“charming, in every respect, and with great vivacity and frankness of spirit” (Correspondance, vol. 14, p. 165, 1915). According to Céleste Albaret, Mme de La Béraudière “was at the feet of M. Proust and didn’t know what to do to make him interested” (Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, p. 194).

Proust must finally have seen Clary again before October 15, 1915, according to his Correspondance.

Proust writes, in a letter of August 7, 1915: “I cannot move these days, awaiting a visit from the Major of which I do not know the day or the hour.” The visit took place on August 8 or 9.

The reference is to pages on roses, written by Mme Williams (but which have not come down to us). See letter 14.

Mme Terre [Earth] was evidently the person in charge of the construction or renovation work that was making him suffer so (see letters 21 and 23). [Napoleon’s mother was known as “Madame Mère.”]

Verlaine’s “a shiver of water on moss” comes from “Listen to the Very Gentle Song,” 1881, the sixteenth poem of collection 1 of Sagesse: “Listen to the very gentle song / That weeps only to please you, / It is discreet, it is light: / A shiver of water over moss!”

Jean de Reszke (1850–1925), opera singer (tenor), Polish by birth, as was his brother Édouard (bass).

See note 25. Pelléas says, at the end of act 2, scene 1, “The truth, the truth.” [The Wolff Agency (misspelled by Proust) was a German press agency, one of the major news agencies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.]

Concerning Mme Terre, see also letters 20 and 23.

This is a pastiche of the sonnet that appeared in 1833 in the collection Mes heures perdues [My lost hours] by Félix Arvers.

According to his Correspondance (vol. 14), in mid-October 1915, Proust saw Clary again twice.

Hahn arrived from Vauquois on November 11 or 12, 1915. He made use of that leave to give the first performance of Le ruban dénoué. [In the original, for “in disarray” Proust puns, using the expression en “bataille” (literally “in battle” — with quotes around “battle”) to signal the pun.]

Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 42, line 6.

Reynaldo was a fervent admirer of Thérésa [Emma Valladon, 1837–1913], queen of the café-concert. She sang La terre [The earth] (L’Eldorado, 1888), poem and music both by Jules Jouy, arranged by Léopold Gandolff. The poem begins: “Our nurse and our mama — / She is the earth: / Her flower and grain sprouting / Under the earth.” Proust evokes this song to make fun of Mme Terre — see letters 20 and 21. (Information kindly supplied by Benoît Duteurtre.) Proust had heard this singer at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1888, in Cendrillon.

This confirms that Proust consulted musical scores. Les Béati¬tudes is by César Franck.

Anatole France wrote the preface to Proust’s Pleasures and Days (Calmann-Lévy, 1896).

Robert de Montesquiou’s Les offrandes blessées: Elégies guerrières [Wounded offerings: War elegies] was published by E. Sansot in June 1915. Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) was a celebrated Russian-born dancer and actress. This reading must have taken place on Wednesday, December 20, 1916, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. This letter can therefore be dated Tuesday the 19th.

Pierre Frondaie, novelist, playwright, and poet, used Anatole France’s first novel, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, as the basis for a four-act play which premiered at the Théâtre Antoine either December 2 or 20, 1916, according to different sources. [In his phrase “the ‘acta Sanctorum’ of the Learned Bollandistes,” Proust is quoting from memory (with his own choices of capitalization) from France’s novel: “at the hour when the mice will dance by moonlight before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bollandistes.” A Bollandiste was a member of a learned society founded by the Jesuit and hagiographer Jean Bolland. The Acta Sanctorum were the Lives of the Saints, of which Bolland was the first author and compiler.]

This play, adapted from Anatole France’s novella Crainquebille, was first performed in 1903 starring Lucien Guitry at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. [Crainquebille is the story of a street peddler unjustly jailed and an orphan boy who befriends him on his release. It was also adapted for silent film by Jacques Feyder in 1921.]

A. Demar-Latour: Ce qu’ils ont détruit: La cathédrale de Reims bombardée et incendiée en septembre 1914 [What they destroyed: The cathedral of Reims bombed and burned in September 1914], Paris, Éditions practiques et documentaires ([1915?], 64 pp.). [It is possible, though not certain, that this is the book Mme Williams lent to Proust. As for the year of its appearance, the book itself contains no publication date, and sources, such as library catalogs, variously give 1914 and 1915.]

