Be so good Madame as to recall me to the Doctor and accept my respectful and grateful greetings.
Marcel Proust
Despite the gloomy days, would some flowers please you. And “which” as Verlaine says?
3
[end of 1908 – beginning of 1909?]
Dear Monsieur,
I beg you please to present to Madame Williams with all my respect these flowers which without wearying you with vain speeches will convey my gratitude for the delicate goodness which you employ with regard to me and of which I would ask you to find here the most sincere and most distinguished expression.
Marcel Proust
I absolutely expect you to tell me what I owe you for the expenses I occasion you by these shifts in the workers’ hours.
4
[summer 1909?]
Madame,
I envy your beautiful memories. No doubt that magnificent home which reminds one of Combourg in a less somber site but which certainly has its poetry too, is not the only one that belongs to you. When one is endowed with imagination, as you are, one possesses all the landscapes one has loved, and this is the inalienable treasure of the heart. But really a home where you have memories of your family, a home which you cannot see except through reveries which recede into the distant past, is a very moving thing. I do not know Bagnoles but I so love Normandy that it is, I think, very pleasant.7 And then like all those who are ill I have learned to spend my life surrounded by ugliness where through an irony of fate, I am generally in less bad health. I hope Bagnoles does you good, I also hope that you have with you your son whom I regret not having seen in Paris. You are very good to think of the noise. It has been moderate up to now and relatively close to silence. These days a plumber has been coming every morning from 7 to 9; this is no doubt the time he had chosen. I cannot say that in this my preferences agree with his! But he has been very tolerable, and really everything has been. Please accept Madame my respectful greetings and sincere obeisance.
Marcel Proust
I hope you have good news of the Doctor, I beg you to remember me to him.
5
[mid-August 1909?]
Madame,
Alas your note sought me in Paris and reaches me in Cabourg . . . just as I am getting into the train! Otherwise, since my incessant attacks find in this air an abatement which causes me to seek it out, I would have tried to go and thank you for your charming letter. I would have tried and I do not flatter myself with the hope that I would have succeeded, knowing from experience how impossible it has been for me to receive very dear friends, come from quite far away to see me. But still I would have made the attempt. I am saddened to learn that you, too, have been suffering. It seems natural to me that I should be ill. But at least illness ought to spare Youth, Beauty and Talent! At least you have the support of a loving heart! I hope with all my heart that you will be completely healthy this year and I beg you Madame, in asking you please to remember me to Doctor Williams, to accept for yourself my most respectful greetings.
Marcel Proust
Excuse this letter written at the moment of getting into the train.
6
[autumn 1909?]
Dear Monsieur,
I am sending you my little (and very old!) Portraits of Painters.8 You have them already in my illustrated volume Pleasures and Days (I think you have received it, not through the post like the Ruskin, it must have been conveyed to you by hand) but the music is very difficult to read in the book, and is much better engraved in these little pieces into which, if Madame Williams, whose admirable talent I know, is curious to cast a glance, she will not be unpleasantly bothered as in the book, by the rather fuzzy look of the fac simile [sic]. Today’s fog is provoking in me such attacks that I scarcely have the strength to trace these words, so that I’m afraid I will be even more illegible than the musical fac-similes [sic]. It is this that is preventing me, exhausted by suffering and having wanted all the same before trying to rest a little in the evening to send up to you the pieces which I have received only just now, so late, from expressing to you the thanks which I owe you for a charming letter already a little old to which I would have liked to respond in a manner a little more detailed, but I am enduring at the moment such bad days that I am a very bad correspondent. Always prepared however to respond to you with exactness if you had something to ask me.
Please be so kind as to accept Monsieur the expression of my very devoted feelings.
Marcel Proust
7
[autumn 1909?]
102 boulevard Haussmann
Monsieur,
As I so often expose you to the effects of my troubles by asking you when my asthma attacks are too intense to procure me a little silence, — I think it is only fair that when I have something agreeable I ask you to share it with me. I hope that you will be willing to accept these four pheasants with as much simplicity as I put into offering them to you as neighbor. I will also permit myself to send you a few of my works. Unfortunately my articles from the Figaro are not yet collected in books and it is perhaps this that would most have interested you.9 But I will be able meanwhile to present you with the rest. I implore your help for Monday the 19th the day after tomorrow. I must make the great effort to try to go out in the evening and as I have attacks of asthma all night long, if in the morning there is hammering above me it’s all over for the whole day for resting, my attack will not stop and my evening out is impossible.
Please accept, Monsieur, the expression of my highest regards.
Marcel Proust
8
[17 December 1909]
Friday
* * *
Marcel Proust begs Madame Williams to be so kind as to accept his respectful and enchanted thanks, for the beautiful and artistic letter which she has had the grace and has done him the honor of writing to him. He would be most grateful to her if she would be his spokeswoman with the Doctor to request that there not be too much noise tomorrow Saturday, since he has to go out for a while in the evening. He will not fail as soon as his friend Mr Hahn is back from Aix la Chapelle where he has gone to conduct Prométhée to communicate to him the gracious praise.10
9
[October 1914?]
