Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [6]
“Oh, Monsieur, don’t speak like that. I can see that you are very happy. I, too, am so happy that you’ve finally succeeded in finishing what you set out to do. But I know you well enough, and I’m afraid that you aren’t really finished yet. All these little pieces of paper still need assembling; you still have all the corrections to oversee.”
“That is something else, Céleste. The important thing is that I’m no longer worried now. I haven’t given my life for nothing.”
Writing In Search of Lost Time had given meaning to his life. Proust loved to repeat the words of St. John, so much appreciated by Ruskin: “Work while you still have the light.”
Guérin, who regularly socialized with artists and writers, had amassed a considerable collection of anecdotes and details about the last months of the novelist’s life, when Proust was engaged in a battle against time and against death. Now, seated in the oppressive office of Proust’s brother, he understood the full impact of this word fin, written with such clarity and force, detached from the body of the text. He was envious of the doctor for possessing anything so precious, something at once so intimate and at the same time so universal. The envy that drove Guérin as a collector, his intense longing for direct contact with the ineffable, spurred him to try to extract some further memory from Robert Proust, to get the doctor to reveal some intimacy he had the privilege of sharing with his genius of a brother.
Guérin told him it would mean a great deal to see the first edition of Swann’s Way, which Proust had had to pay Bernard Grasset to print for him after every other publisher rejected it. Of course he would have made his brother a gift of this. The doctor looked at him, taken aback, unable to make sense of the request. He had just offered this young man the honor of holding in his hands Marcel’s own handwritten notebook, certainly an unforgettable opportunity. Now he asked to see an old printed edition? Robert Proust told him he was sorry, but he had no such book. This response, offered rather brusquely, troubled Guérin. He thanked the doctor and took his leave. Coming away from avenue Hoche, he kept ruminating, somewhat surprised, on the doctor’s last words, wondering, with his irrepressible curiosity, what might have really been the nature of the relationship between the two brothers.
Such were the memories that came flooding back to Guérin as he waited in the bookstore in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré early one evening in 1935. Several weeks earlier, on the twenty-second of May, the death of Robert Proust had been reported. Now, in one of those strange twists of fate, Guérin found himself awaiting someone who might provide him access to Proust’s intimate circle, a world to which he was still incredibly drawn.
The sound of the bookshop’s bell roused him. The door opened abruptly and an insolent young man came in, his hat tilted to one side. Guérin carefully gave him a once-over, from head to toe. He was amused—no one could possibly have seemed more out of his element here than this cocky youth among these fusty stacks of old books. Still, Guérin found something quite appealing about him, a seductive mixture of allure and impudence that reminded him of the handsome young men he found in Montmartre and Pigalle.
The bookseller introduced them: Monsieur Guérin, Monsieur Werner.
Guérin looked him over again with a certain disdain, then questioned him as to how he came to have Proust’s furniture to sell, clearly suspicious of the means by which this fellow came into possession of such things.
Werner told him that Dr. Proust had inherited Marcel’s furniture when his brother died. When the doctor died a few weeks ago, his wife had made the decision to vacate her apartment immediately. Their daughter, Suzy, removed the majority of furniture and other effects that once belonged to her uncle Marcel, but she left behind his desk and his bookcase. No one wanted them. Werner offered them to Guérin for 1,500 francs.
Usually a very shrewd negotiator,