The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Read online

  THE COMPLETE

  SHORT STORIES

  OF MARCEL PROUST

  THE COMPLETE

  SHORT STORIES

  OF MARCEL PROUST

  Compiled and Translated

  by Joachim Neugroschel

  Foreword by Roger Shattuck

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2001

  This Cooper Square Press hardcover edition of The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the translator.

  Translation copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel

  Foreword copyright © 2001 by Roger Shattuck

  Translator’s Preface copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel

  This edition copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

  150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

  New York, New York 10011

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922.

  [Short stories. English]

  The complete short stories of Marcel Proust / compiled and translated by Joachim Neugroschel ; foreword by Roger Shattuck.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-8154-1264-9

  1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922—Translations into English. I. Neugroschel, Joachim. II. Title.

  PQ2631.R63 A265 2001

  843'.912—dc21

  00-065739

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD: PROUST’S OWN SOUND by Roger Shattuck

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE: PROUST AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF PARIS

  PLEASURES AND DAYS

  PREFACE by Anatole France

  PROUST’S DEDICATION

  The Death of Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania

  Violante or High Society

  Fragments of Commedia dell’Arte

  Social Ambitions and Musical Tastes of Bouvard and Pécuchet

  The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyves

  Portraits of Painters and Composers

  A Young Girl’s Confession

  A Dinner in High Society

  Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time

  The End of Jealousy

  EARLY STORIES

  Norman Things

  Memory

  Portrait of Madame X.

  Before the Night

  Another Memory

  The Indifferent Man

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Foreword

  PROUST’S OWN SOUND

  Homer still suits us just fine. We turn to him for larger-than-life tales of bravery in battle and for the adventures of a resourceful hero finding his way home again after years of war. Odysseus’ exploits will stay with us because Homer gave them the sturdy shape of epic. The Odyssey has come to look like part of the landscape we live in.

  We tend to neglect Homer’s principal rival, Hesiod, another great collector of stories. In Works and Days, Hesiod wrote both poetically and practically about the seasonal round of work on a farm. In the Theogony, he produced the first gathering of divine myths constituting Greek religious beliefs. Compared with Homer, Hesiod aimed either too low or too high to capture the stuff of epic poetry for the ages. Therefore, we are a bit surprised that in a moment of need Marcel Proust turned not to Homer but to Hesiod for help. Proust was just starting out.

  Barely twenty and taking courses in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, Proust began publishing stories and articles in literary reviews. Admired for his wit and his talents as a mime, he was invited to exclusive literary salons. He managed to find a “job” as a librarian—with no salary, few duties, and a year’s leave of absence to start off. Still, the best way to establish himself as an author would be to publish a book. He succeeded in doing so, but only after four years of planning and shamelessly using his connections. His salon hostess, Madeleine Lemaire, who was also a flower painter, agreed to illustrate the book. He obtained a preface from a celebrated novelist he had met some years earlier in another literary salon, Anatole France. A gifted young friend and musician, Reynaldo Hahn, provided a musical setting for several poems.

  Just a few months before publication, Proust decided he must find a new title for his book. This is the juncture where Hesiod enters the story. Proust had read him in Lamartine’s flowing translation. The Greek author’s title, Works and Days, could suitably be borrowed for a miscellaneous collection dealing with modern experiences. But Proust did not want to emphasize the motif of working for a living to which Hesiod attached great importance. Proust’s sly revision, Pleasures and Days, gives a reverse, almost a perverse, twist to the classic title. It is true that a yearning for pleasure runs like a colored thread through most of the stories and pieces. Even so, Hesiod’s title modified to suggest a garden of delights does not entirely suit the contents. The bulk of writing Proust put into this volume concerns frustration, disappointment, and death. At this early age, Proust did not yet know or could not acknowledge that his true theme was not pleasure but suffering.

  Pleasures and Days contains five substantial stories interspersed with fragments, parodies, portraits in the style of the seventeenth-century moralist La Bruyère, nature descriptions, and philosophical meditations. Calmann-Lévy, a leading publishing house of the era, brought it out in a deluxe edition at a high price. Framed by a trophy preface, illustrated by a society painter, and containing music by a young prodigy, Proust’s writing was overwhelmed as much as it was enthroned. As William Carter writes in his fine biography, “Friends and reviewers . . . wondered whether Pleasures and Days was a book or a social event.”

