CP 02902/en

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This page is a translated version of the page CP 02902 and the translation is 100% complete.


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Marcel Proust to Lucien Daudet [30 or 31 January 1915]

(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)

[1]

My dear little one,

I was very sorry to learn that you are still unwell. Have you had a high fever? Have you stayed in bed[2]? I was also sorry to not have been able to write to you. The day before I received word from you[3], I was out for the first time in an extremely long time (close to two and a half months[4]) and I had gone on a whim, around midnight (after having let her know) to Madame Edward’s[5]; an evening about which there is too much to say for the constraints of one letter[6], but which had left me shattered. In the following days, it was Céleste (now my only housemaid) who was tired, so that I couldn’t send her to visit you. Moreover, since I’ve been more unwell (which doubtless you didn’t know), my hours have once again become later, and at the time when I know that I would be able to have guests, I wouldn’t dare send you a message, and I’m sure in any case that you wouldn’t have been able to come without advance warning. My dear little one, these details are frightfully boring, but it's so that you know that I like nothing more than to see you, and if it weren’t impossible I would’ve seen you. I consoled myself by reading your brother's dazzling book, to whom I have not yet written[7]. But we are less eager for something we can admire than for a few words of politeness. I believe that you received a letter from me in Tours a month ago[8]. If nothing else, the business formula “I have received your communication of” is reassuring enough.

My dear little one, I stay silent due to a plethora of things to say, and moreover we don’t maintain “a correspondence,” so it’s too difficult to start. Tell me when you can come, and let me embrace you tenderly.

Your

Marcel

[9] [10]

