TO THE LEFT OF MONSIEUR Proust’s bedroom door there was a small Oriental cabinet, upon which were arranged old photographs of the author and his brother when they were children. Next to the cabinet there was a large rosewood chest. Stacked in a neat pile on top of the chest were thirty-two notebooks.
These thirty-two books contained the kernel of Marcel Proust’s masterwork. Between their covers he had already constructed the framework of the narrative. The heart of his fictional world was already beating within those pages; now he was fleshing out the body and creating the spirit of the thing. He was slowly bringing his story to life.
Proust knew the contents of every notebook by heart, but he liked to keep them close while he worked. Sometimes he asked Camille to fetch a particular book so that he could check a detail. He would flick to the page he needed, review the text, and then hand it back to her. Camille was comforted by the notebooks on top of the rosewood chest. If Monsieur Proust’s fears about dying before he finished the book were realized, at least they would remain.
So it was a profound shock when one evening her employer summoned her to the bedroom and issued a most unexpected request. He lay, as usual, propped up in his bed, surrounded by pillows and paper. A small gaslight was flickering by his side, which barely illuminated his face.
“Ah, Camille,” he said, smiling at her through the half-light. “There’s something I need you to do for me. It’s of the utmost importance.”
“Of course, monsieur,” she said. Everything he asked her to do was described in similar terms, no matter how trivial.
“I want you to burn my notebooks.”
Camille stood quite still, unsure she had heard correctly. “Pardon?” she said.
“The notebooks.” He pointed at the rosewood chest. “I want you to burn them.”
Camille stood there, stunned. “Are you quite sure?” she asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Proust.
“But why do you want to burn them, monsieur?”
“It’s not your place to question such things, Camille.”
“It’s just that you are always worrying about what will happen if you die before you finish the book!”
He looked at her through those limpid eyes. “And?”
“Well, if you do die, without the notebooks nobody will know how the story ends!”
“But that’s exactly the point. I’ve had some new ideas, you see.” Proust sighed. “The war has changed everything, and now the notebooks are out-of-date. That’s why I need you to burn them. I know every single one of them inside and out, anyway.”
“But, monsieur—”
“Camille, please.”
The words hung in the air between them. She remained uncertainly by the door.
“I have no wish to discuss this further,” he said after a moment, as softly as ever. “Please burn the books in the kitchen grate, and then kindly come back and tell me when it is done.”
An hour later, Camille knelt down in front of the kitchen hearth and set a fire. The notebooks were stacked in piles on the floor. She watched as the thin yellow tongues of flame flickered up and down the stack of kindling.
It was wrong to burn the notebooks. It was wrong to reduce all those years of work to ashes. But it was Monsieur Proust’s wish. The notebooks belonged to him, and nobody else. Camille knew that nothing she could say would change his mind. She took the top notebook off the stack and opened it. She gazed at the familiar handwriting. Her eyes drifted down those well-ordered lines. Such clarity of thought, such unerring precision! She would be the last person ever to see these words.
The flames were growing higher. Camille put the notebook into the grate. For a moment the fire was trapped beneath its heft, but then the flames crept around its edges. The black leather curled into crescents, and smoke began to escape from between the pages as they browned and warped in the heat. She watched as the words were swallowed by the fire, reduced to ashes.
She reached for another notebook.
After that she began to work more quickly, throwing books onto the flames in twos and threes, numbly watching the growing conflagration. With every incinerated volume came the sensation of unbearable loss. Each time her fingers released another notebook into the fire’s embrace, it was one more senseless eradication, terrible in its irreversibility.
In the end, her betrayal was an act of self-defense.
Just as Camille threw the final notebook onto the fire, she knew—as surely as she had ever known anything—that she could not let it burn. Instinctively she reached back into the flames. The black leather was already hot to the touch. She forced her fingers to close around the spine of the notebook, and pulled it out of the fire. She let go of it at once, her fingers scalded. The notebook landed on the flagstones. She had been quick. The edges of the paper had not even been singed.
Camille stared down at the rescued book, stupefied by what she had done. Not once had she disobeyed Monsieur Proust in even the smallest way.
She ran a finger across the cover, a thin straight line through the soft ash.
After she had cleaned the kitchen grate, Camille hid the rescued notebook in her handbag. She was stunned by her own betrayal. All those years of faithful service, undone in a stroke.
She knocked on the bedroom door.
“Ah, Camille.” Marcel Proust looked up at her. As usual, he lay in his bed, surrounded by paper. “I smelled the burning from down the corridor. You did as I asked?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“All the notebooks are destroyed?”
She looked down. “Oui, monsieur.”
“Thank you.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
She closed the door and walked back to the kitchen.
Camille went home and hid the rescued notebook at the bottom of an old trunk, beneath piles of neatly folded clothes and linens, where Olivier would never find it. In the weeks and months that followed, she did her best to act as if nothing had happened. She tried to pretend that the notebook was not there. There was no furtive rummaging to retrieve it when she was alone in the apartment. To read the words that Monsieur Proust had wanted to be burned would have compounded her guilt still further. The notebook lay at the bottom of her trunk, unseen and unread. Camille was appalled by what she had done, but she was unable to bring herself to destroy what she had stolen. The notebook was hers, now, hers alone, and she was determined not to give it up for anything: she would always have it to remember him by.
She didn’t tell Olivier, fearful that her husband would make her confess everything. Brick by careful brick, she hid her crime behind walls of ashamed silence. But too late, she saw that it was not just the stolen notebook that lay hidden within the catacomb that she had built. Camille herself was trapped in there, along with her secret. There was to be no escaping what she had done.