Your very respectful
MARCEL PROUST
About Clary, I ask you not to speak of this at least for the moment.
11
[autumn 1914]
Night of Wednesday to Thursday
Madame,
Through the grace of generosity — or a play of reflections — you lend my letters some of the qualities possessed by your own. Yours are delicious, delicious in heart, in spirit, in style, in “talent.” — . The continuation of Swann (if I have properly understood)? or Swann itself? If it is the continuation, there exist only the excerpts, very long, true, of the 2nd volume, which appeared in the Nlle Revue Fçaise.17 The War came, the 2nd and 3rd volumes could not be published, naturally. I have friends who continue to write books, and publish them, since they send them to me. No doubt their publisher is not mobilized like mine, their thoughts are not mobilized like mine which, as regards “proofs” [épreuves, which also means “trials, difficulties”], are at this time turned toward others than those I would have to be correcting. So if it is the continuation of Swann I have only the excerpts from the Nlle R. F. This took up two Issues of the Revue. I should have them. But where? I will look for them. If I don’t find them today, I will write to Gide, the only director of the N.R.F. who has been mobilized in Paris itself (as far as I know). I am too happy about having such a reader as you to miss this opportunity. But will these detached pages give you an idea of the 2nd volume? And the 2nd volume itself doesn’t mean much; it’s the 3rd that casts the light and illuminates the plans of the rest. But when one writes a work in 3 volumes in an age when publishers want only to publish one at a time, one must resign oneself to not being understood, since the ring of keys is not in the same part of the building as the locked doors. — . It is true that one must resign oneself to something worse which is to not being read. At least I would have the joy of knowing that those lovely lucid eyes had rested on these pages.
I don’t know if you read, at the time, some intelligent and too-indulgent articles on this book which will perhaps amuse you because they say something about your neighbor and even his bedroom (Lucien Daudet, M. Rostand, J. Blanche etc.).18 Thank you for telling me that I am read by one of your friends at the “Front.” Nothing can make me prouder. Please accept Madame my respectful and grateful regards.
MARCEL PROUST
12
[autumn 1914]
“The flowers will follow . . .”
Madame,
The Nouvelle Revue Française has published my excerpts in 2 Issues [of] June and July. If I send you 3 (2 issues of July) it is because alas I can only have copies which have been torn apart in order to glue pieces of them on proofs of the 2nd volume which was supposed to appear then, and which the “aspera fata” prevented.19 But the pieces cut out should not be the same in the two Issues. With the two, you will have a single complete one. And alas I will no doubt be obliged to ask you for them back later. But, naturally you will have the whole work in one volume! I will send it to you complete!20 — What I said to you about the real meaning of each part being conferred on them only by the following part, you can find an example of in the June Issue. — In Swann, one might be surprised that Swann should always be entrusting his wife to M. de Charlus, presumed to be her lover, or rather one might be surprised that the author should go to the trouble of publishing yet again after so many vaudevillians of the lowest sort that blindness of husbands (or of lovers). Yet in the June Issue you will see, since the 1st indication of M. de Charlus’s vice appears there, that the reason why Swann knew he could entrust his wife to M. de Charlus was quite different! But I had not wanted to announce it in the 1st volume, preferring to resign myself to being very banal, so that one might come to know the character as in life where people reveal themselves only little by little. Starting with the 3rd volume moreover one will see that Swann has nevertheless been mistaken; M. de Charlus had had relations with only one woman, and it was precisely Odette.21 — It pains me to think that you are ill and cloistered, I would so much like nephritis and neuritis to be no more than a bad memory that would not prevent you in any way from leading a pleasant life. But I think that your company is worth more than that of others, which is for you a reason (quite personal) for appreciating solitude. Please accept Madame my very respectful greetings.
MARCEL PROUST
13
[autumn 1914]
Madame,
Forgive me for not having yet thanked you: it is I who have received marvelous roses described by you with “fragrance imperishable”22 but various which, in the evocations of the true poet that you are, cause the aroma, at every hour of the day, by turns, now to infiltrate the agatized chiaroscuro of the “Interiors”23 or now to expand within the fluent and diluted atmosphere of the gardens.
Only . . . I have been so ill these days (in my bed which I have not left and without having noisily opened or closed the carriage entrance as I have it seems been accused of doing) that I have not been able to write. Physically, it was impossible for me. Keep the Revues as long as you like. — . By an astonishing chance Gide, of whom we were speaking, and whom I have not seen for 20 years, came to see me while we were speaking of him in our letters. But I was not in a condition to receive him. Thank you again Madame for the marvelous pages flushed with a smell of roses. Your very respectful
MARCEL PROUST
The successor to the valet de chambre makes noise and that doesn’t matter. But later he knocks with little tiny raps. And that is worse.
14
[autumn 1914?]
Madame,
I am quite unwell as I write but I thank you deeply for the letter that has brought me I assure you a vision more enduring than a bouquet and as colorful. One after another lovely verses written in all periods to the glory of autumn roses the autumn rose of d’Aubigné “more exquisite than any other” (an autumn rose is more exquisite than any other), Verlaine’s: “Ah! When will the roses of September bloom again,” Gérard de Nerval’s “Rose with violet heart flower of Ste Gudule” next to his trellis “where vine with rose unites,”24 not to mention the innumerable “mature roses” of two poetesses my great friends whom I no longer see alas now that I no longer get up Mme de Noailles and Mme de Régnier, I have assembled in my memory a bouquet of all the written roses. Now yours seemed to me worthy of being added to them, and your prose of residing as neighbor with their verse. Upon your roses at dusk I would place this epigraph by Pelléas:
“I am a Rose in the shadows.”25
Deign to accept Madame, this hasty and suffering expression of my respectful gratitude.
MARCEL PROUST
15
[end of 1914?]
Madame,
May my book have given you as much pleasure as I have had in reading your letter. Perhaps certain painful parts of it concerning the dawn, and also certain worldly scenes, are fairly accurate.26 But the descriptions in it hardly satisfy me. — I am not familiar with any of the regions you mention to me. But I have so often dreamed of them; and you, with your pictorial and sunlit words, have brought color and light into my closed room. Your health has improved you tell me, and your life become more beautiful. I feel great joy over this. I cannot say the same for myself. My solitude has become even more profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me. It has thus been a blessed messenger, and contrary to the proverb, this single swallow has made for me an entire spring. Allow me to thank you for it, Madame, with all my heart, and asking you to remember me to the Doctor, to lay at your feet my most respectful regards.
MARCEL PROUST
16
[March 1915]
Madame,
Yesterday I was grieving most profoundly. After so many family and friends killed in the war, the dearest perhaps after M. Hahn (who is in Argonne but doing well) a person rare and delightful Bertrand de Fénelon has been killed.27 I did not believe that God could add to my pain, when I was informed of yours. And I have so much fallen into the habit, without knowing you, of sympathizing with your sorrows and your joys, through the wall where I sense you invisible and present, that this news of the death of Monsieur your brother has acutely saddened me.28 I always think of you a great deal, I will think of you even more since you are grieving. Alas I know that this sympathy is a small thing. When we are suffering, the only words that touch
