Letters to His Neighbor Read online

  From the invoices of Proust’s orders it is possible to know the names of those with whom Proust associated while staying at the vast Grand Hôtel Cabourg, before his health worsened to such an extent that he confined himself permanently to Paris. M. Lerossignol has had the idea of organizing a tour of the still surviving villas of those to whom Proust sent flowers in Houlgate ordered from Au Jardin des Roses, the florist of M. Lerossignol’s grand­parents, who were also named Lerossignol.

  Lydia Davis

  Floor plan of the apartment in which Marcel Proust lived from 1907 to 1919, at 102 Boulevard Haussmann

  Notes

  [Content in brackets has been supplied by the translator.]

  1. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, trans. Barbara Bray (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1973), 382. On Mme Straus, a client of Doctor Williams who considered him the best dentist in Paris and insisted on Proust’s consulting him, see p. 108. See also note 4 below.

  2. The line is from Victor Hugo’s poem “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre” [What speaks the shadow’s mouth] in his collection Les Contemplations [Contemplations], published in 1856.

  3. See letter 17.

  4. Geneviève Halévy (1849–1926) married, first, Georges Bizet, then the lawyer Emile Straus. She was Proust’s great friend and confidant.

  5. M. and Mme Williams were having construction work done, and Proust obviously suffered from the noise.

  6. The Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921) was a man of letters and friend of Proust, a dandy and a model for the character of Baron de Charlus [in In Search of Lost Time].

  7. He is thinking of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, a spa town in Normandy, “a home where you have memories of your family.” Proust also mentions the family home of Mme Williams in Le Vésinet.

  8. Portraits of Painters was published in 1896 by Heugel and later included in Pleasures and Days, published by Calmann-Lévy on June 12, 1896.

  9. From 1900 to 1912, Proust published numerous articles in Le Figaro, which makes the dating of this letter tricky. It could be either from 1909, after the publication of Pastiches, or from 1912 after that of excerpts from Swann’s Way.

  10. “Prométhée triomphant” [Prometheus triumphant], an oratorio for solo voices and chorus set to a poem by Paul Reboux. Performed in concert on Friday, December 17, 1909, conducted by [Eberhard] Schwickerath. Reynaldo Hahn and a few French friends attended the concert and the banquet that followed it.

  11. This occurred on September 30, 1914 (information kindly supplied by Mme Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer; M. Proust, Correspondance, vol. 13, p. 305). [To be mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour signified that one was being honored for one’s courage or devotion to duty.]

  [Military service review board: the meaning of Proust’s own term is unclear. He speaks of a conseil de contre-réforme, which did not exist as such. A conseil de réforme, however, was a body charged with examining soldiers who might be declared unfit to serve. Proust has added the word contre (against). He uses this same formulation in another letter, one written Feb. 12, 1915, in which he says: “My brother, since the first day, has been in great danger, but actually so far has escaped everything and is doing well. I have a conseil de contre-réforme to pass, but have not yet been summoned” (letter to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Correspondance générale, vol. 4, p. 67). ]

  12. Alfred Agostinelli died May 30, 1914.

  13. John 3:8.

  14. Joachim Joseph Charles Henri (1875–1918), third count of Clary, son of Napoleon II’s aide-de-camp, a friend of Proust, Lucien Daudet, and Montesquiou, presumably an inspiration to Proust for the japonisant part of In Search, but also a model for Baron de Charlus going blind, in Time Found Again. Clary was the author of L’île du soleil couchant [The island of the setting sun], published by Arthème Fayard in 1912, a novel about Japan cited by Marcel Proust in one of his letters of November 1912.

  [Since Joachim Clary is mentioned in no fewer than eight letters of the present volume, we may say a little more about him. The following description is taken from a memoir by his friend, the English composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, in her Impressions That Remained – Memoirs of Ethel Smyth (Knopf, 1919). She had first known Clary as one of the “enfants de la maison” in the English residence of the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III:

  I had first known Clary as a clever, good-looking, active, rather spoilt youth; now, though still a young man, he was a cripple, scarcely able to move hand or foot, his limbs twisted and gnarled with arthritis, in constant pain day and night, and totally blind. Yet his originality, his culture, his unconquerable sense of humour and, above all, his superb courage, made our friendship one of the assets of my life.

