“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco
What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is!
Episode 66: “Marcel & Celeste, Part I”
Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and before I get started, I’d like to give a big welcome to new listeners! For those who don’t already know, this week I was able to live out one of my childhood dreams. Growing up, my favorite section of the newspaper was always the advice columns. What can I say -I love telling people what to do! My friend, Danny Lavery, is better known as Dear Prudence over on Slate, and this week they invited me to be their guest host! For my longtime listeners, if you’ve ever thought, “Hmm, I really love Diana’s weird anecdotes about French history, could she tell me how to raise my children?” then it’s a banner day for you. You can listen to the episode at slate.com/podcasts/dear-prudence, and I’ll put the link in this episode’s show notes. Meanwhile, if you’re a Dear Prudence listener tuning in for the first time, thank you and welcome! With that happy announcement out of the way, let’s turn to today’s episode.
Listeners, we have come to the end of a very, very long year. I’m cranky, I’m bored, I’m really really really good at baking now and I miss my friends terribly. One of the only ways I’ve gotten through 2020 with my sanity arguably intact is by experiencing it side-by-side with my loving boyfriend, Daniel, or as he prefers to be known, the much-abused unpaid intern and occasional producer of this show. He has been the bright spot of my year, and I wanted to pay him back by giving him a little Christmas gift: an episode all about his favorite person in the world, and perhaps the person best suited to comment on this strange period of history, the great French writer, Marcel Proust. 2020 was a year of seclusion and confinement, and it was also a year of transition. We speak of the Before Times, and a world, a whole way of life, which feels like it’s slipping out of our reach. At the same time, we hunker down, sheltering ourselves against an invisible enemy, staying within the safe confines of home and wiping down the groceries. Who could better understand the story of this year than a man conceived during a siege, who spent the last third of his life as a recluse, terrified of infection, dreaming of a lost world and mourning the impossibility of return? But there is one aspect of Marcel Proust’s life which feels especially relevant to us today, a part of his story which is often skipped over. While Proust famously loved and adored his sainted mother, his later years are inextricably linked to Proust’s father: the world-famous epidemiologist, Adrien Proust, pioneer of the modern cordon sanitaire. Today, we will navigate between the inner world and the outer, between safety and exposure, between past and present, between reality and memory, between sickness and health, between the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris and the dark chamber in which our story is set. The chamber in question was a refuge, it was a nest, and in many ways, it was a cage. This is the story of Proust’s bedroom.
I. Open with impending siege (so he thinks) of Paris in September 1914, culminating in the flight to Cabourg
II. Flashback to 1870 and the Siege of Paris
III. Proust’s childhood illnesses (what is dad doing during this time?)
IV. November 1913 – Swann’s Way is published.
IV. Says goodbye to the Paris that he knew and leaves for Cabourg. But the hotel is no escape (soldiers etc) and so he must return home. Coughing fit on the way home resigns him to the idea that he doesn’t have much longer – and so he must devote his remaining time to finishing his great work. Begins life as a recluse.
One evening in September 1914, Marcel Proust woke in the middle of the night and took a last look at Paris. It was the opening salvo of World War One, and Paris, everyone assumed, was doomed. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops on the march, it would only be a matter of time before glittering fin-de-siècle Paris found herself ground under German boots. It should have been a joyous time for Proust. Six years previously, he’d begun working on what he believed would be his masterpiece: a sprawling multivolume meditation on time and memory. After a string of rejections, he published the first volume, Swann’s Way, in November 1913, to wild acclaim. But he had little time to savor the victory – only a few months later, France found herself preparing for war. On August 2nd, just before Germany issued a formal declaration of war, Proust wrote a letter to a friend. “My petty interests…seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred.” Three million Frenchmen received mobilization orders that day, including Proust’s friends and family. Though he’d done routine military service as a young man, Proust was far too ill to fight now, and he found himself left behind in a city full of women, children and the elderly, all of whom were preparing to flee.
