Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [5]
DR. ROBERT PROUST.
As was the fashion in those days, several weeks after his recovery the young man presented himself at the doctor’s office to offer his thanks and pay his bill. He rang the bell at the building on avenue Hoche and was let into a large apartment, the home befitting a surgeon of some reputation, luxuriously decorated in the questionable bourgeois taste of the period. Guérin recoiled slightly as he took it all in—the overstuffed sofas with their slightly concave backs, the tapestries depicting bucolic scenes, the incredibly textured paintings on the walls, impressive even to someone accustomed to the canvases of Soutine and Courbet in his own home. In keeping with the late-nineteenth-century taste for heavy furnishings, nothing in the doctor’s office was not somber or depressing.
Guérin was transfixed by the massiveness of the furniture, including a three-sectioned black bookcase and an imposing desk with brass-inlaid drawers. The doctor mistook his patient’s scrutiny for admiration. He explained to Guérin that the pieces of furniture had once belonged to his brother, Marcel, who had inherited them from their father, Dr. Adrien Proust. Marcel had valued them highly, and now Robert cherished them as mementos of his late brother and father.
The young man’s fascination with his doctor’s brother was palpable. Graciously, Robert opened one of the glass doors of the formidable bookcase. He pointed to the tall stacks of manuscript notebooks. Arranged in no particular order, these were the complete works of Marcel Proust, written in his own hand. Guérin’s eyes opened wide. The doctor removed one notebook from the stacks and handed it to him. The young man opened it and found inside an arabesque of words, scratched-out sentences, insertions, notes, marginal annotations; a cathedral of vowels, consonants, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, erasures, and changes, which Guérin scrutinized hungrily. He strained to decipher the irregular, brittle, jerky handwriting that filled every available space, page after page. Proust’s downward-slanting script was exceedingly angular, entangled, hastily scrawled. As described by his housekeeper Céleste, Proust would write in bed, a notebook in one hand stretched in the air, his pen in the other hand. Pages would scatter upon the bed and fall on the rug. Céleste would tenderly gather them up with loving care and attention.
At the time of Guérin’s formal post-operative visit with Robert Proust, Marcel Proust had been dead only seven years. In that space of time, his life and death had already attained legendary status. Guérin had heard much about the writer’s eccentric life: his cork-lined room on boulevard Haussmann, the intense cold in his bedroom on rue Hamelin, where the central heating was turned off to avoid aggravating his asthmatic condition, the nightly vigils to bring his great work to completion in an incessant race against death. He was engaged in an ongoing struggle against an illness for which he refused either medication or proper care. As Proust described it, death was a stranger who had chosen to take up residence in his brain, coming and going; “a too considerate tenant,” was how he put it. “I was surprised to see that she was not beautiful,” he wrote in a preface to Tender Stocks, his friend Paul Morand’s book. “I had always imagined that death was.” In a moment when this “too considerate tenant” was absent, Proust finally succeeded in bringing his great work to completion, inscribing the word fin in the determined, assured strokes Guérin now saw emblazoned before him on the yellowed pages of a worn notebook.
Proust had awoken one day in the spring of 1922—at four o’clock in the afternoon—and said to his housekeeper, “Something wonderful happened last night, Céleste.” Usually when he awoke, he would remain silent, but that afternoon he looked up at her and announced:“My dear Céleste, I have to tell you about it, it’s great news. Last night,