  Ethel Smyth remarks that Clary’s death was “wholly unexpected.” (At the time she describes seeing Clary, she would have been in her late fifties, Clary about 41. He was to die the following year.)]

  15. The letter is torn in places, and passages are missing.

  16. Doctor Léon Faisans (1851–1922), often mentioned in Proust’s correspondence. He was a specialist in respiratory illnesses and a physician at the Hôpital Beaujon.

  17. June and July 1914, 48 and 52 pages of La Nouvelle Revue Française, excerpted from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way I.

  18. The poet Maurice Rostand and the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche were close friends, as was Proust, of Lucien Daudet. Each of them devoted a laudatory article to Swann’s Way.

  19. “The cruel fates.” A verse from Virgil’s Aeneid, 6: 882, addressed to Marcellus, nephew of Augustus. [It is perhaps a reference to the war.]

  20. Proust was envisaging at this point a work in three volumes; the second was to have included the present In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way, in shorter versions. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the proofs of this volume printed by Grasset.

  21. This important revelation was omitted from the final version of In Search of Lost Time.

  22. Title of a book of poems by Anna, Countess de Noailles.

  23. What is Proust referring to here? Is he alluding to the play by Maeterlinck, to a poem by Mallarmé, or to a poem by his neighbor herself?

  24. Respectively, Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les tragiques, 4; Paul Verlaine, Sagesse; Gérard de Nerval, “Artémis” and “El Desdichado,” Les Chimères.

  25. The reference is to Pelléas and Mélisande, the lyric drama by Maurice Maeterlinck and Claude Debussy.

  26. Perhaps an allusion to the train trip to Balbec described in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1914 and in which the narrator, borne away by the train, watches a young milkmaid recede into the distance.

  27. Reynaldo Hahn was in the Argonne at Vauquois in April 1915. Bertrand de Fénelon (1878–1914) died December 17, 1914, at Mametz. [Since this fact was obscured by contradictory rumors until it was declared official in March of the following year, Proust did not fully accept it until then.]

  28. Mme Williams’s brother, Lieutenant Alphonse Emile Georges Marcel Pallu (1882–1915) of the Third Regiment of Dragoons, died for France (thus designated) as a result of an illness contracted in the field, February 13, 1915, at Nantes.

  29. The dentist’s office was on the third floor, above Proust’s apartment. His private apartment was on the fourth (that is, on the third floor above the mezzanine).

  30. He is referring to the military doctor (see letter 19).

  31. According to the Baedeker of 1914, “First-class hotel in the Champs-Elysées, 55 Avenue de l’Alma and 101 Avenue des Champs-Elysées.” The Avenue de l’Alma is now the Avenue George V.

  32. The Countess Wladimir Rehbinder, née Jacqueline Contéré de Monbrison (1871–1925), wrote fashion articles. She was earlier divorced from Count Jacques de Pourtalès (1858–1919).

  33. Madame de La Béraudière was the mistres
s of [Henri,] Count Greffulhe. Proust found her “charming, in every respect, and with great vivacity and frankness of spirit” (Correspondance, vol. 14, p. 165, 1915). According to Céleste Albaret, Mme de La Béraudière “was at the feet of M. Proust and didn’t know what to do to make him interested” (Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, p. 194).

  34. Proust must finally have seen Clary again before October 15, 1915, according to his Correspondance.

  35. Proust writes, in a letter of August 7, 1915: “I cannot move these days, awaiting a visit from the Major of which I do not know the day or the hour.” The visit took place on August 8 or 9.

