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 the cork trees that grow in the south of France, painted over in black so as to protect Proust’s lungs from the material’s crumbling or disintegration – though Proust’s servant has described the cork as being the colour of honey. The famous cork was suggested to Proust’s close friend Anna de Noailles, a poet and another noise-phobic, who used it in her own home.
The extant contents of Proust’s bedroom are in the Musée Carnavalet, the city museum of Paris. They are down a corridor and within hailing distance of the recreated bedroom of Anna de Noailles. Here, too, square tiles of cork line the walls of Proust’s room, a plain tan cork which the literature of the museum describes as an exact replica of Proust’s cork. In Illiers-Combray, there are a few more objects from Proust’s apartment: the dishes he ate from; the coffee maker used by Céleste to make his special coffee; several shelves of books.
Because they are the real thing and not approximations, Proust’s bedroom furniture – the brass bedstead, the bedside table and lamp, the desk, the sideboard, the chaise longue, two armchairs, and the Oriental screen – are haunted by his presence, especially those with signs of wear: most of all, because so intimately associated with the human body, the places on the upholstery where the nap of the fabric has been worn down to the thread, not only by Proust but by others, too, presumably his mother, his father, his brother, and his visiting friends.
Because of his illness, Proust spent most of his time in bed, heavily dressed in – according to one account – two sweaters, socks, and long underwear, with a hot-water bottle at his feet that was renewed three times a day. A blanket folded in four hung over the large door to the room to protect him from draughts and noise. Both shutters and curtains were closed over the double-paned windows, so that no sound could be heard from the street. The chandelier that hung from the ceiling was never illuminated. A candle was kept burning, since he lit his powders using a folded paper rather than striking a match. He generally woke ‘for the day’ at nine in the evening, and had his only meal at that time – coffee and a croissant which Céleste would bring to him when he rang.
When he felt well enough, Proust liked to have a friend visit occasionally, as long as that friend followed certain rules: no cigarettes, of course, no perfume. Proust describes Reynaldo Hahn coming in, playing the piano for a little while, and then leaving again ‘like a hurricane’ (or, at other times, ‘like a whirlwind’ – as Proust puts it apologetically in letter 23).
One can pause to listen, via YouTube, to the composition by Reynaldo Hahn mentioned in the note to letter 23, Le ruban dénoué [The untied ribbon], twelve waltzes for two pianos.
As performed by two Italian pianists in a lamplit chamber concert in Rome, it is at times dynamic and forceful, more often gentle. The audience, visible in the background, is so absolutely still that for a while you might think the video has been manipulated and they have been frozen visually. From this, you may stray over to Anne Sofie von Otter singing another composition of Hahn’s, a three-minute song. Her voice is liquid, effortless. In contrast to his style of entering and leaving Proust’s building, Hahn’s compositions tend to be calm, balanced and elegant, intimate, moderate in tempos and dynamics, and characterized by uncluttered simplicity, charm, and sentimentality. Hahn himself, though a singer and gifted interpreter of his music, apparently smoked and talked too much.
Many friends have described visiting Proust in the room, among them the writer Maurice Rostand, who says of the room: ‘Everything was left lying around, his aspirins and his dress shoes; books were piled up in pyramids; ties were strewn alongside catalogues, invitation cards to the British embassy lay next to medical prescriptions …’
Céleste herself, in her memoir, remembers that the predominant colour was blue, and the lamp next to his bed cast a green light because of the shade. She describes the room as perpetually dark as night, and densely smoke-filled when Proust had been burning his powders. The smoke from these powders would sometimes drift under the doors and out into the rest of the building, and the neighbours would sometimes complain.
And it has to be said that in other ways, too, Proust was in his own turn guilty, on occasion, of disturbing his neighbours. He describes to a different correspondent how another long-time close friend, Robert de Montesquiou, came by in the early hours of the morning and, in his emotion, kept stamping on the floor ‘without pity’ for the Gagey family sleeping downstairs (whom Céleste in her memoir describes as plutôt des couches-tôt, or ‘rather early-to-bedders’).
Or, several times, Proust, a great lover of music, and not well enough to go out to concerts very often, would hire musicians to come and play for him in his bedroom. Once, at 1 a.m., impulsively and without prior warning, he sent for the Poulet Quartet to come and play César Franck’s quartet. Before beginning, the musicians (in the room lit only by candles) hung cloths over the opening of the fireplace to stop the sound from travelling – though one would think that was hardly effectual. When they reached the end of the piece, at two in the morning, Proust induced them (for a handsome sum) to start over and play the whole piece again.
But Proust was well liked by his neighbours, on the whole, for the same qualities so evident in his letters to Mme Williams: his grace, eloquence, thoughtfulness, sympathy, gestures of gratitude. Evidence of these good relations is not hard to find: an inscription in a copy of his Ruskin translation, La Bible d’Amiens, to his ‘good neighbour’, one Arthur Pernolet, who occupied the apartment above him before the arrival of Dr Williams, and whom Proust knew already before he moved in; the helpfulness of Mme Gagey when the time came for most (or all?) of the tenants of the building to move out – she supplied Proust with the results of her own research into suitable apartments; and the fact that a year after they were no longer neighbours, having scattered to other buildings, Dr Gagey came to Proust in answer to a request for a consultation: oddly enough – perfectly symbolic – he had put something in his ear to block the ambient noise, it had got stuck, and the ear was infected.
As the vast resources of the Internet allow us to walk along a Paris street that is almost unchanged from the 1920s and gaze up at – or even float over – the building in which one of Proust’s friends died, and as it allows us within a few seconds to begin listening to one of Reynaldo Hahn’s compositions, or to leaf through the caricatures of the very popular singer Thérésa, with whom Hahn was infatuated, so it also reveals more of the life of Proust’s building: the wartime activities of Proust’s downstairs neighbour, the couche-tôt Dr Gagey, who was commended in 1915 for his ambulance service ‘in circumstances often difficult and always perilous’; and the legacies of the former upstairs neighbour, Proust’s friend Pernolet, who, after his death, also in 1915, left funds to at least two Paris museums for the acquisition of paintings.
Follow every reference in these letters, and Proust’s world opens out before us.
Proust, so very solitary, as he says in many of his letters, and devoting most of his waking hours to his work, was also intensely gregarious and an uninhibited talker. When he was feeling well enough, he talked without pause, and the person he talked to the most, because she was always available, was Céleste, an intelligent and responsive listener. He often rang for her after she had gone to bed, and she would come as she was, in her nightgown and robe, her hair ‘down her back’, as she says. He would talk to her for hours at a time, sitting up in bed leaning against two pillows, while she stood at the foot of the bed.
Gide describes, in his journal, Proust’s style of talking: ‘His conversation, ceaselessly cut by parenthetical clauses, runs on …’
The diplomat and Proust fan Paul Morand enlarges upon this: the Proustian sentence was ‘singsong, cavilling, reasoned, answering objections the listener would never have thought of making, raising unforeseen difficulties, subtle in its shifts and pettifoggery, stunning in its parentheses – that, like helium balloons, held the sentence aloft – vertiginous in its length … well constructed despite its apparent disjointedness; … you listened spellbound …’
This style, so natural to him in conversation, pours out also in his letters – letters, as his friend Robert Dreyfus put it, ‘in which he always wanted to say everything, as in his books, and in which he succeeded by means of