Madame,
It is always a very great pleasure for me to receive a letter from you. The latest was particularly sweet for me in these terrible times in which one trembles for all those one loves, and I do not mean by that only those one knows. It is however permitted without being too selfish to have exceptional worries, and the fate of my brother who is operating in the line of fire, has had his hospital bombed, the shells falling even on the operating table so that he has been obliged to take his wounded down into the cellars, is particularly close to my heart. Happily he has been completely safe up to now and has been mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour.11 I hope that you too have good news of your family. As for me I will imminently be going before the military service review board. I don’t know if I will be taken or not. I had wanted to write you last summer to hear your news. But even well before the War I was overwhelmed with worries. First, I was more or less completely ruined, which I found extremely painful. But shortly afterward my poor secretary was drowned by falling from an airplane into the sea.12 And the immense sorrow I felt, and that still endures, has prevented me from thinking about material troubles, very small next to an emotional trial. You knew him perhaps by sight because he lived in my home with his wife. But what you could not know is the superior intelligence which was to his, and extremely spontaneous since he had had no schooling, having been until then a simple mechanic. Never did I better understand the profoundness of the saying “The Spirit bloweth where it listeth.”13 The part of your letter in which you spoke of Clary is not that part which gave me the least pleasure, pleasure mingled with pain since you tell me he is still unwell.14 He is a truly rare person, I have a very profound affection f
or him; I think he does not believe it because for reasons which involve on my part more delicacy than he supposes, I have not expressed it to him. But there is no one whose company I have found sweeter. I never see him and I think constantly of him. I do not know if he has received my book, I sent it to him when it appeared (this is not a reproach for the fact that he has not written to me, he is unwell and excused for everything). But I do not know if the address was correct. And my memory is so fatigued by my drugs that I cannot even manage to specify whether that book did not come back to me, or if it is a hallucination of memory. In any case what I am sure of, is that I sent it. Often I would like to write for very selfish reasons. [Word missing] to speak of his health. I’m afraid [of] failing to mention a regimen [. . .] that would perhaps very quickly restore [his] health. I have known people who [. . .] spoiled their lives, always prey [to] attacks of rheumatism until the day [when some] astonishingly simple prescriptions [. . .] rigorously observed relieved them and made them regret the time they had lost.15 I would like to know if before treating himself, Clary saw, even once, a great “diagnostician.” For example Doctor Faisans.16 I know Clary to be very withdrawn, very reserved, and it is this that has stopped me from speaking to him about that. But since you speak to me about his health, you will give me great pleasure if you tell him that it concerns me very much. I hope that your own is completely good Madame. The Doctor was good enough to leave his card one day at Cabourg. Would you have the extreme goodness to tell him that starting on that day I tried to go find him at Deauville Trouville. But automobiles could not go out after 6 o’clock. And I could not manage to leave early enough. One day I succeeded, but on that day it was impossible to find an automobile. If I had not had the plan to go see him postponed day after day, I would have written to him right [end of the letter is missing]
10
[October 1914?]
Madame,
Please permit me to appeal to you and the Doctor for tomorrow Tuesday regarding the noise (early). I had to go out today in extremely dangerous health conditions and I very much dread tomorrow. — . If in a little while I am better I would be happy to talk to you about Clary. I have learned through some friends very dear to him one thing which I tell you in confidence for it is a very delicate subject but one which makes me very happy because I believe that this may be for him a great consolation: I mean an awakening of a profoundly religious life, an ardent and profound faith.
Your very respectful
Marcel Proust
About Clary, I ask you not to speak of this at least for the moment.
11
[autumn 1914]
Night of Wednesday to Thursday
* * *
Madame,
Through the grace of generosity — or a play of reflections — you lend my letters some of the qualities possessed by your own. Yours are delicious, delicious in heart, in spirit, in style, in “talent.” — . The continuation of Swann (if I have properly understood)? or Swann itself? If it is the continuation, there exist only the excerpts, very long, true, of the 2nd volume, which appeared in the Nlle Revue Fçaise.17 The War came, the 2nd and 3rd volumes could not be published, naturally. I have friends who continue to write books, and publish them, since they send them to me. No doubt their publisher is not mobilized like mine, their thoughts are not mobilized like mine which, as regards “proofs” [épreuves, which also means “trials, difficulties”], are at this time turned toward others than those I would have to be correcting. So if it is the continuation of Swann I have only the excerpts from the Nlle R. F. This took up two Issues of the Revue. I should have them. But where? I will look for them. If I don’t find them today, I will write to Gide, the only director of the N.R.F. who has been mobilized in Paris itself (as far as I know). I am too happy about having such a reader as you to miss this opportunity. But will these detached pages give you an idea of the 2nd volume? And the 2nd volume itself doesn’t mean much; it’s the 3rd that casts the light and illuminates the plans of the rest. But when one writes a work in 3 volumes in an age when publishers want only to publish one at a time, one must resign oneself to not being understood, since the ring of keys is not in the same part of the building as the locked doors. — . It is true that one must resign oneself to something worse which is to not being read. At least I would have the joy of knowing that those lovely lucid eyes had rested on these pages.