On August 29, Proust witnessed the first breach: a German monoplane flew over Paris and dropped a few bombs. By September 6th, the German army was only 30 miles outside Paris, all the taxis in Paris were barreling to the front lines carrying reinforcements, the government was packing up for Bordeaux, and Marcel Proust stood in the moonlight, making his farewells. He was leaving for Cabourg, a fashionable resort town on the coast where he’d stayed every summer with his family. With his genteel wardrobe folded gently into trunks, his manuscript gathered securely in his battered old suitcase, and his medications close at hand in his trusted housekeeper’s purse, Proust was one of a million Parisians saying goodbye. “In seeing this immense Paris that I did not know I loved so much, waiting, in its useless beauty, for the onslaught that could no longer be stopped, I could not keep myself from weeping.”
Almost exactly forty-four years earlier, another man had faced almost identical circumstances: an invading army on the doorstep, Paris preparing herself for a siege, a city unsure whether to stay and fight or flee for safety. Like Marcel, this young man was at a turning point: after rising steadily through the ranks of his profession, he was on the cusp of a great breakthrough. Like Marcel, he would use the war to come as fodder for his career, and by the war’s conclusion, he would enjoy international fame. But as the Prussians advanced towards Paris on that sunny afternoon, the young man had only one thing on his mind: it was September 3rd, 1870, and Doctor Adrian Proust was getting married.
At the age of 32, Adrian Proust embarked on the adventure of his life. For the past ten years, he’d been a rising star: graduating with honors from the Academie de médecin, before defending his doctoral thesis in 1866. After passing one final exam, Adrian was certified for a teaching post at the Academie de médecin – but a medical catastrophe that summer changed the course of his career. For the third time that century, a dreaded monster reared its head: cholera. Cholera was a disease of cities, found where too many people cluster together and contaminate the water supply. Originating out of India, the disease made its way to Europe by boat, and as trade between Asia and Europe grew, so did the threat of an outbreak. In 1832, cholera arrived in France and killed 100,000 people. In 1849, it returned and killed three times that many. In 1866, as Dr. Proust began weighing the option of a teaching position or a practice, cholera returned to Paris, deadlier than ever. That year’s outbreak had a fatality rate of 50%. All summer, Dr. Proust worked long hours, caring for patients while maintaining strict personal hygiene standards to keep himself from getting infected. As hard as he tried to save his patients, there was only so much Adrian could do – once infected, patients often died within 72 hours, by which point their family members would usually arrive with symptoms of their own. The only way to beat cholera, he knew, was to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Adrian Proust belonged to a burgeoning discipline we would eventually come to know as epidemiology. Studying under his mentor, Adrian learned about the concept of a cordon sanitaire – a means of keeping infected persons isolated to prevent the spread of disease. While John Snow had famously shut off the Broad Street Pump in London during its 1854 cholera outbreak, the jury was still out about what exactly caused cholera, and it would be another 20 years before a German scientist discovered the guilty bacteria. In the meantime, Doctor Proust experimented in his own clinic, by isolating his cholera patients away from everyone else, to great success. After seeing the results on such a small scale, Proust wondered whether big results could only come from big measures: what if you could apply a cordon sanitaire to a whole country? What if a country with an outbreak could be hemmed in, to prevent outsiders from getting in to contract an infection, and to prevent infected people from getting out? In 1869, Doctor Proust represented France at the International Health Conference in Vienna to propose this audacious idea. “The question of international hygiene,” he proclaimed, “passes and surpasses political frontiers.” But before you could even begin to stop the transmission route of a disease, you’d have to know where, exactly, that transmission route was located. With the blessings of the conference, Doctor Proust set out on a grand international quest: starting in Russia, making his way to Persia, and then from Persia to Mecca, Turkey, Egypt and then finally back to Paris, he would map the voyage of the invisible enemy across the Western world.
