OUTSIDE THE APARTMENT, the war raged. Olivier remained stationed at the front. Finding themselves increasingly alone, the two occupants of the apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann began to talk more and more.
“Tell me about Auxillac,” Marcel Proust said one afternoon, watching Camille carry the tray of coffee and croissants across the bedroom.
“Oh, monsieur, you’re not interested in where I came from,” she demurred. “I’m a simple country girl from the Lozère.”
He looked amused. “And?”
“You spend your evenings talking to duchesses in tiaras! What possible interest could my childhood be to you?”
“My dear Camille, why on earth do you imagine that those people are more interesting than you? Because they’re duchesses? Or because they wear tiaras?”
“Now you’re mocking me, monsieur.”
“Not in the slightest. It was an entirely serious question.” Proust reached for a croissant. “Most of those women are stupendously boring. They’re obsessed with trivialities, they have no opinions of their own, and they are uniformly dim. An aristocratic pedigree is no guarantee of anything these days, least of all a discernible character.” He took a bite. “You, though,” he said, after chewing for a moment. “I see still waters running deep within you.”
Camille blushed, quite undone.
“Never let anyone tell you you’re boring, Camille. If they tell you that you don’t matter, that you’re of no consequence, don’t believe it for one moment.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“I like you so very much, Camille! Will you promise me something?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Be a strong woman. Most of all, be yourself! Don’t ever let anyone tell you what to do. Especially not a man.” He paused, a small smile on his lips. “Except me, of course. You should always follow my instructions to the letter.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“So, tell me about Auxillac.” He took another bite of croissant.
And so, hesitantly at first, she began to tell stories of her childhood. She was sure that Monsieur Proust would quickly become bored by the tedium of her family’s simple, bucolic life, but he appeared quite enchanted, and asked for more. Once she was sure he was not teasing her, she obliged. She resurrected old family legends that she had heard told around the dinner table countless times as a child. She reminisced about the carefree summers of her youth, and the hard, cold winters. She recalled old friends that she had not thought about in years. Most of them were still living in Auxillac. Sometimes Camille did not know whether to laugh or cry when she thought of them now, so very far away.
Marcel Proust listened to every word, his eyes never leaving hers while she talked. Occasionally he would elicit an extra detail from her, but for the most part he remained silent. He wanted to know about Olivier’s courtship, those long drives along the country lanes with the wind in her hair.
“Ah, youth is wasted on the young, Camille,” he said softly.
He began to tell her stories about his own childhood. He recalled long-ago weekends spent at an uncle’s house in Auteuil, summers at another uncle’s house in Illiers. He recounted tales of the mischief that he and his brother, Robert, would get up to when out of sight of their parents. He told her of the dreadful trip to the Bois de Boulogne when he was nine years old, when there had been so much pollen in the air that he’d suffered his first asthma attack. “That was when everything changed, Camille,” he said. “It’s only when you have to fight for every breath that you realize how essential air is to life.”
He spoke lovingly of his parents, especially his mother. “She was the greatest love of my life,” he told her. “From the moment I was born, my world revolved around her, until she drew her last breath.” He was silent for a moment. “I remember the day she died so clearly. I walked through the apartment one last time before they took her poor body away. There was a floorboard near her bedroom that creaked every time someone walked on it. Whenever my mother heard it she would make a little noise. It was her way of saying she wanted me to go and kiss her.” He gave Camille a sad smile. “That day I stepped on the floorboard, and it creaked as usual. But there was no little noise from the bedroom. No kiss.”
“But you still have your memories,” said Camille.
“Memories, yes.” He gestured around the room. “And all this helps, of course.”
“All this?”
“Why do you think this apartment has so much furniture in it?”
“I’ve never really thought about it,” lied Camille. Every day she had to navigate the forests of tables and chairs, keeping all the mahogany surfaces polished and free of dust, and had often wondered, somewhat irritably, what it was all doing there.
“These pieces all belonged to my parents,” explained Proust. “When my mother died I couldn’t bear the thought of parting with any of them. The idea of a stranger’s clothes hanging in that armoire, of someone else sitting at that desk—” He waved a hand around the room and shuddered. “It was too much to contemplate. So I kept it all.” He paused. “When I look at an empty armchair, it’s not empty to me. I see my mother sitting in it, reading a book.”
“I have nothing like that,” said Camille.
