Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (15 page)

My cousin Mathilde said she would drop by this afternoon with Nuna, and the Cottins are here for dinner, so we are busy with our engagements. Unfashionably so, by the standards of Mme Lemaire!

Marcel has had some kind of falling out with Reynaldo but will not tell me what it is all about. He is quite turned over with anxiety and will not sit still for a minute, but prowls about the apartment fiddling with the
objets d’art
. I suggested I write to the boy urging reconciliation, but Marcel will not hear of it.

His father insists we must address the career question once and for all, and it is all I can do to fend him off. I told him that Marcel was far too upset over his dispute with Reynaldo to give serious consideration to other issues at the moment, and he accused me only of indulging the child’s emotions. If this continues, I wonder that Marcel’s health will bear up.

What news about M. Faure. No one expected it. Just yesterday morning Adrien was saying that Brisson was sure to win. I wonder how Madame feels about it. I imagine she will be quite pleased, for she has always valued her husband’s achievements despite the difficulties of their relations. She deserves it, poor thing, for there are many joys that man never gives her.
Social standing can be some compensation for a lack of tenderness, and if one is to put up with the duties of the political life, one might as well do it in return for the largest prize, I suppose. I do not imagine I will be seeing much of her for a while. Her new functions will surely prove too onerous to take time out for walks.

As I had feared, Marcel has collapsed—a ghastly attack finally quieted with Trional at three in the morning. I write because I cannot sleep, but brought my diary here to the antechamber to Marcel’s room. I listen for his breathing, timing each stroke of the pen to the rise and fall of his lungs. Would that we were free of this demon.

I rehearse the events of my pregnancy, his birth, and his childhood again and again in my mind, wondering at what moment I could have prevented this route. Was I wrong to indulge a sickly infant? Should we have paid less heed to the attacks once they started? Did all my ministrations, my fears, the words whispered in his room when he was a little boy who could not sleep, the hand stroking his brow, did they all lead inevitably to that horrible day in the Bois, when he lay choking on the ground?

His father has high ambitions for him, for all that he says he only wants the boy to choose any career he pleases, no matter how undistinguished. Me, I would give my life just that Marcel’s could be normal.

After several unpleasant days of rasping breath and a second albeit milder attack, Marcel has recovered. Nonetheless, I will not let him leave the apartment as it is bitterly cold these past few days. His illness has had one welcome effect: a reconciliation with Hahn, who found out about his illness from some friends with whom Marcel was supposed to be dining on Tuesday. He rushed over here and was tenderly received. Jean showed him into the salon at first, since Marcel had left instructions he was not to be woken, but I was sure he would make an exception for Reynaldo, and tiptoed into his room to announce his visitor. I left the two alone and did not see Reynaldo when he left, but Marcel looked decidedly better and took dinner with us for once, so I gather all is forgiven, whatever it was they had quarrelled over.

I seem to be behind on all my domestic tasks since Adrien’s return from his latest German trip, but I cannot say that I have had any particular obligations to keep me so busy. It has been a pleasure to have him around more, and less distracted than he has been. I had feared that I was to become a total stranger to the pleasures of conjugal life at what is not, after all, such an advanced age. He has returned from Berlin more gentle and sensitive than I have seen him in some years and I have revelled in his attentions. Every real marriage has its joys and its sorrows, its peaks and its valleys, and then, just when we think the landscape is
entirely familiar and holds no surprises, a new summit emerges.

I finally found time to write a little note to Mme Faure, which I had been putting off. How does one congratulate a friend on her husband’s elevation to the presidency? I was not quite sure but managed a few sentences of well wishes. I feel for them both as they embark on such an arduous journey, but Adrien laughed at me at breakfast when I said so. “Jeanne, only you could be so soft-hearted as to worry yourself about a president,” he said, and declared I would worry about the Deity himself, if I could only get news of him.