  The book was launched by the publication, on the same day and on the front page of two Paris dailies, of Anatole France’s preface. It was a splendid publicity coup. With just a hint of detachment, even irony, France referred to Proust’s charm and grace and to the sadness of the book’s hothouse atmosphere. “The book is young with the youth of the author. Yet it is old with the oldness of the world.” The half-dozen reviews ran from outright mocking of “these elegant nothings” to measured judgment of a promising talent to full endorsement of the book’s wisdom and originality. Priced out of the range of most readers, the book sold hardly any copies. At the time, Proust himself spoke disparagingly about the whole undertaking. Twenty years later he compared this early writing favorably with his later style. It would be seventeen years before he published another book of his own.

  The five major stories that provide the armature of Pleasures and Days all deal with some form of moral weakness that brings corruption: vainglory, snobbery, emotional caprice, voluptuousness, and jealousy. And all end in death or some equivalent—boredom and the yoke of habit. The most shocking story, “Confessions of a Young Girl,” entails a double death. A young woman dying by a half-botched suicide relates how her mother’s seeing her with a lover in flagrante delicto causes the apoplexy that kills her mother. The theme of matricide remained with Proust to the end of his life. Several times he accuses himself of being guilty of the crime, at least indirectly.


  The last and longest story, “The End of Jealousy,” comes close to shifting the meaning of death from curse to salvation. The lover whose passion metastasizes into an all-devouring jealousy finds some consolation when an accident first maims him and then takes his life. But there is an irresolute, sentimental gesturing in the closing pages that will disappear when Proust fleshes out this story into Swann in Love, the opening volume of In Search of Lost Time.

  To separate and lighten these gloomy stories, Proust intersperses them with lively literary exercises that display his versatility. “Fragments of Commedia dell’Arte” applies Italian conventions to the chic poses of Parisian society. “Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time,” a collection of short fragments, reveals his uncertainty about which way to turn in his writing. Monet began as a caricaturist on the beach at Honfleur. Proust began by doing satirical portraits, Baudelairean prose poems, nature descriptions, sentimental pieces about memory, Poe-like allegories, and psychophilosophical meditations. He flirted with every genre.

  Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures. (115)

  This reflection is followed by an anecdote about a precocious ten-year-old boy in love with an older girl. He cannot live without her. At the same time her physical presence disappoints and frustrates him. He jumps out a window. Thirty pages later Proust comes back to the same dilemma, now furnished with a potential cure or prosthesis:

  No sooner does an approaching hour become the present for us than it sheds all its charms, only to regain them, it is true, on the roads of memory, when we have left that hour behind us, and so long as our soul is vast enough to disclose deep perspectives. (142)

  The fateful and perverse disappointment of life, which I have called “Proust’s complaint,” here finds a form of redemption in the operations of memory. But we obtain barely a glimpse of these “deep perspectives.” It will take Proust twenty years to explore them and to write his long novelistic report about them. Meanwhile, in the same meditation called “Critique of Hope in the Light of Love,” Proust leaves us with an incurable case of metaphysical hunger:

  I unpin your flowers, I lift your hair, I tear off your jewels, I reach your flesh, my kisses sweep over your body and beat it like the tide rising across the sand; but you yourself elude me, and with you happiness. (144)

  One consolation remains to help us through our despair: nature. The last three parts in this section describe Proust’s response to the Normandy coastline:

  The sea has the magic of things that never fall silent at night, that permit our anxious lives to sleep, promising us that everything will not be obliterated, comforting us like the glow of a night light that makes little children feel less alone. (147)

  A reader familiar with Proust’s later work can play a revealing recognition game in the pages of Pleasures and Days. For, naturally, Proust is already planting and transplanting motifs that will return in different forms. Not only snobbery and jealousy and Proust’s complaint about life as a perpetual let-down after great expectations make their appearance. These early pages also give important treatment to weakness of will as the great scourge, to homosexuality (“Violante” and “Before the Night”), and to solitude as superior to the illusions of love and friendship (“The Stranger”).

  Why publish, why read a great author’s juvenilia? Is there any reason to spend our time on early work when the later work dramatically surpasses it in quality and has enough bulk to absorb our attentions? I shall use a comparison in order to answer the question.