Proust looked at her kindly. “Well, you don’t really need such things, you know. The only place where you can regain lost paradises is in yourself.”
One morning there was a knock on the apartment door. One of Olivier’s sisters stood in the corridor, her face white and drawn. She was clutching a blue envelope tightly in her fist. Camille looked down at the telegram and her world collapsed messily in on itself. Her tongue felt thick inside her head. She croaked one hoarse word: “Olivier?”
A shake of the head.
Moments later Camille knocked on the door of Monsieur Proust’s bedroom. He looked up from his work in surprise. She never disturbed him without being called for.
“Oui, Camille? What’s the matter?”
“It’s my mother, monsieur.”
“Yes? What about her?”
“She’s dead.”
At once his work was forgotten. He gently took her hands in his. “Oh, my dear Camille. I’m so very sorry.”
Camille said nothing. She was determined not to cry in front of him. She wanted him to think her strong.
“You must go back home at once, of course,” said Proust. “Now is the time to be with your family.”
But you are my family now, she thought. All she could think to say was: “Who will look after you if I am gone?”
“I shall manage very well, don’t you worry about me. Go and see your mother one last time and say your good-byes. It would be too awful if you didn’t.”
And so later that day Camille was on a train headed south, staring out of the carriage window at the snow that covered the fields as far as she could see. Every mile closer to her childhood home was a mile farther away from Olivier on the front, and Marcel Proust in Paris. She had never felt so alone.
By the time she arrived in Auxillac, her mother was already buried. Camille stood in front of the freshly dug grave, staring numbly at the ground. The following day, she climbed back on board the train to Paris.
After that, her old home was forever out of reach. The trains still ran, but there was no returning to where she wanted to go.
Monsieur Proust continued to ask for tales from her childhood, and she continued to oblige him, but now she told those stories as much for herself as for him. Memories were all that remained now—both sweeter than before, and more painful. When she had finished, when the words had finally exhausted themselves and a sad, heavy silence took their place—then he would begin to speak, softly, slowly, telling stories of his own. Alone together in their strange cocoon, they shared more and more confidences. Marcel Proust told her things that he had never spoken of to anyone else.
“Ah, my dear Camille.” He sighed. “Everyone thinks they know me, but nobody knows me like you do.”
As their intimacy deepened, Marcel Proust began to ask her opinion about things. He wanted to know what she thought of the progress of the war, or whether he should attend this soirée or that. Camille would always demur, insisting that she knew nothing of such things. One evening, after she had refused to say which scarf went best with his hat, he lost his patience.
“I don’t ask you these things to be polite, Camille,” he said. “I ask you because I want to know what you think.”
“But what does it matter what I think, monsieur? I’m just—”
“A country girl from the south, yes, yes, I know.” Marcel Proust stood by the door to the apartment, a scarf in each hand. “For some reason you believe that means you shouldn’t have an opinion about anything. But you’re quite wrong. You should have an opinion about everything.” He handed both scarves to Camille. “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared into his bedroom. He returned with a sheaf of papers in his hand. “I want you to listen to this,” he told her. “Tell me what you think.”
Marcel Proust began to read. Camille stared at the floor, wishing, as devoutly as she had ever wished for anything, that he would stop. But he did not stop. He stood in the hallway with his coat still on and read and read. After what felt like an eternity, he finally looked up from the pages in his hand.
“Et alors?” he said. “What do you think?”
Camille let out a small moan.
“It’s not a difficult question, Camille. Did you like it?”
“Oh yes, very much,” she said at once.
“What did you like about it, exactly?”
She glanced at the clock. “Won’t you be late for your rendezvous?”
“They can wait.” He looked at her expectantly. “Tell me what you liked about it.”
“It was very—interesting.”
“Really,” said Proust. “That’s your opinion?”
She nodded. “That’s my opinion,” she said.
“Well, I thank you for that.” He pointed at the two scarves she was still holding. “And now would you please choose a scarf for me to wear?”
One scarf was made of blue silk, the other of dark gray wool. After a moment’s pause, she handed him the woolen one. “This is warmer, and it suits you better.”
Proust took it from her. “Thank you,” he said. He gave her his papers and began to tie the scarf around his neck.
“Your sentences are too long,” blurted Camille.
He looked up. “Oh?”
