Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811224123
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Translator’s afterword

As we read these letters, it is helpful to picture the room in which Proust wrote them, and him in the room. Although one would imagine that the room would be preserved as a museum, even furnished with Proust’s own furniture (which is extant), that is not the case. Proud though the French are of one of their premier authors, the apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in which he lived for nearly twelve years and in which he wrote most of In Search of Lost Time is now part of the premises of a bank. Some years ago — I don’t know if this is still the case — it was, at least, possible to visit the room during the summer by appointment on Thursday afternoons. One was shown around by a bank employee, with interruptions when she had to go off and answer a banking question.

Proust’s bedroom was unpopulated for much of the day, unless it was being used for a meeting with a client or among bank officials. A portrait of Proust hung on the wall, but the talk in the room would have been about financial matters, and though financial matters interested the generous, extravagant, impulsive Proust — see the passage in letter 9 in which he tells Mme Williams that he was (several months before the start of WWI) “more or less completely ruined” — his spirit would probably not be present. It might drift in for a moment if those taking part in the meeting paused to recall him and his life and work. And French bankers and their clients would conceivably have a strong interest in and respect for Proust.

The room gave the impression of being rather small, perhaps because of its very high ceiling, which Proust’s housekeeper estimated to be some fourteen feet high. Yet Proust described it as “vast” when he made the difficult decision to rent the apartment, and in fact the room measured nine and a half paces by six, as a visitor without measuring tape might estimate it, which translates to roughly twenty-one feet by fifteen, or over three hundred square feet. Maybe it seemed small because it was so relatively empty, containing only a sideboard, a bookcase, a small table in the center, and four small chairs.

According to the bank employee-cum-guide, certain structural parts of the room were the same as they had been in Proust’s time: the two tall windows; two of the four doors; the moldings around the tops of the walls; the parquet floor; and the fireplace with its thick white marble mantel. There were few outward signs that this room had anything to do with Proust: in addition to the portrait on the wall, there was a short row of volumes of the Proust Society’s quarterly journal occupying part of one shelf in the otherwise empty glass-fronted bookcase, one that had not belonged to Proust; and, on the top of the sideboard, which also had not belonged to Proust, a small sign

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