Rooms of One's Own by Adrian Mourby

Author:Adrian Mourby [Adrian Mourby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785781865
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

PARIS

BOULEVARD HAUSSMANN – MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922)

Marcel Proust lived most of his childhood and early adulthood in Boulevard Malesherbes, a three-minute walk from L’église de la Madeleine. Gabriel Fauré was the church’s resident organist at this time and Fauré’s first violin sonata, written when Proust was just four years old, is thought by some to be the inspiration for the ‘little phrase’ that infiltrates Swann’s mind in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.

These days there’s a Bowen shoe shop on the ground floor of this identikit Baron Haussmann apartment block. My wife looked inside while I took some photos and tried to get a feel for this area which Proust called ‘one of the ugliest parts of town’. The writer loved his parents dearly, but clearly wished they had not chosen to raise him in this upwardly-mobile arrondissement. Proust’s spiritual home was Faubourg St Germain where France’s superannuated aristocrats were sitting out their decline in grand townhouses, or hôtels particuliers.

In 1905, after the death of both his parents, the 34-year-old Proust moved not to his beloved St Germain but no distance at all to an apartment that had belonged to his maternal uncle. Because his adored mother had taken him to visit the apartment, Proust claimed that it exercised ‘a tender and melancholy attraction’. Here on the second floor of 102 Boulevard Haussman the author lived from 1906 to 1919, penning his seven-volume masterwork and growing increasingly eccentric as he wrote through the night and slept through the day in his cork-lined bedroom.

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