“They just—they go on and on and on. Whoever is speaking gets halfway through a point, and then he starts talking about something else for an age, and then he finally gets back to the first thing he was talking about, but then he goes off on a different subject, and it took forever for him to say anything, and it was all very confusing.” She paused. “And, well, it was boring, monsieur. Nothing really happened.” She stared at him, her cheeks burning with mortification.
Marcel Proust turned and picked up his hat off the table in the hallway. He put it on. “There,” he said with a small smile. “That wasn’t so difficult, now, was it?”
And with that he walked out of the door.
In the summer of 1916 a telegram arrived with the news that Nicolas Cottin, the valet to whom Camille had curtsied so prettily on her first visit to Boulevard Haussmann, had died in a military hospital, and her anxiety about Olivier escalated. She awoke every morning terrified that another telegram would arrive—but it never did.
Olivier was finally discharged from service, and returned to Paris. Camille did not want to return to their old apartment in Levallois. Boulevard Haussmann was her home now. When Marcel Proust invited Olivier to move into the apartment, he gave a small shrug of acquiescence and carried his suitcases into the spare bedroom without another word.
Camille’s relief at her husband’s return did not last long. She wanted to ask him about the war, about everything he had seen at the front, but Olivier did not want to talk about that. He did not want to talk much at all. At night he moaned in his sleep, sometimes crying out in terror, unable to keep his memories at bay. He spent his days staring out of the window, alone with his thoughts. Whenever Monsieur Proust needed a driver, Olivier took him. These trips across the city would lift his spirits, but never for long. He began to complain about the peculiar hours his wife kept.
“We live in the same place but I never see you!” he told her. “You spend more time with him than me!”
“You are quite capable of looking after yourself, Olivier,” answered Camille, although as she spoke the words she wondered if this was, in fact, true. “Monsieur Proust, on the other hand—”
“Oh, I know, I know,” muttered her husband. “You’re the only one who can make his coffee just how he likes it. And what could be more important than that?”
“Really, Olivier, must you be so ungrateful? Monsieur Proust has been so kind to us both! Think how lucky we are to stay in this apartment!”
“Yes, as long as we follow his rules!” hissed Olivier. “I’m walking around all day and night on my tiptoes, Camille, for fear of disturbing him! It’s driving me to drink!”
Camille had become so accustomed to creeping through the apartment that she no longer noticed that she was doing it. “Is that really so difficult?” she asked.
Olivier sighed. “I spent years living at the front, Camille, up to my armpits in mud and shit. Now that I’m back, all I really want is to live in a place I can call my own. Somewhere I can stomp around and make as much noise as I want.”
“A home, in other words,” said Camille quietly.
“If you like, yes. A home.”
They looked at each other for a moment. Within the tired, anxious man before her, Camille saw the ghost of the person she fell in love with, and her heart ached with loss.
“Perhaps we should start a family,” she said.
The words hung between them.
“Really?” said Olivier.
Camille’s mouth opened and closed a few times as she tried to formulate a sentence, a phrase, anything that might reel back in the words that had just escaped her. Then she saw the light that had appeared in her husband’s eyes, and nodded.
“Really,” she whispered.
It was the key that set him free. Olivier fell on the idea like a starving dog on a juicy bone. A family, yes, of course! At once he began to conjure up a whole new life for them, a spontaneously improvised nirvana of domestic contentment. Camille listened as he spun stories and hatched plans for the future. She was delighted by his excitement, but felt a shadow of apprehension that she could not ignore. She had shifted the axis of Olivier’s world with a few whispered words. There was no going back now.
She was right to have worried. Every month they held their breath; every month they were devastated by fresh disappointment. Olivier suffered the most. Camille began to wish that she had never said a word. Her attempt to rescue her husband had left him more miserable than ever. Olivier became obsessed with the baby that they could not create. Month by month, he sank deeper and deeper into a private sadness, where Camille could not reach him.
When their daughter finally arrived in the spring of 1918, everything changed. Marie was a tornado, sweeping away everything that had gone before. There was of course no question that Monsieur Proust would ever tolerate a crying baby in the apartment, and so the new parents found somewhere else to live. Camille continued to keep the same, upside-down hours as before, which meant that Olivier was largely responsible for looking after their daughter. It was precisely the lifeline he needed: Marie rescued her father and brought him home. He no longer spent his days looking out of the window, lost in his memories of the war. Now, when Camille returned home, he regaled her with stories about everything he and Marie had done that day. Camille listened to these reports with a smile fixed firmly in place, trying to ignore the twinge of guilt that caught somewhere deep within her. She was a mother now. Shouldn’t she be tending to her child, rather than to her ever-demanding employer?
