL 2: 85, n. 5. For the complete text, see SL 2: 83–85.
76. SL 2: 83–84.
77. In the Search, Cottard recommends a milk diet for the Narrator.
78. SL 2: 91.
79. François Maigre (1864–1930), formerly barber to Napoléon III. SL 2: 93, n. 4.
80. SL 2: 92–93 and n. 7; Corr. 4: 282, n. 11.
81. SL 2: 98.
82. SL 2: 102.
83. Proust’s dentist was Dr. Paul Ferrier. See Corr. 4: 303 and 304, n. 2.
84. SL 2: 103.
85. Corr. 4: 319 and n. 2.
86. Corr. 4: 327, n. 1. When the couple reached Cairo in mid-November, Marcel sent one wire, asking for a safe address, and signed it Marcelle Paris. Corr. 4: 345.
87. Corr. 4: 320.
88. Corr. 4: 328.
89. Corr. 4: 310.
90. Corr. 4: 324, 325 and n. 3.
91. Corr. 4: 330–31.
92. See SL 2: 111–12 and n. 10.
93. The Narrator makes a similar appeal to Saint-Loup in an attempt to obtain a photograph of his aunt, the duchesse de Guermantes, for whom Mme Greffulhe was one of the chief models.
94. SL 2: 109–10 and n. 2. The marquise d’Eyragues, née Henriette de Montesquiou-Fezensac, was Montesquiou’s cousin.
95. SL 2: 113.
96. SL 2: 117 and n. 1.
97. SL 2: 105–6. Gabriel de la Rochefoucauld took Proust’s advice and revised his novel. Proust makes an appearance as the character Larti, a hypochondriac who is not attracted to women, who travels to Holland with his best friend Hermois and believes that happiness cannot be found in love. See Tadié, Marcel Proust, 501, n. 2.
98. Tadié has also concluded that the person in question seems to be Hahn. See Tadié, Marcel Proust, 502.
1. SL 2: 138, n. 1. Freer later gave his Whistler collection to the Smithsonian Institution.
2. SL 2: 137. See also SL 2: 138, n. 5.
3. Scott is the only person other than Marie thanked in the acknowledgments of Sésame et les lys.
4. SL 2: 137.1 have substituted bare for the translator’s naked.
5. SL 2: 143.
6. SL 2: 141, n. 3, and 147.
7. SL 2: 145.
8. Fragson’s real name was Victor Pot, (1869–1913). See SL 2: 149, n. 1.
9. See SL 2: 153–55.
10. SL 2: 164–65.
11. Corr. 5: 103 and n. 7.
12. SL 2: 158–59. I have modified the translation from “enclosed nun’s room.”
13. SL 2: 164–65.
14. Montesquiou mockingly alluded to the fable of “Solomon and the Ants,” on which he had based a poem, “La Makédienne” (in Le Parcours du rêve au souvenir: 1895). SL 2: 162, n. 1.
15. SL 2: 175.
16. SL 2: 172.
17. See SL 2: 170. The quotation is from Horace’s Ars Poética 2: 7. SL 2: 170, n. 4.
18. SL 2: 171.
19. Corr. 5: 140.
20. SL 2: 179.
21. SL 2: 176.
22. SL 2: 182.
23. The description of Proust and his conversation is from Nordlinger, Lettres à une amie, x. Her account differs from Proust’s on one point; she recollected that they worked on the translation until dawn. See SL 2: 197.
24. Corr. 5: 192.
25. In the book he thanked his “friend Marie Nordlinger” for “having carefully reviewed this translation, often making it less imperfect.” See Sésame et les lys, preceded by “Sur la lecture,” with an introduction by Antoine Compagnon, Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1987, 37.
26. On Reading Ruskin, 99.1 have modified the translation from “we left without having lived them.”
27. On Reading Ruskin, 99–100. The beginning of the preface, with its shifts in time and place, is an early sketch for the first paragraph of the Search, in which the Narrator, in bed and falling asleep while reading, is uncertain of where he is, who he is, and even what he is, for in his slumbering state he confuses his own identity with that of the book he is trying to read. The preface ends with another resurrection of the past.
28. Quotations are from On Reading Ruskin, 101 and 107. In the preface Proust wrote Méséglise, a name he used in the Search for an area near Combray, instead of Méréglise, a real place near Illiers. Was this merely a slip or had he already begun fictionalizing Illiers and its environs for a story? See On Reading Ruskin, 101. Later in the essay Proust informs his reader that he has fictionalized scenes from his travels to illustrate points: “The channel I placed in Utrecht is in Delft,” for example. See On Reading Ruskin, 137. Proust’s friends and first readers of the Search were quick to observe the importance of the preface as a precursor of the novel. See Dreyfus, Souvenirs, 178 and n. 1: “These pages contain a very developed sketch of [the Narrator’s] memories of Combray.” Dreyfus, who quotes Benjamin Crémieux, considered this essay on reading to be “the basis for Proust’s work.”
29. On Reading Ruskin, 101. Proustian richness or layering, as demonstrated in his novel, involves his theory of personality, according to which we each contain multiple selves. This notion is expressed later in this preface: “Diverse personalities are to be found in the breast of each of us, and often the life of more than one superior man is nothing but the coexistence of a philosopher and a snob.” See On Reading Ruskin, 152.
30. See On Reading Ruskin, 143–46.
31. Robert de Billy links Proust’s analysis of Ruskin’s style and structure and his fascination with the English critic’s subjects to Proust’s Wagnerian side. As evidence of this Billy mentioned the seven themes, organic structure, and retrospective unity that Proust found in Sesame and Lilies, which lead to the final apotheosis. Billy, Lettres et conversations, 133.
32. On Reading Ruskin, 156.
33. From Proust’s essay “Sur la lecture.” See On Reading Ruskin, 111. Proust observes that the thesis is the same as Descartes’s.
34. On Reading Ruskin, 120, 112.
35. On Reading Ruskin, 162.
36. On Reading Ruskin, 116–17.
37. On Reading Ruskin, 138. Kolb suggests that this note, which he dates from the first months of 1905, is the point of departure for Proust’s essay Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve). Proust took this up again several years later. He never completed it because it was the springboard for something far greater: In Search of Lost Time. See Corr. 5: 10.
38. On Reading Ruskin, 145; see also 157.
39. Ruskin and Montesquiou also shared a fascination with etymology, a trait given to the pedantic Brichot in the Search. Proust had acknowledged, in a passage already quoted here, that a writer must know these things, but his choice of words will be determined not by erudition (idolatry) but by something more profound summoned by the organic nature of his vision.
40. On Reading Ruskin, 128–29.
41. This example of Venice may be the inspiration for the episode of the uneven paving stones that sets off the final crescendo of involuntary memories, bringing the Narrator at last to discover his vocation and accept the challenge of fulfilling it.
42. Corr. 5: 229.
43. SL 2: 191–92 and n. 2.
44. Corr. 5: 234, n. 3. Proust’s first critics sought the right adjectives to describe his unprecedented style. Their word choices are understandable, even if Proust, while appreciative and often flattered, later protested against “delicate,” “fine,” “meticulous,” and so on.
45. Corr. 5: 243.
46. Corr. 5: 275
47. Corr. 5: 237.
48. SL 2: 196–97.
49. SL 2: 197–98 and 199, n. 8. For the painter Elstir in the Search, Balbec bay was the “the gulf of opal painted by Whistler in his Harmonies in Blue and Silver,” Search 3: 27. This passage is a good example of Proust’s technique of juxtaposing the real-life model and the character he or she inspired. SL 2: 199, n. 8.
50. Corr. 5: 267, 283.
51. SL 2: 200.
52. Proust jokingly called Brissaud “our dear ‘Doctor in spite of himself,’” after Molière’s farce by that title. Is this a mere pleasantry, as Kolb believed, or part of a list of topics that Proust wanted to write about, comparable to items in the list that he was to develop in 1908, just before beginning the Search? See Corr. 5: xxv, 318, and 319, n. 5.
53. Corr. 5: 337.
54. SL 2: 184–85.
55. Corr. 5: 335.
56. See “Un Professeur de beauté,” CSB 5: 506–20. Montesquiou liked the article and had it reprinted in Altesses sérénissimes (1907).
57. “Un Professeur de beauté,” CSB 5: 514. For the pears “bon chrétien,” see Search 4: 556. Both these remarks fall under the category of idolatry, one of Charlus’s errors inherited from Montesquiou. Among a number of Montesquiou’s traits, Charlus possesses the same erudition regarding fabric, fruit, and literature, particularly Montesquiou’s great admiration of Balzac. Because Charlus is essentially a satirical figure, a caricature, Proust portrayed only the talented dilettante side of Montesquiou. Although the count was clearly a talent of the second order, many of his articles on art reveal an astute critic. And Montesquiou was a determined and prolific writer, even if the quality of his work was often unexceptional.
58. Corr. 10: 215. Such a photograph, similarly motivated, is used in the episode at Balbec when the grandmother experiences her first attack. The photograph will reveal to the Narrator aspects of his grandmother’s character and his own reactions to grieving and forgetting. Search 2: 500–501, 4: 237–43.
59. Corr. 10: 215.
60. Corr. 5: 338.
61. Corr. 5: 342–43.
62. Corr. 5: 342.
63. SL 2: 207.
64. Hahn, Journal, 99.
65. See Search 3: 470–71. Anna de Noailles received a letter from Marcel in which he described in detail his mother’s death. This letter was later stolen from her, but she maintained that the grandmother’s death in Search was described in the same terms. In any event, Marcel had not witnessed his grandmother’s death, because he was at Orléans at the time, serving in the military. See Corr. 5: xxvi and n. 81.
66. SL 2: 208.
67. See Corr. 12: 402 and n. 3.
68. CSB 5: 335.
69. Corr. 5: 379–80 and n. 2.
70. Lauris, À un ami, 206, quoted in Corr. 5: xxviii.
71. Corr. 5: 346.
72. Corr. 6: 49
73. See Duchêne, L’Impossible Proust, 530.1 have used Duchêne’s conversion figures for 1994 francs, which I have converted to dollars according to contemporary exchange rates.
74. Proust quoted Renan’s observations that “one only writes well about what one loves.” Corr. 6: 38.
75. Corr. 6: 50.
76. See Milly, “Proust traducteur de Ruskin,” 83.
77. SL 2: 211.
78. Corr. 6: 103, n. 2.
79. SL 2: 211.
80. Corr. 6: 48–49.
81. Duplay, Mon Ami Marcel Proust, 112.
82. Corr. 6: 104.
83. Corr. 6: 117–18 and n. 2.
84. In July, Marcel Cruppi, a distant relation of Proust’s, also compared him to Montaigne. Corr. 6: 147, n. 4. In a review that did not appear until the following year, Jean Bonnerot also saw the similarities between Proust and Montaigne. See “Journées de lecture,” CSB 5: 160, n. 1.