The voyage spanned thousands of miles, crossed on ever-changing modes of transport. Leaving Paris in a gleaming luxury train, after crossing into Russia he downgraded to the rudimentary wooden kibitka carriage. From there, he crossed the Caucausus Mountains on horseback, before descending into Persia on the back of a camel. In Tehran, Adrian found himself meeting the shah of Persia, desperate for relief from the cholera epidemics raging through his own empire. In Mecca, Proust watched millions of pilgrims sharing squalid conditions on the road to Hajj. Finally, in Egypt, Doctor Proust walked through the ports, inspecting ships bound for Europe. Retracing the path of every cholera outbreak of the 19th century so far, Doctor Proust had asked himself, “Where was cholera breaking out just before it reached Europe?” Every time, the answer was the same: “Egypt”. As the chokepoint between India and Europe, Egypt, Proust would one day write, “must be considered Europe’s barrier against cholera.” After completing his epic voyage, Doctor Proust returned home on November 28, 1869, accompanied by steamer trunks full of notes. He was the talk of Paris, and everyone wanted to meet this brave, pioneering young doctor to hear of his adventures – including a beautiful young woman from a good family, Jeanne Weil. (Jzhan Vey-uh) In the summer of 1870, Adrian made one last trip to inspect ports of entry around the French coast, but it was no time to be far from home. The Prussians were rattling their sabers, and Adrian had a girl waiting for his return. On September 2nd, 1870, the French army surrended to the Prussians. On September 3rd, Adrian Proust and Jeanne Weil were married. On September 19th, Paris was under siege.
In a single terrible blow, after a year spent traveling thousands of miles across the world, Adrian’s world suddenly shrank to a single city. He found himself subject to an older, crueler form of isolation: the cordon militaire. Cut off from the outside world, Paris was a world apart. With all lines of communication cut except a few brave carrier pigeons and a daring hot air balloonist, Parisians knew they were on their own. Nothing could cross the barrier, not even food. Rationing kicked in at once. The cows disappeared, then the horses, then eventually dogs, cats, rats, and worse. Almost immediately, disease ravaged the capital. Two months into the siege, smallpox deaths tripled, and dysentery deaths quintupled. By the beginning of December 1870, Parisians were dying at triple the normal rate. Almost as terrible as the hunger and disease was the isolation: like Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the ill” Parisians existed in a different time and space from the rest of the nation. They felt abandoned and forgotten. Paris was a world apart. At that moment, Jeanne came to Adrian with an announcement: she was pregnant.
In the weeks ahead, Paris descended into a hellish winter: in subzero temperatures, Prussians cut the gas lines, firewood ran out, and food was a distant memory. By the end of the month, as discussed in the second episode of this podcast, desperate Parisians broke into the city zoo to eat the animals. Victor Hugo’s Christmas dinner was a slice of roasted elephant. Finally, on January 26th, just before the last of the food was set to run out, the French government in Versailles declared a truce. While starving Parisians fought over rations distributed by the Prussian army, the French government reassembled at Versailles to determine the outcome of the Prussian war. By that point, Parisians were estranged from their countrymen in every way: for four months, they’d held out against the Prussians, refusing to betray their country by giving in to the enemy, paying a terrible cost for their loyalty. But for what? Now, they’d been sold out by the same bungling government which had gotten them into this war, and if the peace treaty wasn’t insulting enough, it couldn’t have been more insensitive to the needs of starving, impoverished Parisians. In one outcry which feels particularly resonant today, the government announced that all landlords were entitled to full back payment on rent, which had been suspended during the siege, at the same time they suspended wages to the National Guard. Little surprise that in March, a violent uprising commenced in the poor districts of Paris, which we now know as the Commune.
Fearing for the safety of his wife and unborn child, Adrian weighed his options. He’d just spent four months enduring the unthinkable in the city he loved. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon his patients. When Jeanne begged him to stay home rather than travel through the barricades to treat wounded fighters, Adrian refused. In a prescient argument his son would one day echo, Adrian explained that he had a duty to fulfill, and a fear of death was not a good enough reason to abandon his duty. When Jeanne was six months pregnant, an insurgent took fire at Adrian, and the bullet just barely grazed his coat. Jeanne dissolved into fear, and became so overwhelmed with anxiety for Adrian’s safety that the doctor began fearing for her health, and that of their baby. More for their protection than his own, Adrian finally crossed the barrier, passing his family through the city gates to the estate of Jeanne’s uncle, Uncle Louis, in the suburb of Auteuil. In May, Paris burned. In June, the government broke through from the other side. After months of Parisians trying to get out of the capital, the French army was now getting in, killing 17,000 Communards and dumping their bodies in mass graves. A few weeks later, on July 10th, 1871, Jeanne went into labor. Once again, the transition from within to without was not easy. In the first of many such occasions, Marcel Proust was unwilling to enter the wider world. After a long and difficult labor, Marcel nearly died. It took two weeks before Adrian and Jeanne believed he was out of danger. They realized at once that Marcel was a frail child. Between Jeanne’s malnutrition, anxiety, and suffering, Marcel was the victim of a turbulent world before he was even born.