Notes

  1. ↑ This letter dates from around the end of January 1915: it alludes to the recipient’s illness (see note 2), and to “your brother’s dazzling book” (note 7). As it predates by two or three days the following letter to Lucien Daudet, and it was sent within the same envelope (see CP 02905; Kolb, XIV, no. 16), it must be dated 30 or 31 of January 1915. [PK, FL]
  2. ↑ Madame Daudet notes in her Journal de famille et de guerre 1914-1919 (Paris, Fasquelle, 1920, p. 84), on the date of Sunday 31 [January 1915]: “The day after Odile’s baptism, Lucien returned to me with severe bronchitis, overwhelming fatigue”, and she “dreads the moment that he will leave”. Given that Odile Chauvelot’s baptism took place on Friday 15 January 1915, Lucien therefore had returned to Paris sick on Saturday 16 January, and on Sunday 31st, he had not yet left to go back to Tours. [PK, FL]
  3. ↑ Letter not found. This “word” from Lucien Daudet asking if he could come and visit Proust must date from the weekend of 9-10 January 1915. In fact, returning to Paris with bronchitis, he wouldn’t have proposed visiting Proust on Saturday the 16th, nor during the fortnight when he remained ill. This letter could not be dated to more than a few days before Saturday or Sunday, 30 or 31 January: Proust speaks about his outing which clashed with Daudet’s visit in the pluperfect, as an event largely anterior to the moment of writing the present letter, and he underlines the fact that Céleste Albaret had been tired "several days" afterwards, the reason why he had not been able to send a messenger. — For the date of his exceptional outing that had tired him too much to be able receive Lucien Daudet as a visitor the next day, see note 5 below. [FL]
  4. ↑ The rediscovered letters to Dr Samuel Pozzi attest that Proust, very ill on his return from Cabourg in the first days of October 1914 (CP 05409, notes 1 and 3), had gone for a consultation with Pozzi shortly before 24 October (see CP 05411, note 2, and CP 02830, notes 3 and 4; cf. Kolb, XIV, no. 179). If we ascribe the outing that prevented his receiving Lucien Daudet's visit that weekend to Friday 8 or Saturday 9 January 1915, Proust had therefore not gone out since the day of his visit to Pozzi, on about (or shortly before) 24 October 1914, in effect two and a half months earlier. [FL]
  5. ↑ According to Philip Kolb, the only outing that Proust made between the end of October 1914 and the end of January 1915 would have been motivated by his wish to present his condolences to Louis Gautier-Vignal for the death of his brother-in-law, Rudolphe de Foras, killed in action 27 September 1914, a visit that he places in November 1914 (Kolb, XIII, no. 13, note 3). But the correspondence with Gautier-Vignal does not mention any visit of condolence in October, November, or even December 1914: it is only on 7 January [1915] that Proust proposes to go and see him "one evening, very late, at your house" because he senses that he is unhappy "with a sadness without any cause that I am aware of", imagining him to de "relatively happy" (CP 02891; Kolb, XIV, no. 2; our italics). Having dated his letter (7 January), he no doubt was coming to receive the melancholy New Year wishes of Gautier-Vignal and clearly had no idea that the latter had lost his brother-in-law a few weeks earlier and, more recently, his brother Paul, killed in action 27 December 1914 - a death that he learned of not from the newspaper obituaries but from the reply of his correspondent (see his letter to Gautier-Vignal of [18 January 1915]: CP 02899; Kolb, XIV, no. 10). But Proust could not have made a late night visit to Gautier-Vignal around 7 or 18 January: his correspondent was in Nice during this whole time, the postmark proving where it was sent from (see note 1 to each of these letters). Not being able to prove this supposed visit of condolence to Gautier-Vignal (neither in November 1914, nor in January 1915), if we adhere to the information furnished by Proust in his letters to Lucien Daudet and Mme Scheikévitch (CP 02904; Kolb, XIV, no. 15): his only outing between the end of October 1914 and 31 January 1915 must therefore be the one he made to Mme Edwards, as he writes here. - In 1915, it was not unknown to him that Misia Godebska had been divorced from Alfred Edwards (her second husband) since February 1909 and had become the companion of the painter José Maria Sert (who she married later, in 1920); but at this period, a divorced woman was always referred to by the name of her ex-husband. [FL]
  6. ↑ Since the beginning of the First World War, when mobilization in mid summer had interrupted society life, Mme Edwards had remained a very active hostess, her connections with prominent government figures as much as with the advanced musical and literary circles made her salon a politico-artistic hotspot. According to her biography by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, New York, Vintage Books, 1992, p. 162-212), she had organized a network of ambulances from the beginning of the conflict, several leading couturiers whose premises had been closed having agreed to place their delivery wagons and motor vehicles at her disposal for use as ambulances, and she herself went to the front to bring back the wounded along with Sert and Cocteau (for whom the couturier Poiré had designed costumes that were appropriate in the context of the war). During the aerial bombardments over Paris, she went outdoors or onto her balcony with her guests to watch the spectacle, having an aesthetic and exalted vision of these unprecedented events. Her soirées brought together a number of artists, including Cocteau, Satie, Gide, Jacques-Émile Blanche, or the musicians and artists of the Ballets Russes whose careers she watched over. Due to the restrictions on coal, she entertained most often in her private apartment at the Hôtel Meurice, being unable to heat her apartment in 29, Quai Voltaire. — Even though Proust doesn't comment here in his letter to Lucien Daudet on this first society soirée he attended since mobilization ("too much to say"), he must have drawn from it a train of reflections which, augmented by those from numerous other soirées (notably in 1916-1917), enriched his depictions of Parisian social life during the war, and in particular the mutation of Mme Verdurin's "artistic" salon into one of the foremost politico-artistic salons (see RTP, IV, p. 301-313). [FL]
  7. ↑ According to his foreword, Léon Daudet's book, Devant la douleur. Souvenirs des milieux littéraires, politiques, artistiques et médicaux de 1880 à 1905. Deuxième série, Nouvelle Librairie nationale, was written and printed before the declaration of war. Its distribution however was quite recent: It was announced in Le Figaro, 21 January 1915, p. 4, under the heading "Vient de paraître" [Recent Publications]. [PK, FL]
  8. ↑ According to Philip Kolb, Proust was referring to a letter to Lucien Daudet "[shortly after 21 November 1914]" (CP 02850; Kolb, XIII, no. 199). But this letter dates from not "a month" but more than two months earlier and, given that it furnishes sensitive details of his relationship with Agostinelli and his grief over his death (as we learn from some unpublished passages printed in Christie's catalogue of 27 November 1996), it is difficult to imagine that Lucien Daudet would not have replied to such painful confidences. The letter sent a month earlier and without reply could rather be that of [Thursday 31? December 1914] (CP 02889; Kolb, XIII, no. 204), actually written just one month earlier, unless it is a question of another letter that has not been found. [FL]
  9. ↑ Translation notes:
  10. ↑ Contributors: Cbunning, IAndrews, Yorktaylors
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