85. Corr. 6: 115.
86. Corr. 6: 120, n. 6.
87. SL 2: 214. This statement is given to the duc de Guermantes in the Search.
88. CSB 5: 789, n. 2.
89. Corr. 6: 124.
90. Corr. 6: 154.
91. SL 2: 222.
92. SL 2: 222.
93. Corr. 6: 161. This part of the letter is omitted in the English translation.
94. Corr. 6: 167. This passion for train schedules as a substitute for travel will be given to Swann and the Narrator. See Search 1: 415.
95. Corr. 6: 168–69.
96. Corr. 6: 265, n. 1.
97. See Jean Santeuil, 4: 23–31.
98. SL 2: 235. See also Corr. 6: 312.
99. SL 2: 235.
100. SL 2: 227.
101. SL 2: 228.
102. Corr. 6: 256.
103. Corr. 4: 259–62.
104. Corr. 6: 274.
105. This apparatus was manufactured by the Aeolian Company, located nearby at 32, avenue de l’Opéra. Corr. 6: 294, n.3. This decision was postponed until 1914.
106. Corr. 6: 302–3.
107. See Corr. 6: 64–66, 214–15, 282–83, 294–95, 298–99, 300, 316.
108. SL 2: 230. In June, Proust had told Beaunier there would be no more translations: “I am ending the series . . . with Sésame et les lys, be assured!” Corr. 6: 106.
109. Corr. 6: 18.
110. See Corr. 6: xxv and 332, n. 4. This is Kolb’s hypothesis.
111. SL 2: 235.
112. Corr. 6: 344, 345 and n. 1.
113. Corr. 6: 346.
114. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 135.
1. See SL 2: 238–39.
2. In The Guermantes Way the Narrator has a nightmare in which he tortures his parents. In Sodom and Gomorrah the author refers to a future chapter to be called “The Profanation of the Mother.” Apparently, Proust never wrote this chapter. It would probably have resembled the scene in which Vinteuil’s photograph is profaned as part of a lesbian love ritual engaged in by his daughter and her friend. See Search 1: 226–30.
3. SL 2: 253–54. Ulrich (born 1881?) sometimes ran errands for Proust. SL 2: 296, n. 9.
4. Corr. 7: 52.
5. See “Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide,” CSB 5: 150–59. Proust included his final exchange of letters with Van Blarenberghe in the article.
6. Proust had not yet read Wilde’s similar observation. See Corr. 10: 184–85. After his parents’ deaths, the two shortcomings for which Marcel reproached himself were the worry he caused his mother and his lack of success. In the good-night kiss scene in the Search, there is a subtle allusion to matricide: “I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head.” Search 1: 52.
7. Proust’s article almost completely filled four columns on the Figaro’s front page of February 1. See Corr. 7: 108, n. 3.
8. SL 2: 249. There are some interesting parallels between Proust’s ideas and those of Freud. Freud had begun developing his theory of the Oedipus complex around 1897, a theory he was to develop substantially over the years; Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, New York: Norton, 1988, 100. It was more than a decade before Freud began to be known in France, where the first article about him appeared in 1911; Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, vol. 2, Intellect, Taste and Anxiety, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 867.
9. SL 2: 250–51. For the details of Proust’s defense and his explanation of Greek morality regarding such parricides, see this letter.
10. Dreyfus, Souvenirs, 202.
11. See Corr. 7: 320–21.
12. Corr. 21: 627.
13. SL 2: 251–52.
14. SL 2: 252. He also urged Lucien to “stop thinking of wasted time [temps perdu].” It is the double meaning in French of temps perdu, “wasted time” and “lost time,” in the sense of time retrievable and thus potentially useful, that eventually led Proust to choose his resonant title. He was to write in an article on Anna de Noailles’s latest poems a sentence that applies particularly well to the themes he was to develop for the Search: “She knows that a profound idea which has time and space enclosed within it is no longer subject to their tyranny, and becomes infinite.” SL 2: 293, n. 1.
15. SL 2: 252–53.
16. SL 2: 255.
17. Hahn had reproached Proust for a sentence of more than fifty-five lines in “On Reading.” See Corr. 5: 245, n. 2.
18. Corr. 7: 90–91; see 91, n. 5.
19. Corr. 7: 79.
20. Corr. 18: 582. In April, Proust again made inquiries about a manservant, indicating perhaps that he was displeased with Nicolas, who may have started drinking. Corr. 7: 135, n. 6.
21. Corr. 7: 11. Céline, too, contributed elements to the servant Françoise in the Search.
22. Corr. 7: 84.
23. SL 2: 257.
24. He gave his final statement on the phenomenon of love and eternal separation in the section of the Search known as “The Intermittencies of the Heart.” At one point, Proust considered using “The Intermittencies of the Heart” as the general title for the novel.
25. Maurois, World, 225.
26. In Hortensias bleus, Montesquiou had dropped a number of the original dedications to friends who had fallen from grace.
27. The publisher Émile-Paul had begun to bring out the first volumes of Les Récits d’une tante: Mémoires de la comtesse de Boigne, née d’Osmond, 1781–1866.
28. Search 3: 174.
29. “Journées de lecture,” CSB 5: 531. Ellipsis is Proust’s. Proust later demonstrated that if reality disappoints us, it is often because we have failed to understand the true meaning of the experience.
30. Proust also uses an analogy comparing a name to a magic lantern that summons up visions of medieval times. This seems to be a precursor of the scene in Combray in which the child Narrator watches the projection of the story of Golo and Geneviève de Brabant. See “Journées de lecture,” CSB 5: 531.
31. The passage cut by the newspaper contains an early sketch of the Search’s Mme de Villeparisis.
32. SL 2: 262.
33. SL 2: 265–66.
34. SL 2: 266.
35. SL 2: 267–68.
36. SL 2: 270.
37. Corr. 7: 160.
38. SL 2: 273.
39. SL 2: 274.
40. SL 2: 276–77. Cf. Search 6: 374.
41. SL 2: 278 and n. 1.
42. SL 2: 286 and nn. 1, 2.
43. SL 2: 288, n. 2. Search 2: 453.
44. Corr. 7: 11.
45. SL 2: 288. Proust believed that when he spoke too soon after a fumigation it gave him a sore throat. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 63.
46. See “Les Éblouissements, par la comtesse de Noailles,” CSB 5: 533–45. In this article Proust says that he would like to write a book called The Six Gardens of Paradise, each inhabited by a different artist he admired: Anna de Noailles, John Ruskin, Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, and Claude Monet. He gives a sample of what each garden would be like.
47. Corr. 7: 106–7.
48. “Les Éblouissements,” CSB 5: 534. The other two paintings are La Péri and the Indian Poet.
49. “Les Éblouissements,” CSB 5: 536, 537.
50. SL 2: 293.
51. SL 2: 300.
52. See SL 2: 302–3 and nn. 4, 5.
53. SL 2: 303. In a January letter Proust had written: “Félicie made a frightful scene this evening.” SL 2: 245.
54. SL 2: 310–11.
55. SL 2: 315–16 and n. 3.
56. Corr. 7: 285–86.
57. The inauguration took place on July 7; The Figaro and L’Écho de Paris were among the papers that carried stories about the event; see Corr. 7: xv. The boardwalk is today named the Promenade Marcel Proust.
58. Corr. 8: 188.
59. Corr. 7: 259.
60. Corr. 7: 266, n. 8.
61. SL 2: 325.
62. SL 2: 326, and 327, n. 3. Sem’s real name was Georges Goursat (1863–1934).
63. SL 2: 333.
64. René Gimpel, Diary of an Art Dealer, translated by John Rosenberg, with an introduction by Sir Herbert Read, New York: Universe, 1987, 174.
65. SL 2: 318–19.
66. Unic was the trademark name of the cars built at Puteaux by Georges Richard. Bizet had been one of the founders of the Unic model and one known as Le Zèbre. Corr. 7: 290, n. 10.
67. Corr. 7: 290, n. 10. See Henri Bonnet, Marcel Proust de 1907 à 1914, Paris: Nizet, 1971, 47, n. 29. According to Céleste Albaret, the automobile rental company was created by the Rothschilds, who were related to Émile Straus, and was managed by Straus’s stepson, Bizet. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 101–2.
68. Corr. 7: 285–86.
69. SL 2: 325.
70. Corr. 7: 252, nn. 1, 2.
71. Corr. 7: 254, n. 4.
72. SL 2: 320, and 321, n. 1.
73. See SL 2: 326–27.
74. SL 2: 327.
75. SL 2: 329, nn. 3, 5. See Search 2: 574.
76. Corr. 7: 259.
77. SL 2: 321.
78. SL 2: 326.
79. He wrote to ask Emmanuel Bibesco whether the Bayeux tapestry, which he had been unable to see, was “something truly beautiful and interesting” that he should return and see. See Corr. 7: 255, and SL 2: 322. Before returning to Paris, Proust also visited Jumièges, Lisieux, and Saint-Wandrille.
80. SL 2: 322.
81. Madeleine Lemaire, impatient with Proust’s endless complaints, answered one letter and told him that surely he could find something more interesting to tell her about than “the noise in the hotel.” SL 2: 324.
82. SL 2: 322. “I much preferred Bayeux cathedral to the churches of Caen.” See SL 2: 326. He said that he was “too tired” to explain why. Could it have been because of the elements he called Oriental? The Narrator is just as puzzled when Swann speaks of Persian art in the Balbec church. During the Narrator’s first trip to Balbec, Elstir explains the church’s Oriental elements to the Narrator.
83. SL 2: 322. It is possible Proust envisioned some sort of novel at this time, but we do not know why he wanted to see such a town. Perhaps he was looking for inspiration and thought an old “Balzacian” town would yield secrets about novel writing.
84. Corr. 21: 616. See also Corr. 18: 583, and 584, n. 4. Eight months later Proust wrote Albufera that he was “writing a study on tombstones.” See Corr. 8: 113. All this is reduced to a single sentence in Swann’s Way. See Search 1: 80.
85. The period of French history embraced by La Comédie humaine is roughly from the Consulate through the July monarchy.
86. SL 2: 332 and n. 1. It is not known whether Proust ever found what he was looking for. When he invented Combray, the provincial town in the Search, he was inspired primarily by memories of Illiers and Auteuil, though Combray is a product of the creative imagination. The arrival at Glisolles with Agostinelli is mentioned in Carnet 1908, 52: “Hector, Agostinelli à Glisolles,” 52.
