1
[end of 1908?]
Madame,
Your letters are "Parthian Letters." You give me so great a desire, and almost your permission, to see you: and then at the very moment that I receive the letter, you have left! My most ardent hope is that the coming year may bring the softening, I won't say the forgetting since memory is the proud treasure of wounded hearts, of the trials which the year that is ending has brought you. In this hope I include with you the Doctor, whom I do not know, but whose praises I hear sung by Madame Straus, by everyone. And particularly your son who had promised to express his desires to me so that I could satisfy them and whose discretion, please tell him, is not at all friendly. Please accept Madame my gratitude for your kind concern for my rest, my most respectful greetings.
MARCEL PROUST
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. 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.
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. 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! — 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. — 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
18
[summer 1915?]
Madame,
I had ordered these flowers for you and I am in despair that they are coming on a day when against all expectation I feel so ill that I would like to ask you for silence tomorrow Saturday. Yet as this request is in no way conjoined with the flowers, causing them to lose all their fragrance as disinterested mark of respect and to bristle with nasty thorns, I would like even more not to ask you for this silence. If you are remaining as I am in Paris and if one evening I were not suffering too much, I would like since the Doctor and your son I believe have left and perhaps you are feeling a little lonely to come up sometime in the next few weeks to keep you company. But actually doing this encounters so many obstacles. I have three times in the evening and with what difficulty hired rather leisurely cars to go see Clary, who Madame Rehbinder said was asking to see me. The 1st time I went with Madame de la Béraudière to the rue du Colisée where we were told he no longer lived and was at 32 rue Galilée. At 32 rue Galilée the concierge got out of bed to tell us that he ... did not know Clary. Madame Rehbinder corrected the mistake and told me that he lived at 33. I went off again another evening when I rang at number 33 a fantastic house with no Clary. Finally on the 3rd attempt I got it right with number 37. But then, I mistook the floor the elevator went up to the top causing me to do the opposite of what the Doctor's clients do cach day ringing at my door. And when I went back down I felt [word missing: that] the concierge would not let me go up again, swearing to me that Clary had gone to bed.
Your very respectful and devoted
MARCEL PROUST
26
[late April—early May 1918?]
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 colors 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 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. AIready 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