In 1873, the Proust family experienced two major triumphs: the arrival of Marcel’s younger brother, Robert, and the publication of Doctor Proust’s groundbreaking paper: “An Essay on International Hygiene: Its Applications against Plague, Yellow Fever, and Asiatic Cholera”. The so-called essay was really over 400 pages explaining how cholera originated in Asia and traveled its way to Europe, complete with a map. Cholera, Doctor Proust explained, was like an invading army. Constant vigilance at the borders could keep infection out – better yet if you could draw a line around the sick to separate them from the well. Once again he argued for a cordon sanitaire, in which European nations would cooperate to enforce a quarantine for all international ships trying to enter their waters. It’s not hard to see how the siege of Paris could seep into Doctor Proust’s thinking about illness, even if he wasn’t conscious of the fact: by standing united against a common enemy, by barring the gates to the outside world, by inspecting anything that crossed the threshold to the inner sanctum, Europe could stay healthy. To anyone who’s lived through 2020, however, the response will hardly come as a shock. The rest of the world rejected Doctor Proust’s arguments. Not because of any ethical concerns about what it means to seal up an entire community, but because they were worried about the impact it would have on the global economy. Sure enough, cholera reared its head again a decade later. After that epidemic, France finally adopted Adrian’s idea, and the next time cholera showed up in the Middle East, ships began quarantining at French ports before unloading. Years later, based on his recommendations, France would lead the formation of the International Office of Public Hygiene, which you may know better as the World Health Organization. The 1873 essay, and his eventual success at keeping cholera outbreaks out of France, secured Adrian Proust fame and fortune and the Legion of Honor. But for all his international expertise, there was one health puzzle he couldn’t seem to solve: what was wrong with his son Marcel?
On a fine spring day in the spring of 1881, Marcel and his family took a long walk through the Bois de Boulogne. After enjoying an afternoon outdoors, they turned back towards the family home, when all of a sudden, nine year old Marcel stopped breathing. Gasping for air, he collapsed into his father’s arms. As the esteemed doctor watched in terror, Marcel nearly died right there on the sidewalk. As it turned out, Marcel suffered from severe asthma. This first attack traumatized the entire family, and changed the course of Marcel’s life. His brother, Robert, remembers that all of a sudden, his rambunctious brother had to give up “outings in the open air, the beauty of the countryside, and the charm of flowers.” Marcel spent the rest of his life terrified of suffocation, and while his asthma went into remission during certain periods of his life, he wrestled with it his entire life.
The rest of Marcel’s childhood became a struggle to keep him alive. 110 times, Marcel had his nasal passages cauterized, to render him less sensitive to pollen. The doctors assured him the procedures would work, but after a trip to the country, a field of lilacs left Marcel “seized with such violent asthma attacks that until they were able to bring me back to Paris, my hands and feet remained purple like those of drowning victims.” His parents didn’t know what to do. They were from the old school: fresh air was a good cure, and if that wasn’t enough, accompany it with a brisk walk. Over and over, Adrian took Marcel to the seaside, hoping the sea air would strengthen his lungs. For the rest of his life, Marcel treasured those days, but they were few and far between. Instead, he spent long stretches of time in his bedroom, cut off from the world. Here, cocooned away from pollen, dust, and other dangers, young Marcel learned how to dwell in his own imagination, recreating the outside world. It was a skill that would shape the rest of his life.