87. SL 2: 333.
88. Clermont-Tonnerre, Montesquiou et Proust, 101.
89. SL 2: 332, 334 and n. 3. These windows of Saint-Hilaire were “never so sparkling as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you could be sure it would be fine inside the church.” Search 1: 80.
90. Corr. 7: 295, 19: 712.
91. These details from Proust’s visit are from Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre’s memoirs, Montesquiou et Proust, 101–2.
92. SL 2: 334–35, 336, n. 7.
93. See “Journées en automobile,” CSB 5: 63–69.
94. For the Narrator’s text, see Search 1: 255–56.
95. “Journées en automobile,” CSB 5: 67.
96. Corr. 7: 286.
97. Jossien is thought to have inspired the name of Jupien in the Search. SL 2: 335 and n. 5.
98. SL 2: 334.
99. Search 4: 632, 735. Corr. 7: 14.
100. Corr. 7: 296.
101. SL 2: 336.
102. SL 2: 337.
103. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914, London: Folio, 1995, 309.
104. SL 2: 336. For Charlus’s remark about the dignity and courage of those accused in the scandal, see Search 4: 471.
105. In 1906 and 1907 Proust had asked Auguste Marguillier whether there were any essays by the American art critic Bernard Berenson available in French translation. Kolb writes that Proust may have known through Robert de Rothschild, or a member of his circle, that Rothschild’s cousin Baronne Léon Lambert had entreated Berenson to explain homosexuality to her. Berenson had responded by writing an essay in which he was completely frank about his homosexuality. See Corr. 7: vii and n. 14; see also Corr. 7: 26, and 27, n. 6.
106. See Recherche, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Poche, xxv.
107. SL 2: 338 and n. 2. See Search 5: 799, where the Narrator receives, in similar circumstances, a letter of congratulation “in an illiterate hand and a charming style.”
108. SL 2: 341.
109. “Gustave de Borda,” CSB 5: 549.
110. “Gainsborough par Gabriel Mourey,” was published in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, March 9, 1907; see CSB 5: 524–26.
1. SL 2: 348.
2. In three of the remaining notebooks Proust made notes about readings, aristocratic names, gossip, and other material that interested him. In other notebooks and, more rarely, on loose-leaf paper, he wrote drafts on topics or episodes listed in Carnet 1908. Although the notebook is known as Le Carnet de 1908, it contains entries that date to as late as 1912. See the chronology in Carnet 1908, 38–42. In reminders made to himself in other notebooks, Proust referred to this one as “The big notebook Kerby [sic] Beard young man.” See Carnet 1908, 164, n. 221.
3. SL 2: 345.
4. Robert is seen with his pet goat and toy cart “seated on the ground beside his kid, fondling its head and kissing it on its innocent reddish nose. . . . He and his pet bore but a scant resemblance to that popular theme of English painters, a child fondling an animal.” Robert, dressed in his finest clothes to be photographed, “looked as sumptuous as any English child beside his animal friend.” This scene, and some of the others published by Bernard de Fallois as part of the drafts for Contre Sainte-Beuve, are available in STW. For “Robert and the kid goat,” see STW, 257.
5. Carnet 1908 contains a list, dating from the summer of 1908, of six scenes already written, “Pages écrites.” See Carnet 1908, 56. The texts grouped by the editor in Contre Sainte-Beuve are drafts, not intended for publication, of episodes, characters, and themes that foreshadow the Search. Fallois changed Proust’s titles, which were more like working names. For the episode of Robert and the kid (“Robert et le chevreau, Maman part en voyage”), Fallois used the title “The Return.” See STW, 248–64.
6. In the sketch about Robert and the kid, part of this action takes place near Chartres, but elsewhere Proust mentions Évreux.
7. Search 1: 204.
8. STW, 255, 261. The narrator describes his eagerness to join his mother in terms of an asthmatic: “I was bent on getting to you as a stifling man is bent on drawing breath.” STW, 262. Trying to reassure his mother, concerned about how he would manage if something happened to her, he admits: “For the first week, I am demented. After that, I can go on by myself for months, for years, for ever.” That evening, however, a different topic makes him tell her that “contrary to what I had previously believed, the latest scientific discoveries and the most advanced philosophic inquiries demolished materialism and made out death to be something merely phenomenal; that souls were immortal and eventually met again. . . .” STW, 262–64. Ellipsis is Proust’s. This sketch contains the name of Mme de Villeparisis, one of the novel’s important characters, the bluestocking of the Guermantes family.
9. See Carnet 1908, 48 and n. 5.
10. Cf. Search 4: 713, 5: 615.
11. See Carnet 1908, n. 23, 135–36.
12. Kolb suggests that Proust was seeking models for Odette; Carnet 1908, 133, n. 6.
13. Vautrin was one of the rare—and very discreet—homosexual characters in French literature before Proust’s era. Carnet 1908, 48.
14. This remark will be given to Charlus, who quotes Swann as the originator of the witty comment; Search 4: 611. See Carnet 1908, 48 and n. 13.
15. Fénelon will be the principal model for Saint-Loup, who is in love with the actress Rachel, for whom the primary model was Louisa de Mornand. Proust knew Louisa much better than her sister, Suzanne Montaud, who played at the Bouffes under the stage name Jane Moriane. Carnet 1908, 134, n. 15.
16. Proust sometimes joined the game, tipping his hand to reveal the original models, as he did in the 1918 dedication to Jacques de Lacretelle. See [Dédicace], CSB 5: 564–66.
17. This is one of the major themes and structural devices of the Search: the difference between dream and reality. Examples are the Narrator’s anticipation of meeting the duchesse de Guermantes and going to Balbec. Each experience disappoints him. Later he promises himself to discover the laws that control the phenomena of anticipation, disappointment, illumination. Search 5: 223–24, 6: 263–74.
18. As he noted, “the past lingers obsessively in odors,” Carnet 1908, 91; for dreams, see 50–51.
19. See Corr. 8: xxii.
20. See Billy, Lettres et conversations, 170. See also CSB 5: 7, n. 1. See Proust’s own note in the 1919 edition of Pastiches et mélanges. On July 6, 1909, Lemoine was sentenced to six years in prison. Parodies had long been an aspect of Proust’s writing, from the early (1893) pastiche of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet in Pleasures and Days, to the 1903 description of Mme Lemaire’s salon in the manner of Balzac, to the 1904 “Fête chez Montesquiou à Neuilly,” in the manner of Saint-Simon. In the Search, Proust used this talent when he created dialogues for characters, newspaper articles (an obituary, or articles on fashions, receptions, the war), and the remarkable parody of the Goncourt brothers’ Journal. This parody is given an important structural and thematic role at the conclusion of the Search. It illustrates why Proust never kept a diary and believed that such copying from real life was not art.
21. Corr. 8: 43, n. 4.
22. The pastiches can be found in “L’Affaire Lemoine,” CSB 5: 7–59. The Saint-Simon parody includes the earlier one of “Fête chez Montesquiou à Neuilly.” Proust left unpublished Lemoine parodies in the styles of Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand, Maeterlinck (Pelléas et Mélisande), and Ruskin describing Giotto’s frescoes as representing the Lemoine scandal for the edification of young students. See [Appendice], CSB 5: 195–207.
23. SL 2: 356–57. During the time of the parodies, he mentioned this ability in a note for the Sainte-Beuve essay: “As soon as I read an author, I quickly distinguished beneath the words the air of the song that is different in each . . . and, as I read, without realizing I was doing so, I hummed it.” [“Notes sur la littérature et la critique”], CSB 5: 303. Cf. Search 5: 146–51. Gregh, who considered the parodies “masterpieces of critical thinking,” urged Proust to publish them. See Gregh, Amitié, 136–38.
24. Gregh realized this when he observed that “everything Norpois says results from this ‘in the manner of and mimics deliciously the sort of speech one heard among elderly diplomats.” Gregh, L’Âge d’ Or, 159, n. 1.
25. SL 2: 350. Ellipsis is Proust’s.
26. See SL 2: 353, 355, and 356–57. Barrès congratulated Proust on having created “a delicious form of literary criticism.”
27. In a 1919 letter to Ramon Fernandez, Proust saw in retrospect that the parodies had served to purge him of the “natural vice of idolatry and imitation,” allowing him to become only “Marcel Proust when I write my novels.” Corr. 18: 380.
28. Corr. 8: 104.
29. His temperament in this regard resembles Walt Whitman’s. The leaves of the Search would be as all-embracing as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Proust’s earliest texts, written during adolescence, contain traces of androgyny and homoeroticism.
30. SL 2: 360.
31. SL 2: 365.1 have modified the translation from “get me put inside.”
32. Wolf Von Eckardt, Sander L. Gilman, and J. Edward Chamberlin, Oscar Wilde’s London: A Scrapbook of Vices and Virtues, 1880–1900, New York: Anchor, 1987, 259.
33. H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: A Biography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, 118.
34. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 282.
35. SL 2: 365–66.
36. In June he told Albufera: “Once my work is done I think I shall leave for Italy and if I can’t settle near you in Paris I shall buy a little house above Florence.” SL 2: 381.
37. SL 2: 371.
38. Duchêne remarks that Proust, as in his university days, remained a literary man and a philosopher. L’Impossible Proust, 583.
39. SL 2: 372 and n. 1. Proust often noticed unexpected refinement and distinction among members of the working class. Agostinelli provided one example, as did Céleste Albaret, whom Proust came to regard, despite her remarkable ignorance on a number of subjects, as a kind of genius.
40. See SL 2: 373–74.
41. SL 2: 374.
42. See Search 4: 20–44. The Eulenburg case is followed closely by Charlus because of his “own tendencies.” See Search 4: 471. From the early sketches, Charlus, like almost all Proust’s “homosexual” characters, is capable of heterosexual experience. Guercy, an earlier version of Charlus, remained married for fifteen years, until his wife died. Charlus was also married and left a widower. See STW, 229.
43. JS 4: 872. Jean’s attitude influences his mother to be more tolerant without compromising her own moral standards. M. Sandré, on the other hand, would have chased such creatures from his house by beating them with a stick.
