Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [22]
How this language must have been familiar to the perfume maker Guérin!
He began to spend his summers near Chantilly, in the Val d’Oise, just north of Paris. Guérin bought a house designed at the end of the eighteenth century by the neoclassical architect François-Joseph Bélanger, for his mistress, the soprano Sophie Arnould. Here he was able to provide a home for Jean Genet upon his release from prison; here he nurtured and encouraged the writer. In 1947, Guérin created a perfume he called Divine, inspired by the transvestite character in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. The novelist reciprocated the compliment in his own way, dedicating his next novel, Querelle de Brest, to Guérin, with words that reveal the depth of Genet’s understanding of his benefactor: “There is no better way to express my gratitude than by proclaiming the joy I feel in knowing a reader for whom fetishism is a religion.”
Genet introduced his patron to Violette Leduc, who, thanks to Guérin, was able to have a deluxe edition of her autobiographical novel, L’Affamée, published. This she dedicated to Guérin, as she did her novel Thérèse et Isabelle, initially rejected by publishers in 1955 for its scandalous lesbian sex scenes, but which finally appeared to much acclaim in 1966.
Years went by, and with the passage of time, Guérin began to enter into Marthe’s good graces, helping her financially through the purchase of manuscripts still in her possession. An almost affectionate relationship developed between them.
Marthe must have been enraged and wounded by the knowledge of the relationship between Dr. Adrien Proust and her mother. That affair had led directly to her own marriage to Robert Proust, who, like his father, had also come to keep a mistress. If she had taken the time to read some of Marcel’s books before having spurned them, Marthe might have found the passage in the novel where the Narrator addresses Dr. Cottard’s infidelity, revealed to his wife only after his death. Mme Cottard discovered correspondence that exposed her husband’s long-standing liaison with Odette de Crécy. The Narrator tried his best to console Mme Cottard, explaining to her that “from the moment he was unfaithful to you, he took great care that you would never know, he worried about hurting you, he respected you and always preferred you. . . . In heaven it is you alone that he longs to see again.” Proust undoubtedly wrote these lines thinking about his mother, but with neither the culture nor the refinement of his mother, his sister-in-law might still have found comfort in them.
Marthe was beset by familial grief and dire economic straits. She never understood, she could never fathom, the elevated stature held by her brother-in-law in the world of letters. She could not bring herself to read In Search of Lost Time. What mattered to her was to remove all trace of indecency liable to expose the family name to shame and disgrace.
In this spirit of vengeance, Marcel Proust’s love letters were destroyed, as well as reams of his worldly correspondence, and most egregiously, innumerable drafts and working notes for his great masterwork. In the nick of time, Guérin had appeared and managed to save many priceless treasures, including the thirteen notebooks Robert Proust never surrendered to Marcel’s publishers, once feared missing. These books contained variations of the final sections of In Search of Lost Time, which Proust