Letters to the Lady Upstairs Page 4
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 fulfil 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 favourite 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 marvellous 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 colours 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 to 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
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 as roughly six and a half metres by four and a half, or over twenty-nine square metres. Maybe it seemed small because it was so relatively empty, containing only a sideboard, a bookcase, a small table in the centre, 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 mouldings 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 draughts and helped buffer him from the noise that came from the adjoining building, on the other side of the wall.
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 neighbour 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 neighbours 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 the same as the British: 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 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: there was, at that address, first the ground floor, which in those days was entered through a two-panelled 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 neighbourhood 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 centre 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. To the rear of them, towards 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 centre 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 first floor 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 i
s 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 standin 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.