I fear that the unexpected arrival this evening at midnight of my friend Reynaldo Hahn who for the 1st time in 15 months was returning from the front and who entered in disarray may have occasioned some noise which would so ill have recompensed that which you are sparing me.44 I was very moved to see him again. I do not know to what extent my health will allow me to see him during the 6 days that he will be spending in Paris but I will ask him not to be so noisy again. He comes up like a whirlwind and goes down in the same way, I can’t understand that. Alas he will not be coming back again until the end of the war … —. I also wonder if the voice of my housekeeper, very sharp, does not rise to you. She stays with me very late and does not make any noise when she moves about. But if her voice could be heard, I implore you to tell me. In prescribing for me certain modifications in my ways of doing things, I cannot express to you the intimate pleasure that you would give me. Their daily repetition would mingle your image with my obedience. ‘Nothing is so sweet as her authority.’45 I am a little sorry that you have not received my last letters (though they were addressed I believe quite correctly). The pastiche of Thérésa’s Song: ‘This is the earth [terre]!’ would have made you smile, I believe and was less bad than that of the sonnet of Arvers which you did receive, I think.46 Clary told me what a great musician you were. Will I never be able to come up and hear you? The Franck quartet, the Béatitudes, the Beethoven Quartets (all music that I have in fact here) are the objects of my most nostalgic desire.47 I have never once been well enough to go to hear them (last Sunday the Béatitudes was performed, but I was wheezing in my bed) and when by chance a musician comes to see me in the evening, I stop him from making music for me so that the noise may not bother you. What compensation if on one of the very rare evenings when I can get up, you should permit me to hear you. Thank you again Madame and please accept my lively and grateful respects.

MARCEL PROUST

24

[December 19, 1916]

Tuesday 10 o’clock – evening

Madame,

Alas upon returning home in the grip of the most violent attack I find your charming letter. The letter offers me the most delicious pleasure, the attack pitilessly denies me it. When it has subsided a little tomorrow, if it subsides, I will go to bed and will not be able to get up again for several days, what a stupid idea I had to go out for a moment today. If I had stayed in bed, I could have got up tomorrow, spent the afternoon with you, gone to shake the hand of my old and dear Maître France who in the past first introduced me to the public.48 He remembers me and forgives me I am told by Lucien Daudet who sees him often. I was determined not to go out tomorrow, I had told Montesquiou I would not go to hear Madame Rubinstein pronounce some wounded offerings, and it was because I was so determined not to go out tomorrow that I made this stupid outing today, with no interest, with none of the pleasure that I would have had tomorrow.49 So I am disappointed and disheartened. —. Ever since the day on which you brought me the bright interval of your visit I have been ill the whole time. What is more the Strauses, whom I left that day, may have told you that I have not been able to see them since, for I know that you are close to them. And I have not been able to see Clary either. On the other hand I have had the joy of often having by my bedside my brother who after having been very unwell is in Paris for a little while. I wanted to mention to him the name of your mutual friend of whom you had spoken to me and have not been [word missing: able] to recall it. Happily your letters are too remarkable for one not to keep them. And I will thus find the name again. What will happen, at the theatre, to those admirable phrases of S. Bonnard which I know by heart and which my memory though so enfeebled will retain until the end like a piece of music one has loved as a child. What a joy it would have been to bring together the susceptibilities of our memories and the exigencies of our predilection to listen to that.50 Perhaps it’s just as well. At the theatre Crainquebille made me weep.51 I envy you Madame that tomorrow among the ‘acta Sanctorum’ of the Learned Bollandistes you will see old Sylvestre Bonnard, and I thank you for having had the thought of inducing me to see it, as Bonnard, (the very old Bonnard that I am) would have thanked the Countess Trépof for the precious legend.

Please be so kind as to remember me to the Doctor and accept Madame my most grateful regards

MARCEL PROUST

25

[Christmas 1916]

Madame,

I ask your permission to keep, today as well – in order to ennoble this tragic Christmas which does not bring ‘Peace on earth to men of good will’ – the wonderful and moving images which will be restored to you tomorrow.52 And really through this miraculous vision you have, with a disconcertingly inventive intelligence, continued beyond what is possible what we were saying the other day about the Countess Trépof in Sylvestre Bonnard.53 Because in fact it is in the form of a Yule log that the incomparable Lives of the Saints has come to me, the amazing Golden Legend, or rather purplish (for a compatriot of Doctor Williams told me the other day that Reims, for its sublime steeple alas, has turned the most extraordinary purple)54 the Bible of Reims which is no longer intact like the Bible of Amiens, the stones of Reims which fulfil the prophecy: ‘And the very stones shall cry out to demand justice.’ Perhaps, moreover, the disaster of Reims, a thousand times more pernicious for humanity than that of Louvain – and for Germany first of all, for whom Reims, because of Bamberg, was the favourite cathedral – was a crime rather coldly conceived.