It is typical of Adrien not to see the toll that hard work can take on one’s health and happiness, and to think that social or political elevation is necessarily to be desired. I suppose that he shares that with Marcel in a way, for all that he doubts the wisdom of the boy’s dallying with duchesses. Secretly, I think he is sometimes proud that his son moves in such circles. Certainly, he listened with great interest to Marcel’s account of dinner at the Marquise de Brantes’s last week.

And I am not so sure that I am soft-hearted, although Marcel and Dick always say so too. Perhaps I am just better at hiding my harsher judgements than some.

Adrien dined with Uncle Louis in Auteuil last night and says he is worried by his heart, noting that he puffs horribly at the slightest exertion. They had a grand old time nonetheless, for Adrien was not home when I feel
asleep at eleven, and told me at breakfast it had been after midnight that he returned. Uncle does not have energy for his lady loves any more, but it must do him good to have the occasional entertainment.

What odd news from London about Mr. Wilde’s trial. The man has been sentenced to two years hard labour in an English jail and one hears the conditions in these places are horrific, worse yet than any French prison or even Devil’s Island. The courts clearly had no choice but to find him guilty, but one really wonders what the man can have been thinking. These relationships happen, many suspect they do, but to have advertised it to the world so unashamedly. He was asking for trouble, and now he has got it.

Mme Dauvergne, who is a very silly woman at the best of times, was at Marie-Marguerite’s yesterday afternoon, and clearly dying to gossip about the case. Really, I have no interest at all in the affair, and she kept pressing me, saying she sought my opinion as an anglophile, and was it true to say the English were more reserved in their public manners, but less upright in their private morals than the French. I could not silence her, and finally it dawned on me that she must have heard from Marie-Marguerite—who really tolerates her only because of the family connection—of that odd occasion two or three years ago when Mr. Wilde was supposed to have dined with us. So, finally, I said to her, “Really, madame, I know nothing of M. Wilde and his morals. I have never met the man, although I believe my son did shake his hand once at a reception.” And then I gave her a very firm look that closed the conversation at last.

Had I the wit of a Mme Straus—and her conversational courage—I would have reminded the good lady of a passage from Tartuffe: “Those whose own conduct gives room for talk are always the first to attack their neighbours.”

M
ME
P
ROUST WAS
to spend years struggling to help her son establish what she called a normal life, and yet, through her anxious love for him, somehow preventing it too. His health would never improve.

The librarians have rung the warning bell: it is time to return files to the reserve desk, for the
salle des manuscrits
shuts promptly at six o’clock and leaving the room takes some time. I take my box back up to the desk, retrieve my orange disk and exchange it for the green one, and then stop by the information desk to get a chit signed by the assistant assistant librarian once he has inspected my bag to ascertain I am not removing precious documents. I hand that paper and the green disk in at the entrance booth and may now leave the library, but I plan to squeeze in one further piece of research before I head home for the evening.

In Paris, the Proustian pilgrim is an impoverished soul. Apart from this archive, there are few physical remains of the great writer in the city where he lived his whole life. No museum is dedicated to his memory; no house or apartment carefully preserved. The Musée Carnavalet, an old
hôtel
full of displays about Parisian social history, has recently acquired a few relics, including the writer’s bed, bookcase, desk, inkwell, and hairbrush. These pieces were donated in 1989 by one Mme Odile Geraudon in memory of her mother, Céleste Albaret, the writer’s servant at the time of
his death. With these artifacts, the museum has recreated Proust’s room at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he lived from December 1906 to June 1919, and where, on the advice of his friend, the poet Anna de Noailles, the walls were lined with cork to keep out the noise.

There is something pathetic about this little shrine, a small cramped bedroom of dark wood and faded furnishings squashed in amongst the society portraits and art nouveau café fittings that make up the museum’s testament to
la belle époque
. Crowded with reminders of the past, the place seems empty of memory. I visited it one afternoon in my first week here in Paris and left disappointed.

