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Marcel Proust to Léon Bailby [9 Decembre 1914]

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

102 bd Haussmann[1]

My dear Léon[2]

If it isn’t too much of a nuisance to you I would like to ask your advice, not as Director of L’Intransigeant[3] but as a reserve officer and above all as a friend[4]. In a word, after having completed my military service in the infantry[5] (and at present having pulled more "strings" to avoid being discharged than many others have done in order to be), and being too ill I was later appointed as an administrative officer[6]. But as my health worsened I have never exercised any of those duties (even though I have been promoted in seniority!), so that four years ago[7] after a visit from a major[8], I was struck off the lists on health grounds by presidential order[9].

When I was told this summer that all discharged men would have to appear before a review board and would have to register at the Town Hall[10], I was very ill, not at all well informed, and so as not to risk disobeying the rules I had myself registered at the Town Hall[11]. I told the person who was taking care of this task[12] to provide the information that was asked of them, but as there was no mention of the question of being an "officer", I judged that it was pointless to flaunt my rank, not being familiar with the procedures. So now I’m going from one day to the next thinking that I’m about to be summoned before a review board. But a friend of mine who is a reserve officer[13] passing through Paris and coming up to see me the other day and who I informed of all this, told me (I don’t know how well informed he is) firstly that this counter discharge only applied to privates and not to officers. Secondly that when the review board saw that I was an officer they wouldn’t make me undergo an examination and that I would have tired myself unnecessarily. As for the second point I think that I should just wait to be summoned and then immediately ask at H.Q.[14] to forestall my recruitment so that instead of going to the review board I would report to H.Q. What I would like best would be to not make any visits at all, my medical certificates establishing my total incapacity[15], and in any case when I published my book Le Temps and other papers came to interview me[16], and their reporters said that they came to my bedside and that I hadn’t left it for years[17]. But at that time nobody could foresee what was to come and it couldn’t have been a means of ensuring a "cushy number"[18]! But in the end, if I have to be seen I would prefer to put myself out and report to H.Q. rather than letting a major suffer my fumigations where the chances are that he would find me in the middle of one, and which make the atmosphere in my room unbreathable. Then again maybe there won’t be any need for them to make a visit at all if the counter discharge doesn’t apply to officers. And this is where you can perhaps advise me, because I seem to recall that at Versailles when you were such a fine cavalryman, you were a reserve officer[19]. If you can’t answer this please don’t bother to ask at H.Q., because d’Albufera is going to give me a letter[20] for Major de Sachs[21] who is there, and plus I know Reinach who is bound to be there too[22]. (Which of them would be best?) Your intervention will only be valuable to me (and very much so) if you are well enough acquainted with the officer I am depending upon, who is Director of the Department of Health (Inspector M. Février I think) to settle everything with regard to my certificates. But that’s not really likely. Although perhaps you can tell me in any case if the counter discharge would apply to officers.

Dear Léon, I am deliberately confining myself to practical advice that I need to ask you. Otherwise there would be too much to say! I wrote to you[23] last summer I think, after my terrible sorrow[24], before the thunderbolt of war. Since then I have been trembling for the lives of dear ones just like everybody else. You have no doubt heard that my brother’s hospital at Étain was bombarded while he was operating and since then he has never stopped putting himself in terrible danger - and meeting it head on. At the moment he’s in the Argonne[25] but I’ve had no news for a month. I hope that you don’t have too many anxieties and sorrows on your part. If you reply I would be very pleased to hear your news about Albert Flament[26]. As an unimportant detail I’d like to know which idiotic windbag you were alluding to yesterday, talking about the "synthesis of courage"!

To you my dear Léon with all my heart, united together in the same terrible anguish and the same great hopes

Your Marcel Proust

[27] [28]

