Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [0]
Lorenza Foschini
TRANSLATED BY
Eric Karpeles
To my family, a bizarre family history
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Author’s Note
Also by Lorenza Foschini
Copyright
About the Publisher
“THE OVERCOAT WAS BEFORE ME AT LAST.”
Chapter I
Beauty is always strange.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
I stood in that big room with the fluorescent lighting, like someone who had come to identify the body of a loved one. M. Bruson and his assistant brought out a cardboard box. They carried it delicately and with a certain detachment, as if exhuming such a meager thing were beneath them. They placed the box on a metal-topped table in the center of the room and removed its cover. All of a sudden the men, shaking out sheets of tissue paper, their arms raised, were covered in white, like two gesticulating ghosts. I was immediately overcome by the smell of camphor and mothballs.
I approached the table slowly, taking little steps, smiling with embarrassment. The overcoat was before me at last, laid out like a shroud at the bottom of the box on a large sheet of tissue paper. Stiffened by paper padding, the coat seemed to be covering something dead. Tufts of tissue were protruding from the heavily padded sleeves. I bent forward farther. It struck me that inside the box was a dummy, a plump, corpulent, barrel-chested dummy with no head or hands.
I was uncomfortable in the presence of M. Bruson. He discreetly sought not to fix his gaze upon me, but I knew that he was spying on me surreptitiously. Unable to resist, I lightly fingered the overcoat’s threadbare, dark gray wool, worn smooth at the hem. It was a double-breasted coat, closed by two rows of three buttons. At some point these buttons had been moved to alter the coat for someone thinner, yet traces of where they had originally been sewn on remained visible, little buds of black thread. A small hole in the cloth suggested a missing button that must have been used to close the collar. From the black fur lapel hung a white tag, tied to a red string. I lifted it up, but there was nothing written on it. I unbuttoned the coat in hopes of finding some clue, a label indicating the name of a store or tailor: nothing.
Hopeful, I slid my hands into the pockets: again, nothing. The overcoat was lined on the inside with otter, the fur worn thin and devoured by mites. M. Bruson seemed impatient, but I wasn’t quite ready to detach myself from this inert, sham figure. I decided not to leave just yet. Really, hardly several minutes had passed, and this was the overcoat Proust had wrapped about himself for years, which he spread upon himself like a blanket while in bed writing In Search of Lost Time. The spirit invoked in Marthe Bibesco’s memoir came back to me: “At the ball, Marcel Proust sat down in front of me on a little gilded chair, as if coming out of a dream, with his fur-lined cloak, his face full of sadness, and his night-seeing eyes.”
I thanked M. Bruson. Carefully, he made several small readjustments: he plumped up the paper padding, rebuttoned the coat, and buried it again under its blanket of white tissue paper. He fitted on its cardboard cover. With the help of his assistant, the box was lifted and placed back up on the highest shelf of a metal storage unit. Before leaving, I took one last look behind me. On the side of the box, in capital letters, a black felt-tip pen had been used to inscribe proust’s overcoat. I went out, across the beautiful interior courtyard of the Musée Carnavalet, and left by the same side door through which I had entered, onto rue de Sévigné.
Chapter II
It all started when I interviewed Piero Tosi for a television program. Tosi is the celebrated costume designer who worked side by side on many remarkable projects with Luchino Visconti, the esteemed Italian film and theater director. That afternoon, at Tosi’s house near the Piazza Navona in Rome, he spoke with me about his life and some of his extraordinary experiences. As we were finishing