CP 02970/en
Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac to Marcel Proust [beginning of July 1915]
(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)
Dear Marcel,
I do not think I need to contradict you when you write “everybody will have their favourites”.[2]
I do not know what my “Offerings” are equal to; but I am starting to think that they are equal to each other, since everyone tells me, in fact, that they like one of them which is one that has not been mentioned to me by anyone else. Is that not something of a justification for all of them?
Then I take out just one, replace it, add a dozen more, and the book is reprinted[3] like that, brought, as I wanted, up to two hundred pieces by this addition.
But the well is not dry, and I will compose more of them for those who love them.
I do not believe in your visit, not that I say, like Madame Valmore:
To feel such happiness, I have waited too long…[4]
But, so long postponed, such an event would take on, today, the proportions of a “sign in the heavens”; there are plenty of those already[5].
I do however hold dear the wish to believe probable, imminent even, that which is not to be, even though we know that that is the case; it is the only way to tolerate the fact that life can come to an end without consultation, and can terminate without warning.
We are not, alas! “people who see each other” as those people say who we should never have chosen to give such a label.
I have often suggested that I come and see you[6]; you never seem to have heard.
Similarly for the book,[7] which I have offered to send you[8].
When one is anxious for some things there is no need to credit their existence in order to allow time for them to happen; we must repeat, like in the story about Stevens: “If you were to die this very night![9]"
There is between us, from now on, a wall of ice. It contains, keeps and preserves fresh and coloured flowers; we see them, but without being able to touch them[10].
Robert de Montesquiou.
1915.
Notes
- ↑ Reply to the letter CP 02969, which can be dated as [beginning of July 1915]. See also note 3. [PK, FP]
- ↑ Proust had written: "Everybody will have their favourites from your Offrandes [...]". [PK, FP]
- ↑ A "new revised and extended edition" of Offrandes blessées shows the colophon 13 July 1915. [PK, FP]
- ↑ Approximate quotation of the line: "That there may be happiness, I have waited too long". (Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, "Le Message", Poésies, t. II, Paris, A. Boulland, 1830, p. 198.). [PK, FP]
- ↑ Probable allusion to the zeppelins and aeroplanes dropping bombs over Paris in spring 1915. See for example "A Taube over Paris", Le Figaro, 23 May 1915, p. 1. [PK, FP]
- ↑ No letter has been found from 1914 or 1915 in which Montesquiou proposes a visit to Proust. It is often the case that in their letters, even before the war, Proust claims that he intends to visit his correspondent, but in fact always "puts it off", notably in January 1914 (CP 02661 and CP 02662; Kolb, XIII, no. 9 and no. 10). [FP]
- ↑ See note 4 of letter CP 02969 to which this is the reply.
- ↑ This letter has not been found. [FP]
- ↑ Approximate quotation from a scene where Jean-Christophe says to his friend Olivier Jeannin, who is in love with Colette Stevens: "You count too much on the centuries. Prepare yourself [...] Because you never know whether the Lord will not pass before your door this night". (Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe à Paris : Dans la maison, Paris, Ollendorff, 1909, p. 231-232.) [PK, FP]
- ↑ Montesquiou is adapting an image that he has used before in a letter of January 1914: "your memory remains for me, like a bouquet frozen in the ice [...]" (CP 02661; Kolb, XIII, p.44). [FP]
- ↑ Translation notes:
- ↑ Contributors: Yorktaylors