CP 02992/en

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This page is a translated version of the page CP 02992 and the translation is 100% complete.
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Marcel Proust to Lionel Hauser Friday [27 August 1915]

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

Friday[1]

My dear Lionel

I actually wrote to you straight away to express my deep gratitude but my letter has been unlucky. Taken straight to Boulevard Flandrin[2] because it was too late for the rue de la Victoire[3], they said you no longer lived there. So the next day I sent it to the rue de la Victoire, you weren’t there[4]. Today (which makes it forty eight hours without you having any means of knowing that I am not ungrateful, which makes me feel ill) I sent back to the rue de la Victoire to ask for your new address (which should have been done in the first place) and they refused to give it out[5]. So I am going to send this note back again to rue de la Victoire in the hope that one day or another you will know of my gratitude.

You are very kind (and I fear a little mocking), when you say you read my letter with interest; because there is nothing more boring, except on the part of the questioner, than these requests for advice. But you can easily understand that in my case I read your reply with great interest, because in it you deal with general questions, such as the exchange rate, which I read as if it were an article in the Revue de Paris, only better written. In the meantime the director of the Agence du Crédit Industriel has come back from three months’ leave and sent me a detailed table of gains and losses. I should just say losses because nothing has gone up. On taking a closer look at the Rothschild account (I wanted to send you it but I was afraid of boring you to death) I see that the Jutland and the Dutch have too little presence to be of any use. On the other hand might large groups of Bank of Spain, Rio, La Plata, Santa Fé, Chilean 5%, Russia, perhaps benefit from the point of view of exchange rates? Don’t trouble yourself writing back to me. I’ll ask the Crédit Industriel and shudder that he might tell me that I need to sell. Because then I will have to confront Monsieur Neuburger. As for the shares that are not giving any interest, such as the Doubowaïa Balka, I would naturally prefer to sell them. But the capital has fallen too low. As for the Gold Mines, I don’t know if the war will profit them. But then they provide a good income.

I didn’t understand what you told me about my broker, but as I am not obliged to raise the securities[6], it is all the same to me. Moreover those shares are lower than in June. Nevertheless I’m going to write to him that he can put a stop to the gamble[7], if he wishes. You have been of course kind, clever, delightful, in all of your advice and giving it to me so quickly and in so much detail. But it seems to me (and I say this very affectionately), that you have been a little less so when you said you were happy that I had been assigned into the armed services because you know very well that in my current state of health it would be the death of me in forty eight hours. To be sure there is nothing pleasant about the life I lead and even knowing that I can be of no use whatsoever to the army, I am making myself useful by allowing myself to be excluded. But I very much want to finish the book I have started and put into it the truths that I know will give many people sustenance and which otherwise will perish along with me. But anyway (and this is my primary reason for my delay in thanking you) just after I received your letter I was unexpectedly informed of the visit of some new military doctors, to my great astonishment because I had been deferred for six months (no doubt due to the Dalbiez act[8]). The consequence was that on the contrary I am being put forward for Discharge. I hope I am not causing you any distress by telling you this.

Please don’t take this last part of my letter other than how it was written, which is to say “cum grano salis”, and rather in the fullness of its meaning that you believe me to be your grateful and affectionate,

Marcel Proust

Please don’t tell anybody what I told you about my brother[9] because he hasn’t told anyone, I only found out about it indirectly, it has never interrupted his work and I hope he will get over it fully.

P.S. Now that I have been reviewed again I shall try to make one or two tentative efforts to go out. The first will be to come and thank you, if I am able to join you. And then ask you if you possess a copy of my book illustrated by Madame Lemaire (Les Plaisirs et les Jours). If not I’ll be happy to send it to you, it is pretty enough to look at so even without taking the trouble to read it you might at least take some pleasure in looking at the drawings. Perhaps I have already given you it. I no longer remember.

I have discovered (I’m jumping back to the first matter) that the Egyptian Bonds, the Swiss Federal Rail, the Tunisian, the Revenue, the Suez have fallen too low to sell. Provisionally I have stopped at the Nitrates and the Water Company

[10] [11]

Notes

  1. ↑ Written in reply to Lionel Hauser's letter dated 24 August 1915 (CP 02991; Kolb, XIV, no. 103), this letter, written "48 hours" after Hauser's (according to Proust's explanations), must date from Friday 27 August 1915. [PK]
  2. ↑ M. and Mme Lionel Hauser lived in a private town house at 15, boulevard Flandrin (see Tout-Paris, 1912, p. 281) before their move which Proust clearly did not know about. [PK]
  3. ↑ In July 1914, Lionel Hauser and Co had left 22, rue de l'Arcade and had moved their offices to 92, rue de la Victoire. [PK]
  4. ↑ In his (almost immediate) reply of 28 August 1915 (CP 02993; Kolb, XIV, no. 105), Hauser responds to these insinuations that he has been absent from work by saying that he has "not missed a single day" since April and that Proust's messenger must not have gone up to his office because nobody at the bank had seen him for a long time. [FL]
  5. ↑ In his reply of 28 August 1915 (CP 02993; Kolb, XIV, no. 105), Hauser gives him his new address (18, rue de l'Observatoire, 5th floor) and guesses that Proust's messenger just asked the concierge at 92, rue de la Victoire, rather than going up to the office of the bank where he would have been given the information. [FL]
  6. ↑ In his letter of 24 August 1915 (CP 02991; Kolb, XIV, no. 103), Hauser had indeed pointed out to Proust, with regard to his "position as broker", that he was not "bound" to take up his securities, "because liquidation will only take place if we find it possible to continue to report on those which do not need to be either taken up or sold", and that "this was the reason his broker asked for his instructions because it is only by understanding their clients' intentions that brokers can determine the sum needed to enact the liquidation". After more than a year's moratorium, most financiers, from around August 1915 onward, were hoping that stock market and other financial transactions could quickly be resumed. [FL]
  7. ↑ This was exactly the advice that Hauser had given Proust in his letter of 24 August 1915 (CP 02991; Kolb, XIV, no. 103). [FL]
  8. ↑ The Dalbiez act, voted for in the Senate on 12 August 1915 and ratified by the Chamber of Deputies on 13 August, aimed to round up the "shirkers". See the article "The Dalbiez law", Le Figaro, 4 June 1915. [PK]
  9. ↑ See the letter to Hauser of [23 August 1915] (CP 02990; Kolb, XIV, no. 102), in which Proust says that his brother Robert has been suffering from dysentery for the last eight months but that he did not want it spoken about so as not to interrupt his work. [PK]
  10. ↑ Translation notes:
  11. ↑ Contributors: Yorktaylors
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