Kitabı oku: «Letters to the Lady Upstairs»

Foreword

The present collection forms a real novel in miniature, and is the result of a surprise discovery: twenty-three letters written to a certain lady of whom at first we knew nothing, along with three to her husband. She turned out to have been Marcel Proust’s neighbour on the third floor of 102 Boulevard Haussmann, one Mme Marie Williams, the wife of an American dentist. Doctor Charles D. Williams’s dental practice was two floors above the mezzanine – that is, directly above the head of poor Marcel. And that was the source of more than one drama endured by that noise-phobic.

We know very little about her. Born Marie Pallu in 1885, she married first, in 1903, a certain Paul Emler, who worked for a maritime insurance company. With him she had a son in 1904 whom Proust knew. She divorced in July 1908, the year in which she moved into the building on Boulevard Haussmann. The dentist was her second husband (though not the last). Through Proust’s letters, she appears to us like a heroine in a Maupassant novel, perhaps Our Hearts, for instance – we know that that novel was inspired by Proust’s friend Mme Geneviève Straus, also a friend of Mme Williams, who, oddly, resembled her, as she also resembled the courtesan Laure Hayman, a model for Proust’s character Odette (as though, with her, Proust were testing the theory according to which one always loves the same type of woman).

We know what Proust’s housekeeper Céleste Albaret said about the couple: on the floor above, ‘there was that extraordinary man Williams, the American dentist. […] Williams was a sports enthusiast and went off every Saturday with his chauffeur to play golf. He had married an artist, very distinguished, very perfumed, who was a great admirer of Monsieur Proust and had told him so in her letters. I recall that she played the harp. Her apartment was on the third floor, above her husband’s office. M. Proust’s opinion was that they formed a “disparate” couple. I don’t think he knew Mme Williams, but they corresponded and I know that he rather liked her refined way of expressing herself in her letters.’¹

In this epistolary novel, the two correspondents compete in style: ‘Through a grace of generosity – or a play of reflections – you lend my letters some of the qualities of your own. Yours are delicious, delicious in heart, spirit, style, “talent”,’ writes Proust to Mme Williams, whose letters we do not have (as we do not have those of others of Proust’s correspondents, pages that were no doubt the victims of some sad auto-da-fé). What is intriguing is that these letters were exchanged between neighbours, from one floor to the other, sometimes even via the post. In each of them, Proust deployed all his charm towards Mme Williams, his sparkling humour, his cultivation, his skill with a compliment. Beyond his desire to please a neighbour who had some control over the silence he so needed, he felt a real sympathy for this other recluse, a kind of affection, as though, invisible yet present, she played the maternal role of that other ailing woman, Mme Straus.

What were the letters about? The noise first of all, the work being done on the floor above, which tormented Proust during the hours when he was sleeping and writing. ‘How right I was to be discreet when you wanted me to investigate whether the morning noise was coming from a sink. What was that compared to those hammers? “A shiver of water on moss” as Verlaine says of a song “that weeps only to please you”.’ In fact, Proust set each of his remarks within a humorous comparison that also achieved one more degree of art. For everything makes noise, even painters, who sing like a certain famous tenor: ‘Generally a painter, a house painter especially, believes he must cultivate at the same time as the art of Giotto that of Reszke. This one is quiet while the electrician bangs. I hope that when you return you will not find yourself surrounded by anything less than the Sistine frescoes …’

Music was also one of his subjects, because Mme Williams loved music and played the harp (perhaps also the piano): ‘Clary told me what a great musician you were. Will I never be able to come up and hear you? The Franck quartet, the Béatitudes, the Beethoven Quartets (all music that I have in fact here) are the objects of my most nostalgic desire.’

Proust, who described the hawthorns or the young girls in flower, admirer of Parsifal, with its flower-maidens and its ‘Enchantment of Good Friday’, placed flowers at the heart of his friendship and his correspondence. He sent bouquets to the young woman, and he delivered a dazzling speech on autumn roses in poetry. He was aware of being heir to the literary tradition of the language of flowers. He felt that ‘all women are tinted with the blood of roses’.² They recur in the title of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, which Proust was just then writing. He demonstrated his knowledge of poetry yet again in creating a pastiche, from memory, of the whole of the once celebrated sonnet by Félix Arvers (cited in Search). It is amusing to see that in The Guermantes Way Proust attributes this taste for quoting poetry to the footman Périgot, who, writing to peasants ‘whose stupefaction he anticipated […], intermingled his own reflections with Lamartine’s verses, as though he were saying: time will tell, or even: hello’.

Memory, in fact, was never very far away: ‘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.’ It was the memory of beauty that allowed these two infirm people to endure the ugliness that surrounded them. Proust was ill, and so was Mme Williams, who must not have been very happy with her often absent husband. We see her going off to take the cure at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne. Or: ‘It saddens me very much to learn that you are ill. If bed does not bore you too much I believe that in itself it exerts a very sedative effect on the kidneys. But perhaps you are bored (though it seems to me [word skipped: difficult?] to be bored with you). Couldn’t I send you some books. Tell me what would distract you, I would be so pleased.’ And, one summer, from Cabourg: ‘It seems natural to me that I should be ill. But at least illness ought to spare Youth, Beauty and Talent!’