I don’t know if you read, at the time, some intelligent and too-indulgent articles on this book which will perhaps amuse you because they say something about your neighbor and even his bedroom (Lucien Daudet, M. Rostand, J. Blanche etc.).18 Thank you for telling me that I am read by one of your friends at the “Front.” Nothing can make me prouder. Please accept Madame my respectful and grateful regards.
Marcel Proust
12
[autumn 1914]
“The flowers will follow . . .”
Madame,
The Nouvelle Revue Française has published my excerpts in 2 Issues [of] June and July. If I send you 3 (2 issues of July) it is because alas I can only have copies which have been torn apart in order to glue pieces of them on proofs of the 2nd volume which was supposed to appear then, and which the “aspera fata” prevented.19 But the pieces cut out should not be the same in the two Issues. With the two, you will have a single complete one. And alas I will no doubt be obliged to ask you for them back later. But, naturally you will have the whole work in one volume! I will send it to you complete!20 — What I said to you about the real meaning of each part being conferred on them only by the following part, you can find an example of in the June Issue. — In Swann, one might be surprised that Swann should always be entrusting his wife to M. de Charlus, presumed to be her lover, or rather one might be surprised that the author should go to the trouble of publishing yet again after so many vaudevillians of the lowest sort that blindness of husbands (or of lovers). Yet in the June Issue you will see, since the 1st indication of M. de Charlus’s vice appears there, that the reason why Swann knew he could entrust his wife to M. de Charlus was quite different! But I had not wanted to announce it in the 1st volume, preferring to resign myself to being very banal, so that one might come to know the character as in life where people reveal themselves only little by little. Starting with the 3rd volume moreover one will see that Swann has nevertheless been mistaken; M. de Charlus had had relations with only one woman, and it was precisely Odette.21 — It pains me to think that you are ill and cloistered, I would so much like nephritis and neuritis to be no more than a bad memory that would not prevent you in any way from leading a pleasant life. But I think that your company is worth more than that of others, which is for you a reason (quite personal) for appreciating solitude. Please accept Madame my very respectful greetings.
Marcel Proust
13
[autumn 1914]
Madame,
Forgive me for not having yet thanked you: it is I who have received marvelous roses described by you with “fragrance imperishable”22 but various which, in the evocations of the true poet that you are, cause the aroma, at every hour of the day, by turns, now to infiltrate the agatized chiaroscuro of the “Interiors”23 or now to expand within the fluent and diluted atmosphere of the gardens.
Only . . . I have been so ill these days (in my bed which I have not left and without having noisily opened or closed the carriage entrance as I have it seems been accused of doing) that I have not been able to write. Physically, it was impossible for me. Keep the Revues as long as you like. — . By an astonishing chance Gide, of whom we were speaking, and whom I have not seen for 20 years, came to see me while we were speaking of him in our letters. But I was not in a condition to receive him. Thank you again Madame for the marvelous pages flushed with a smell of roses. Your very respectful
Marcel Proust
The successor to the valet de chambre makes noise and that doesn’t matter. But later he knocks with little tiny raps. And tha
t is worse.
14
[autumn 1914?]
Madame,
I am quite unwell as I write but I thank you deeply for the letter that has brought me I assure you a vision more enduring than a bouquet and as colorful. One after another lovely verses written in all periods to the glory of autumn roses the autumn rose of d’Aubigné “more exquisite than any other” (an autumn rose is more exquisite than any other), Verlaine’s: “Ah! When will the roses of September bloom again,” Gérard de Nerval’s “Rose with violet heart flower of Ste Gudule” next to his trellis “where vine with rose unites,”24 not to mention the innumerable “mature roses” of two poetesses my great friends whom I no longer see alas now that I no longer get up Mme de Noailles and Mme de Régnier, I have assembled in my memory a bouquet of all the written roses. Now yours seemed to me worthy of being added to them, and your prose of residing as neighbor with their verse. Upon your roses at dusk I would place this epigraph by Pelléas:
“I am a Rose in the shadows.”25
Deign to accept Madame, this hasty and suffering expression of my respectful gratitude.
Marcel Proust
15
[end of 1914?]
Madame,
May my book have given you as much pleasure as I have had in reading your letter. Perhaps certain painful parts of it concerning the dawn, and also certain worldly scenes, are fairly accurate.26 But the descriptions in it hardly satisfy me. — I am not familiar with any of the regions you mention to me. But I have so often dreamed of them; and you, with your pictorial and sunlit words, have brought color and light into my closed room. Your health has improved you tell me, and your life become more beautiful. I feel great joy over this. I cannot say the same for myself. My solitude has become even more profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me. It has thus been a blessed messenger, and contrary to the proverb, this single swallow has made for me an entire spring. Allow me to thank you for it, Madame, with all my heart, and asking you to remember me to the Doctor, to lay at your feet my most respectful regards.