Thanks to his father’s prestigious career, Marcel was admitted to the Lycee Cordorcet, where he enmeshed himself into a social network of rich, privileged children. Though he missed long stretches of school due to illness, Marcel was an adept social climber, and by the time he graduated school, his life was consumed with society events, with a bit of writing going on in the background. The year of his graduation, France passed a law requiring a year of voluntary military service. Improbably enough, the sickly, frail Marcel enlisted. Within weeks of his arrival at the barracks, the captain asked him to take a room in town because his nightly coughing fits kept the other soldiers awake. Marcel made it through a year of service, mostly thanks to a colonel impressed by his fancy parents. Excused from most athletic requirements, the most active part of his week came on Sundays, when Marcel used his leave to visit fashionable salons. After enrolling in the local military college, he finished 63rd in a class of 64. Meanwhile, his brother Robert was thriving. After leaving the army, Marcel drifted headlong into society life, publishing a few pieces of writing in between trips to the theater and nights at the salon. His writing was well-received, but not especially serious – mostly society sketches and clever gossip columns. Like many a rich young doofus, he spent gobs of money on everything, slept all day and stayed out all night, and wrecked his health. He fell in love with men, and possibly women, and visited brothels on his to try to sort out his urges, to little success. In a real flex move, Marcel took a job to please his parents, immediately applied for sick leave, and extended it for three years, until they decided he had resigned. He’d never once showed up for work. By the end of the century, the nearly 30 year old Marcel was barely employed, very well known in society circles, a little bit published, and very unmarried. Jeanne and Adrian were terrified that their brilliant son might just amount to nothing at all.
Worst of all, his illness kept worsening. His letters reveal a young man whose nights of social chatter and the arts were interrupted by life-threatening fits that lasted for days. “For two days,” one letter says, “my asthma has been so violent that I’ve not been able to bear anything or anyone near me.” Later he describes “two days of convulsions caused by asthma and suffocation.” Another letter describes “attacks so violent that nothing could stop them.” His medical treatment was, shall we say, haphazard. Skeptical after so many failed procedures, Proust insisted on developing his own treatments, the most infamous of which were anti-asthma powders, which he used to fumigate his room. He would smoke anti-asthma cigarettes, and as as asthmatic myself, I have to really shudder at that particular product, but they were worse than you’d think: sometimes, the smoke from the medicated cigarettes would mix with the smoke from the fumigation powders and Proust would give himself atropine poisoning.
Meanwhile, his father was busy writing prestigious papers about a neurological disease of the day called neurasthenia. Adrian published a paper in 1897 in which he described neurasthenia as a “weakness of the nerves” causing “headache, insomnia, and irritability.” It was to be found among those who lived in high society: “those who go out much, have their whole day taken up by the duties that convention and the van care of their reputation impose on them: visits, dinners, balls, and evening parties.” The condition could be made worse by what Adrian called “bad education” – too much attention from one’s mother. In an ironic turn of events, Adrian objected to Marcel’s isolation, which was little more than a cordon sanitaire in miniature. He considered Marcel’s isolation emasculating, “women’s treatments”. When reading these passages, I can only think back to the siege of 1870, when Adrian strode out among the barricades to treat the ill and Jeanne had to stay home, burrowing as deep within her home as she could, putting as much distance between herself and her unborn child and the dangerous streets as she could. In some ways, neurasthenia becomes a way to pathologize the crime of being a mama’s boy. I can only imagine how the 26 year old Marcel reacted to this paper, if he could read it between coughing himself close to death. Even today, Marcel Proust has a reputation for hypochondria. Modern scholars compete to see who can discredit more of his health problems as attention-seeking or mental illness. They see his illness as a metaphor for homosexuality, as attention seeking behavior, as something that was all in his mind – as though that made it any less real. But this was a young man with a life-threatening condition, traumatized by near-death experiences, who lived in terror of the next unstoppable attack which could be his last – wouldn’t you close the shutters, too? But he persisted in his society life and his writing, publishing some early works but mostly, as he would put it, wasting his time away. Then, a series of calamitous events changed Marcel’s entire life. Before long, he would be on his way to literary immortality – and physical collapse.