But today, armed with a list of addresses, I pursue my pilgrimage a few blocks north from the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Boulevard Haussmann, named for the great urban planner whose broad avenues, limestone facades, and blue-slate roofs made his the most beautiful city in the world. It is rush hour now and I work my way upstream against the flow of people emerging from the offices in the heart of the financial district and heading for home. I hurry along the street, past the big department stores that have stood there since Proust’s day, where vendors hawk vegetable choppers and hair bows with cries of
“Regardez, mesdames…”
I imagine myself belonging to this crowd, a well-dressed Parisian with a schoolboy in freshly pressed blue jeans and a husband who favours colourful ties waiting for her at home. Perhaps my heels are not quiet high enough nor my figure chic enough to pass, but I walk forcefully on, knowing that determination can compensate for many lacks.

Number 102 is now a bank. I hesitate outside, looking up. A man in a suit leaving the bank glances at me, wondering perhaps if I need directions, but as he follows my gaze,
he smiles to himself and moves on. Above our heads is a discreet marble plaque with gold lettering of the type used to mark historic sites all over Paris: “Marcel Proust, writer, lived in this building from 1906–1919.” It is the apartment of the cork-lined room.

I go also to 44 Rue Hamelin, the building where Proust lived from 1919 to 1922. To reach this street, I get on the Métro and ride a few stops westwards into the heart of the Sixteenth Arrondissement and emerge in the Place d’Iéna. It is growing dark now and the street lamps reflect off the cobblestones. Forty-four Rue Hamelin is now a small hotel, and I stand across the street from it, beside a laundromat, scanning the facade for some sign of the event that occurred there in 1922, but I fail to find any acknowledgment of the building’s most famous occupant. Puzzled, I check the address again and then, about to give up, I notice what the glare of the spotlights that illuminate the hotel’s striped canopy had obscured. Just above them hangs another plaque: “Marcel Proust, writer, died in this building November 18, 1922.”

These are the sites where Proust wrote his great novel, but the places of childhood and youth, the years with his doting mother, are not so well remembered. At 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, an elegant facade goes unmarked. It is a classic Parisian building of grey-limestone with wrought-iron balconies and a mansard roof. Translucent lace curtains obscure any clear view into the apartment on the third floor, but a hazy yellow lamplight shines warmly into the street and a figure is just discernible, sitting in a large armchair by the window, a head bent over, sewing perhaps, or reading. It was in these rooms that Mme Proust wrote in her notebooks.

Adrien is quite excited about a new prospect he has discovered for Marcel. He was dining with M. Hanotaux the other night, whom he has not seen in a while—the man’s public duties keep him horribly busy—and was again discussing the possibility of Marcel entering the diplomatic service. Of course, some discretion is required there, for Marcel would have to sit the exam and pass through the regular channels like any other candidate, even if the minister is a friend of his father’s. Adrien was carefully asking M. Hanotaux how difficult the exam might be, and worrying that Marcel would never really be healthy enough to do foreign postings, certainly not in a difficult climate. M. Hanotaux suggested that a post at one of the libraries might be more in order, and said they are always looking for librarians.

From what Adrien gathered, a man of Marcel’s education would not take any of the paid positions, but the voluntary attachments are respectable occupations for one of a literary nature. It sounded to me an ideal solution. It is not as if Marcel really needs to earn a living; his allowance is perfectly sufficient for any reasonable wants at the moment. It is only because he is so extravagant that it seems anything less than generous. And, in time, his inheritance would allow him to establish a household without need of other income.

It would be good to see the boy with paid employment—it teaches the value of money, of that there is no doubt—but it is not strictly necessary. And work at a library would suit his literary interests and provide some discipline in his life. I agreed with
Adrien we would wait a few days, think it over, and then approach Marcel together when he returns from Brittany. It is always better to show him that his parents are united in their ideas on the subject of his career.