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By Root 549 0

including a monthly revenue of some $15,000; his brother received the same amount. Both Marcel and Robert were astonished, since their parents had always pled poverty and practiced the strictest economies. Now that Proust was more than comfortably settled, he still persisted in feeling that he was always on the verge of bankruptcy, an utterly unfounded fate he was always tempting by buying friends extravagant gifts—bejeweled watches, paintings, diamond-studded cigarette cases, Gallé vases, even the airplane which he ordered for his beloved chauffeur Agostinelli but which he was able to cancel after the chauffeur’s sudden death. (In his novel the Narrator offers to buy Albertine a yacht.) Proust gave good advice to friends on love, money, and health, but when making decisions affecting himself in these same domains, he solicited absolutely everyone’s advice, then, disastrously, followed none of it. He made many ruinous investments but refused to listen to his banker. He bought when a stock was high and sold when it was low. More often than not he purchased a stock because of its poetic name (“The Tanganyika Railway,” “The Australian Gold Mines”); in fact, these stocks were a substitute for the travels to exotic places he longed to make. He wore shabby clothes and invited large parties to the Ritz. He regularly tipped 200 percent. According to one famous anecdote he borrowed a large sum from the doorman at the Ritz and then promptly gave him back the money as a tip. Yet he took no interest in collecting paintings or books or even in buying clothes or refurbishing his apartment. He was a playboy-monk.

He felt that his parents’ apartment was too large for him and far too expensive—and too full of memories. As he wrote one friend, “I went into certain rooms of the apartment where for one reason or another I hadn’t been in a while and I explored unknown parts of my suffering which stretched out infinitely the farther I proceeded. There is a certain floorboard near Maman’s room that always creaks when you tread on it and as soon as Maman would hear it she’d purse her lips with that little noise that means: come kiss me.”

On December 26, 1906, he moved to an apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann that had belonged to his great-uncle Louis Weil (the now-deceased old man who had been Laure Hayman’s protector). Upon his uncle’s death Proust had inherited a quarter of the building, but unfortunately he let his aunt buy out his share, which meant that he ended up a mere renter without any rights—a situation that would eventually turn drastically against him. It was another of his impractical decisions, though in his defense it should be pointed out that Proust at this time was looking for a house in the country (“but not in the trees,” he insisted, ever alert to causes of asthma attacks) and was determined to leave Paris.

The apartment was in itself ill-suited to an asthmatic writer sensitive to noise since it was located near the huge department store Printemps, not far from the Saint-Lazare train station, and was on one of the principal arteries of the new Paris—a boulevard full of dust and clamor, lined with chestnut trees heavy with the pollen that sent Proust into stifling crises. Yet Proust was attracted to the six-room apartment because he had often come to dine there with his mother, and he could not accept to live somewhere that his mother had never known. Perhaps he liked it, too, because it looked out on the melancholy Chapel of Atonement to Louis XVI, which had been built after the Restoration to expiate the sins of the nation for guillotining its ruler.

To insulate his bedroom, where he wrote, he lined the walls with cork in 1910—an idea he got from the poet Anna de Noailles, who had picked up the tip from the successful playwright Henry Bernstein, another martyr to noise. There he inhaled his fumigations of medicinal Legras powder, which floated out into the hallway and caused the neighbors to protest against the smell. The windows were hung with layers of heavy curtains that were never opened. Light, noise, and above