As it was, Marcel Proust needed her more than ever. He was, in his way, just as helpless as an infant. He suffered from a procession of illnesses, infections, and diseases. Some were real, some were imagined, but he was convinced that each one spelled the end. His brother, Robert, a doctor, was frequently summoned to examine him and deliver his verdict on the latest symptoms. Robert listened to Marcel’s litany of complaints and would then briskly inform his brother that he was perfectly fine. His fraternal duty performed, he would wink at Camille in a friendly way and let himself out while the patient seethed with impotent rage at these disappointing diagnoses.
Now that it was just Camille and her employer in the apartment again, they became closer than ever. Marcel Proust, propped up in his bed in his strange, cork-lined bedroom, became her confessor. She told him about Olivier’s bad dreams, the weight of his sadness. She admitted her misgivings about leaving him with the baby, her jealousy when she saw Marie asleep in his arms.
“Ah, but what must I be thinking, to say such things to you!” she said with a sigh one day.
“To me?” said Proust. “What do you mean?”
She pointed to the sheets of paper that lay scattered over the bed, every one covered with his small, neat handwriting. “You’re a writer, monsieur. All those stories you tell me when you return from your trips into the city. The gossip you hear at those parties. It all goes into your novel, doesn’t it?”
“Some of it,” he admitted.
“Et alors. I don’t want to see the tales that I tell you in your book.”
He looked hurt. “It’s not the same thing at all, Camille. The things you tell me are quite different from the stories I hear at parties. Those are between the two of us. I would never betray a confidence. Not from you.”
“All right, then,” sniffed Camille.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I believe you,” she said. She picked up the tray on the bedside table and turned to leave.
He crossed his arms. “No, you don’t.”
She laughed. “Tenez, now you read minds, as well?”
“I know you too well, Camille,” he said. “I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
Now it was her turn to be hurt. “I do believe you, monsieur,” she said.
“Prove it!”
She shook her head in exasperation. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“Tell me something you’ve never told another soul.”
“Oh, if only my life were that interesting! I have no such secrets.”
A sardonic eyebrow. “None, Camille?”
She thought of the one secret that she had never told anyone. Her guts twisted anxiously at the thought of saying the words out loud.
“There is one thing,” she said.
“I knew it,” exclaimed Proust, triumphant.
“You promise you’ll never tell a soul?”
He sat up in the bed. “I cross my heart.”
She put the tray back down.
As the war progressed, German bombs fell daily on the city. During these aerial bombardments, the occupants of 102 Boulevard Haussmann retreated to the basement—all except Marcel Proust, who refused to stop working and remained in his bedroom, writing furiously while the rockets fell. Camille was terrified by the prospect of a direct hit on the building, and so always fled downstairs, each time wondering if she would ever see her employer again. The attacks reduced large parts of the city to rubble, and as the danger to civilians showed no signs of abating, hundreds of thousands of Parisians fled to the safety of the countryside. Camille longed to follow them out of the city, and when Monsieur Proust was offered the use of a villa in Nice, she was thrilled at the prospect of escaping the bombs and feeling the warmth of the southern sun on her face. Marcel Proust, though, thought only of his work, and decided that there would be too many distractions in the countryside—to say nothing of too much pollen. He decided to remain in Paris. Camille was disappointed, but there was no question that she would ever leave the city without him.
The streets were half empty. In addition to those who had left for the country, there were many soldiers still away at the front, and hundreds of thousands of men who had been killed. Death hung over Paris like a shroud. On the sidewalks Camille passed young widows dressed in black, often with fatherless children in tow. She looked away, ashamed of her own good fortune. Many of the men she passed in the street bore the scars of war. Some hauled themselves down the boulevards on crutches, others wore coats with empty sleeves rolled up and pinned at the shoulder. For some, the damage lay deeper, betrayed by their vacant stares.
Still, there were young and healthy men living in Paris, miraculously untouched by the war’s devastation. Camille knew this because she would catch glimpses of some of them, late at night, as they closed the door of Marcel Proust’s bedroom and crept down the corridor, tucking their shirts into their trousers as they went. Camille sat in the kitchen, hidden in the shadows. She watched every one of them come and every one of them go, and she never breathed a word to anyone.
She kept her employer’s secrets, and he kept hers.