CP 03100/en

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This page is a translated version of the page CP 03100 and the translation is 100% complete.
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Marcel Proust to Lionel Hauser Wednesday 17 May 1916

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

Wednesday 17 May 1916[1]

My dearest Lionel

You cannot imagine how touched I am that you have taken it upon yourself to see to it that my interest payments are reduced. It is not only your faculties that amaze me, but the generosity with which you employ them. I don’t know who this selfless and miracle-working banker of yours is[2], but that you have found him so promptly arouses my boundless admiration for your keen intuition. I am also sorry to learn that you are not Portuguese[3], not only because of the cliché, “Les Portugais / Sont toujours gais ”[4] but because I would have tried to make this epistle as sensational as the notorious “Letters of a Portuguese Nun”[5]. In any case, it was before I found out that you were English that I made note of my partiality towards the United Kingdom in my works on Ruskin[6].

That being said, my reply is only as clear as a terrible crisis and seventy hours of insomnia will allow. I no longer have accounts with the brokers. I have paid Léon, Wellhoff[7] etc. My only broker is the Crédit Industriel (Carpet and Mexico). You have a list with your office of the securities I own[8] (the only subsequent sales being Interborough, Dutch, Saragossa, Maïkop and North Spanish). I own, for example, 57 stocks in the Compagnie des Eaux[9] and Russian bonds. You only have to refer to the tables that you had drawn up[10]. The Crédit Industriel does not send out statements of shares, except on the occasions when I have explicitly requested them. The details of the account that I closed with them on 31 March is in the enclosed papers, but it cannot be of much use to you: this is why. My 2080 account is with them, which is complicated by the open credit account[11] and the liquidation account. On the other hand, having deposited certain Rothschild shares with them, whose sale was supposed to extinguish my debt and of which none except those mentioned above could be sold, I had a second separate account opened so that the income from these shares would not be absorbed by the open credit. This second account can only be in the black. They sent me the quarterly statement of the other account (2080) but not for this one, presumably because it is new.

In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to (happily) accept your banker’s offer and see to it that he tries to pay the lowest possible amount to the Crédit Industriel (by immediately selling off the Carpet and the unsold Mexico stocks, the Banco Español del Río de la Plata for example). - (For Doubowaïa I am told that it’s performing well at the moment. As you can imagine). Once we have decided on the amount that will remain to be paid to the Crédit Industriel, without worrying if they are guaranteed shares, or whether they are Rothschild or Hauser shares, we would give your banker the best-performing ones up to the price he asks. For example, if the top-quality Rothschild and Industriel securities were not enough, we could make it up with some of the 5% you bought from me, even if it means replacing it with an equivalent amount of less solid Crédit Industriel shares (preferably taken from the 2080 account because I opened the other one so recently).

In a word, gratitude, joy, total and unconditional devotion; these are the feelings of your ever-appreciative beneficiary

Marcel Proust

Enclosed is the heard-earned receipt from Suez[12].

[13] [14]

Notes

  1. ↑ This letter dates from the same day as the one to which Proust is replying (CP 03099; Kolb, XV, no. 35). [PK]
  2. ↑ In 1912 Proust had obtained an advance of 218,000 francs from the Crédit industriel et commercial, upon which he was paying 8% annual interest (Gian Balsamo, Proust and his Banker: In Search of Time Squandered, Columbia, South Carolina, The University of South Carolina Press, 2017, p. 38). In his letter of 17 May 1916 Hauser announced that he had found another establishment prepared to accept a transfer of this debt at a more advantageous rate of interest of 5% (CP 03099; Kolb, XV, no. 35). For the moment he did not disclose the name of the bank and only revealed it once the transaction was completed (CP 03123; Kolb, XV, no. 59). [FP]
  3. ↑ Hauser had written, in his letter of 17 May 1916 (CP 03099; Kolb, XV, no. 35): "I have never been of Portuguese nationality." [PK]
  4. ↑ Chorus from the comic opera Le Jour et la Nuit (1881), music by Charles Lecocq, libretto by Alberto Van Loo and Eugène Leterrier: see the transcription for piano. [PK, FP]
  5. ↑ Up until the beginning of the twentieth century these letters were considered to be authentic, and attributed to a Portuguese nun, Marianne Alcaforada. It was only in 1926 that the theory was advanced, and later confirmed, that they were a work of fiction written by the Comte de Guilleragues. [FL]
  6. ↑ Allusion to Proust's reading of Ruskin from 1899, leading to articles and studies published between 1900 and 1903, and to his copiously annotated translations La Bible d'Amiens (1904) and Sésame et les lys (1906). [PK, FL]
  7. ↑ Refers to the house of Wellhoff, Neustadtl et Cie, bankers. [PK]
  8. ↑ Proust had sent Hauser a list of the shares he held with Rothschild brothers and with the Crédit industriel et commercial in his letter of Friday 22 October 1915 (CP 03006; Kolb, XIV, no. 118). The sales of shares set to repay his debt was actioned in November 1915. [PK, CB]
  9. ↑ Refers no doubt to the General Water Company. - In the novel, the narrator's father consults M. Norpois about some investments he has made on behalf of his son, showing to him some of the share certificates; described thus: "in its rectangular and floral border, held aloft by river deities, a registered share in the Water Company." (RTP, I, 446.) [PK, FP]
  10. ↑ An apparent allusion to the statement of Proust's accounts and their analysis which Hauser had sent him in his letter of 29 October 1915 (CP 03013; Kolb, XIV, no. 125). [PK]
  11. ↑ See note 2 above. It was through taking out credit with the Crédit industriel et commercial that had allowed Proust to purchase an enormous stock in Doubowaïa Balka, which he then ordered to be sold before the outbreak of war. See the letters written to Hauser on 26 July [1914] and [about 28 July 1914] (CP 02805 and CP 02807; Kolb, XIII, no. 154 and no. 156). [PK, FP]
  12. ↑ Hauser had asked for the receipt for the 31 shares in the Société civile de Suez in his letter of 17 May 1916 (CP 03099; Kolb, XV, no. 35). [PK]
  13. ↑ Translation notes:
  14. ↑ Contributors: Jciaccia, Yorktaylors
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