On Tuesday, November 24, 1903, Adrian Proust walked out the door to a meeting and returned home on a stretcher. Participating in yet another committee at his beloved Academie de medecin, Adrian suffered a stroke, and after two days deteriorating at home, he passed away. Adrian’s obituary in Le Figaro took up the entire front page, but Marcel’s own tribute took place in letters to his friends. Suddenly, the long hours spent with his father treating his asthma and neurasthenia seemed like a blessing in disguise. “Now,” he wrote a friend, “I bless those hours of illness spent at home, which during these last years enabled me to enjoy so much of Papa’s affection and company.” Aware that he was “the dark spot in his life” Marcel regretted his final conversation with Adrian – an argument about politics, and he vowed to support his beloved mother in her grief. But he did not do so for very long. Only two years later, on a mother and son spa getaway, Jeanne collapsed. Rushing her back to Paris, Jeanne died on September 26th, 1905. It was the worst tragedy of Marcel’s life, and he would never truly recover. “She takes my life with her, as Papa had taken away hers.” As he wrote soon afterwards, “My life has now forever lost its only purpose…I have lost her whose unceasing vigilance brought me in peace and tenderness the only honey of my life.” Worst of all, he blamed himself for causing her so much anxiety over the years. “I have the feeling that because of my poor health I was the bane and the torment of her life.” With his parents dead, and his younger brother married with a child of his own, and his romantic desires considered shameful and impossible, Marcel found himself truly, utterly alone. Jolted out of his old life, Marcel realized he had wasted his life: an entire decade spent at dinner parties instead of committing himself to his writing. Soon thereafter, he moved into his late uncle’s Paris apartment at 102 boulevard Haussman, and embarked on a new way of life: serious, hardworking, and indoors.
Within weeks of his move to 102 boulevard Haussman, Marcel Proust adopted the habits which would distinguish him for the rest of his life: nocturnal hours, an almost negligible appetite, and an a neurotic obsession with sensory intrusions from the outside world. He was not, at least then, a recluse. Marcel continued his ventures into society, where his characteristic wit and unfailing manners secured him good will and interest in his next publication. Yet he was also known for rejecting friends who showed up at his home, for canceling appointments, and for refusing entry to anyone wearing perfume. His attacks got worse: within weeks of moving in, he wrote that “for the first time in my life I’ve been laid low by attacks which last thirty six hours, forty, fifty hours!” He set to work renovating 102 boulevard Haussman to suit his needs: stowing most of the family treasures around the apartment but tucking a very few totemic items into his small bedroom. In one of the most famous home renovations in literary history, Marcel lined the walls of his bedroom with cork to keep out the sound, affixed heavy shutters to his window, and created a sensory deprivation chamber in which to dedicate himself utterly to his writing. There, as in his childhood bedroom, Proust could sink into his own imagination, recreating the world he had known. It was during this time that a germ of an idea formed in his mind: what does it mean to experience the world? what does it mean to remember your experiences? what does it mean to lose something, some one, some time? is it possible to fight back against the tyrannical passage of time? In the summer of 1908, Proust began sketching the structure of a grand work, though he didn’t realize it at the time. For the next four years, Proust divided his time between writing and stepping into the world to conduct research: research on high society and low society, research on streetcars, research on market stalls, research on women’s hats and the era’s unwritten rules of conduct. His entire life until now had been smorgasbord of sensation, and Proust was attempting nothing less than to capture it all. Bit by bit, Marcel’s kernel of an idea shaped itself into a story, then into an grand vision.
