Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [4]
Though he refused to think of himself as a bibliophile, by the time he was in his twenties he was already known as one. In 1923, Erik Satie inscribed a note “To my good friend Jacques Guérin, the charming bibliophile.” Proust captured the animating consciousness behind Guérin’s love of books: “ . . . that which enables us to see through the bodies of poets and lets us look into their souls is not their eyes, nor the events of their lives, but their books, precisely where their souls, with an instinctive desire, would like to be immortalized.”
Guérin had made his first purchase when he was eighteen, a rare first edition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s early short-story collection L’Hérésiarque et Cie. At the time, Apollinaire was practically unknown, and Guérin bought the book for a song, at thirteen francs. As an old man he recalled with pride this first transaction, aware that the book would have cost him millions of francs had he sought to acquire it years later. For an industrialist’s son—why deny it?—this elicited an incalculable pleasure. He also owned a drawing of Apollinaire as a wounded soldier, made by Picasso on the Italian front during the First World War. Guérin had come across the portrait on a visit to Picasso in his studio. Picasso had never been a favorite painter of Guérin’s, but Guérin admired the Spaniard’s extraordinary gift for self-promotion. The drawing of Apollinaire didn’t strike him as especially beautiful, but he praised it out of politeness. Picasso detached the portrait from his sketchbook and inscribed it, “To Jacques.”
Guérin also had a taste for secrets and a love for hidden things. During the long hours at the factory, Guérin labored alongside his employees, surrounded by thousands of little vials of fragrance. His day’s work behind him, he would often head back to the center of Paris in a pale green 1929 Buick convertible. Parking his car near the Parfums d’Orsay store, he would begin his circuit on rue de la Paix. He loved to stroll in and out of the city’s antiquarian bookstores, scanning the shelves for any new inventory, sniffing out finds with his “nose” for the unique. As recounted by Guérin to Jansiti (for an article in Le Figaro Littéraire published in the 1980s), he was making the usual rounds one day in 1935 and came into the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He saw a bookshop he had never noticed before, just across from Hermès. He went into the shop and began to browse. The owner approached him, asking if he could be of help, if there were any writers in particular who interested him.
Guérin demurred, but mentioned Baudelaire and Proust.
The bookseller, named Lefebvre, made a gesture of surprise. Only a few minutes earlier he had bought some proofs corrected in the hand of Marcel Proust. The seller had just left. In addition to autograph manuscripts, Lefebvre had also been informed that Proust’s desk and bookcase were for sale, but he had declined these, as he was not set up to deal with furniture. The bookseller said that the man would soon be returning to the store to pick up a check.
Of all his favorite writers, Guérin was most fascinated by Proust. He had begun to read him at the age of twenty and had never stopped. He was twenty-seven during the summer of 1929 when his life intersected with the writer’s family. Dr. Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother, was called to Guérin’s bedside after what seemed