Notes

  1. ↑ The mention at the end of the letter of an article published "yesterday" (Léon Bailby, "Notes de guerre : La question du silence", L’Intransigeant, 9 December 1914) allows us to establish the date. L'Intransigeant being an evening paper, the issue dated 9 December would have actually come out on 8 December. By referring to it on the following day Proust must have written on 9 December. [FP, FL]
  2. ↑ Only two other letters from Proust to Léon Bailby have been found, from 1 September [1910] (CP 04844; Kolb, XX, no. 367) and [20 July 1922] (CP 05118; Kolb, XXI, no. 257). There is currently no biography, but the Wikipedia entry about Léon Bailby is richly documented. [FP]
  3. ↑ Bailby was editor in chief at La Presse from 1896 to 1905, then L'Intransigeant of which he became major shareholder and director 1908 (Roland Ropion, "Un grand patron de presse d’origine tourangelle : Léon Bailby 1867-1954", Bulletin de la Société archéologique de Touraine, 2007, p. 272-273). [FP]
  4. ↑ Proust and Bailby had known each other since 1894: for information about their friendship see Will L. McLendon, "Lettre de Marcel Proust à Léon Bailby", Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust, 1971, no. 21, p. 1121-1130) et F. Proulx, "Une lettre à Léon Bailby", Bulletin d'informations proustiennes, no. 48, 2018, p. 15-23. [FP]
  5. ↑ Proust performed his military service at Orléans under the one year volunteer regulation, from November 1889 to November 1890: see Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust (Paris, Gallimard, 1996), p. 123-130 et p. 135-137. [FP]
  6. ↑ In his military record Proust is named as "assistant officer 2nd class reserve (administration) to the military hospital attached to the Health Service of the Military Government, Paris" 4 October 1893, then "administrative officer 2nd class" 8 June 1901. [FP]
  7. ↑ Actually in September 1911 : see note 9 below. [FP]
  8. ↑ It is unknown whether such a visit actually took place. [FP]
  9. ↑ Proust was struck from the lists in 1911, thanks to the intervention of Émile Calmette (brother of Gaston Calmette, director of Le Figaro), medical inspector and director of the Health Service of the Military Government, Paris. See the letter from the Minister of War to Marcel Proust 6 September 1911 (CP 02225 ; Kolb, X, no. 168) and the letter from Proust to Gaston Calmette explaining that this decision "came in fact from your own brother" (CP 02228 ; Kolb, X, no. 171). At the time of the call up of reserve ranks in autumn 1914, Proust was worried that his exceptional situation - he had been removed from the lists without going before a discharge board - could go against him. [FP]
  10. ↑ See article 1 of the "Order relating to the attendance of those exempt and discharged among the ranks of those not yet released from their military obligations" signed by the Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, 15 septembre 1914: "All men placed in the situation of discharge through dismissal [...] as well as men exempted by the review board, belonging by age to a rank still subject to military obligations, must make, within eight days, a declaration of their military situation at the town hall of their current place of residence." [FP]
  11. ↑ The date of this registration is uncertain. Proust explained to Reynaldo Hahn, [shortly after 24 October]: "In any case I have been registered. What gets one out of it is a visible infirmity, like a missing thumb or something. Illnesses such as asthma can’t be discerned." (CP 02830; Kolb, XIV, no. 176 ; Lettres, no. 396). He wrote [16 November 1914, or shortly afterwards] to Lucien Daudet: "I have been stupid because I didn’t need to get myself registered, having been struck from the lists" (CP 02844; Kolb, XIII, no. 193 ; Lettres, no. 397). See also note 22 below. [FP]
  12. ↑ Céleste Albaret perhaps, although she makes no mention of this registration in her memoirs (Monsieur Proust, propos recueillis par Georges Belmont, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1973); Ernest Forssgren makes no mention of it either (The Memoirs of Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish Valet, éd. William C. Carter, Yale University Press, 2006). [FP]
  13. ↑ In all probability Clément de Maugny (1873-1944). Proust wrote to Lucien Daudet [16 November 1914, or shortly afterwards]: "these Boards are only for privates, according to what Clément de Maugny told me, when he came to see me one evening as he was passing through Paris" (CP 02844; Kolb, XIII, no. 193 ; Lettres, no. 397). For details about Clément de Maugny's military service and his visits to Proust during the war, see Yves Kinossian and Martine Simon-Perret, Marcel Proust, Clément de Maugny et le Chablais, Annecy, Archives départementales de la Haute-Savoie, 2010, p. 82-90. [FP]
  14. ↑ "La Place" in French. In military jargon it means the military administration at the level of a town. It was there that the review boards were located as well as the military medical offices. [PK]
  15. ↑ By 9 December 1914 Proust had obtained medical certificates from Maurice Bize (CP 05838 and CP 05839), Léon Faisans (CP 05641) and Samuel Pozzi (certificate has not been found; see "Marcel Proust et 'Docteur Dieu' : lettres inédites à Samuel Pozzi", Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust, no. 51, 2001, p. 29). [FP]