44. SL 2: 354, n. 2.
45. These observations are all from Kolb’s foreword to Corr. 8: x–xi.
46. SL 2: 376. The purpose of the letter had been to explain his way out of another awkward situation. At the ball, he had told Vicomte François de Pâris that Mme Proust had thought his “the most handsome face of any man she knew, and she knew that I also admired your looks. If you pretended to find something funny in the way I told you this, it’s because I didn’t want to embarrass you with a compliment coming from me in front of Madame de Chimay.” Marcel continued with more justifications of his remarks: “I would never link Mama’s memory with anything that wasn’t the very truth itself.” He ended the paragraph: “You are not worth my having tired myself writing you all this. But the truth is worth it.” SL 2: 376. Duchêne, who does not believe Marcel’s frequent protests, suggests that this is a form of profanation, taking his mother’s name in vain. Duchêne, L’Impossible Proust, 584. See Corr. 8: 139, n. 3 for the Figaro’s account.
47. SL 2: 380–81.1 have modified the translation from “so nice close to.”
48. Corr. 8: 84.
49. Carnet 1908, 69.
50. SL 2: 382–83.
51. SL 2: 387.
52. According to Kolb, Mlle de Goyon is a likely model for girls the Narrator pursues and dreams of possessing. See Corr. 8: xiii. The closest match in this category for Mlle de Goyon is a character with a lovely name, the elusive Mlle de Stermaria.
53. The duchesse de Guermantes’s cousin, like Mlle de Goyon’s aunt, is called Zénaïde. SL 2: 354, n. 2. For her appearance and noble birth, Oriane de Guermantes is modeled upon the comtesse Greffulhe, whose cousin Montesquiou is the chief model for Oriane’s cousin the baron de Charlus. One can name obvious traits in his friends that inspired Proust’s characters, but they are not merely composites but unique fictional beings. To create the duchesse de Guermantes’s wit Proust borrowed a number of bons mots from Geneviève Straus. See Search 4: 216.
54. Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou, 40.
55. SL 2: 383
56. SL 2: 386.
57. SL 2: 386–87, n. 7.
58. Corr. 8: 179. Proust made a note to remember the odor of the grass at Louveciennes. Carnet 1908, 51.
59. Carnet 1908, 56.
60. Sometime around May 1909 Proust changed Villebon to the more euphonious Guermantes. Carnet 1908, 141, n. 61. Proust slightly changed the name of Méréglise, a village located four kilometers from Illiers; Carnet 1908, 14. Villebon is a castle located twelve kilometers from Illiers.
61. In the brief descriptions of these “pages already written,” words for mother or grandmother occur four times, as does the word visage, face. The face in question is either the mother’s as seen directly or profaned in the resembling face of a debauched offspring.
62. Kolb believed that this followed the plan sketched in a note to Sésame et les lys, where the ending explains what has preceded; Carnet 1908, 13.
63. The failure to find contentment in sexual possession is the basic outline of Swann’s experience with Odette and the Narrator’s with Albertine. Proust will use the two couples to portray variations on the major theme of obsessive, jealous love, one of several manias that prevent Swann, Charlus (who is similarly infatuated with Charles Morel), and, for a while, the Narrator from exerting their will. In depicting homosexual love in the same manner and as thoroughly as heterosexual love, Proust was a courageous pioneer. Before the Search, the full spectrum of human sexuality had been largely left unexplored by serious writers.
64. Carnet 1908, 142, n. 64. Search 3: 338, 4: 416.
65. See Louis de Robert, Comment débuta Marcel Proust, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, 105–6; Clermont-Tonnerre, Montesquiou et Proust, 146. For Proust’s notation “le petit monstre Gabardine de Robin,” see Carnet 1908, 54. This anecdote may also have been the inspiration for the play Proust wanted to write with René Peter.
66. As usual in Proust, there are layers to this aspect. The two ways have also been joined in the flesh by the marriage of Gilberte (Swann’s way) to Saint-Loup (the Guermantes way). The Narrator finds the crossroads of his entire experience bound up in their child, Mile de Saint-Loup. See Search 6: 501–7.
67. The first word is longtemps, translated as “For a long time,” and the last words are dans le Temps, “in Time.”
68. Proust later realized that he had found the ideal structure for the kind of novelist he proved himself to be. One of Proust’s many fascinating tricks as narrative enchanter is to have his reader follow the Narrator through three thousand pages of dazzling prose—Iris Murdoch said Proust wrote like an angel—all the while proclaiming his lack of talent and inability to write. That is why at the end, in a superb mirror trick that awed another literary magician, Nabokov, the Narrator is ready to write the master version of what we have just read. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Walk by Swann’s Place,” in Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers and with an introduction by John Updike, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, 210–11.
69. Corr. 8: 183, 185.
70. Lauris claimed that Proust had not selected the color but had accepted the lining that came with the coat, having specified only that the garment was to be padded with wool. See Lauris, À un ami, 29.
71. Corr. 8: 187.
72. SL 2: 381.
73. Corr. 8: 14.
74. Corr. 8: 193.
75. Corr. 8: 14.
76. Corr. 8: 188.
77. SL 2: 392.
78. SL 2: 390.
79. SL 2: 391, n. 8, 392. See Corr. 8: 201, n. 6; Carnet 1908, 55, 56, 39. This vision may have inspired Proust to use Lucy’s dress as the model for the scene in which the child Narrator meets, without learning her name, Odette de Crécy. Odette, a cocotte like Louisa and Lucy, wears a pink dress at his Uncle Adolphe’s. Until he learns her true identity as Mme Swann, he thinks of her as “the lady in pink.” Of all the Proustian characters, many of whom can be quite protean, Odette has the most different identities and names. Odette, like her model Laure Hayman, was raised by her mother to be a courtesan. She would play her roles as actress and prostitute to please men and work her way up in society.
80. Carnet 1908, 55–56.
81. SL 2: 389–90, 391, n. 1.
82. SL 2: 391, n. 2.
83. See Marcel Plantevignes, Avec Marcel Proust, Paris: Nizet, 1966, 15–17.
84. SL 2: 399, n. 3.
85. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 615.
86. Corr. 8: 208.
87. Carnet 1908, 99, 101, and 59, where he is mentioned in a passage with Fénelon, another model for Saint-Loup.
88. SL 2: 434, n. 1. Jeanne Pouquet inspired aspects of Gilberte.
89. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 615, n. 7.
90. SL 2: 457, n. 1.
91. Carnet 1908, 58.
92. This was apparently Proust’s first movie; it may also have been his last. The cinema was one of the modern inventions that interested him little.
93. Corr. 8: 222.
94. Plantevignes, Avec Marcel Proust, 40.
95. See SL 2: 398–99
96. SL 2: 399.
97. Corr. 8: 15.
98. Plantevignes described his recollection of the evening in his memoirs Avec Marcel Proust, 251–54. Odette also goes Chez Prévost for chocolate.
99. Corr. 8: 227.
100. Corr. 8: 255–56, 257.
101. SL 2: 405–6.
102. SL 2: 408, n. 1; Corr. 8: 219, n. 17.
103. SL 2: 408, n. 3.
104. Corr. 8: 243–44.
105. SL 2: 415.
106. SL 2: 402.
107. Carnet 1908, 60–61.
108. Their example he called a “noble lineage.” Carnet 1908, 61 and nn. 94, 95. In Time Regained, Proust uses the same example and same phrase. Search 6: 334–35.
109. A few pages later Proust asked the same question, this time using an expectant mother as the image for the creator and wondering whether she will ever find the strength, before dying, to give birth to the child she carries: “Will I ever see you?” Carnet 1908, 69. Similar images are used in the Search 6: 507–8, 522.
110. SL 2: 405.
111. See SL 2: 410, n. 4. Jacques Thibaud (1880–1953), a famous violinist, is mentioned twice. Search 5: 63, 383. Proust had heard him play Fauré and Franck. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 620, n. 1.
112. SL 2: 409–10.
113. Carnet 1908, 80, dated November 1908.
114. Today there are seventy-five notebooks containing manuscripts for the Search at the Bibliothèque nationale. Céleste affirmed having burned thirty-two similar notebooks on Proust’s instructions. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 622 and n. 4.
115. “Moréas,” CSB 5: 311.
116. SL 2: 412.
117. SL 2: 411–12. In the letter Proust remarked that Léon Blum “has never said anything as good.” Then he admitted that he often found Ruskin’s words “stupid, cranky, exasperating, wrong, preposterous, but they are always estimable and always great.” See also Corr. 8: 288, n. 5, where Kolb observes that Proust quotes Ruskin’s version of the same commandment when he sketches the beginning of Against Sainte-Beuve, shortly after this letter to Lauris. John 12: 35 reads, “Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light.”
118. SL 2: 410–11. See Tadié, Proust, 263, n. 1.
119. SL 2: 419.
120. The only difference in the letters is that Proust did not forget Anna’s unquenchable thirst for compliments: “It’s because you are our greatest writer that it’s monstrous to bother you with these trifles, but it’s also for that reason that your advice is irreplaceable.” SL 2: 416. For the letter to Lauris, see Corr. 8: 320. Just before December, Proust made many notes for Against Sainte-Beuve; Corr. 8: xxiv.
121. SL 2: 416.
122. The fragments we have include a scene in which he calls his mother to his room to read such an essay to her. Just as he is about to discuss Sainte-Beuve, the fragment ends. Proust apparently stopped there because he continued to hesitate between a number of topics and because he was headed for a work of fiction and not a critical essay.
123. SL 2: 417.
124. During this time, Proust wrote the unpublished parody of Chateaubriand. Corr. 8: 16.
125. SL 2: 420.
126. In July, Proust had noted in his Carnet: “Agostinelli at Glisolles,” Carnet 1908, 52. See Search 5: 514–17.
1. Corr. 9: v.
2. We do not have any of these letters. Reynaldo may have told Marcel some things he did not want to hear about self-medication and dependency on drugs.
3. SL 2: 421–22.
4. SL 2: 421–22. Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) was a French moralist whom Proust admired and about whom he drafted a brief article of unknown date. See Search 6: 650–51 and STW, 371–72.
5. SL 2: 425, n. 7; see Corr. 9: 42.
6. SL 2: 430. It is unclear exactly when Proust attended this party.
7. SL 2: 428–29.
8. He read Lauris’s novel twice and attempted to help the young writer Max Daireaux place a text. Judging by the number of letters we have, Proust apparently did write fewer letters in the 1909–11 period.
9. SL 2: 432.
10. Corr. 9: 71. A note on Moréas around this time shows Proust concerned with the idea of various “selves” and the relation of the particular to the universal. “Moréas,” CSB 5: 311.
11. Two volumes of maxims from the Search have been published. Proust, despite his reputation for being long-winded, could be as pithy as any of his great predecessors in the maxim genre.
