On holiday mornings, the young Proust would get up late. He had once again gone through the horrors of the night, when the whole world seemed to abandon him and he wanted to cling to the light, prevent it from dying or drag it with him into death; he had travelled unscathed through the dreaded land of dreams; and now the sun’s reflections filtered into his room, grazing the bed and armchair, and finally lost themselves in the mirror, which held within it—imprisoned—the image of his mother. At that moment, after knocking softly on the door, Mrs Proust would enter the room to “pay a little visit”. She opened the shutters and sat down next to her son’s bed, while the bright rays of the spring sun traced ‘the beautiful lines of her Jewish face, imbued with Christian sweetness and Jansenist courage’.
The conversation began at random: a lesson from Professor Darlu, a trip by his father to Rome or Toulon, something moving and, at the same time, absurd. Soon, it was as if they had never stopped talking, as if the eager and terrifying hand of night had never suspended their deep agreement, their complicity in every moment, their uninterrupted whispering. While the son’s voice was carried away by the fever of enthusiasm, a constant irony enveloped the mother’s words, insinuating itself like an impalpable atmosphere in the small sphere of the world where she lived; and the son recognised in these word games the echo of a family tradition that perhaps dated back to the time when the Weils led an obscure existence in the ghetto of Metz. Guided by the momentum of the conversation, Mrs. Proust recalled a sentence from Molière, two verses from Racine or La Fontaine, an episode from Madame de Sévigné, and playfully applied them to the most humble situations, just as the faithful apply verses from the Bible to all the contingencies of life. Thus, the son believed he saw embodied in the ‘beautiful lines of that Jewish face’ the classical, tragic, and Cartesian France that he venerated but did not love. The mother did not like to read any of the geniuses of modern France: neither Balzac, nor Flaubert, nor Baudelaire. And the ‘grace of animals and flowers’ found no access in that spirit completely devoted to cultivating the pure grace of human feelings.
The disagreement did not last long. Behind her mother’s discretion and restraint, behind the surface of that world without flowers, animals or Baudelaire’s verses, something immensely sweet was hidden: the slow Rousseauian and Lamartinian river had left a crystal-clear lake of tenderness in Mrs Proust’s heart. The kindness that floated in her eyes ‘like a water flower’ with no roots in her body separated her completely from herself and drove her to give herself without measure, without reserving anything for herself. At times, her son must have had the impression that this devotion was not directed at him or anyone else, but descended upon the earth like a continuous, painful and indifferent grace.
Despite the serenity she sowed with both hands in her wake, Mrs Proust was not happy. How could she be, when the centre of her life was always outside her? When the light that illuminated her existence came from others? When she had to hide all her pain, sobs and moans in her voice, as if in a fragile crystal tomb? Lying between the curtains of the bed like an oriental lord, bathed in the rays of the sun like a young prince of happiness, Proust still did not understand this sadness. He understood it only a few years later, when, devoured by anxiety, tortured by ‘thoughts, desires, fears, anxieties, which until then had grown under his mother’s wing and which, finding themselves suddenly abandoned, leapt inside him to throw themselves out, frightened, desperate, like a litter of little seagulls thrown into the sea’, he called his mother on the phone; and his mother’s voice on the phone seemed broken to him, full of cracks and fractures: tiny, bleeding fragments of glass trampled by the cruel foot of life.
A young student at the Lycée Condorcet, he was ‘a disorderly student, always poorly dressed, unkempt, covered in stains, with a feverish or dejected attitude, with gestures more expressive than noble, with an exalted gaze when he was alone, shy and embarrassed in front of people’. He was pale, with eyes ‘tense, marked by agitation, insomnia and fever, and with a nose too robust for his sunken cheeks’; and only his large, thoughtful eyes, ‘with their light and torment, shed some beauty on his irregular and sickly figure’.
An overabundance of love, tenderness, desire, enthusiasm and adoration swelled his heart like an overflowing, insatiable and inexhaustible wave. No gesture could fully express that wave of love: neither the candid joy that made him run mad with happiness through the small garden of his home; nor the infinite kindness of spirit that drove him to invent the most delicate and absurd gestures; nor the kindness, attentiveness, and outbursts of devotion to his companions, which brought tears to his eyes at the slightest pretext of emotion. But few guessed the extraordinary maturity that dominated the mind of the seventeen-year-old. Precisely he, immersed in changing things, completely lost in ecstatic feelings, wrote that ‘changing reality is, in itself, insignificant’; and he began to investigate the ‘general laws’, the relationships and analogies that are the only things that allow us to understand life.
A few years later, when he posed for Jacques-Émile Blanche’s portrait, the restless Condorcet student seemed forgotten. No one would have recognised him in the extremely elegant, calm and confident young man who observed all of Paris with his ‘elongated eyes, white as a fresh almond’. Now Proust frequented the salons of Madame Straus, Madame de Caillavet, Princess Mathilde and Madame Lemaire. Moved by “a painful restlessness”, he admired the Polynesian grace and mauve orchids that fell to the nape of Countess Greffulhe’s neck; and, at the theatre, he contemplated the small peacock head, the overly long and arched nose, the hawk-like eyes, and the dreamy bird-like grace of the Countess of Chevigné. Seated on a cushion at the hostess’s feet, he talked and talked, full of flattery, witty remarks, and abysmal gallantries, in which he lavished a fantasy worthy of The Thousand and One Nights; and compliments to which exaggeration added grace. Then, suddenly, he would burst into infectious laughter, while his immense, melancholic and serious eyes ‘seemed to see everything at once, without ever looking at anything’.