  James Joyce’s Ulysses appeared in Paris in 1922 and in New York in 1933 after years of excerpts published in literary reviews, fanfares announcing the novel’s importance, and a notorious obscenity trial in the United States decided by a landmark First Amendment verdict. Ulysses had as effective advance publicity as Goethe’s Faust in its successive versions. Critics have hailed Joyce’s book as the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

  Why then do we often turn back to Dubliners, stories finished when Joyce was twenty-two? In this still debated instance, I believe we value Dubliners because it allows us to discover how directly and delicately Joyce could tell a story before he yielded to the temptations of word play, stylistic innovation, the Homeric template, and constant allusiveness. Many profoundly literary readers admire Dubliners more than Ulysses and admit they have never finished the latter. But for the purposes of literary history and college curricula, Ulysses remains the great literary monument. Dubliners, the modest cousin who lives nearby, gives us enough simple evidence of genius to accept the official monument at face value. Nevertheless, some of us believe the most effective of Joyce’s writing lies in Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  Pleasures and Days presents a different case but not the opposite. Proust’s first tryouts and exercises as a writer do not display his full powers. He has not yet matured enough to detach himself from the spell of aristocracy and of social institutions such as the salon and the elegant dinner party. He has not assimilated his gifts as a comic genius (though the pastiche of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet makes a foray in that direction). He trails behind him the flowing garments of decadent aestheticism that belonged to the fin de siècle. And he has not yet begun to assemble the patient, slow-motion, marathon sense of structure that will make him the greatest long-distance novelist of our era and perhaps of all time. Pleasures and Days will never rival In Search of Lost Time. It provides the benchmark from which we can measure the accomplishment of that all-encompassing novel. These baby pictures are both endearing and revealing. They point up the steady evolution of a writer rather than, as in the case of Joyce, deflection from immense promise.

  Pleasures and Days also brings its own reward that does not arise from comparison with more mature writings. Behind the artificialities of personal posing and social arrangements that propel them, the stories reveal a growing counterforce. The fourteen-year-old boy who observes his uncle’s early and anxious death in the opening story has come to rely on frequent rides on his new horse. This physical exertion “aroused in him . . . a sensation accompanying youth as a dim inkling of the depth of its resources and the power of its joyfulness” (17). In the closing story, “The End of Jealousy,” it is as if that boy has survived with his inklings into maturity. For here, Proust describes the male protagonist’s obsessive jealousy in equally physical terms. “While dressing for dinner, [Honoré] automatically kept his mind focused on the moment when he would see her again, the way an acrobat already touches the still faraway trapeze toward which he is flying” (151). Before the accident that finally takes his life and releases him from jealousy, Honoré has been out for an early morning walk among the galloping horses in the street. In the cool, sweet air he recognizes “the same profound joy that embellished life that morning, the life of the sun, of the shade, of the sky, of the stones, of the east wind, and of the trees” (161). I have elsewhere given the medical term cœnesthesia to these moments of heightened awareness in Proust, as in any writer who remains aware of concrete sensuous experiences. The term refers to the direct physical sensation of being alive as oneself in the world, a sensation that arises equally from the dynamic functioning of our inner systems and organs and from our response to the variegated circumstances that surround us. The hovering despair of these early stories is cut through at intervals by an unexpected gush of vitality from a spoiled, asthmatic, highly cultivated young author. Yes, he unerringly chose Mallarmé’s famous decadent line as one of his epigraphs: “The flesh is sad, alas! And I’ve read all the books.” But for the following chapter he found in Madame Sévigné’s letters the appropriate retort to Mallarmé’s aestheticism: “His youth is roaring inside him, he does not hear.”

  When he assembled Ple
asures and Days in his early twenties, Proust did not hear as much of himself and of the world as he would a decade later. But in the supple translations of Joachim Neugroschel, we can discern the extent to which the youthful Proust had already found his own sound and his own direction.

  ROGER SHATTUCK

  Lincoln, Vermont

  September 2000

  Roger Shattuck’s books include Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography; The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France; Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts; The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron; and the acclaimed Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time. A world-renowned Proust scholar, his Marcel Proust, commissioned by Frank Kermode for the Modern Masters series, won the National Book Award in 1974. He resides in Vermont and is professor emeritus of comparative literature at Boston University.

  Translator’s Preface

  PROUST AND THE MYTHOLOGY OF PARIS

  For Balzac and Zola, the Paris of the nineteenth century was a city of light and dark, and the panoramic cross-sections of their fiction exposed and interwove all facets, classes, and issues of the French capital—indeed of France itself. But for Marcel Proust, fin-de-siècle Paris is a metropolis of rapture and privilege, hierarchy and opulence, eroticism and frustration—all held together by a devout and yet sometimes derided faith in wealth, art, and leisure, in elegance and sensuality.

  Other French novelists created a Parisian mythology that was elastic and all-encompassing in its vast array of intertwining experiences and characters. But for Proust, Paris is a world of Pleasures and Days, whereby this title of his first book, in parodying Hesiod’s title Works and Days, blatantly spotlights the chief concerns of Parisian high society. Indeed, Proust intensifies the mythological character of the capital by placing some tales in exotic Never-Never-Lands that serve as flimsy fairy-tale disguises for Paris.