Concerning Mme Terre, see also letters 20 and 23.

42. This is a pastiche of the sonnet that appeared in 1833 in the collection Mes heures perdues [My lost hours] by Félix Arvers.

43. According to his Correspondance (vol. 14), in mid-October 1915, Proust saw Clary again twice.

44. Hahn arrived from Vauquois on November 11 or 12, 1915. He made use of that leave to give the first performance of Le ruban dénoué. [In the original, for ‘in disarray’ Proust puns, using the expression en ‘bataille’ (literally ‘in battle’ – with quotes around ‘battle’) to signal the pun.]

45. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 42, line 6.

46. Reynaldo was a fervent admirer of Thérésa [Emma Valladon, 1837–1913], queen of the café-concert. She sang La terre [The earth] (L’Eldorado, 1888), poem and music both by Jules Jouy, arranged by Léopold Gandolff. The poem begins: ‘Our nurse and our mama— / She is the earth: / Her flower and grain sprouting / Under the earth.’ Proust evokes this song to make fun of Mme Terre – see letters 20 and 21. (Information kindly supplied by Benoît Duteurtre.) Proust had heard this singer at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1888, in Cendrillon.

47. This confirms that Proust consulted musical scores. Les Béatitudes is by César Franck.

48. Anatole France wrote the preface to Proust’s Pleasures and Days (Calmann-Lévy, 1896).

49. Robert de Montesquiou’s Les offrandes blessées: Elégies guerrières [Wounded offerings: War elegies] was published by E. Sansot in June 1915. Ida Rubinstein (1885–1960) was a celebrated Russian-born dancer and actress. This reading must have taken place on Wednesday, December 20, 1916, at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. This letter can therefore be dated Tuesday the 19th.

50. Pierre Frondaie, novelist, playwright, and poet, used Anatole France’s first novel, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, as the basis for a four-act play which premiered at the Théâtre Antoine either December 2 or 20, 1916, according to different sources. [In his phrase ‘the “acta Sanctorum” of the Learned Bollandistes’, Proust is quoting from memory (with his own choices of capitalization) from France’s novel: ‘at the hour when the mice will dance by moonlight before the Acta Sanctorum of the learned Bollandistes.’ A Bollandiste was a member of a learned society founded by the Jesuit and hagiographer Jean Bolland. The Acta Sanctorum were the Lives of the Saints, of which Bolland was the first author and compiler.]

51. This play, adapted from Anatole France’s novella Crainquebille, was first performed in 1903 starring Lucien Guitry at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. [Crainquebille is the story of a street peddler unjustly jailed and an orphan boy who befriends him on his release. It was also adapted for silent film by Jacques Feyder in 1921.]

52. A. Demar-Latour: Ce qu’ils ont détruit: La cathédrale de Reims bombardée et incendiée en septembre 1914 [What they destroyed: The cathedral of Reims bombed and burned in September 1914], Paris, Éditions practiques et documentaires ([1915?], 64 pp.). [It is possible, though not certain, that this is the book Mme Williams lent to Proust.