Noise from construction within the building or from next door was a continuing menace and plague for Proust during his years here, as we can see from the letters in the present collection. It was the neighbor on the entresol below, one Dr. Gagey, who was having work done on his apartment when Proust first moved in, in the last days of 1906, as we know from the complaints, sometimes humorous, in his other, voluminous letters. Just as the work on Dr. Gagey’s apartment was ending and relief for Proust was in sight, work began in the building next door, where one Mme Katz was installing a new bathroom just a few feet from his head. (Kafka, at about this time, was recording the same sorts of complaints in his diaries, though he liked to turn them into small stories about what fantastic things these neighbors might be doing.)
After the death of his mother, Proust had made the decision not to continue living in the too-large, memory-haunted family apartment. This apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann was just one possible choice of residence among many which Proust had investigated by proxy, with the help of a host of friends and without moving from his temporary rooms in a hotel at Versailles. It is therefore surprising to realize that he was in fact a quarter-owner of the building at the time, his brother owning another quarter and his aunt the other half.
When he moved in, he considered the apartment to be no more than a transitional residence. It was the first he had ever lived in on his own, but it was a familiar part of his past: his mother had known it well, and his uncle had lived and died here — Proust had in fact visited him on his deathbed, in the same room that became his bedroom. He later, through inattention, and without fully realizing the consequences, allowed his aunt to buy his own share and his brother’s, and thus had no say in the matter when she in turn decided, in 1919, to sell the building to a banker, who intended to convert the premises into a bank, obliging him to move, against his will, and in fact twice more. This was only three years before his death, and in Céleste’s opinion hastened his decline.
In order to talk about the context of the letters in this volume — including the room in which Proust wrote them and the apartment in which the room was situated — it is helpful to have some sense of the geography of Proust’s building. The French system of numbering is different from the American: what the French call the first floor is the floor above the ground floor, the second floor is two floors above street level, etc. Proust’s apartment was on what they would call the first floor, the dentist’s practice on the second, the dentist’s apartment on the third. But, complicating this numbering system, in the case of Proust’s building, was the entresol, that low-ceilinged half-floor which can be between any two floors but is generally between the ground floor and the first, in which case we in English call it the mezzanine.
When there is an entresol, the floor above it may in fact be called the second floor, and this is what Proust calls it at least once in this collection of letters, as do the editors of the French edition. Other sources, including the memoir of his housekeeper Céleste, call it the first. (There is no disagreement about where Proust lived, just some inconsistency about how to number the floor.) We will adhere to the traditional French system in discussing the apartments and inhabitants of 102 Boulevard Haussmann.
However, to clarify matters for American readers: there was, at that address, first the ground floor, which in those days was entered through a two-paneled carriage entrance (the same that Proust mentions indignantly in letter 13). This level contained, at least, an apartment occupied by the concierge Antoine and his family. One flight up, there was the entresol, under Proust’s apartment, occupied by Dr. Gagey, his wife, and their daughter. Another flight up was Proust’s apartment. Above it was the practice of the American dentist Charles Williams, on the street side directly above Proust’s head, as well as, in the back, his laboratory. Since this latter workplace was located away from the street, looking out on the courtyard, Proust was not bothered by the footsteps of the several assistants who worked there.
Above Dr. Williams’s practice was the apartment occupied by the Williamses and their small son, who was about four years old when they moved in. There were another two floors above the Williamses’ apartment, but it is not clear who lived in them, though on the top floor, under the roof, there would usually have been small independent rooms connected by a narrow corridor, the bedrooms of the servants who worked in the apartments below. There was a back stairway which Proust referred to as the service stairs or “small” stairs. This was used by the building’s servants, and by the concierge when he brought up a message for Proust, discreetly tapping at the kitchen door to avoid the disturbance of ringing the doorbell, and for other deliveries, including the milk, brought daily by the neighborhood crémerie for Proust’s coffee. Somewhere in Proust’s apartment, probably near or next to the kitchen — though it is not clear from the simplified floor plan of the apartment included in this volume exactly where — was a bedroom for the use of a servant, and this was where Céleste slept after she moved in sometime in 1914.
There have of course been changes in the layout of the rooms since the time Proust lived here. There is now a door at the head of Proust’s bed. The corridor outside his bedroom, across which he used to step on the way to his dressing room and bath, now extends into the building next door. The other door out of his bedroom, the door he assigned to be used by visitors and by his housekeeper, opens into a generous room with a massive conference table in the center and a fireplace at either end. Here too, very little is original: the fireplaces, the wood floor, and the windows. But a change in the wood of the parquet floor marks the line where a wall stood, separating Proust’s large drawing room from a small anteroom where his guests used to wait to see him.
These three rooms line the street side of the apartment. In back of them, toward the courtyard, there are other vestiges: the marble surface of the stairs and landing by which visitors approached the apartment; the shaft for the small elevator (though it is a different elevator) that rises up in the center of the stairwell; the oeil-de-boeuf window through which Céleste used to look out into the stairwell to see who was coming up. Proust’s visitors stopped and waited on the landing in front of the front door to the apartment, but there is no longer a wall or a door there, only open space and two white pillars. Nowadays, from a spot that was once inside the apartment, you can watch the stairwell as men in shirtsleeves and ties, carrying folders, walk up from the landing that would have opened into the apartment of Dr. Gagey, and on up to the next floor — the floor where Dr. Williams had his practice and his laboratory of assistants — or come trotting back down, talking finance. Visitors now coming up to the second floor (as we call it in America — first floor for the French) to do business with the bank will see, when they walk into what used to be Proust’s apartment (across what used to be the entryway, where his gloves and handkerchiefs sat in a silver salver), an open area with a sofa and armchairs, and they may sit there to talk. This was in fact Proust’s dining room, though the walls are gone and he used it not as a dining room but as a storeroom. He had inherited a great deal of the contents of the family apartment, and did not want to part with much of it, but could not find places for it all in the other rooms, so he filled the dining room until it was “like a forest,” according to Céleste. An imaginative financier with a little information might be haunted, sitting next to the lone potted plant, by the lingering presence of a crowded accumulation of heavy fin de siècle furniture and bric-a-brac.
There is no balcony on the front of the building now, though Proust describes stepping out onto the balcony from his bedroom and actually enjoying a rare contact with sunlight. The apartment is no longer a set of rooms whose closed shutters and curtains create an eternal night, but is now glowingly well lit, with its high ceilings and tall windows, prosperous and busy.
A fourth reference to Proust in his former bedroom is not immediately obvious: the walls are lined with cork. But this is a marbleized, decorative cork that has been put on the walls since Proust’s time, and it is not even obviously cork unless you look closely. It is a sort of compromise cork, a stand-in for Proust’s cork. In Proust’s time, the bank officer explains, the walls were crudely lined with thick slabs of raw bark off
