Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [50]
Rochat seldom left Proust’s apartment, where he had a room of his own. He spent most of the day by himself, painting. In The Captive the Narrator writes that “Albertine’s paintings, the captive’s touching distractions, moved me so much that I complimented her on them.” What researchers have figured out in recent years is that Proust wrote first The Fugitive, soon after Agostinelli’s departure and death, while the material was still vivid in his mind and a weight on his heart, whereas he elaborated The Captive later, even though the book actually precedes The Fugitive in the published sequence. Why? Simply because the main inspiration for the Albertine of The Captive is Henri Rochat, not Alfred Agostinelli. It was Rochat who lived in his own room, solitary and self-sufficient, in Proust’s gloomy apartment, whereas Agostinelli had lived with his wife and only briefly under Proust’s roof. Accordingly, The Captive, which had been sketched out as early as 1916, doubled in size during the two years Rochat lived with Proust.
The simple act of “possessing” another human being is something that Proust describes in The Captive with depth and sweetness (“For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself,” he writes). About Albertine the Narrator says:
. . . And just as people pay a hundred francs a day for a room at the Grand Hotel at Balbec in order to breathe the sea air, I felt it to be quite natural that I should spend more than that on her, since I had her breath upon my cheek, between my lips which I laid half-open upon hers, through which her life flowed against my tongue.
But this pleasure of seeing her sleep, which was as sweet to me as that of feeling her live, was cut short by another pleasure, that of seeing her wake. It was, carried to a more profound and more mysterious degree, the same pleasure as I felt in having her under my roof. . . .
Interestingly, it is only in this passage that the Narrator ever calls himself “Marcel,” and then only provisionally. When Albertine awakens she says:
“My—” or “My darling—” followed by my Christian name which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be “My Marcel,” or “My darling Marcel.”
Soon Rochat’s presence—so cool and self-sufficient, so obviously dedicated to milking his master—began to annoy Proust, who sought to get rid of him. He complained to Madame Straus that he had embarked on a romantic affair “without a way out, without joy and constantly involving fatigue, suffering and absurd expenses.” In 1919 Proust accompanied him to the train station, so eager was he to see him off. Proust had arranged for his passport and even a job possibility in Switzerland, but all too soon Rochat returned to Paris and moved back in with Proust (“He came to ask me for a hospitality that I could not refuse him but that poisons my existence,” Proust wrote a friend). Only at the end of May 1921 did Proust finally convince Rochat to leave for Buenos Aires and a bank job, though no one has ever been able to find a trace of him in Argentina. In leaving, Rochat abandoned his fiancée, just as the handsome, perfidious violinist Morel jilts his fiancée, Jupien’s niece. When the demanding young “captive” finally flew the coop, all Proust could say to his maid was, “At last, Céleste, here we are, nice and peaceful.”
In January 1920, Proust had published in La Nouvelle Revue Française one of his most striking literary essays, devoted to Flaubert’s style. He was responding to a recent article that had charged Flaubert with being a bad writer. Proust was quick to admit that Flaubert lacked the ability to invent metaphors (“I believe that metaphor alone can give a sort of eternity to style, and in all of Flaubert there is perhaps not one fine metaphor”). But he defended Flaubert’s innovative use of verb tenses, even his mournful sequence of events and gray vocabulary. Perhaps he saw Flaubert as his opposite, for surely no one ever discovered