12. [“Notes sur la littérature”], CSB 5: 303–4; STW, 265–66: “This young man who . . . plays among my ruins lives on air; the pleasure he draws from the sight of the idea he has discovered is all the food he needs; he creates the idea and is created by it; he dies, but an idea survives him—like those seeds which suspend the process of germination in too dry an atmosphere and are lifeless; but a little moisture and warmth is enough to bring them back to life.”
13. Corr. 9: 49–50.
14. Corr. 9: 78.
15. See Carnet 1908, 19, 71. In a sense, Proust’s argument with Sainte-Beuve continues his contention with Ruskin in “On Reading,” that the experience of literature is superior to conversations with friends, no matter how learned: “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.” In another draft for Sainte-Beuve, Proust wrote that other authors cannot serve as our guides “since we possess within us, as the compass dial or the carrier pigeon, the sense of our orientation.” Text omitted in English edition. “Moréas,” CSB 5: 311.
16. STW, 98–100. “La Méthode de Sainte-Beuve,” CSB 5: 221–22. Proust had understood this in Jean Santeuil, where he expressed it differently: “Each time an artist, instead of depending on his work for happiness, depends on his life, he feels a disappointment that is almost remorseful and which gives him clear warning that he has made a mistake.” JS 4: 490.
17. STW, 267.
18. STW, 25–26.
19. STW, 19.
20. STW, 21.
21. STW, 19.
22. There are other aspects of this voice. For example, the Narrator as a man reflects on his childhood and his present. Sometimes when he considers the past from the viewpoint ofthe present, he draws certain conclusions that are corrections of what he thought earlier, but then may add, “however, as I was to learn later. . . .” After the Narrator discovers his vocation as an artist, he reflects on the work he is about to create in relation to the story which we have just read.
23. STW, 20.
24. Search 1: 60.
25. “All the efforts of our intellect” to recapture the past “must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.” Search 1: 59–60.
26. STW, 20.
27. STW, 21.
28. Search 6: 273.
29. Search 6: 304.
30. This is the plot synopsis proposed by Gérard Genette. See Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 30.
31. Carnet 1908, 54.
32. I have modified the translation because “an egotism which could be put to work for the benefit of other people” seems too wordy and lacks the clarity of Proust’s simple “utilisable pour autrui.” See Search 6: 513.
33. Search 1: 1.
34. STW, 23. CSB 5: 214.
35. [Projets de préface], CSB 5: 218.
36. This chronology is approximate. Proust never concerned himself greatly with linear narration and precise dates, so it is not possible to establish an exact time frame for the Search. The most comprehensive attempt to do so can be found in Gareth H. Steel’s “Chronology and Time” in À la recherche du temps perdu, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979.
37. STW, 22.
38. From the 1909 draft “Romain Rolland,” CSB 5: 309. Text omitted in English version. This draft contains a variation of this remark about intelligence: “More and more I believe it [intelligence] powerless in this recreation of reality that constitutes all art.” CSB 5: 216.
39. See Search 6: 289, 298.
40. From the 1909 draft “Romain Rolland,” CSB 5: 309. Text omitted in English version.
41. Search 6: 302. Traces of Proust’s remarks about “materialist art” from his draft in Sainte-Beuve about Romain Rolland in 1909 remain in Time Regained just before the quotation about “real books.” Proust wanted to avoid the superficial, conversational style of Sainte-Beuve. See Corr. 9: vii–viii.
42. JS 4: 856.
43. See Proust-Halévy Corr., 92, 97 and nn. 47, 48, 221–22. The editors date this letter between mid-October and mid-December 1907. Kolb dates it as January 1908; see Corr. 21: 628. Péguy’s essay “De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne devant les accidents de la gloire temporelle,” in which Proust found passages that he said bore some resemblance to what he had written on topography and names, appeared in Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine on February 3, 1907. See Proust-Halévy Corr., 216, n. 39.
44. Duchêne followed the Proust-Halévy Corr. editors on this point; L’Impossible Proust, 575 and n. 5. Tadié does not; see Marcel Proust, 601, n. 4.
45. This text, with slight alterations, became the telephone call the Narrator makes to his grandmother in The Guermantes Way.
46. Carnet 1908, 61; last quarter of 1908.
47. Corr. 9: 92.
48. Kolb believes that Proust saw the exhibition, but we do not know for certain that he did. Corr. 9: x.
49. Monet had insisted on this title. This was the largest number of paintings Monet had ever exhibited of any single series. See Paul Hayes Tucker, Claude Monet: Life and Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 191–96.
50. Monet’s Grandes décorations found their home in rooms especially designed for them in Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie.
51. SL 2: 435. See SL 2: 436, n. 3. “François de Pâris’s aunt, the baronne de Lareinty, née Puységur, had inherited the château de Guermantes, near Lagny, Seine-et-Marne.”
52. SL 2: 436.
53. Corr. 9: 117.
54. Corr. 9: 119. She lived on avenue Henri-Martin and had vacationed at Cabourg in August, 1907. Corr. 9: 121, n. 21.
55. He had first used an autobiographical “I” in the 1905 text “On Reading,” though even there he had begun to fictionalize it, having indicated in the first drafts that “mother” was not really his mother, and in any case, he later changed “mother” to a fictional “great aunt.” In 1907, in “Impressions de route,” he had mingled autobiographical and fictional elements. From 1908 on, the “I” who spoke for Proust the storyteller shared many traits with the real person known as Marcel Proust. But there are many differences between Proust and the Narrator, the most obvious of which are found by comparing the family situations: the Narrator’s parents are both Catholic; he is an only child; his father is not a scientist; he has no homosexual tendencies, although he is suspiciously well informed about and fascinated by the subject. As Proust developed the plot, the list of similarities and dissimilarities lengthened.
56. There is a draft in which Proust rather coyly says that if the Narrator had the same given name as the author, his name would be Marcel. This rather oblique hint at what the Narrator’s name might have been should not be read as a confession. What Proust unquestionably sought to capture in his book was the essence of his life, not the banal details.
57. Corr. 9: x–xi.
58. SL 2: 438.
59. Corr. 9: 122.
60. See Corr. 9: 131–32. A young publisher by the name of Bernard Grasset, who ultimately published Swann’s Way, brought out Lauris’s novel in 1910, after it had been refused by Calmann-Lévy and Fasquelle. Lauris most likely paid for publication. See Franck Lhomeau and Alain Coelho, Marcel Proust à la recherche d’un éditeur, Paris: Olivier Orban, 1988, 117.
61. The parodies were found and published posthumously.
62. See Corr. 9: 134–35.
63. SL 2: 439.
64. Search 1: 493–94.
65. Search 3: 1091. Proust occasionally slips into a letter a passage or fragment he is writing for the novel. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 628, n. 6.
66. SL 2: 440–41. Kolb dated this letter July 17 or 18.
67. SL 2: 439, n. 3.
68. The acronym of the periodical will be italicized as the NRF, while the name of the publishing house will appear in roman type.
69. Corr. 9: 152.
70. SL 2: 444, n. 3.
71. Proust considered his book “obscene” by the standards of his time. It would be so judged, he feared, because he depicted homosexuals (not their acts) in pursuit of partners, a topic that had been taboo.
72. SL 2: 442. Sylvie, by Gérard de Nerval, was one of Proust’s favorite books.
73. SL 2: 443. La Double Maîtresse was a novel by Henri de Régnier that Mercure de France had published in 1900. SL 2: 444, n. 6.
74. SL 2: 443.
75. Search 2: 394–95.
76. An early example occurs in the novel when Swann, deeply moved by a new sonata, attempts to learn who composed it. The music has extraordinary power, and listening to it Swann discovers “many of the riches of his own soul,” releasing him briefly from his obsession with Odette. All he can find out is that the composer’s name is Vinteuil. At Combray, Swann has a country neighbor named Vinteuil, who is the local piano teacher. Could he be the composer? Swann pictures the man, prudish, apparently dull, not in any way fashionable, and immediately rejects the thought that such a man could have written the remarkable sonata capable of moving a man like himself. In the Search, when Proust speaks of the “artist” in general (as opposed to a specific writer, painter, composer), he means the creative person. In Swann’s meditation on Vinteuil’s sonata, he calls such artists “explorers of the unseen” and gives as examples two scientists, Lavoisier and Ampère. Search 1: 496, 498–99.
77. Corr. 9: 154.
78. Corr. 9: 12.
79. Tadié, Proust, 269.
80. SL 2: 444.
81. Proust had “kept writing to my architect” from Cabourg, “’I may come back tomorrow,’ they were unable to get down to work.” SL 2: 466, 467, n. 1.
82. SL 2: 445–46. The excessive dampness in his room soaked his writing sheet after fifteen minutes, and the walls were covered with damp stains of moisture.
83. SL 2: 446.
84. SL 2: 447.
85. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 629 and n. 3.
86. SL 2: 466, 467, n. 5.
87. Corr. 9: 197 and n. 7.
88. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 619.
89. Corr. 9: 171 and SL 2: 447.
90. Corr. 9: xix.
91. SL 2: 448–49.
92. Corr. 9: 191.
93. SL 2: 451.
94. Corr. 9: 210, n. 2.
95. Kolb wonders if the girl in question might have been one of Albert Nahmias’s sisters, Estie or Anita, about whom virtually nothing is known. Corr. 9: xxii.
96. See SL 2: 458, 459, and nn. 9, 10.
97. SL 2: 459.
98. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 630.
99. Corr. 9: 222.
100. Corr. 9: xxii.
101. Corr. 9: 215.
102. SL 2: 460.
103. Proust had crossed out “a few enormities,” misreadings by the copyists.
104. My account of the Proust-Beaunier-Calmette misunderstanding is based on Kolb’s foreword in Corr. 9: xxiv–xxv.
105. Proust found this out several months later. SL 3: 9.
106. SL 2: 461.
107. During 1908 Proust had begun and abandoned notebooks containing a hybrid genre consisting of an essay and a narrative (Against Sainte-Beuve) and had filled twenty bound notebooks of drafts for the Search (still without a title). He had written first versions of “Combray,” “Swann in Love,” a description of a seaside sojourn at Querqueville (to become Balbec), and passages about Gilberte and her mother. Proust’s method of composition had become fixed. Some notebooks, like Le Carnet de 1908, contained notes, preliminary sketches; or reminders. In other notebooks he organized these sketches and revised them. See Recherche 1 (NP): cxxx.