In The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, the princess (not countess) Trépof presents Sylvestre Bonnard with the manuscript of The Golden Legend, which he has been coveting, secreted within a hollowed-out log. Proust cites the same passage in a letter of May 1913 to Mme Schéikevitch (Correspondance, vol. 12, p. 173).

The compatriot is perhaps Walter Berry, President of the Franco-American Chamber of Commerce and a friend of Proust.

The source of the phrase is in fact the 11th-century monk Raoul Glaber.

[Because Proust refers to the death of Clary’s mother, which occurred March 11, 1917, and because Clary himself, who died May 8, 1918, is evidently still alive, this letter must have been written sometime between those two dates. Proust had been out of touch with Blanche, whom he mentions here, before April 10, 1918. He is presumably back in touch with him if he contemplated sending him the carnations. A possible date for this letter, therefore, would be sometime in the month extending from mid-April to mid-May.]

Index

Acta Sanctorum (Jean Bolland) 67, 100n50
Aeneid, The 96n19
Agostinelli, Alfred 95n12
Aix-la-Chapelle 29
Albaret, Céleste 7, 74, 76–81, 83, 93n1, 98n33
Amiens 68
Annecy 60, 62, 85
Antoine (concierge) 77
Argonne 52, 97n27
“Artémis” (Nerval) 97n24
Arthème Fayard 95n14
Arvers, Félix 9, 65, 87, 99n42
Au Jardin des Roses (florist) 90
Avenue de l’Alma 98n31
Avenue George V 98n31
Bagnoles-de-l’Orne 10, 25, 93n7
Balbec 12, 89, 97n26
Bamberg 68
Baudelaire, Charles 99n45
Beethoven, Ludwig von 9, 65
Bernard, Saint 69
Bernhardt, Sarah 11
Berry, Walter 101n54
Bibliothèque nationale de France 96n20
Bizet, Georges 93n4
Blanche, Jacques-Emile 37, 70, 96n18, 102n56
Bolland, Jean 101n50
Bollandistes 67, 100n50
Brach, Paul 12
Brailowsky, Alexander 13, 72
Bray, Barbara 93n1
Cabourg 10, 26, 33, 89
Calmann-Lévy 94n8, 100n48
Cendrillon (Massenet) 100n46
Ce qu’ils ont détruit (A. Demar-Latour) 10, 101n52
Champs-Elysées, Avenue des 98n31
Chartres 68
Clary, Angèle (mother of Joachim) 70, 102n56
Clary, Joachim 9, 12, 14, 32–34, 52, 54, 55, 58, 65–66, 70, 95n14, 98n34, 99n43, 102n56
Côte Fleurie 89
Combourg 25
conseil de contre-réforme 94n11
Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, The (A. France, Pierre Frondaie) 67, 68, 100n50, 101n53
Crainquebille (A. France) 67, 101n51
d’Aubigné, Agrippa 47, 97n24
Daudet, Lucien 37, 52, 66, 95n14, 96n18
da Vinci, Leonardo 10, 68
Deauville 11, 33
Debussy, Claude 97n25
Demar-Latour, A. 10, 101n52
de Pourtalès, Count Jacques 98n32
Dreyfus, Robert 83
Duteurtre, Benoît 100n46
Éditions practiques et documentaires 101n52
Éditions Robert Laffont 93n1
“El Desdichado” (Nerval) 97n24
Emler, Paul 7
E. Sansot 100n49
Eugénie, Empress 95n14
Faisans, Léon 33, 96n16
Fénelon, Bertrand de 11, 52, 97n27
Feyder, Jacques 101n51
Figaro, Le 28, 94n9
Flowers of Evil, The (Baudelaire) 64, 99n45
France, Anatole 66, 100n48, 100n50–51, 101n53
Franck, César 9, 65, 82, 100n47
Franco-American Chamber of Commerce 101n54
Frondaie, Pierre 100n50
Gagey, Dr. Emile and Mme 75, 77, 78, 81, 82
Gandolff, Léopold 100n46
Gide, André 36, 46, 83
Giotto di Bondone 9, 58
Glaber, Raoul 101n55
Golden Legend, The 68, 101n53
Gospel according to John 95n13
Grand Hôtel de Cabourg 89
Grasset 96n20
Greffulhe, Henri, Count 98n33
