Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [21]
In 1913, Cocteau penned a written portrait of Proust, portraying him as he “returned at dawn from his nightly drives, huddled in his fur-lined overcoat, deathly pale, his eyes dark as coal, a liter of Evian water jutting out of his pocket.” To accompany this description, Cocteau drew a sketch of his subject, wrapped in his bulky overcoat, his chin buried in its fur collar, his mustache as black as the hair sticking out from under his hat. Several smudged pencil strokes represent his darkened eyes and his badly shaved cheeks.
COCTEAU’S DRAWING.
Guérin owned this drawing; it was part of the treasure from the hatbox. He framed it in a dark mat, heightening the contrast between the pale yellow sheet and the dark lines Cocteau had drawn. Guérin had had this done long before he learned that the overcoat in the sketch was still being used to protect a peddler’s legs from a river’s winter cold.
Finally Guérin came to own the coat, the ultimate relic, so evocative of the physical form of the writer. “I can still see his appalling bedroom on the rue Hamelin,” the Nobel laureate François Mauriac recounted of his meeting with Proust on February 28, 1921, “the blackened hearth, the bed where his overcoat served as a blanket, the waxen mask from behind which one could say our host watched us eat. His hair seemed to be the only thing that was alive.” The overcoat was ever-present.
Sometimes Guérin would delicately fondle his prized possession, fingering the buttons that had been altered to fit Werner’s younger and smaller body. He would stroke the discolored fur collar that had been ravaged by the water of the Marne. Rubbing this tattered material between his fingers he felt the same emotion as when he was rifling through the pages of a rare book once believed to be lost. Something that needed to be saved had found its way to him.
Guérin had the overcoat cleaned, had it smartened up, and ordered a teak box to preserve it from the ravages of time. On the outside of the box his old housekeeper lettered the words: proust’s overcoat.
The knack Guérin had for discovering and marketing new, enormously commercial perfumes continued to make him rich, and over the years he came to be known not only as a bibliophile but also as a patron of the arts. His “nose” led him to nurture the new talents he came across in the artistic and literary salons of Paris; he was always stimulated by the prospect of protecting something rare and precious. From Maurice Sachs, a novelist and shady character associated with many Parisian writers, Guérin bought the autograph manuscripts of Raymond Radiguet’s novels that Cocteau had sold to finance his opium habit; he then donated them to the Bibliothèque Nationale. His was an insatiable appetite, a sort of carnal love for unique objects. Guérin must have relished this description of longing in Sodom and Gomorrah, of a man’s craving for a woman he has dreamed about, who he knows need not be beautiful to be desirable:
These desires are only the desire for this or that person; vague as perfumes, as styrax was the desire of Prothyraïa, saffron the ethereal desire, spices the desire of Hera, myrrh the perfume of the clouds, manna the desire of Nike, incense the perfume of the sea. But these perfumes that are sung in the Orphic hymns are far fewer in number than the deities they cherish. Myrrh is the perfume of the clouds, but also of Protogonos, of Neptune, of Nereus, of Leto; incense is the perfume of the sea, but also of the fair Dike, of Themis, of Circe, of the nine Muses, of Eos, of Mnemosyne, of the