CP 03988/en
Marcel Proust to André Chaumeix, [shortly after 12 December 1919 ]
(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)
44 rue Hamelin
Dear Sir,
I have only just received your letter[2] and I am much obliged. I see that mine was the result of an error. I thought you were the director, or editor-in-chief and so I thought you could have an article written. But never, even when I thought it to be true, did it enter my mind to ask you to exert your influence over M. de Pierrefeu[3], in one way or another. I have too much respect for freedom of thought, and if you had the power to do so, I would have been sorry had you used it. Simply put, my concern was that you commissioned the article from someone hostile rather than favourable, especially after the misunderstandings in the press arising from an illness that prevented me from receiving journalists, my editors received them badly, which upset them, and the absurd idea that the money politics complicated everything. Naturally, I have not corrected anything that concerns my age, my financial situation, or political opinions, etc. Alas, you are no longer the literary critic of the Débats, nor its director. But your sympathy is more precious to me than the articles you would have written about me in the first case, or in the second case, to have had written about me. To put all this to rest, if you were to get the chance to speak to M. de Pierrefeu, you could tell him that the last chapter of my novel, having been written before the first[4], and all the writing having been done and dusted, he will not have to wait for my death to see À la Recherche du Temps Perdu finished[5] (I recognise that this loathsome title may betray the strict structure of the book). This story is so rigid[6] that M. Francis Jammes, having urged me to remove from Du Côté de chez Swann a scene that shocked him[7], I was on the verge of giving in to his request, this scene being in fact irrelevant to the first volume. But I realised that if I removed it, the third and fourth volumes would be destroyed since it is the recollection of this scene which, in inspiring the jealousy of the narrator, (he who says “I” and who is not necessarily me)[8] brought on what one would call in the the theatre, “peripeteia”[9]. I refuse, then, Les Débats not having dealt with la Vie Heureuse[10], any rectification. I will send you my article on Flaubert[11] once it is published, not so that you can talk about it, since you do not have the kind of situation in Les Débats that I thought you had, but so, in case you are kind enough to read it, you see that I pay more attention to matters of grammar than what is suggested. Besides, what artist has not been told that he could not draw? What musician has not been told that he could not harmonise?
All of this does not prevent M. de Pierrefeu from being very talented, and he is quite right to say when he likes something, and to say when he does not.
Please accept, dear Sir, with my deep gratitude and sympathy, this expression of my admiration and devotion.
Marcel Proust