Guitry, Lucien 101n51
Hahn, Reynaldo 29, 52, 64, 80–81, 82, 84, 94n10, 97n27, 99n44
Halévy, Geneviève. See Straus, Geneviève
Haussmann, Boulevard 7, 13, 28, 60–61, 62, 73, 75, 76, 85, 91
Hayman, Laure 7
Helleu, Paul 70
Heugel 94n8
Hôpital Beaujon 96n16
Hôtel d’Albe 54, 98n31
Houlgate 89–90
Hugo, Victor 93n2
Illiers-Combray 74, 79
Impressions That Remained – Memoirs of Ethel Smyth 95n14
Jouy, Jules 100n46
Kafka, Franz 75
Katz, Mme 75
Kolb, Philip 12
La Béraudière, Mme de 55, 98n33
La Bible d’Amiens (Ruskin) 68, 82
Lamartine, Alphonse de 9
La Nouvelle Revue Francaise 11, 36, 44, 46, 96n17
La terre (Jules Jouy) 100n46
Legras powders 74
L’Eldorado 100n46
Le Nouvel Observateur 88
Lerossignol, M. 89–90
Le ruban dénoué (Reynaldo Hahn) 80, 99n44
Les Béatitudes (Franck) 9, 65, 100n47
Les Chimères (Nerval) 97n24
Les contemplations (Hugo) 93n2
Les offrandes blessés: Elégies guerrières (Robert de Montesquiou) 100n49
Les tragiques (Agrippa d’Aubigné) 97n24
Le Vésinet 93n7
L’île du soleil couchant (Joachim Clary) 95n14
Lives of the Saints. See Acta Sanctorum
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 87
Louvain 68
Maeterlinck, Maurice 97n23, 97n25
“Major, the,” 53, 56–57, 98n35
Mallarmé, Stéphane 97n23
Mametz 97n27
Mante-Proust, Suzy 12
Maupassant, Guy de 7
Mauriac-Dyer, Nathalie 94n11
Mes heures perdues (Félix Arvers) 99n42
Monbrison, Jacqueline de. See Rehbinder, Countess Wladimir
Montesquiou, Count Robert de 11, 20, 66, 81, 93n6, 95n14, 100n49
Morand, Paul 83
Musée Carnavalet 79
Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits 14, 88
Nerval, Gérard de 47, 97n24
Noailles, Countess Anna de 47, 79, 84, 96n22
Normandy 25, 89, 93n7
Notre Dame 68
Our Hearts (Maupassant) 7
Pallu, Alphonse 97n28
Pallu, Marie. See Williams, Marie
Parsifal (Wagner) 9
Pelléas and Mélisande (Debussy & Maeterlinck) 47, 60, 97n25, 99n40
Pernolet, Arthur 82
Poulet Quartet 81
“Prométhée triomphant” (Reynaldo Hahn & Paul Reboux) 29, 94n10
Proust Museum 74
Proust, Robert 12
Proust Society 74
Reboux, Paul 94n10
Régnier, Marie de 47, 84
Rehbinder, Countess Wladimir 55, 98n32
Reims 10, 13, 68–69, 85, 101n52
Reszke, Edouard de 99n39
Reszke, Jean de 9, 58, 99n39
Rostand, Maurice 37, 81, 96n18
Rubinstein, Ida 66, 100n49
Rue du Colisée 55
Rue Galilée 55
Ruskin, John 27, 57, 82, 85
Sagesse (Verlaine) 97n24, 99n38
Sainte-Chapelle 60, 85
Schéikevitch, Marie 101n53
Schwickerath, Eberhard 94n10
Smyth, Ethel 95n14
Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin) 10, 69, 85
Straus, Geneviève 7, 8, 19, 66, 93n1, 93n4
Théâtre Antoine 100n50
Théâtre de la Renaissance 101n51
Théâtre du Châtelet 100n46
Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt 100n49
Thérésa (Emma Valladon) 64, 82, 100n46
Terre, Mme 58, 60, 98n37, 99n41, 100n46
Trépof, Princess 101n53
Trouville 33
Vaudoyer, Jean-Louis 94n11
Vauquois 97n27
Verlaine, Paul 8, 20, 47, 58, 97n24, 99n38
Versailles 75
Virgil 96n19
von Otter, Anne Sofie 81
Williams, Doctor, passim
Williams, Marie, passim
Williams, son, passim
Wolff Agency 60, 99n40
WORKS AND CHARACTERS OF PROUST
Guermantes Way, The 9, 11, 96n17, 96n20
In Search of Lost Time 9, 73, 85, 93n6, 95n14, 96n21
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 11–12, 96n17, 96n20, 97n26
Pastiches 94n9
Pleasures and Days 27, 94n8, 100n48
Portraits of Painters 27, 94n8
Swann’s