Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [24]
The melancholy Hahn had already concluded: “The pleasure that love offers is not really worth the happiness that it destroys.” In a similar vein Proust wrote, in “Critique of Hope in the Light of Love” (published in Pleasures and Days), that there is nothing worse than a collapse of trust in love, although if an end to trust kills love in the present and the future, it cannot affect memories of a shared past in a happier time: “Come closer, my dear little friend. Dry your eyes so that you can see—I don’t know if tears are blurring my vision but I think I can pick out, over there, behind us, bonfires that are being lit. Oh! My dear little friend, how I love you. Give me your hand, let’s go without getting too close to these fires. I think that it is Memory, indulgent and powerful, who wishes us well and is about to do so much for us, my dear.”
Almost seamlessly Proust left Hahn for Lucien Daudet, who became his new focus of amorous interest in 1896 and 1897. Lucien was even younger than Reynaldo (and seven years younger than Proust), but wonderfully cultivated; he was nicknamed by his friends “Mister I-Know-Everything” (Monsieur Je-sais-tout), which also suggests he could be intolerably vain about his wisdom. Lucien’s older brother Léon declared that Lucien was the aristocrat of the family, and indeed Lucien (partly through his alliance with the empress Eugénie) rose far higher in society and for a longer time than Proust himself did. Although he was the son of one of the most celebrated writers of the day, Lucien was such a snob that he once remarked that he would have traded all his father’s works for the chance to use the aristocratic particule and to call himself “d’Audet” instead of “Daudet.” He was such a dandy that another member of the empress’s court told him he was “overdressed” (using the English word) and that his ties were too pretty.
Marcel and Lucien shared a lively sense of humor as well as a taste for painting and literature. Lucien was adept at both arts, though he was crushed from the beginning by the example of his father as novelist and of their family friend Whistler as painter. As Lucien would write his mother in 1905 or 1906: “Whistler, whose only French student I was, instilled in me a certain taste in painting, led me to understand why something is beautiful, but at the same time he also gave me a great deal of scorn for whatever was not of the first rank and . . . this scorn I apply also to what I do.” Later, of course, Lucien would feel totally eclipsed by Proust’s monumental achievement, but also awed. The affair with Lucien, in any event, lasted no more than eighteen months, no longer than had the affair with Hahn. Proust and Lucien stayed friends, though Lucien frequently complained of neglect. Ever faithful in his fashion, however, Proust favorably reviewed Daudet’s 1908 novel, the discreetly gay Le Chemin mort.
To please his parents Proust took a nonpaying job as a librarian, an “unremunerated attaché” at the Mazarine Library, housed in the same building as the French Academy. Typically, Proust pulled many strings to be named to this position, but as soon as he obtained it he worked with equal assiduity to take a medical leave, which was extended again and again until Proust was finally, years later, dismissed. As André Maurois, one of Proust’s first biographers, put it: “He was the most detached of all attachés and went from leave to leave.” Just as Flaubert had protected his time to write by working up medical reasons that kept him from practicing law (including a full-scale nervous breakdown), in the same way Proust, while pretending to humor his father’s determination that he find a job, even an unremunerated one, managed in his passive-aggressive way to avoid doing anything he disliked for even so much as a day.
In 1896, when Proust was twenty-seven, his first