In the depths of illness lies solitude: it is unusual to see Proust offering his company to a solitary woman (letter 18). His letters, which take to an extreme the art of insinuating himself into others’ hearts and minds, might have inspired jealousy in the husband. However, the misfortunes of the times came to outweigh them: the war, with its sorrows and its destruction. Reflecting this, for instance, is the very beautiful letter 25 about the bombing of the Reims Cathedral. Mme Williams had had a book delivered to Proust which we can identify as A. Demar-Latour’s 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] (see note 52). Proust comments on it after offering the opinion that the sculptures of Reims are both the heir of Greek antiquity and the heralds of Leonardo da Vinci’s smile: ‘But I who insofar as my health permits make to the stones of Reims pilgrimages as piously awestruck as to the stones of Venice believe I am justified in speaking of the diminution to humanity that will be consummated on the day when the arches that are already half burnt away collapse forever on those angels who without troubling themselves about the danger still gather marvellous fruits from the lush stylized foliage of the forest of stones.’ Worse than the destruction of stones is the death of men, and in witness to this is a very beautiful letter of condolence to Mme Williams in which Proust mentions the death of Bertrand de Fénelon, of which he speaks in all his letters of this period and which will be represented in the novel by the death of Robert de Saint-Loup, before he speaks to her of the death of her brother: ‘I myself have only an experience of sadness that is already very old and almost uninterrupted.’

Mme Williams took an interest in Proust’s writing. He was therefore careful to explain to her that it was not enough to have read Swann’s Way and the excerpts of the next volume published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1914 if she were to understand his novel. ‘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 designs 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.’ He also wanted her to know that the characters appeared very different from what they would be in the next volume, very different from what they were in reality. And he takes up, again, the example of Baron de Charlus, whom one believes to be Odette’s lover, whereas Swann is right to entrust him with his mistress (since Charlus is not attracted to women). And yet, he is also wrong, Proust declares, in a second reversal: Odette is the only woman with whom Charlus will have slept (a feature that in fact will not be retained in the final text of the novel and that was perhaps inspired in Proust by the brief and dramatic affair between Montesquiou and Sarah Bernhardt). One has to grasp the overall design of the book, says Proust, which is not possible unless one knows the content of the two following volumes (actually, The Guermantes Way and Time Found Again: at this stage of the composition, Proust believed he would be able to confine himself to a novel in three volumes).

And what of the husband – the absent figure in this comedy? The terzo incomodo? The dentist, who moved his practice to Deauville during the summer months, makes an appearance in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, described in this way by Albertine: ‘That little old fellow with the dyed hair and yellow gloves, well, he’s nicely turned out, not bad looking, he’s the Balbec dentist, a good guy.’ It is extraordinary to see how Proust allows nothing of his own life to be wasted. One might well suppose, then, that one could put a real name to each character, a real event to each event in his fiction.

Another figure often neglected by Proust’s biographers appears here, and that is Clary, an old friend of his and a descendant of a family linked to Napoleon. He was also a friend of Mme Williams. He was ill, and went blind (Proust was to use this feature for Charlus as an old man), and found solace in his religious faith, a fact emphasized by Proust in terms we don’t find elsewhere: ‘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.’

The tone of the letters is that of friendship, of ever growing intimacy, between two solitary people. Proust expresses the wish to go upstairs to the upper floor to listen to music, and he did go up at least once,³ took an interest in the Williamses’ young son (born in 1904; Proust watched him grow up, took pleasure in his visits, wanted to give him presents), and in Mme Williams’s health, and he lavished little comforts on her.

Lovely metaphors, and emotion, and irony, and rhythm: these are the letters of a great writer. We are induced to change our mind about Proust’s correspondence. When the first edition of the Correspondance générale [General correspondence] was published in six small volumes, edited first by Robert Proust and Paul Brach, and then, for volume 6, by Suzy Mante-Proust (with the assistance of Philip Kolb), between 1930 and 1936, there were cries of sycophancy, frivolous attachment to materiality, snobbery, and, finally, tedium. Some critics even imagined that it would be enough to read a selection. The truth is that, to an unimaginable degree, Proust puts himself in the place of the person whom he is addressing, pushing divination to the point of total fusion. He experiences the feelings of the other before the latter himself has become entirely aware of them; he imagines and feels better than does his interlocutor. He interrupts him to speak in his place.

We do not have the last letters sent to Mme Williams by Proust. Might they have contained touching farewells? Will they resurface one day like so many others, after having slumbered in unknown collections? The dentist left Boulevard Haussmann at the same time as Proust. Constrained to leave by the sale of the building, he moved on May 31, 1919. Proust did not talk to anyone about Mme Williams. As for her, she met a sad end: after divorcing the dentist, she married the great pianist Alexander Brailowsky, thus fulfilling a love of music that the dentist could hardly satisfy except with the sound of his drill. Then, in 1931, in a last and tragic piece of drama, she committed suicide. It had been a long time since Proust was there to make her laugh and comfort her.

As it stands, this dialogue, of which we can hear only one voice, being obliged to reconstruct the other from its reflection, its echo, has the beauty of those damaged statues on the Reims Cathedral as they were described by Proust, when he was sent their photograph by his neighbour.

JEAN-YVES TADIÉ

The notes can be found at the end of the book, beginning here.