Letters to the Lady Upstairs by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Marcel Proust]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

26

[late April – early May 1918?]56

Madame,

I am abashed (and delighted!) that you have written to me. You’re right in thinking that it wasn’t a matter of ‘sending flowers’. But a woman who has unique greenhouses having given me these two carnations which seemed to me truly rare, I sent them to you, after having hesitated between you, Helleu, and Jacques Blanche, that is to say, between three lovers of refined colours to whom one sends a flower as one would send a butterfly wing. I am glad about what you tell me concerning the imminent arrival of your son. I am glad above all for you. But also a little selfishly for myself as I would very much like to see mother and son. And to see the son would perhaps be less difficult. For an ill person feels, even so, his vanity less embarrassed in allowing all the sad apparatus of his illness to be seen by a child, even a charming one, than by a woman. Since you speak to me about my health, I ask your help for Sunday morning. Monday would be more logical since it is on Sunday that I must go to see friends and therefore Monday that I will be ill. But my request is on the contrary for Sunday. Because if on Sunday morning there is too much noise I will not be able to get up in the afternoon. —. I still have not been able to see Clary again and it grieves me very much. What fate that here in Paris where it is almost impossible to find one apartment near another, mother and son succeeded, perhaps by chance, in finding themselves adjacent, Madame Clary having only to knock on her kitchen wall for her son to hear her, and that she should have died without their seeing each other again. Already I carry around with me in my mind so many dissolved deaths, that each new one causes supersaturation and crystallizes all my griefs into an infrangible block. Most respectfully your grateful

MARCEL PROUST

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