1. Corr. 10: 24.
2. Corr. 10: 31.
3. Corr. 10: 28.
4. SL 3: 1. Proust gave his fascination with photographs and the Périgord anecdote to the Narrator, who attempts in vain to obtain Gilberte’s photograph. See Search 1: 103–4. Simone de Caillavet became the primary model for the daughter of Saint-Loup and Gilberte Swann; her brief appearance at the end of the Search has an important structural and symbolic role. Search 6: 502–7.
5. Corr. 10: 45–46.
6. SL 3: 2.
7. See Corr. 10: 49–50 and n. 5.
8. Corr. 10: 49, 51.
9. Corr. 10: 68, n. 2.
10. See letters to Montesquiou and Lauris; Corr. 10: 71, 72–73.
11. Corr. 10: 73.
12. Proust sought and took advice from friends, some well placed and knowledgeable, others mere novices and dreamers. He also followed the recommendations of columnist Yvel in the Figaro, a practice he admitted did him “no good. The rubber and oil and all the rest of the shares invariably wait for the day after my purchases to come tumbling down!” SL 3: 7.
13. SL 3: 6–8. See also SL 2: 446, n. 1, where Kolb says this text, begun in 1909, may be the “earliest draft” of the Search, “consisting of its long overture, Combray, and its conclusion as then envisaged.”
14. See SL 3: 8–9.
15. See Corr. 10: 114, 115, n. 3; 120, n. 3. See Corr. 11: 346, n. 2.
16. SL 3: 11, n. 2.
17. Search 5: 314.
18. Brody, Kaleidoscope, 130.
19. SL 3: 12.
20. Corr. 10: 122–24.
21. Corr. 19: 715.
22. Corr. 10: 136, 137.
23. Corr. 10: 144, and 146, n. 2.
24. SL 3: 14.
25. SL 3: 16–17 and n. 7.
26. Corr. 10: 169.
27. Corr. 10: 215.
28. SL 3: 20–21.
29. SL 3: 22–23.
30. Corr. 10: 197–98.
31. “Swann in Love” ends with this diatribe by its main character: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” Search 1: 543. Before the long flashback of “Swann in Love,” Proust had shown the reader glimpses of Mme Swann in the garden at Combray. At the conclusion of “Swann in Love,” the reader guesses that, despite Swann’s final words, he married the cocotte known as Odette de Crécy. The next volume begins with a section entitled “Mme Swann at Home.”
32. Swann’s jealous obsession with Odette will be repeated, with variations, in the Narrator’s youthful crush on Gilberte, in his mature involvement with Albertine, and in Charlus’s fixation on the violinist Morel. Proust masterfully orchestrates the theme, which runs in profane counterpoint to the sacred theme of creativity.
33. Proust knew that if he succeeded in writing the Search, he would have created himself as the man capable of writing such a book. Some years after Proust’s death, Robert de Billy reflected on how his friend would have been remembered had he died in 1910. Proust “would have very rarely been mentioned as a writer of note.” He was considered “bizarre,” someone amiable who loved society and art. Billy, Lettres et conversations, 14.
34. Search 1: 60.
35. Corr. 10: 214–15.
36. Corr. 10: 217.
37. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 624, n. 4. Proust had first used the name Guermantes in May 1908 in Carnet 1908. Once he was certain that the title was clear, he substituted it for the name Villebon. See Carnet 1908, 94 and n. 392. Entries dating from February 1909 show that he had also found the names Swann, Combray for the little provincial town, and Saint-Hilaire for its church. See Carnet 1908, 97 and n. 407.
38. SL 3: 27.
39. SL 3: 27.
40. SL 3: 28.
41. See SL 3: 33, n. 24; Corr. 10: 253, n. 22.
42. Corr. 10: 254.
43. SL 3: 30–31.
44. Corr. 10: 273.
45. Quoted in Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography, Boston: David R. Godine, 1986, 75–76.
46. Corr. 10: 260, n. 115. Le Dieu bleu, a ballet by Cocteau and Frédéric de Madrazo with music by Reynaldo Hahn, was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 13, 1912.
47. Corr. 10: 258, n. 2.
48. Corr. 10: 254.
49. Corr. 10: 256–57.
50. Search 1: 291.
51. Search, 1: 267.
52. SL 3: 33–34. See “Pastiche de Pelléas et Mélisande,” CSB 5: 206–7.
53. SL 3: 34.
54. Corr. 10: 271. Proust wrote “collaboratrice inspirée,” whose feminine form with the adjective inspired seems to indicate that he had in mind a “muse” who inspires through illness.
55. In spite of the reputation of the creators and performers—Ida Rubinstein played the saint, Bakst had provided the set and costumes, Fokine the choreography—the show closed after eleven performances. See Corr. 10: 289 and n. 7.
56. SL 3: 41. In the Search, Proust frequently used scientific analogies to explain perception, the way impressions are recorded by the body.
57. SL 3: 40 and n. 3.
58. Corr. 10: 294 and n. 5.
59. Corr. 10: 317, n. 5.
60. Corr. 10: 308.
61. SL 3: 42 and n. 1.
62. Corr. 10: 317, n. 4.
63. SL 3: 43–44 and n. 1.
64. SL 3: 43.
65. This scene occurs in the opening section of the book, sometimes referred to as the overture—indeed Proust himself once called it that in a letter—and is not, therefore, anchored chronologically in the Narrator’s experience. The succession of involuntary memory experiences at the conclusion of the book does occur chronologically at the end of the Narrator’s quest.
66. Search 1: 64.
67. Phrases he mentioned in a letter to Reynaldo are attributed to Odette in this section. See Corr. 10: 332 and 335, n. 13; Search 2: 109. This English title needs to be replaced by one closer to the original. The literal meaning of Proust’s title À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is “In the shadow of girls in bloom.” The traditional English title unfortunately loses the key element of girls in the flower of youth.
68. Corr. 10: 323, 324.
69. SL 3: 45.
70. SL 3: 52, n. 1.
71. Corr. 18: 588–89.
72. See Corr. 10: 344–45.
73. SL 3: 48–49 and n. 8.
74. An unknown typist produced part of the typescript (beginning at Search 1: 430); see Corr. 10: 350, nn. 5, 6.
75. Corr. 10: 359, n. 3.
76. See Corr. 10: 353 and nn. 23, 24 for details; Corr. 10: 356, n. 24.
77. Quotations from Dumont-Wilden are in Corr. 10: 356, n. 24.
78. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers, revised edition, New York: Norton, 1981, 466.
79. SL 3: 52.
80. Corr. 10: 382 and 19: 716.
81. SL 3: 54. See SL 3: 56, n. 17: in recent speculations at the Bourse, Proust had lost, in less than a month, nearly 10 percent on two large transactions. Cf. SL 3: 8, n. 13.
82. SL 3: 53, 55, n. 9. Léonie de Clomesnil, a celebrated courtesan, was one of the models for Odette. See Search 1: 340–41, where Swann sees Odette in a fashionable new outfit, “a cape trimmed with skunk, a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her bosom.”
1. Corr. 11: 25–26.
2. Tadié, Marcel Proust, 667.
3. Corr. 11: 28.
4. Corr. 11: 28 and n. 4. See the Search 5: 406, n. 20.
5. Corr. 11: 32. Proust frequently quoted this line to friends when speaking about his bad luck at the Bourse.
6. Corr. 11: 41.
7. Corr. 11: 34 and n. 4.
8. Corr. 11: 43–44.
9. SL 3: 63.
10. Corr. 11: 46.
11. Corr. 11: 51 and n. 3. The painting, stolen on August 21, 1911, was found in Florence on December 12, 1913.
12. SL 3: 58 and n. 13. Italics indicate the Figaro’s interpolation.
13. Corr. 11: 66 and n. 6.
14. SL 3: 65 and n. 4. Fauré’s composition, which apparently induced erotic fantasies in Proust, is Trois Romances sans paroles pour piano, op. 17 (1863).
15. SL 3: 65–66.
16. SL 3: 62.
17. SL 3: 65.
18. SL 3: 63–64 and n. 7. It is difficult to refer to the various parts of Proust’s novel as volumes, because the number of volumes varies considerably among editions. The best way to refer to the Search is by the seven main divisions of the story: Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah (formerly entitled Cities of the Plain), The Captive, The Fugitive (formerly entitled The Sweet Cheat Gone), and Time Regained.
19. SL 3: 62–63.
20. The palace was located at Le Vésinet, about fifteen miles west of Paris. SL 3: 66, n. 8.
21. SL 3: 65–66.
22. Corr. 11: 93.
23. Corr. 11: 84–85.
24. Corr. 11: 86 and n. 3; SL 3: 68, n. 2.
25. Corr. 11: 88.
26. Corr. 9: viii.
27. SL 3: 67–68. Ellipsis is Proust’s. I have modified the translation from “cold douche.”
28. SL 3: 74, 78.
29. SL 3: 70, n. 7.
30. SL 3: 71.
31. Corr. 11: 118–19.
32. SL 3: 72. In December, Proust quoted Montesquiou, who “says paleographers spend years deciphering my letters.” SL 3: 139.
33. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 76–77.
34. Sumurum, performed at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, was Max Reinhardt’s mime adapted from tales by Friedrich Freska. Victor Hollaender wrote the music. SL 3: 74, n. 6.
35. SL 3: 74, n. 5, where Edward VII is incorrectly referred to as Edward VIII.
36. See Search 3: 62–67, in which the duchesse de Guermantes and the princesse de Guermantes sit together in the duchess’s box at the Opéra and are observed by the Narrator.
37. Corr. 11: 125.
38. SL 3: 74.
39. SL 3: 76–77.
40. SL 3: 78–79 and n. 5; Search 4: 731; addendum to Search 4: 157.
41. Corr. 11: 142.
42. SL 3: 76 and n. 1.
43. Corr. 11: 143–44.
44. Corr. 11: 151. The exact date of this letter is not known. It was obviously sent well before October 12, when Proust had chosen most of his titles, Le Temps perdu, and Le Temps retrouvé, Time lost, Time regained. See Corr. 11: 257.
45. SL 3: 74–75.
46. SL 3: 79.
47. SL 3: 81.
48. Hahn wrote Massenet’s obituary in Le Journal, August 18, 1912. Corr. 11: 186, n. 2.
49. SL 3: 88; Corr. 11: 194, n. 5.
50. Corr. 11: 185.
51. See SL 3: 85–87.
52. SL 3: 86–87 and n. 6; see Search 1: 412. Proust made a remark in the letter to Nahmias that hints at the famous scene in which the duchesse de Guermantes, Swann’s oldest friend, is running late for a dinner party and does not have time to listen to him, even though he has, at her insistence, begun telling her that he has a terminal illness and will soon die. Proust to Nahmias: “One day I shall describe those characters who, even from a vulgar point of view, will never understand the elegance, when one is dressed and ready for a ball, of forgoing it in order to keep a friend company.” See Search 3: 816–19. For the scene in which Charlus berates the Narrator, see Search 3: 760–65.