By 1912, Proust’s first book was complete. That Christmas, the Nouvelle Review Française received an immaculately wrapped manuscript. The manuscript was picked up by the avant-garde intellectual, Andre Gide, who instinctively reacted to the name on the cover. He knew Marcel Proust, thank you very much: a dilettante, a social butterfly, an unserious man, and a snob. Gide claimed to have read two passages, but Marcel knew better: his valet’s meticulous wrapping job was untouched. Andre Gide sent notice: the NRF was not interested in publishing this so-called “Swann’s Way”. After receiving Gide’s rejection, along with a string of others, Proust decided he would simply publish the work himself, using his considerable inheritance. He worked like a madman that year, editing endless proofs, dragging himself out of bed and across town to wheedle and schmooze society contacts who could influence the novel’s reception, all while his mental and physical health deteriorated. “My health has degraded entirely,” he wrote, “and I have grown so thin you would not recognize me.” Deeply underweight with a bushy beard, Marcel traveled outside the city only to return days later, unable to go further. In the week leading up to his book’s publication, Marcel conducted interviews with leading newspapers and journals from his bed. One journalist was struck by Marcel’s bedroom. Not realizing how famous the space would one day become, he documented its piles of “books, papers, letters and little boxes of medicine. A little electric lamp, whose light is filtered by a green shade.” He noted that the author wrote only at night, and always in bed. Another journalist marveled at the “bedroom eternally closed to fresh air and light and completely covered in cork.” Proust replied, in a prescient quote which would dominate the last decade of his life, “Shadow and silence and solitude…have obliged me to recreate within myself the lights and thrills of nature and society.”
Swann’s Way was sensational. On November 14th, 1913, Swann’s Way arrived on shelves. No fewer than 19 reviews appeared before the end of the year, a few critical but most of them effusive with praise. Perhaps the greatest review of all came from none other than Andre Gide, he who had turned down Proust’s manuscript the year before. “My dear Proust, for several days I have not put down your book. The rejection of this book will remain the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most bitterly remorseful regrets of my life.”
Things were looking up. A dilettante no more, Proust had published his first great work, and had earned the respect of his peers. His appetite began to recover, and in January 1914, he sat down to eat “macaroni, a liter and a half of milk, roasted veal, three croissants and an enormous raspberry tart.” But as Proust’s narrator might lament, the good times didn’t last.
That spring, Marcel’s former chauffeur and one of the loves of his life, Alfred Agostinelli, died in a plane crash. “I found myself hoping,” he told a friend, “that every time I got into a taxi that an oncoming bus would run me down.” He was still deep in the throes of grief when thousands of miles away, a Serb nationalist assassinated the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and triggered the outbreak of war. At once, Marcel’s fortunes were frozen in the financial chaos hitting the markets. Utterly unfit for service, a weak Marcel watched his more robust male friends and family members leave for war, including his younger brother, Robert, now a distinguished doctor like their father. After waving Robert off at the train station, Marcel began reading seven newspapers a day to follow along with his brother’s movements. “I have just seen off my brother who was leaving for Verdun at midnight” he wrote a friend that week. “Alas, he insisted on being posted to the actual border.” The war effort already reached inside Proust’s own home: first, the war board called up his beloved valet, Nicolas. A few weeks later, they called up the replacement valet, too. Then, his remaining chauffeur, Odile, received his own mobilization papers. The driver’s wife, Céleste, moved in with Marcel to act as his temporary housekeeper until yet another valet could be found. She would stay for the rest of his life. Theirs would become one of the most storied friendships in literary history.
That summer, Proust stood on the precipice of Paris, just as his father had, watching an army approach. Desperate to stay home, he convinced himself to travel back to the family’s seaside resort in Cabourg. Accompanied by the enterprising Céleste, whose offer to dress in boys clothing for the journey was gently rejected by an amused Proust, the unlikely pair set out for the coast. The four hour train journey took nearly a day. When they arrived, rather than escaping the war, they found themselves in an auxiliary branch of it: the Grand-Hotel was now a military hospital. There were almost no guests. He walked along the promenade, staring out at the same sea he had known as a child. As he would later describe in In Search of Lost Time, “The sight of a ship that was moving away like a nocturnal traveler gave me the same impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom…I threw myself down on the bed; and, just as if i had been lying in a berth on board one of those steamers that I could see quite near to me and which at night it would be strange to see sailing slowly out into the darkness, like shadowy and silent but unsleeping swans, I was on all sides surrounded by images of the sea.” Marcel spoke with Céleste about his travels, and the beautiful landscapes he knew from his past. “Perhaps, one day…if I’m better…” he would say. “And I’ll take you. You absolutely must see it.” “And in his voice,” Céleste remembered, many years later, “there was an almost childlike wistfulness for scenes he longed to see again.”
