Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [16]
My book, The Guermantes Way, will be coming out the first week of October. It’s only half as long as the others, but I’m sure you won’t read it. . . .
Unlike Marcel, Robert took after their father in all ways and yielded to his will: he unhesitatingly married the woman chosen for him, embraced the same medical career, had a mistress. This was a Mme Fournier, who lived in a small apartment not far from the hospital where Robert operated. On at least one occasion, during the war, Robert made his brother complicit in this arrangement, involving Marcel in a transaction to get Mme Fournier a sum of money while he was still at the front. In a letter written in 1917 to their mother’s friend Mme Catusse, Marcel colors his report of this episode with an amused and smug tone:
Quite remarkably, I can give you firsthand news of Robert, who wrote to me for the first time in six months, because while he is dutiful, he is at the same time overwhelmed, by both work and laziness. He’s fine. But the nature of what brought him to write to me two days ago might better remain a secret between us, and so please do not let on to my sister-in-law that I received a letter from her husband. Since I never see Marthe, I feel no compunction to remain silent.
A complicity regarding extracurricular affairs of the heart (as common now as then, no doubt) existed between the brothers, though Proust surely knew he could never expect reciprocity on this account from Robert. He would never have dared to infringe upon the family’s respectability.
Marthe certainly knew about her husband’s infidelity, and she was also well aware of her brother-in-law’s proclivities. During Proust’s lifetime, her rapport with him was characterized by a cold politeness. When, in November 1906, Marthe’s infant daughter, Suzy, contracted diphtheria, Proust wrote to his brother about his niece: “It pains me to consider this child, in whom I like to think a little bit of Mama and Papa lives on, starting life so sadly.” When he telephoned Marthe to relay his concerns about Suzy’s condition, she responded “with an excessive brevity,” which annoyed him. “She’s very nice, despite her humorlessness,” he wrote to Mme Catusse about Marthe, but added, “though it is true, without realizing it, I can be disagreeable to the nth degree.”
Marthe’s marriage was a miserable failure: Robert had other women in his life and had managed to run through not only his considerable inheritance, but also her own sizable family resources. When Robert died, Marthe was left in serious financial straits. She nurtured a persistent indignation against the two brothers that over time festered into hate. With both brothers now dead, Marthe was determined to destroy any and all traces left of her brother-in-law: papers, books, intimate and cherished items. As for the furniture, it was as if these objects released in her resentments that had never before surfaced explicitly.
In 1906, after both parents had died, Marcel, aged thirty-five, finally moved out of his family’s large rue de Courcelles apartment. Long and wearisome negotiations about the distribution of Jeanne and Adrien Proust’s furniture began. The brothers exchanged letters that were cordial but not without reproach: “Keep what you want, put the rest in storage,” wrote Robert, exasperated. Marcel felt that his brother’s refusal to take his share of the furniture put a financial burden on him, because it meant he could not move into a smaller apartment: “You forced me into arranging my expenses, my investments, my life in a different way.” As soon as Marthe took interest in a rug or a tapestry, Marcel would suddenly decide to keep it for himself.
In George Painter’s biography, he commented wryly that “Proust’s catalogue of furniture, in which every single object from 45 rue de Courcelles is in turn destined for every room in 102 boulevard Haussmann, or given to servants, to Robert, to Dr. Landowski, or sold, or popped into the basement, is an enormity which the biographer must spare the reader.”
It was no coincidence that brother-in-law and sister-in-law