  16. ↑ On publication of Du côté de chez Swann the previous year, Proust had been interviewed by Élie-Joseph Bois ("Variétés littéraires : 'À la recherche du temps perdu'", Le Temps, 13 novembre 1913, p. 4) and André Arnyvelde [pseudonym of André Lévy] ("À propos d’un livre récent : L’œuvre écrite dans la chambre close. Chez M. Marcel Proust", Le Miroir, 21 décembre 1913, n. p.). [FP]
  17. ↑ André Arnyvelde had actually written: "M. Marcel Proust spoke to me in his large, dimly-lit bedroom which he hardly ever leaves" (our italics). [FP]
  18. ↑ Proust must have seen a series of articles in L'Intransigeant, "Les embusqués" ("Those not at the Front") (29 November 1914), "Vrais et faux embusqués" ("Those genuinely and falsely not at the Front") (3 December 1914) and "Ceux qui ne partent pas" ("Those who will not go") (8 December 1914) in which Bailby denounces the zeal of the review boards who "accept as fit for service every category of the able-bodied and... invalids, the partially well and those declared unfit" ("Vrais et faux embusqués"), (3 December 1914); these articles may perhaps have motivated this letter, written on 9 December 1914. Proust took up the argument he makes here in a letter to Joseph Reinach [shortly after mid-January 1915]: "I was 'interviewed' by Le Temps and various other newspapers over a year ago when there was no question of 'avoiding the call up', they wrote [...] that for the last ten years I never got out of bed more than once in a month" (CP 02896; Kolb, XIV, no. 7). A note by Philip Kolb clarifies this as "Exaggeration", citing in support the interviews in Le Temps and Le Miroir (Kolb, XIV, no.7, n. 14). [FP]
  19. ↑ Bailby recounts volunteering for service in a chapter of Pourquoi je me suis battu : Souvenirs (Paris, Plon, 1951), (Why I fought: Recollections). He was assigned in Rouen to a cavalry regiment, the 12e chasseurs à cheval (p. 21-25), then became a second lieutenant of reserves at Versailles. While there he met a certain Charles Morel, "artist, draughtsman, pupil and friend of Detaille" (p. 31), who, along with his wife, introduced him to Wagner "for the first time". Bailby immediately continues with another associated memory: "the second introduction I received came from Marcel Proust" (p. 32). But he does not give any dates for these events, and does not confirm whether Proust himself ever met the man who shared his name with the violinist in A la Recherche. The next date he mentions is January 1896 (p. 47). [FP]
  20. ↑ Proust wrote to Joseph Reinach, [shortly after mid-January 1915]: "I haven't made use of the letters that d'Albufera gave me for H.Q. (which I am depending on, and not Recruitment)" (CP 02896; Kolb, XIV, no. 7). The letters in question have not been found (Kolb, XIV, p. 34, n. 5). [PK, FP]
  21. ↑ See the Légion d'honneur dossier for Major Paul de Sachs. Three official letters written by Major de Sachs to Marcel Proust on the subject of his "case" have survived, dated 26 July 1915 (CP 02981; Kolb, XIV, no. 93), 28 July (CP 02982; Kolb, XIV, no. 94) and 10 September (CP 02998; Kolb, XIV, no. 110). [FP]
  22. ↑ About mid-November 1914 Proust asked Joseph Reinach for the same information as he was asking here from Léon Bailby: as a reserve officer might he be called before a counter discharge board? Such an eventuality is broached in two letters from Proust to Reinach in mid-January 1915 (CP 02896 et CP 02897; Kolb, XIV, no. 7 and no. 8). Reinach, Deputy from 1889 to 1898 and from 1906 to 31 May 1914, almost certainly had contacts in the Ministry of War. In the second of his two letters Proust recounts: "Fr. de Madrazo told me from you two months ago that without any possible doubt my being struck from the lists would release me from any military obligations. On the strength of that assertion, I did not avail myself of my rank as officer [...] I did what you told me at the time (that is to say applied to the Town Hall), [...]" [FP]
  23. ↑ Letter not found. [FP]
  24. ↑ The death of Alfred Agostinelli on 30 May 1914. [FP]
  25. ↑ Proust likewise wrote to Georges de Lauris [30 November 1914]: "my brother whose hospital at Étain was bombarded while he was carrying out operations [...] is now in the Argonne and is causing me terrible anxiety" (CP 02852; Kolb, XIII, no. 201); similarly to Mme Scheikévitch, 9 January 1915 (CP 02892; Kolb, XIV, no. 3). [FP]
  26. ↑ Albert Flament (1877-1956) was the long time companion of Léon Bailby. See F. Proulx, "Une lettre à Léon Bailby", Bulletin d'informations proustiennes, 2018, no. 48, p. 16-17, also the Wikipedia article about Léon Bailby, which cites numerous sources on the subject. In his letter of [20 July 1922] to Bailby, Proust shows the same politeness, and asks in a P.S.: "How is Albert" (CP 05118; Kolb, XXI, no. 257). Similarly on a visiting card sent to Flament [24? December 1913] he writes: "Tell Léon that [...]" (Françoise Leriche, "Trois lettres à Albert Flament", Bulletin d'informations proustiennes, 2018, no. 48, p. 13). [FP]
  27. ↑ Translation notes:
  28. ↑ Contributors: Yorktaylors.
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