  36. The reference is to pages on roses, written by Mme Williams (but which have not come down to us). See letter 14.

  37. Mme Terre [Earth] was evidently the person in charge of the construction or renovation work that was making him suffer so (see letters 21 and 23). [Napoleon’s mother was known as “Madame Mère.”]

  38. Verlaine’s “a shiver of water on moss” comes from “Listen to the Very Gentle Song,” 1881, the sixteenth poem of collection 1 of Sagesse: “Listen to the very gentle song / That weeps only to please you, / It is discreet, it is light: / A shiver of water over moss!”

  39. Jean de Reszke (1850–1925), opera singer (tenor), Polish by birth, as was his brother Édouard (bass).

  40. See note 25. Pelléas says, at the end of act 2, scene 1, “The truth, the truth.” [The Wolff Agency (misspelled by Proust) was a German press agency, one of the major news agencies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.]

  41. Concerning Mme Terre, see also letters 20 and 23.

  42. This is a pastiche of the sonnet that appeared in 1833 in the collection Mes heures perdues [My lost hours] by Félix Arvers.

  43. According to his Correspondance (vol. 14), in mid-October 1915, Proust saw Clary again twice.

  44. Hahn arrived from Vauquois on November 11 or 12, 1915. He made use of that leave to give the first performance of Le ruban dénoué. [In the original, for “in disarray” Proust puns, using the expression en “bataille” (literally “in battle” — with quotes around “battle”) to signal the pun.]

  45. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 42, line 6.

  46. Reynaldo was a fervent admirer of Thérésa [Emma Valladon, 1837–1913], queen of the café-concert. She sang La terre [The earth] (L’Eldorado, 1888), poem and music both by Jules Jouy, arranged by Léopold Gandolff. The poem begins: “Our nurse and our mama — / She is the earth: / Her flower and grain sprouting / Under the earth.” Proust evokes this song to make fun of Mme Terre — see letters 20 and 21. (Information kindly supplied by Benoît Duteurtre.) Proust had heard this singer at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1888, in Cendrillon.

  47. This confirms that Proust consulted musical scores. Les Béati­tudes is by César Franck.

  48. Anatole France wrote the preface to Proust’s Pleasures and Days (Calmann-Lévy, 1896).

  49. Robert de Montesquiou’s Les offrandes blessées: Elégies guerrières [Wounded offerings: War elegies] was published by E. Sansot in June 1915. Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) was a celebrated Russian-born dancer and actress. This reading must have taken place on Wednesday, December 20, 1916, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. This letter can therefore be dated Tuesday the 19th.

  50. Pierre Frondaie, novelist, playwright, and poet, used Anatole France’s first novel, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, as the basis for a four-act play which premiered at the Théâtre Antoine either December 2 or 20, 1916, according to different sources. [In his phrase “the ‘acta Sanctorum’ of the Learned Bollandistes,” Proust is quoting from memory (with his own choices of capitalization) from France’s novel: “at the hour when the mice will dance by moonlight before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bollandistes.” A Bollandiste was a member of a learned society founded by the Jesuit and hagiographer Jean Bolland. The Acta Sanctorum were the Lives of the Saints, of which Bolland was the first author and compiler.]

  51. This play, adapted from Anatole France’s novella Crainquebille, was first performed in 1903 starring Lucien Guitry at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. [Crainquebille is the story of a street peddler unjustly jailed and an orphan boy who befriends him on his release. It was also adapted for silent film by Jacques Feyder in 1921.]

  52. A. Demar-Latour: Ce qu’ils ont détruit: La cathédrale de Reims bombardée et incendiée en septembre 1914 [What they destroyed: The cathedral of Reims bombed and burned in September 1914], Paris, Éditions practiques et documentaires ([1915?], 64 pp.). [It is possible, though not certain, that this is the book Mme Williams lent to Proust. As for the year of its appearance, the book itself contains no publication date, and sources, such as library catalogs, variously give 1914 and 1915.]

