CP 04852/en
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Colette to Marcel Proust [shortly before 11 December 1919]
(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)
LE MATIN 3, 4, 6 BOUL. POISSONNIÈRE 1, 3, 5 & 7, FAUB. POISSONNIÈRE PARIS (IXe ARRt)
Dear Sir, but from now on I would like to say dear friend,
You think I have been neglecting your submission[2], which I have been struggling to fit into the narrow, the ridiculously narrow columns of Le Matin[3]. I have already had it typeset in 8 point. But it's not enough. I beg you, as does Jouvenel, could you cut it by thirty lines[4]? Then it could go in straight way. I hope you don't object.
Trust me your friend,
Colette de Jouvenel
But please (as long as you agree) don't take out the part about the official despatches[5]!
Notes
- ↑ This letter seems to be dated shortly before 11 December 1919, the date on which the extract in question here appeared in Le Matin: see note 2. [PK]
- ↑ This is a section of the stay in Venice of À la recherche du temps perdu, which would appear in Le Matin of 11 December 1919, p. 2, section “Les Mille et un Matins”, under the title: “Mme de Villeparisis à Venise”. This extract seems to have been pending in Le Matin since September (see CP 03910 and 03924; Kolb, XVIII, no. 229 and no. 243). It should be noted that on 1 September 1919, the column "Les Mille et un Matins" published a "short story" entitled "La gondole au soleil" [The gongola in the sun], by Louis Lefebvre, member of the Association des Écrivains combattants, where the author compared in a nostalgic way the Venice of 1914 and Venice during the war. It is possible that it was reading this article that led Proust to choose an extract from his Venetian episode to appear in this same section, rather than an extract from À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs which, in the running for the Prix Goncourt, nevertheless presented a greater degree of literary topicality. [PK, FL]
- ↑ Colette, married since 1912 to Henry de Jouvenel, editor-in-chief of the daily Le Matin, then held the position of literary director of this same daily. [FL]
- ↑ The text initially sent to Le Matin not having been found, it is not known whether or not the published extract was shortened. Given that it occupies thirty-one lines more than the two columns provided for this section, it is not impossible that Colette, learning on 10 December 1919 that the Prix Goncourt had just been awarded to Proust, decided to publish as is the excerpt which was a little too long (even if it meant overflowing the section into a third column), this literary news justifying the publication, as is, of the winner's unpublished work. — We have almost no preparatory text to the episode offered by Proust to Le Matin. In fact, in Cahier XIV, a fair copy of the stay in Venice (1915-1916), we find, inserted in the form of a paperole, only a primitive version of this scene of the dinner of Norpois and Mme de Villeparisis, where the diplomatic remarks of Norpois concern the political crisis of 1905 with Morocco, in accordance with the chronology of the novel, and where the revelation by Mme Sazerat of the scandalous past of Mme de Villeparisis does not exist (see Cahier XIV, paginated paperole f. 96 r. pasted on f. 97 r.; for the transcription of this version, see AD, Esquisse XVI.1, pp. 699-702, or for a more complete transcription, Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Proust inachevé. Le dossier, "Albertine disparue", Paris, Champion, 2005, "Annexes", p. 301-304). Proust therefore profoundly reworked this episode in the fall of 1919 with a view to pre-publications in Le Matin and Les Feuillets d'Art (see note 5 below). [FL]
- ↑ The extract published in Le Matin is mainly centered on the scene where, in a restaurant in Venice, the protagonist observes a dinner between M. de Norpois and his old mistress Mme de Villeparisis during which the ambassador entrusts his friend with various diplomatic secrets that he just learned. In the version in Le Matin, Norpois mentions in particular "two dispatches from Ribot to Jonnart" which testify to the duplicity of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandre Ribot in June 1917, during the ultimatum undertaken by Jonnart to force the abdication of Constantine, the King of Greece. Indeed, King Constantine being under the control of the German ambassador, Charles Jonnart (1857-1927), appointed by Ribot on 25 May 1917 "High Commissioner of the Protective Powers of Greece, with full civil and military powers" , undertook at the beginning of June 1917 to land in Salamis on a warship at the same time as a French expeditionary force invaded Thessaly, and he demanded, on 10 June the abdication of King Constantine in favor of his second son, ultimatum accepted 12 June 1917. According to the words of Norpois, Ribot, "frightened by the violent action of Jonnart", would have tried to dissuade him in a first dispatch, then, after the success of this ultimatum, would have warmly congratulated in a second dispatch, affirming that he would have helped him in the event of any obstacle. This passage on the dispatches sent by Ribot, which no longer exists in Albertine disparue (RTP, IV, p. 211-212), was therefore not deleted by Proust from the extract intended for Le Matin. — We find the text that appeared in Le Matin (including Norpois's speech) in the (much longer) version of the Venetian episode published by Feuillets d'Art on 15 December 1919. Proust states in a letter to Robert de Billy [shortly after 15 December 1919] that it was the editors of this review who "completed the article by adding [the extract] published in Le Matin" (see CP 03994; Kolb, XVIII, no. 314), which would have forced him to cut out the dedication to Billy from the proofs at the last moment, for fear that such diplomatic gossip would harm the career of his friend, ambassador to Athens since 1917. (About Billy's diplomatic career and the question of this dedication, see Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, "Robert de Billy. 'Et puis c'est si amusant de causer avec vous' [And then it's so amusing to chat with you]", in Le Cercle de Proust, tome 3, ed. J.-Y. Tadié, Paris, Champion , “Recherches proustiennes” collection, 2021, pp. 142 and 148). Since the print copies intended for each of the two publications and the corrected proofs have not been found, it is impossible for us to verify Proust's assertions. In fact, it seems rather that Proust had taken for Le Matin a few pages of the episode initially intended for the Feuillets d'Art: in his letter of [14 or 15 October 1919] to Jacques Porel, he mentions "one thing that I wrote about Venice for […] le Feuillet d'Art [sic] from which I would like to detach a page for Le Matin which has been asking me for a page for so long” (see CP 03924; Kolb, XVIII, no. 243). Le Matin having therefore published the extract in question on 11 December, the editorial staff of the journal could have decided at the last moment to reinsert these pages in order to reconstitute the entire episode that Proust had entrusted to it. For the text of Les Feuillets d'Art and a comparison of its variants with that of Le Matin, see Nathalie Mauriac Dyer's transcription, Proust inachevé. “Albertine disparue,” Paris, Champion, 2005, “Annexes”, p. 325-341. — In Albertine disparue (RTP, IV, p. 209-213), Norpois' diplomatic indiscretions were modified when the 1922 typescript was made (see Mauriac Dyer, op. cit., p. 279-283), narrative consistency not making it possible to preserve the political events of 1917 (and even of September 1919 for the capture of Fiume by d'Annunzio, commented on by Norpois in this same extract from Le Matin) while the protagonist's stay in Venice is supposed to take place long before the First World War. [FL]
- ↑ Translation notes: Merci, Yorktaylors for sage advice. Not sure: in French 'Albertine disparue' ? (RTP, IV, p. 211-212),
- ↑ Contributors: Marcelitaswann, Yorktaylors