The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [9]
Proust’s mother had an operation in the summer of 1898 to remove a cancerous tumour; she regained sufficient strength to travel with her son to Venice and Padua in 1900 but was no longer her resilient self. In November 1903 her husband, by now commander in the Legion of Honour for his distinctions in medical science, died suddenly. In September 1905, still distraught at her loss, after repeated attacks of uraemia, the complaint from which her mother had suffered, Jeanne Proust died of acute kidney failure. ‘She takes my life with her’, wrote Proust in a letter at the time, ‘like Papa had taken hers.’3 The solidity and comfort of the family unit was shattered and Proust, fragile of health, was alone in the world with his grief.
The two brothers shared the considerable family fortune. Although this included a substantial monthly income Proust was incorrigibly extravagant and lived constantly in fear of becoming insolvent. Towards the end of his year of mourning, he resolved to move to new surroundings, something he had always found debilitatingly difficult. He moved to his uncle’s old apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann, a property his mother had known well, which pleased him. Such consolation notwithstanding, the move was an enormous upheaval: the noise of traffic and passers-by outside and renovation work within the building troubled him; he feared the levels of dust, and pollen from the trees. In August 1907 he went to Cabourg, a destination again determined by fond memories of time spent there with his mother, and this trip – the first of a succession of summers spent in the seaside resort – marked a number of new beginnings.
There he met Alfred Agostinelli, a nineteen-year-old driver, in whose taxi he visited many nearby sights of interest and in whom he found an employee, companion and, ultimately, an object of love. Agostinelli served as Proust’s driver in 1907 and 1908 before disappearing from view until 1913 when he contacted Proust looking for work. Proust already had a driver in Paris, Odilon Albaret (whose wife Céleste, from 1914 until Proust’s death, served as his housekeeper), but he nevertheless agreed to take on Agostinelli as a secretary and lodged him and his partner Anna in the apartment on boulevard Haussmann. Proust preferred to keep this arrangement quiet; tensions grew between them (primarily because of Proust’s jealousy) and yet still he spent great sums of money on the younger man. Agostinelli, however, fled without warning to the south coast of France in December 1913. Proust did his best but failed to make him return. The following summer, having enrolled himself in a flying school near Antibes under the name ‘Marcel Swann’, on just his second solo flight, against his instructor’s advice Agostinelli attempted a low turn, crashed into the sea and drowned with his sinking aircraft. For Proust, an ‘integral part of [his] existence’ had been stolen from him by the fierce, sudden finality of death.4
Many aspects of Proust and Agostinelli’s relationship work their way into the Search, above all in the later, tortuous unfoldings of the Narrator’s relation with Albertine, written after Agostinelli’s death. For Proust the period between meeting Agostinelli in Cabourg in August 1907 and his death in 1914 was one of unprecedented, intense creative activity.
Near the start of 1908 Proust began making notes and jottings for a novel in a notebook, the Carnet de 1908, which has entries dating up to 1912 and is a vital document in understanding the genesis and evolution of the various scenes and ideas that would eventually combine to form In Search of Lost Time. As Proust’s creative cogs began to turn, in January 1908 there broke an intriguing news scandal: an engineer