Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [5]
Proust’s father, Adrien, thirty-five years old when Marcel was born, came from a far more humble background, though he rose to great heights in the medical profession. His father had been a grocer in Illiers (the name is derived from that of Saint Hilaire), a village near the cathedral town of Chartres, south of Paris; Marcel gave the village the name of “Combray,” and today it is known officially as Illiers-Combray and has become a major goal for Proust pilgrims from all over the world. (The local bakeries are all grinding out madeleines in Proust’s honor, and the house where he and his family summered has become a museum. Perhaps in another century the name Illiers will be dropped altogether as life completely surrenders to the tyranny of art.)
Adrien Proust was originally intended for the priesthood and he brought a nearly religious zeal to his work as a doctor. It was he who made famous—and effective—the idea of a cordon sanitaire, a “sanitary zone” circling Europe in order to keep out cholera. In order to put his principles to work Dr. Proust traveled to Russia, Turkey, and Persia in 1869 and figured out the routes by which cholera in previous epidemics had entered Russia and thereby Europe. For this successful investigation and the resulting efficacious sanitation and quarantine campaign Dr. Proust was awarded the Legion of Honor. He became one of the most celebrated professors of medicine and practicing physicians of his day. Whereas Marcel would be willowy, artistic, asthmatic, and obsessed with titled ladies, his father was the very model of the solid upper-middle-class citizen, fleshy, bearded, solemn, and, thanks to his wife’s fortune, rich. He was also, unbeknownst to his son, an inveterate ladies’ man. His extramarital adventures were never noticed by Marcel’s mother—or if she did know something about them, she was too discreet to mention it.
In the partially autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil, written while his parents were still alive, Marcel portrays his father as a brute (“What a vulgar man,” thinks Jean Santeuil), someone whose peasant ways had not been amended by a lifetime of honors. In his correspondence Marcel later told his editor that his father had tried to cure him of his effeminacy and neuroses by sending him to a whorehouse. But by the time he came to write Remembrance of Things Past, after his parents’ death, he idealized both of them and disguised his father as a wise, indulgent minister of state.
Proust’s mother was pregnant with him during the Franco-Prussian War and the difficult aftermath of France’s defeat, the period when Napoleon III was chased from the throne and a socialist commune was briefly declared in Paris before the Third Republic was at last established. During the months of war and the internecine street fighting, coal and wood supplies ran out and houses went unheated. In Paris the starving populace ate dogs and cats, even the animals in the zoo. As a result, Jeanne Proust was so weakened from hunger and anxiety that when Marcel was born he was sickly and fragile and at first not expected to live.
In this respect, as in so many others, Marcel was the opposite of his hearty, healthy brother, Robert, born two years later, on May 24, 1873, in more prosperous and settled times. The two brothers were perfect companions as children and remained very close all their lives, although it was the robust younger brother, Robert, who often played the role of protector to the asthmatic Marcel. Like his father, Robert became a doctor—and a womanizer—yet the two brothers never quarreled, and lived their whole lives in the most complete harmony. In the 1890s both brothers were Dreyfusards. At the end of his life Marcel asked Robert to intervene and secure for him the Legion of Honor and, once this honor was obtained, to confer it on him. Robert was at Marcel’s bedside when he died, and after his death it was Robert who oversaw the publication of the last two volumes of his masterpiece as well as his selected correspondence.
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