53. SL 3: 93–94 and n. 6. The text of the Sainte-Beuve essay was lost.
54. SL 3: 99 and n.6. The issue contained an article by Ghéon “mocking the naive piety of Francis Jammes” that would have certainly irritated Proust.
55. SL 3: 97–98.
56. See SL 3: 97–99.
57. SL 3: 100–101; ellipsis is Proust’s.
58. SL 3: 104–5.
59. SL 3: 106–7.
60. SL 3: 108.
61. SL 3: 108–10.
62. SL 3: 120.
63. This title was eventually given to one of the novel’s most remarkable episodes, in which the Narrator returns to the Grand-Hôtel and experiences a much-delayed reaction to his grandmother’s death and meditates on grieving and forgetting, formulating what Proust called “the general law of oblivion.”
64. Corr. 11: 264.
65. SL 3: 111–12. On September 3 the Figaro had published “L’Église de village,” the third of four excerpts from the novel to appear in the newspaper.
66. Corr. 11: 276, n. 3; SL 3: 121, n. 2.
67. See SL 3: 117–19.
68. SL 3: 120–21.
69. SL 3: 122.
70. SL 3: 123–24.
71. SL 3: 126, n. 7; Corr. 11: 295, n. 9.
72. Marcel later learned that Cocteau had contacted Rostand and urged him to write Fasquelle. SL 3: 134.
73. SL 3: 124–25.
74. Corr. 11: 310, n. 2.
75. SL 3: 128–29, n. 1.
76. SL 3: 129–30.
77. SL 3: 135.
78. SL 3: 135–36. Fasquelle, who had relied on a reader’s report, returned Proust’s manuscript on Christmas Eve. Corr. 11: 333, n. 3. In a mid-January letter to Antoine Bibesco, Proust said that he had withdrawn the manuscript over a disagreement about length: “Since Fasquelle wouldn’t allow me the volume length I believe necessary for the presentation of my book, I’ve taken back my manuscript, which will probably be published by Ollendorff while Fasquelle in exchange will publish a collection of my articles.” SL 3: 146.
79. See JS 4: 64; Corr. 11: xxviii.
80. See Corr. 11: xxviii, 295, 335. Maurice had sent a long telegram to Fasquelle.
81. Corr. 11: xxvii.
82. SL 3: 137–38.
83. SL 3: 140–41.
1. Louis de Robert, Comment débuta Marcel Proust, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, 8.
2. Corr. 12: 22.
3. SL 3: 141.
4. Corr. 12: 39.
5. SL 3: 144.
6. Proust described this visit to Mme Straus and Reynaldo in separate letters. See SL 3: 144 and Corr. 12: 48–49.
7. Raymond Poincaré was elected January 17. Corr. 12: 69, n. 7.
8. Corr. 12: 37. The mentality of a sick old woman, comically portrayed in Aunt Léonie, becomes that of the Narrator.
9. Corr. 12: 42–43.
10. SL 3: 143.
11. Proust had read Mâle’s descriptions of the sculptures illustrating such biblical scenes as the life of the Virgin and the kings of Judah, which he used as models for the porch of the church at Balbec. SL 3: 145, n. 4. See Search 2: 573–76.
12. Corr. 12: 45 and 46, n. 19.
13. Corr. 12: 70.
14. SL 3: 148.
15. See Robert, Comment débuta Marcel Proust, 9. The reader, long thought to have been Humblot, was Georges Boyer, the sixty-two-year-old playwright, lyricist, and theater critic for the Petit Journal. See Corr. 12: 87, n. 6.
16. SL 3: 153–54.
17. Robert, Comment débuta Marcel Proust, 10. SL 3: 149, n. 1.
18. SL 3: 156–57.
19. SL 3: 149–52.
20. SL 3: 158–59.
21. SL 3: 159–61.
22. SL 3: 163, n. 3.
23. SL 3: 164.
24. Recherche 1 (NP): cxxxii, and Corr. 12: 10.
25. SL 3: 261.
26. This fascination with sports and machines of speed is a trait given to Albertine in the novel. Albertine and the Narrator make their last excursion together to an airfield. Search 5: 132.
27. See “Impressions de route,” CSB 5: 66.
28. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 189: See the photograph published opposite 385 of the original French edition of Monsieur Proust, Paris: Laffont, 1973.
29. Corr. 13: 239. The Narrator has difficulty comprehending Saint-Loup’s infatuation with Rachel. The actress-cum-prostitute is not attractive when seen up close and has a face that is pockmarked. Search 3: 231–32.
30. Robert Vigneron, “Genèse de Swann,” in Études sur Stendhal et sur Proust, Paris: Nizet, 1978, 106.
31. SL 3: 165.
32. Corr. 12: 118, n. 2. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 3.
33. Corr. 21: 660, n. 2. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 4.
34. SL 3: 168–69. Proust waited nearly a month before he wrote Grasset, offering to pay more for the heavily revised proofs, saying that it would be “dishonest of me to regard such an enormous number of corrections as being covered by our agreement.” SL 3: 173.
35. SL 3: 169 and n. 1. Proust gave his own fictional violinist Morel an “F sharp [that] was enough to make Enesco, Capet and Thibaud die of jealousy.” Enesco, Lucien Capet, leader of the Capet Quartet, and Jacques Thibaud were the three most famous violinists of Proust’s era. See Search 5: 383. Shortly after hearing this performance, Proust added the passage on Vinteuil’s sonata. See Search 1: 493–94. As late as April, Proust fused two characters to create Vinteuil: the naturalist Vington, who had a lesbian daughter, and a composer named Berget. See SL 3: 204, n. 13. See also Alison Winton, Proust’s Additions: The Making of À la recherche du temps perdu, 2 volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 1: 334. Proust took the first syllable of Vington, to which he added the beloved suffix -teuil. The name of this composer, whose works resound thematically in some of the Search’s most beautiful passages throughout, contains the magical sound found in Auteuil and Santeuil, which evoked many memories for Proust, chiefly of his mother and her family.
36. Corr. 12: 149, n. 4. The galley bears the date May 13, 1913. See Search 1: 498–500.
37. See Corr. 17: 193–94.
38. See SL 3: 174; for example, “rose, Rose” in French means pink rose.
39. SL 3: 173–74 and n. 2, 175, n. 12. Proust attended the ballet on May 15. According to Maurice Rostand, Proust attended the Ballets Russes again on May 17 and saw Nijinksy dance Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. Afterward, Proust went with Maurice and Nijinsky to dine at Larue’s. See Corr. 12: 12.
40. SL 3: 207.
41. See also Corr. 12: 181, n. 3.
42. SL 3: 175–76, nn. 1, 2. See Corr. 12: xv.
43. Corr. 13: 381–82.
44. Gaston had written Marcel to accept the dedication of Swann’s Way with “great joy.” Corr. 12: 105.
45. SL 3. 177.
46. Proust corrected the second proofs between May 30 and September 1. Proust mentioned to a number of friends that he had been so ill and lost so much weight they would not recognize him. SL 3: 179–80 and n. 1.
47. Robert, Comment débuta Marcel Proust, 12–13.
48. Jean Bothorel, Bernard Grasset: Vie et passion d’un éditeur, Paris: Grasset, 1989, 76–77.
49. Corr. 13: 389–90. See also SL 3: 203–4 and n. 22.
50. Galley 95 of the first proofs bears the date June 11. Corr. 12: 213, n. 5.
51. Corr. 13: 391.
52. Corr. 12: 211–12.
53. SL 3: 185–86 and n. 1; Proust transferred the greater part of the chapter entitled “Mme Swann at Home” to the second volume, where it became the first part of Within a Budding Grove, but he kept the ending—the description of a visit to the Bois de Boulogne—as a coda to Swann. Because Grasset did not want two books sold together, Proust decided to publish a single volume of 527 pages instead of one of 680. “I shall make it 520.” SL 3: 195. Swann’s Way was to have 525 pages.
54. Louis de Robert had opposed the idea of using notes because it would make Proust’s novel look too scholarly. SL 3: 188–89.
55. Francis Jammes, who would express his profound admiration of Swann’s Way, had also asked for suppression of the Montjouvain scene. Corr. 13: vi–vii.
56. SL 3: 190–92. This letter is one of many in which Proust speaks as the author and as the Narrator.
57. SL 3: 194. See Search 4: 479–80.
58. SL 3: 192–93. Ulrich became the model for Françoise’s erudite young footman, Joseph Périgot. SL 3: 193, n. 2.
59. Corr. 12: xxi.
60. SL 3: 195–96.
61. SL 3: 197.
62. Corr. 12: 248–49.
63. Corr. 12: 252.
64. Corr. 12: 209–10.
65. Corr. 13: 228–29.
66. See SL 3: 261.
67. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 190.
68. SL 3: 198–99.
69. Daudet, Soixante lettres, 67.
70. SL 3: 200–203.
71. SL 3: 200–201.
72. Search 1: 606.
73. SL 3: 205.
74. SL 3: 206.
75. SL 3: 221 and n. 1. See Search 5: 514–16, where Albertine is described as an “angel musician” playing Rameau and Borodin on the pianola.
76. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 5–6. See Corr. 12: 267, n. 15.
77. Corr. 13: 401 and n. 2.
78. Corr. 13: 402.
79. Corr. 12: 285.
80. Corr. 13: 405.
81. Recherche 1 (NP): cxxxii.
82. Corr. 13: 408–9.
83. The danger here, one clearly recognized by Proust, was mortality. Beaunier did not live to see the Search completed.
84. See SL 3: 207 and Corr. 12: 298–99.
85. Corr. 12: 304–5.
86. SL 3: 208, n. 3.
87. Search 1: 58. The conclusion of the scene ends “Combray I.” “Combray II” goes back to the Narrator’s childhood and the family vacations to Combray.
88. Corr. 12: 300, 319. Search 1: 63–64.
89. Corr. 12: 300.
90. Michel-Thiriet, Book, 223.
91. Proust likely quoted these passages from memory for future volumes that he was to develop. For a translation of the complete interview, see Shattuck’s Marcel Proust, 167–72. All the quotations are from Shattuck’s translation.