  53. In The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, the princess (not countess) Trépof presents Sylvestre Bonnard with the manuscript of The Golden Legend, which he has been coveting, secreted within a hollowed-out log. Proust cites the same passage in a letter of May 1913 to Mme Schéikevitch (Correspondance, vol. 12, p. 173).

  54. The compatriot is perhaps Walter Berry, President of the Franco-American Chamber of Commerce and a friend of Proust.

  55. The source of the phrase is in fact the 11th-century monk Raoul Glaber.

  56. [Because Proust refers to the death of Clary’s mother, which occurred March 11, 1917, and because Clary himself, who died May 8, 1918, is evidently still alive, this letter must have been written sometime between those two dates. Proust had been out of touch with Blanche, whom he mentions here, before April 10, 1918. He is presumably back in touch with him if he contemplated sending him the carnations. A possible date for this letter, therefore, would be sometime in the month extending from mid-April to mid-May.]

  Index

  Acta Sanctorum (Jean Bolland) 67, 100n50

  Aeneid, The 96n19

  Agostinelli, Alfred 95n12

  Aix-la-Chapelle 29

  Albaret, Céleste 7, 74, 76–81, 83, 93n1, 98n33

  Amiens 68

  Annecy 60, 62, 85

  Antoine (concierge) 77

  Argonne 52, 97n27

  “Artémis” (Nerval) 97n24

  Arthème Fayard 95n14

  Arvers, Félix 9, 65, 87, 99n42

  Au Jardin des Roses (florist) 90

  Avenue de l’Alma 98n31

  Avenue George V 98n31

  Bagnoles-de-l’Orne 10, 25, 93n7

  Balbec 12, 89, 97n26

  Bamberg 68

  Baudelaire, Charles 99n45

  Beethoven, Ludwig von 9, 65

  Bernard, Saint 69

  Bernhardt, Sarah 11

  Berry, Walter 101n54

  Bibliothèque nationale de France 96n20

  Bizet, Georges 93n4

  Blanche, Jacques-Emile 37, 70, 96n18, 102n56

  Bolland, Jean 101n50

  Bollandistes 67, 100n50

  Brach, Paul 12

  Brailowsky, Alexander 13, 72

  Bray, Barbara 93n1

  Cabourg 10, 26, 33, 89

  Calmann-Lévy 94n8, 100n48

  Cendrillon (Massenet) 100n46

  Ce qu’ils ont détruit (A. Demar-Latour) 10, 101n52

  Champs-Elysées, Avenue des 98n31

  Chartres 68

  Clary, Angèle (mother of Joachim) 70, 102n56

  Clary, Joachim 9, 12, 14, 32–34, 52, 54, 55, 58, 65–66, 70, 95n14, 98n34, 99n43, 102n56

  Côte Fleurie 89

  Combourg 25

  conseil de contre-réforme 94n11

  Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, The (A. France, Pierre Frondaie) 67, 68, 100n50, 101n53

  Crainquebille (A. France) 67, 101n51

  d’Aubigné, Agrippa 47, 97n24

  Daudet, Lucien 37, 52, 66, 95n14, 96n18

  da Vinci, Leonardo 10, 68

  Deauville 11, 33

 
Debussy, Claude 97n25

  Demar-Latour, A. 10, 101n52

  de Pourtalès, Count Jacques 98n32

  Dreyfus, Robert 83

  Duteurtre, Benoît 100n46

  Éditions practiques et documentaires 101n52

  Éditions Robert Laffont 93n1

  “El Desdichado” (Nerval) 97n24

  Emler, Paul 7

  E. Sansot 100n49

  Eugénie, Empress 95n14

  Faisans, Léon 33, 96n16

  Fénelon, Bertrand de 11, 52, 97n27

  Feyder, Jacques 101n51

  Figaro, Le 28, 94n9

  Flowers of Evil, The (Baudelaire) 64, 99n45

  France, Anatole 66, 100n48, 100n50–51, 101n53

  Franck, César 9, 65, 82, 100n47

  Franco-American Chamber of Commerce 101n54

  Frondaie, Pierre 100n50