Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [9]
But if Marthe remained ignorant of the circumstances that had led to her engagement, Mme Proust and her sons must certainly have harbored some suspicions. A decidedly ill humor hovered over the wedding preparations, which, according to Marcel, were organized as secretly as possible. Even the bride-to-be’s brother was kept in the dark.
MME ADRIEN PROUST.
For a while, the wedding preparations turned Proust’s daily habits upside down. Twice he had to get up far earlier than usual, first to make the acquaintance of the young girl, then for the engagement dinner, held on January 24 in the Proust family’s rue de Courcelles apartment. Furthermore, he was under the pressure of a deadline, needing to submit the completed manuscript of his translation of Ruskin’s Bible d’Amiens before March 1, and there was still a great deal of work left to do on it. “This wedding couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” he moaned.
Nevertheless, at noon on February 2, 1903, Proust, exhausted, arrived at the Church of St. Augustin to act as witness and stand up as his brother’s best man. He hadn’t slept for three nights and his appearance was frightful. He was dressed astoundingly, swaddled in multiple layers of clothing; he wore three sweaters underneath a jacket, and three coats on top of that. He had wrapped his chest and neck in flannel, bits of which poked out from the collar of his shirt. According to his young cousin Valentine Thomson, Proust looked like Lazarus resurrected from the dead, “like someone in a cocoon made of black wool. Feeling it was necessary to excuse his appearance as he passed each row, he intoned in a deep voice that he couldn’t have dressed himself otherwise, that he had been sick for months, that he would be even sicker later that night, and that none of it was his fault.”
Yet Mme Proust surpassed even her eccentric son. Due to an attack of rheumatism, she arrived at the ceremony in an ambulance. (How often it happens that our minor maladies betray our far more serious conditions.) She was unable to attend the reception afterward at the house on rue de Messine. Proust did attend, but once there, he managed to collapse in exhaustion. “Robert’s wedding quite literally killed me,” he later wrote to Mme Catusse, a friend of his mother’s. He kept to his bed for two weeks.
From the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with the young M. Werner in tow, it was a quick trip to Robert Proust’s home and office. It was as if, six years later, fate was leading him to a place where he had never expected to find himself again. Once admitted to the ground-floor apartment, he saw that everything had been removed. He felt the air of sadness that lingers after forced departures. What had once been a residence of long standing was now completely abandoned; wallpaper was stripped from the walls, a layer of dirt covered the oak parquet floors. In the entryway, stacks of books were piled up to the ceiling. Guérin made his way into the rooms that had once been decorated in that bourgeois taste he had found so dispiriting on his first visit. Now he found the rooms empty and desolate. Coming into what had been the office where he had once breathlessly fingered Marcel Proust’s manuscript notebooks, he noticed, solitary and poignant, the two massive pieces of furniture that had belonged to the writer. He recognized the huge, clumsy, tarnished black pear-wood desk in the style of the second empire, with its aristocratic pretensions. Two columns of drawers decorated with double lines of brass inlay flanked the