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By Root 95 0

way through several of these, you will come to a narrow hallway. Look to your right and you’ll see Mme de Noailles’s luminous, ultra-feminine bedroom, with its elegant Louis XVI bed. The next room you come to is cordoned off by a length of chain. A notice informs you that the furnishings on display came from Marcel Proust’s bedroom, a gift to the museum from M. Jacques Guérin. The museum guidebook will tell you that “the furniture and objects assembled here accompanied Marcel Proust to the three dwellings he occupied after the death of his parents, from the moment when, after a frivolous youth, he withdrew bit by bit from the world to consecrate his energies almost exclusively to his writing. Being in the habit of writing at night while in bed, it was in this modest brass bed that he composed the majority of In Search of Lost Time, a principal milestone of world literature.”

Here you will find several of the key players from this story, carefully arranged as Proust would have seen them upon waking from sleep in his rue Hamelin apartment: the brass bed covered with a blue satin counterpane, the black bookcase and black desk, the gilded wood candelabra, the severe portrait of Dr. Adrien Proust seated on a neo-Renaissance armchair.

Spread out on a little table, various small precious objects are presented, including the Legion of Honor medal, the Cartier tie pin, and at the foot of the bed, Proust’s pigskin cane. On the floor you will see the old rug that Guérin had come across at Werner’s shed, caked in dirt.

Standing before this fairly conventional furniture, one might well wonder why an extremely cultivated and refined man would consider devoting considerable time, resources, energy, and passion to keeping these humble objects from neglect or even destruction. One answer could be found within the first pages of In Search of Lost Time:

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our thought concerning them. So it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled unsuccessfully to discover where I was, everything revolved around me in the darkness, things, countries, years. . . . These revolving and confused evocations never lasted for more than a few seconds; often, in my brief uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any better than when, watching a horse run, we isolate the successive positions of its body when shown on a kinetoscope. But I saw again now one, now another of the rooms I had inhabited during my life, and in the end I would recall them all in the long reveries that followed my waking. . . . Habit! That skillful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are nonetheless only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

Certainly I was now well awake; my body had veered around for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors.

If it were possible for visitors to get close to the brass bed and run their hands over the faded blue counterpane, they might be surprised to find a small rectangle of the material missing. Jacques Guérin cut off this small strip of fabric right before the bed was packed up and moved from his house to the museum. The critic and novelist René de Ceccatty saw this cutting framed and mounted beside Guérin’s bed, hung like a relic, like a miraculous remnant from a medieval saint’s vestment.

The overcoat is not there to be seen on exhibit in the room at the Musée Carnavalet. A small notice by the side of an armchair, given by the family of Reynaldo