92. The interview appeared in the edition of the Temps published on November 12, dated November 13.
93. See Textes retrouvés, 221–24 and n. 3.
94. See “À propos d’un livre récent: L’Œuvre écrite dans la chambre close. Chez M. Marcel Proust” (About a recent book: The work written in a shuttered room. At M. Marcel Proust’s), Textes retrouvés, 221–22.
95. Corr. 12: 308–9.
96. Corr. 12: 15.
97. Bothorel, Bernard Grasset, 92.
98. SL 3: 212 and n. 11.
99. SL 3: 178, n. 2.
100. Corr. 21: 657.
101. Corr. 12: 320.
102. Corr. 21: 658.
103. See Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 360.
104. SI 3: 209.
105. Corr. 12: 326.
106. Corr. 12: 336.
107. Corr. 12: 321.
108. This involved a literary indiscretion that would have been minor for anyone but Proust: Gide had gossiped about Proust’s having temporarily misplaced a letter from Emmanuel Bibesco regarding the NRF’s rejection of Swann’s Way.
109. Corr. 12: 322.
110. Corr. 12: 333 and n. 7. Flaubert published L’Éducation sentimentale, a novel some critics prefer to Madame Bovary (1857), in 1869.
111. Céleste believed that Anna was largely responsible for the sudden departure of the Agostinellis. According to her, Anna did not like living in Paris and was eager to return to the Riviera. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 190. The date of their departure was determined by Kolb in Corr. 12: 15.
112. See SL 3: 214.
113. For the correspondence between Proust and Nahmias regarding Agostinelli, see Corr. 12: 355–66.
114. The volume telling of Albertine’s disappearance is called The Fugitive, formerly The Sweet Cheat Gone. A letter from the Narrator to Albertine ends with a postscript in which he denies sending Saint-Loup to bribe Mme Bontemps. Proust was as mendacious in his dealings with Agostinelli as are the Narrator and Swann with the women they pursue. Proust had instructed Nahmias to make a similar denial; see Corr. 12: 357. There are echoes of this episode throughout The Captive and The Fugitive. Saint-Loup is sent to spy on Albertine as he tries to win her return through negotiations with Mme Bontemps; in The Captive, there is probably a direct transposition of Proust’s suspicions concerning Agostinelli’s infidelities to his wife. Albertine, who had been taken to Auteuil by a chauffeur, does not dare go out for fear of being seen. The insanely jealous Charlus has Morel tailed by a private detective agency. See Search 5: 283.
115. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 270.
116. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 271. Cocteau also used the term overture to describe the opening volume, a choice of words that would have pleased Proust, extremely sensitive to the connections between what he was trying to achieve in the novel and what Wagner and other composers he admired had achieved in music.
117. SL 3: 210 and nn. 1, 3.
118. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 271–76.
119. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 276–81.
120. Corr. 12: 371.
121. Corr. 12: 372–73.
122. Souday’s review is reprinted in Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 281–87.
123. Corr. 12: xxvii.
124. SL 3: 215. The Ovid quotation is from Metamorphoses, book 2, 1. 5. SL 3: 216, n. 4.
125. Corr. 12: 384, n. 2.
126. Corr. 12: 385–86.
127. Corr. 12: 388–89.
128. Proust later had Céleste call and ask to borrow the copy a second time. See Corr. 12: 391, n. 2.
129. Corr. 12: 387.
130. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 287–91.
131. Edel, Henry James, 688.
132. Corr. 13: 76, n. 7; see also SL 3: 230, n. 4.
133. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 296–98.
134. SL 3: 219, n. 3.
135. SL 3: 218.
136. Search 6: 522.
137. This is Lucien’s version from Soixante Lettres, 214, n. 1. See also Corr. 12: 392.
138. Carnet 1908, 49.
1. Ghéon’s real name was Dr. Henri Vangeon. SL 3: 220, n. 2.
2. Corr. 13: 22–27.
3. Corr. 13: 37.
4. Lhomeau and Coelho, Recherche d’un éditeur, 310.
5. SL 3: 221–22.
6. SL 3: 229.
7. SL 3: 223–24.
8. SL 3: 225–26. Gide had read too quickly the sentence in which Proust describes Aunt Léonie’s “false hair . . . through which the bones shine.” See Search 1: 71.
9. SL 3: 226.
10. Corr. 13: 68.
11. SL 3: 231–32.
12. SL 3: 232–33.
13. Search 6: 513.
14. SL 3: 235.
15. This account of Calmette’s murder is based on Edward Berenson’s from his book The Trial of Madame Caillaux, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 1–2.
16. Corr. 13: 11.
17. SL 3: 237.
18. Fasquelle had made his offer through Maurice Rostand; see SL 3: 237–38.
19. SL 3: 242.
20. SL 3: 245.
21. SL 3: 247.
22. SL 3: 249.
23. Corr. 13: 157.
24. Corr. 13: 167–68.
25. SL 3: 252.
26. Corr. 13: 179–80.
27. Corr. 13: 186–87.
28. SL 3: 255.
29. See the letter to Lionel Hauser in Corr. 13: 213 and 214, n. 2.
30. Corr. 13: 217–21. Other details from Agostinelli’s and Proust’s letters and from events about to unfold were to be attributed to Albertine in the Search. The Narrator, in his vain attempts to lure her back after she flees his apartment, offers her a Rolls-Royce and a yacht, the latter gift being more suitable for a young woman than an airplane. The details about the Mallarmé poem, about engraving on the fuselage the word Swann or Cygne, French for swan, quotations from Albertine’s letter, and so on, have their direct origin in Agostinelli. See Search 5: 614, 632–33. Albertine falsely predicts that the sea will be her tomb.
31. See Bonnet, Proust, 1907–14, 195.
32. Corr. 13: 221, n. 8.
33. SL 3: 258–59. Agostinelli ignored Proust’s request to return all his letters, later destroyed by the young man’s family, who said they were love letters. The one surviving letter, returned because Agostinelli died before he could receive it, does not read like a love letter. See Tadié, Proust, 280, n. 3. Had Proust wanted the letters back in order to use them in his novel? This is Kolb’s thesis. If he is right—the fact that Proust preserved this letter may be an important indication of his intention to use it in the novel—then the novelist had already decided to use Agostinelli as one of the models for Albertine before the pilot’s death. See Corr. 13: 220–21 and 223, n. 25.
34. The idea that Agostinelli drowned because “he had never learned to swim” apparently originated with Painter, who does not cite a source for this information. See George D. Painter, Marcel Proust, vol. 2, The Later Years, Boston: Little, Brown, 1965, 213. This volume is hereafter cited as Painter, Proust 2. Vigneron says that the young aviator was known to be a good swimmer. In fact, none of the earlier accounts say that Agostinelli could not swim. For press accounts of Agostinelli’s death, see Vigneron, “Genèse de Swann,” 339; Corr. 13: 242, n. 3.
35. The Narrator learns of Albertine’s death in a telegram sent by Mme Bontemps (Search 5: 642).
36. Albertine has mysterious rings that bear eagles with spread wings and her initial, A, which, when inverted, resembles the V symbol for velocity. See Search 5: 75, 623–24.
37. Corr. 13: 238.
38. Corr. 13: 225 and n. 2.
39. SL 3: 260.
40. Corr. 13: 241, 243; SL 3: 267.
41. SL 3: 265.
42. Corr. 13: 228 and n. 3.
43. SL 3: 267–68. In a letter to Émile Straus, written three days after Agostinelli’s death, Proust called Agostinelli an “extraordinary person who possessed perhaps the greatest intellectual gifts I have ever known.” SL 3: 261. Cf. Search 5: 668.
44. Corr. 13: 239.
45. SL 3: 293.
46. Corr. 13: 228. SL 3: 261. Proust made the same remark to Gautier-Vignal. See Louis Gautier-Vignal, Proust connu et inconnu, Paris: Laffont, 1976, 243. The Narrator’s guilty feelings over Albertine’s death are harder to justify than Proust’s regarding Agostinelli’s. There is a direct reference in the novel to the guilt the writer felt over the aviator’s death in the aftermath of Albertine’s death: “From my prison she had escaped to go and kill herself on a horse which but for me she would not have owned.” Search 5: 674.
47. SL 3: 264.
48. SL 3: 268. See Search 4: 479–80.
49. SL 3: 270.
50. Corr. 13: 254.
51. My account is based primarily on Martin Gilbert’s in The First World War: A Complete History, New York: Holt, 1994, 16.
52. SL 3: 271.
53. SL 3: 272–73.
54. Corr. 13: 278.
55. Search 6: 157.
56. Corr. 13: 290 and 291, n. 3.
57. Daudet, Soixante Lettres, 135.
58. SL 3: 274.
59. Corr. 13: 286.
60. Corr. 13: 292, n. 4; Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 25.
61. Lettres retrouvées, 109–10.
62. Daudet, Soixante Lettres, 107.
63. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 124.
64. Corr. 13: 298, n. 2.
65. In the fall, Proust inquired about Jacques Berge, the young son of Antoinette Félix-Faure and René Berge. Although he was killed at the battle of Charleroi in August, his fate was not known until months later. Corr. 13: 324, n. 4.
66. SL 3: 276.
67. SL 3: 277.
68. Corr. 13: 302, n. 2.
69. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 29.
70. Corr. 13: 309.
71. Corr. 13: 303.
72. Forssgren and Céleste both claimed to have retrieved the medicine. See Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 36–37, and Ernest Forssgren, “Les Mémoires d’un valet de chambre,” Cahiers Marcel Proust, n.s. 12, Études proustiennes, II, 119–37.
73. SL 3: 278.
74. Corr. 13: 305 and n. 3.
75. Corr. 13: 327, n. 4. See also SL 3: 280, n. 9
76. See SL 3: 280–82. This is the fullest statement we have by Proust of his affection for Agostinelli and the relatively brief period of his intense mourning. In November, Proust wrote a similar statement to Lucien; see SL 3: 293.
77. See Search 2: 254–55; 5: 751.
78. SL 3: 282, n. 1
79. For Bize’s certificate, see Corr. 13: 310, n. 2.
80. Corr. 13: 314.
81. Corr. 13: 219.
82. Corr. 13: xviii, 592.
83. Corr. 13: 328.
84. SL 3: 284, 285, and 288, n. 2.
85. SL 3: 295.
86. SL 3: 285–86.
87. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August, New York: Macmillan, 1962, 45.
88. SL 3: 293.
89. Corr. 13: 349, n. 25.
90. See SL 3: 291–92.
91. Corr. 13: 351, n. 2.
92. See Search 3: 402.
93. Search 4: 1.
94. Search 6: 102.
95. Corr. 13: 345, 360.