Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [12]
Guérin didn’t finish; he let the unmailed letter to Jean Cocteau drop out of his hands and immediately began to read another. He read some lines, then dropped it, and then another, and another, until there were no more letters. He reached back into the hatbox again and extracted an unruly mass of papers made up of individual tiny sheets that separated and fluttered down to the floor. Picking some up, he discovered that these were notes Proust had scrawled to Céleste in his last days, when he no longer had the power to speak. “Why did I hear the bell ring in here?” one read, a handful of words tremulously dashed off in a handwriting that had become fragile, unsteady and fleeting. Looking upon these few jerky strokes of the pen, Guérin keenly felt the presence of Proust caught in the state of feverish solitude and reverberating silence that enshrouded him in his last days.
He reached back in and pulled out some scribbled pen drawings. One was a sketch of a man seated at a piano on which lay the score from Reynaldo Hahn’s opera L’Ile du rêve. Two women stood beside him, one with a matronly air, the other sullen, with a beaklike nose, and two formal gentlemen in black tie. On the back of a program for a recital of Gounod’s Faust, Proust had sketched a man wearing a straw hat, below which he wrote:
I am a sailor, my song is a round
Comme ci, comme ça
And I know how to charm the brunette and the blonde
Couçi couça.
This was followed by a love poem:
My hand sleeps in your hand, my forehead, to better savor
All repose, rests wide awake on your shoulder.
The love between us two trembles like a kiss
And smiles to see tears in our eyes.
REYNALDO HAHN.
Guérin reached into the bottom of the hatbox and pulled out several photographs, most of them yellowed with age. One showed an elegantly dressed young man in a derby hat, a cane in his hand and a gold watch chain slung from one pocket to another across his vest. At the bottom, the inscription read, “To Marcel, Reynaldo.” (Was the love poem Guérin had just read meant for Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s lover and intimate friend?) On the back of the photo he read “Paris, Otto, 3 place de la Madeleine.” Otto was the photographer in The Captive whose study of Odette, posed as if she were royalty, Swann had found pretentious.
Another photograph showed Marcel and Robert Proust as very young boys in matching dresses with piqué collars. They wore small wax-buttoned, polished boots with white Scottish wool socks, and double-breasted jackets with beautiful silk tassel ties. Was Robert’s arm gripping his brother’s sleeve to suggest protection and support? Or was it the contrary, that Robert was clinging to Marcel, in need of his older brother’s greater authority? Another photo showed the brothers even younger, in baby gowns delicately decorated with lacework collars and wrists. Robert’s curly head lay on his brother’s shoulder as Marcel grasped his younger brother’s waist in one hand and clutched his chubby little hand in the other. A double portrait, taken during the first years of their adolescence, revealed that while the faces of the brothers had certain physical features in common, their expressions were entirely dissimilar. As little men in a photograph taken at the studio of Hermann and Company, the adolescent brothers were posed in a conventional late-nineteenth-century setup. (It was a time when fashionable taste skated perilously close to kitsch.) Perched on a railing behind a small-tiered fountain, Marcel gazed at his younger brother with a slightly ironic smile—was it the comedy of the situation that inspired his expression? Robert, seated across from him, his hat resting on his knees, was unsmiling and seemed rather put out, avoiding the arm his brother slid along the railing toward him. Slightly perplexed, caught off