Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [30]
With his new friends Proust shared a taste for medieval architecture; Proust’s enthusiasm was inspired by Ruskin, no doubt. Proust and Antoine de Bibesco and Antoine’s brother Emmanuel, along with other friends, liked to make excursions to the Gothic churches in the Paris region and even beyond. The first trip was to the magnificent cathedral of Chartres. Then in the spring of 1902 Proust went in two motorcars with the two Bibesco brothers, Fénelon, and other friends to Provins (beyond the current site of Disneyland Paris); and on a slightly later trip with the same group, as far away as Laon, eighty-seven miles from Paris. There Proust was impressed by the belfries of the cathedral, decorated by the sculpted heads of eight colossal oxen; the oxen and many other details he observed in this church and others would work their way into his meticulous descriptions in Remembrance of Things Past. Today most writers of fiction avoid comparing their characters to already existing works of art, but Proust was never afraid of creating a highly aestheticized atmosphere. In fact he intensifies the aestheticism to such a point that it becomes an incontrovertible element of his style. The Guermantes family gets compared to those stone oxen and the creatures in Noah’s ark. The painter Elstir discusses scenes from the life of the Virgin which Marcel had also observed at the church in Laon, and women he admires are compared to women in Renaissance Italian paintings.
Later in 1902 Proust traveled to Bruges in Belgium to see an exhibition of Flemish masters. With Fénelon he traveled to Holland, where for the first time he saw Vermeer’s The View of Delft—the very painting that he, Proust, would study again in Paris shortly before his death and that his character Bergotte (the novelist based on Anatole France) would see before collapsing in the museum.
At the end of 1902 Fénelon was appointed as a diplomat to Constantinople and Proust admitted he was living through “truly despairing hours.”
VII
WHEN PROUST BEGAN his translations of Ruskin and his essays on him, the closed, stable world of his family and domestic routine was still intact, but by the time he had concluded them everything had changed catastrophically. On February 2, 1903, his brother, Robert, married Marthe Dubois-Amiot. Later the same year, on November 26, Proust’s father died, a day after the birth of Robert Proust’s daughter Suzy. Two years later, on September 26, 1905, his beloved mother would die of nephritis after a long, painful illness. She was just fifty-six. As Proust wrote at the time, “My life has now lost its only goal, its only sweetness, its only love, its only consolation.” Later he would add, “In dying, Maman took with her her little Marcel.” The sentence can be interpreted, if the emphasis is placed on “little,” to mean that the ineffectual, dandified, immature Marcel died at her death, to be reborn as the determined, wise, ascetic Proust.
For the rest of his life he would mourn her with extra intensity on the anniversary of her death—even on monthly anniversaries of the fatal day. And yet Proust was also capable of later writing, “In this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.” Despite this clearsightedness, Proust became a master of the consoling (or at least wonderfully understanding) condolence letter—always