Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [7]
Werner was insistent that everything be removed immediately. The apartment would be completely cleared out in a matter of hours and whatever was not spoken for he would haul off to a showroom of Drouot’s, the auctioneers, that would take any kind of merchandise that came in.
For the second time in his life, Guérin found himself making his way to the house of Robert Proust, this time with a flippant salesman sitting casually beside him in the Buick. As he drove, he thought about his first meeting with Marthe Dubois-Amiot, Robert’s wife, now his widow—the woman who was in such a hurry to get rid of the furniture he had just bought from Werner. They had been introduced once at a formal celebration in honor of her husband, an event coincidentally hosted by a member of Guérin’s extended family. That occasion also marked the last time he saw the illustrious doctor. The dinner had taken place just a few months after Guérin’s first visit to Robert’s apartment on avenue Hoche.
From 1921 to 1926, Robert Proust had been director of the Tenon Hospital, one of the premier radiotherapy centers in Paris, specializing in tumor research. By the time of this testimonial dinner in 1929, he was the head of a private cancer research foundation. At fifty-six, a goodly age for the period, he was an imposing man, tall and solid. His face resembled his brother’s, but was rounder; his sad eyes were less magnetic; his mustache was less fastidious. He always appeared to be shouldering a weight, and this made him seem heavier than he really was.
When his brother died in 1922, Robert Proust had inherited, along with most everything else, all the manuscripts that were found in Marcel’s last apartment on rue Hamelin. The doctor’s responsibilities as staff oncologist and chief surgeon at one of Paris’s largest hospitals absorbed him completely, yet from the day of his brother’s death he had also assigned himself the extremely difficult and highly technical task of preparing the last volumes of In Search of Lost Time for posthumous publication. In this endeavor, he had to work in close collaboration with an editorial team from Marcel’s publishers, La Nouvelle Revue Française, under the direction of Jacques Rivière. In addition to having been a trusted friend, Rivière was also professionally bound to Proust in a working relationship that endured through to the writer’s last days. Rivière had overseen the publication of the first volumes of the novel and Marcel had charged him to publish his complete notebooks “in case of disagreeable events.”
But the notebooks remained the property of Robert Proust, who retained the publication rights. At first, the collaboration was courteous, nearly affectionate, but the honeymoon was short-lived. The doctor’s complex personality made any straightforward communication nearly impossible. He could be fierce or easily offended, prudent or extremely arrogant. Mostly he was steadfast about the correctness of his own judgment. The final three volumes of In Search of Lost Time not published in Marcel Proust’s lifetime—The Captive, The Fugitive, Time Regained—were edited under the iron will of Robert Proust, who silently and inexorably attempted to impose an absence of any discrepancies in the unpublished texts.
In vain, Rivière and co-editor Gaston Gallimard repeatedly requested to inspect the written manuscripts. In 1926, four years after Marcel Proust’s death, Robert Proust was still the only person alive who knew what happened in Time Regained. Consumed with monklike devotion, the doctor continued to block publication of the last volumes for months. He steadfastly refused to yield either to