On October 13th, Marcel and Céleste boarded the train back to Paris. Marcel was not his father, and this was not his war. To everyone’s surprise, the German army had been repelled at the Marne, and Paris would not face another siege. After this brief excursion outside, Proust was desperate to return to his dark apartment. Proust had satisfied himself that he could envision the sea as well on the beaches of Cabourg as in the beds of the hotels in Cabourg. His memory and his imagination contained the whole world, and now it was his duty to put his mind to use. That afternoon, on the train journey home, disaster struck: Marcel suffered an terrible asthma attack. “I was almost out of my wits” Céleste recalled, “not knowing any better I’d put his medicines and fumigation powder in the valise with his papers.” For nearly 100 miles, Proust coughed and hacked. Finally, Céleste tracked down a railway officer to retrieve the medicine from their luggage, and for the rest of the journey home, Marcel burned fumigation papers and filled their train car with thick black smoke. When they finally made it home, 102 boulevard Haussman was filled with workers, taking advantage of his trip to Cabourg to vacuum the apartment. Dust was everywhere. “I can still see him,” Céleste remembered, “streaming with sweat and still choking as he bent over the fumigation powder. I was terrified, convinced I’d never see him alive again.” But slowly, Marcel recovered – in a way. In the days that followed the dreadful journey, as the suitcases were stored back in the closets and the clothes carefully hung back in the closets, Marcel made up his mind. All he had seen in the past few months: the deaths and departures of those he loved, the emptying streets of Paris, and above all, the disappearance of the Belle Epoque into the jaws of mechanical warfare – the world Proust knew was melting away. His life’s grand work revealed itself at last: he would bear witness to his beloved fin-de-siècle Paris, capturing its fragile, glittering, transient beauty, to see whether he could conquer the old enemy: Time. Retreating once more into his dark bedroom, muffling the sounds of tanks, closing the shutters against the vision of tanks and armies on the march, blocking out the smell of gunpowder, Proust’s room would become a fortress all its own. “My dear Céleste,” he beckoned to his housekeeper and confidant, “there’s something I must tell you. I’ve just been to Cabourg with you, but that’s all over. I shan’t ever go out again, to Cabourg or anywhere else. The soldiers do their duty, but since I can’t fight as they do, my duty is to write my book, do my work. I haven’t the time for anything else.”
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. Next week, I’ll conclude the story of Marcel Proust’s bedroom. Once again, welcome to the newest listeners of this show, and if those of you who are already subscribers listen to my guest appearance on the Dear Prudence podcast, thank you as well! You can follow The Land of Desire on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and subscribe to my newsletter on the show’s website at www.thelandofdesire.com Until next time, au revoir!
Sources:
The two biggies:
The rest:
- “Marcel Proust and the medicine of the Belle Epoque” pamphlet, the Royal Society of Medicine: https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/2060/marcel-proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf
- Lamont, Rosette, and Céleste Albaret. “Interview Avec Céleste Albaret.” The French Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/385924. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust” William Friedkin, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/t-magazine/william-friedkin-marcel-proust.html
- Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its discontents.” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, p. 7+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A168775861/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=9c209110. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- Manley, Janet. “Longing for a Distant Home Amid a Pandemic.” New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, p. B6(L). Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635356510/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=115d21c9. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
- “these were the days; OPINION.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 11 July 2020, p. O1,O6,O7. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629146415/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=6f8acd35. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
Further reading:
- “How I Came to Love My Epic Quarantine Reading Project”, Oliver Munday, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/reading-proust-in-search-of-lost-time-during-pandemic/616850/
- “Analogue Ambles: Marcel Proust’s Dark Room”, Adam Scovell, February 10 2019, https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2019/02/marcel-prousts-dark-room/
- Kear, Jon (2007) Une Chambre Mentale: Proust’s Solitude. In: Hendrix, Harald, ed. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. Routledge, New York/Oxon, pp. 221-235. ISBN 978-0-415-95742-7
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