Please be so kind as to remember me to the Doctor and accept Madame my most grateful regards
MARCEL PROUST
25
[Christmas 1916]
Madame,
I ask your permission to keep, today as well — in order to ennoble this tragic Christmas which does not bring “Peace on earth to men of good will” — the wonderful and moving images which will be restored to you tomorrow.52 And really through this miraculous vision you have, with a disconcertingly inventive intelligence, continued beyond what is possible what we were saying the other day about the Countess Trépof in Sylvestre Bonnard.53 Because in fact it is in the form of a Yule log that the incomparable Lives of the Saints has come to me, the amazing Golden Legend, or rather purplish (for a compatriot of Doctor Williams told me the other day that Reims, for its sublime steeple alas, has turned the most extraordinary purple)54 the Bible of Reims which is no longer intact like the Bible of Amiens, the stones of Reims which fulfill the prophecy: “And the very stones shall cry out to demand justice.” Perhaps, moreover, the disaster of Reims, a thousand times more pernicious for humanity than that of Louvain — and for Germany first of all, for whom Reims, because of Bamberg, was the favorite cathedral — was a crime rather coldly conceived. War is war and we are not only lamenting a humanity of stones. But that of Reims whose smile seemed to herald that of da Vinci, in its draperies which are bewilderingly reminiscent of the most beautiful period of Greece was unique. Neither Amiens though more austerely biblical, nor Chartres though more sacredly immaterial were that. And no doubt I know very well that many deplore Reims who have never lifted their eyes to Notre Dame and who naively believe that the most beautiful church in Paris is our parish church, our ugly Saint Augustin. But I who insofar as my health permits make to the stones of Reims pilgrimages as piously awestruck as to the stones of Venice believe I am justified in speaking of the diminution to humanity that will be consummated on the day when the arches that are already half burnt away collapse forever on those angels who without troubling themselves about the danger still gather marvelous fruits from the lush stylized foliage of the forest of stones. My too ailing eyes which refuse to serve me this evening interrupt a prattle that would be interminable for can one be brief when one sees torn to shreds on France what Saint Bernard I believe (but I believe I’m wrong about the author) called the white mantle of churches.55 I will send back to you tomorrow the Holy Images, the immortal wounded, and I thank you today for your thought with most grateful respect.
MARCEL PROUST
26
[late April – early May 1918?]56
Madame,
I am abashed (and delighted!) that you have written to me. You’re right in thinking that it wasn’t a matter of “sending flowers.” But a woman who has unique greenhouses having given me these two carnations which seemed to me truly rare, I sent them to you, after having hesitated between you, Helleu, and Jacques Blanche, that is to say, between three lovers of refined colors to whom one sends a flower as one would send a butterfly wing. I am glad about what you tell me concerning the imminent arrival of your son. I am glad above all for you. But also a little selfishly for myself as I would very much like to see mother and son. And to see the son would perhaps be less difficult. For an ill person feels, even so, his vanity less embarrassed in allowing all the sad apparatus of his illness to be seen by a child, even a charming one, than by a woman. Since you speak to me about my health, I ask your help for Sunday morning. Monday would be more logical since it is on Sunday that I must go see friends and therefore Monday that I will be ill. But my request is on the contrary for Sunday. Because if on Sunday morning there is too much noise I will not be able to get up in the afternoon. — . I still have not been able to see Clary again and it grieves me very much. What fate that here in Paris where it is almost impossible to find one apartment near another, mother and son succeeded, perhaps by chance, in finding themselves adjacent, Madame Clary having only to knock on her kitchen wall for her son to hear her, and that she should have died without their seeing each other again. Already I carry around with me in my mind so many dissolved deaths, that each new one causes supersaturation and crystallizes all my griefs into an infrangible block. Most respectfully your grateful
MARCEL PROUST
Mme Williams and her third husband, Alexander Brailowsky
Translator’s afterword
As we read these letters, it is helpful to picture the room in which Proust wrote them, and him in the room. Although one would imagine that the room would be preserved as a museum, even furnished with Proust’s own furniture (which is extant), that is not the case. Proud though the French are of one of their premier authors, the apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in which he lived for nearly twelve years and in which he wrote most of In Search of Lost Time is now part of the premises of a bank. Some years ago — I don’t know if this is still the case — it was, at least, possible to visit the room during the summer by appointment on Thursday afternoons. One was shown around by a bank employee, with interruptions when she had to go off and answer a banking question.
Proust’s bedroom was unpopulated for much of the day, unless it was being used for a meeting with a client or among bank officials. A portrait of Proust hung on the wall, but the talk in the room would have been about financial matters, and though financial matters interested the generous, extravagant, impulsive Proust — see the passage in letter 9 in which he tells Mme Williams that he was (several months before the start of WWI) “more or less completely ruined” — his spirit would probably not be present. It might drift in for a moment if those taking part in the meeting paused to recall him and his life and work. And French bankers and their clients would conceivably have a strong interest in and respect for Proust.
The room gave the impression of being rather small, perhaps because of its very high ceiling, which Proust’s housekeeper estimated to be some fourteen feet high. Yet Proust described it as “vast” when he made the difficult decision to rent the apartment, and in fact the room measured nine and a half paces by six, as a visitor without measuring tape might estimate it, which translates to roughly twenty-one feet by fifteen, or over three hundred square feet. Maybe it seemed small because it was so relatively empty, containing only a sideboard, a bookcase, a small table in the center, and four small chairs.
According to the bank employee-cum-guide, certain structural parts of the room were the same as they had been in Proust’s time: the two tall windows; two of the four doors; the moldings around the tops of the walls; the parquet floor; and the fireplace with its thick white marble mantel. There were few outward signs that this room had anything to do with Proust: in addition to the portrait on the wall, there was a short row of volumes of the Proust Society’s quarterly journal occupying part of one shelf in the otherwise empty glass-fronted bookcase, one that had not belonged to Proust; and, on the top of the sideboard, which also had not belonged to Proust, a small sign announcing “Proust’s bedroom” alongside a stack of brochures about the actual Proust Museum, which was elsewhere — in the house of “Tante Léonie” out in Illiers-Combray, one and a half hours from the city.
When Proust lived in it, when he rested, slept, ate, wrote, read, inhaled his smoking Legras powders, drank his coffee, and entertained visitors there, it was crowded with furniture. We learn from a description by his housekeeper and faithful companion Céleste that there was, for instance, a large wardrobe between the two windows, and, in front of the wardrobe, so close that its doors could not be opened, a grand piano. Between the grand piano and the bed, an armchair as well as the three small tables which Proust used for three different purposes. Other pieces of furniture — a bookcase, a work table that had belonged to Proust’s mother, a different sideboard — stood at various spots against the walls. Céleste had to squeeze her way in and out.
My guide pointed out the corner in which Proust’s bed had been placed, along the wall opposite the windows, and where he wrote a great deal of the novel. Standing between the head of the bed and the wall, an Oriental screen protected him from
