MARCEL PROUST
I hope you have good news of the Doctor, I beg you to remember me to him.
5
[mid-August 1909?]
Madame,
Alas your note sought me in Paris and reaches me in Cabourg . . . just as I am getting into the train! Otherwise, since my incessant attacks find in this air an abatement which causes me to seek it out, I would have tried to go and thank you for your charming letter. I would have tried and I do not flatter myself with the hope that I would have succeeded, knowing from experience how impossible it has been for me to receive very dear friends, come from quite far away to see me. But still I would have made the attempt. I am saddened to learn that you, too, have been suffering. It seems natural to me that I should be ill. But at least illness ought to spare Youth, Beauty and Talent! At least you have the support of a loving heart! I hope with all my heart that you will be completely healthy this year and I beg you Madame, in asking you please to remember me to Doctor Williams, to accept for yourself my most respectful greetings.
MARCEL PROUST
Excuse this letter written at the moment of getting into the train.
6
[autumn 1909?]
Dear Monsieur,
I am sending you my little (and very old!) Portraits of Painters.8 You have them already in my illustrated volume Pleasures and Days (I think you have received it, not through the post like the Ruskin, it must have been conveyed to you by hand) but the music is very difficult to read in the book, and is much better engraved in these little pieces into which, if Madame Williams, whose admirable talent I know, is curious to cast a glance, she will not be unpleasantly bothered as in the book, by the rather fuzzy look of the fac simile [sic]. Today’s fog is provoking in me such attacks that I scarcely have the strength to trace these words, so that I’m afraid I will be even more illegible than the musical fac-similes [sic]. It is this that is preventing me, exhausted by suffering and having wanted all the same before trying to rest a little in the evening to send up to you the pieces which I have received only just now, so late, from expressing to you the thanks which I owe you for a charming letter already a little old to which I would have liked to respond in a manner a little more detailed, but I am enduring at the moment such bad days that I am a very bad correspondent. Always prepared however to respond to you with exactness if you had something to ask me.
Please be so kind as to accept Monsieur the expression of my very devoted feelings.
MARCEL PROUST
7
[autumn 1909?]
102 boulevard Haussmann
Monsieur,
As I so often expose you to the effects of my troubles by asking you when my asthma attacks are too intense to procure me a little silence, — I think it is only fair that when I have something agreeable I ask you to share it with me. I hope that you will be willing to accept these four pheasants with as much simplicity as I put into offering them to you as neighbor. I will also permit myself to send you a few of my works. Unfortunately my articles from the Figaro are not yet collected in books and it is perhaps this that would most have interested you.9 But I will be able meanwhile to present you with the rest. I implore your help for Monday the 19th the day after tomorrow. I must make the great effort to try to go out in the evening and as I have attacks of asthma all night long, if in the morning there is hammering above me it’s all over for the whole day for resting, my attack will not stop and my evening out is impossible.
Please accept, Monsieur, the expression of my highest regards.
MARCEL PROUST
8
[17 December 1909]
Friday
Marcel Proust begs Madame Williams to be so kind as to accept his respectful and enchanted thanks, for the beautiful and artistic letter which she has had the grace and has done him the honor of writing to him. He would be most grateful to her if she would be his spokeswoman with the Doctor to request that there not be too much noise tomorrow Saturday, since he has to go out for a while in the evening. He will not fail as soon as his friend Mr Hahn is back from Aix la Chapelle where he has gone to conduct Prométhée to communicate to him the gracious praise.10
9
[October 1914?]
Madame,
It is always a very great pleasure for me to receive a letter from you. The latest was particularly sweet for me in these terrible times in which one trembles for all those one loves, and I do not mean by that only those one knows. It is however permitted without being too selfish to have exceptional worries, and the fate of my brother who is operating in the line of fire, has had his hospital bombed, the shells falling even on the operating table so that he has been obliged to take his wounded down into the cellars, is particularly close to my heart. Happily he has been completely safe up to now and has been mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour.11 I hope that you too have good news of your family. As for me I will imminently be going before the military service review board. I don’t know if I will be taken or not. I had wanted to write you last summer to hear your news. But even well before the War I was overwhelmed with worries. First, I was more or less completely ruined, which I found extremely painful. But shortly afterward my poor secretary was drowned by falling from an airplane into the sea.12 And the immense sorrow I felt, and that still endures, has prevented me from thinking about material troubles, very small next to an emotional trial. You knew him perhaps by sight because he lived in my home with his wife. But what you could not know is the superior intelligence which was to his, and extremely spontaneous since he had had no schooling, having been until then a simple mechanic. Never did I better understand the profoundness of the saying “The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.”13 The part of your letter in which you spoke of Clary is not that part which gave me the least pleasure, pleasure mingled with pain since you tell me he is still unwell.14 He is a truly rare person, I have a very profound affection for him; I think he does not believe it because for reasons which involve on my part more delicacy than he supposes, I have not expressed it to him. But there is no one whose company I have found sweeter. I never see him and I think constantly of him. I do not know if he has received my book, I sent it to him when it appeared (this is not a reproach for the fact that he has not written to me, he is unwell and excused for everything). But I do not know if the address was correct. And my memory is so fatigued by my drugs that I cannot even manage to specify whether that book did not come back to me, or if it is a hallucination of memory. In any case what I am sure of, is that I sent it. Often I would like to write for very selfish reasons. [Word missing] to speak of his health. I’m afraid [of] failing to mention a regimen [. . .] that would perhaps very quickly restore [his] health. I have known people who [. . .] spoiled their lives, always prey [to] attacks of rheumatism until the day [when some] astonishingly simple prescriptions [. . .] rigorously observed relieved them and made them regret the time they had lost.15 I would like to know if before treating himself, Clary saw, even once, a great “diagnostician.” For example Doctor Faisans.16 I know Clary to be very withdrawn, very reserved, and it is this that has stopped me from speaking to him about that. But since you speak to me about his health, you will give me great pleasure if you tell him that it concerns me very much. I hope that your own is completely good Madame. The Doctor was good enough to leave his card one day at Cabourg. Would you have the extreme goodness to tell him that starting on that day I tried to go find him at Deauville Trouville. But automobiles could not go out after 6 o’clock. And I could not manage to leave early enough. One day I succeeded, but on that day it was impossible to find an automobile. If I had not had the plan to go see him postponed day after day, I would have written to him right [end of the letter is missing]
MARCEL PROUST
10
[October 1914?]
Madame,
Please permit me to appeal to you and the Doctor for tomorrow Tuesday regarding the noise (early). I had to go out today in extremely dangerous health conditions and I very much dread tomorrow. — . If in a little while I am better I would be happy to talk to you about Clary. I have learned through some friends very dear to him one thing which I tell you in confidence