For many years, he would symbolically prostrate himself at the feet of something or someone. He needed to admire, exalt and worship a powerful embodiment of reality and prostrate himself before it: he wanted to be rejected and cast aside, painfully happy if one of his indifferent sovereigns barely glanced at him; like a little worshipping angel at the feet of great archangels with splendid coloured wings. Those human faces, those perhaps foolish countesses, those arrogant dukes were, for him, “epiphanies” that embodied absolute and incomparable values that he would find nowhere else in the world. What could he do but assume the role of humble servant? He remained there in the background, loving, suffering, enduring, beneath those symbolic mountains that touched the sky with their heads: like a moved, dark and vibrant valley, where the echo of celestial music resounded at length.
From a young age, his sexual inclinations were clear: although famous courtesans, mature ladies, girls from the village or from good families welcomed him between the curtains of their beds, passion always led him deeper and deeper into the realm of Sodom, among the reprobates and outcasts touched by God’s curse. At the age of seventeen, Proust tried to corrupt his classmates at Condorcet; and what is surprising in his letters, behind the conventional surface, is the audacity, the harshness, almost the violence with which the shy, ashamed and tearful boy tried to pursue his pleasures. After experiences we know nothing about, between 1894 and 1896 he had a relationship with Reynaldo Hahn, a young pianist, singer and composer: ‘the most beautiful, sad and warm voice that ever existed’. Their relationship was, on the whole, serene. But anyone who leafs through Proust’s numerous letters to his friend can find in them traces of a passion no less tragic and intense than that which united Swann and Odette.
During those years, his unconscious ideal of life was a monstrous reinterpretation of the Christian Trinity. In this Trinity, no Father occupied the horizon. In the background stood the sweet and sorrowful Oedipal Mother with open arms; beside her, a young woman, ‘confidante of thoughts, beacon of wandering sorrows, guardian of the sick, source of kindness, perfume of friendship, soul of the evenings,’ prepared to caress the burning forehead with her small sisterly hands; while a delicate young man, whom jealousy would have liked to lock up at home like Albertine, occupied the centre of the picture. The loving dream that the suffering child had pursued in vain in his family had not changed. All affections, impulses, and desires were to converge, intensified and multiplied, in the dark figure of ‘little Marcel,’ kneeling and worshipping at the feet of his Trinity.
The relationship with Reynaldo Hahn experienced a moment of idyll during their stays at the Château de Réveillon, where Madame Lemaire invited them. In the morning, while Hahn played and sang, Proust wore a red tie with a blue jacket, a white tie with a black suit, a straw-coloured tie with a straw-coloured jacket, studying new and more exquisite colour harmonies every day. Then they would go down to the dining room, where blue tufts of maidenhair fern, pink and yellow zinnias, and snapdragons retained, in the vividness of their tones, moistened by the still-fresh dew and enlivened by the sun chasing them from the depths of the park, the same softness of tone as Saxon porcelain. But already the hot eggs were steaming on the table, and the guests were sitting down, unfolding napkins “as white as the joy that shone in everyone’s eyes”. The day retained the same rare happiness of the morning. In the garden, a rose bush with enormous, soft white flowers and another with deep purple roses bloomed alongside simple violet petals like wild roses; the lawn was penetrated, impregnated and nourished by the sun; and pigeons, grey and precious like antique silver, trod upon it with slow and cautious feet…
Back in Paris, one day in November 1895, Proust went to the Louvre museum with Hahn to see Chardin’s paintings again. Standing in front of the two marvellous self-portraits, he thought he could glimpse Chardin still alive: a seventy-year-old man, wearing a nightcap on his head, which made him look like an old woman, or with enormous spectacles that fell to the tip of his nose, his pupils that ‘seemed to have seen a lot, mocked a lot, loved a lot’, and eyelids reddened by fatigue. On the walls around him—the eccentric old man, so intelligent and crazy, seemed to say—he saw neither the portrait of the lady with the peacock head, nor that of the countess covered in orchids, nor the overly splendid roses of Réveillon, nor even the worldly young man portrayed by Blanche. In those small paintings, Chardin’s hand had painted only the stiff folds of a tablecloth, glasses with a few sips of sweet wine left in them, a cat moving its paw over oysters as light as pearly cups; and a strange sea monster, a stingray, which revealed ‘the beauty of its delicate and vast architecture of blue nerves and white muscles, like the nave of a polychrome cathedral’. Was anything else needed? Was it necessary to describe stranger and grander things?
When he finished his journey of initiation into the secret life of still life, Proust understood that all things are ‘divinely equal’ before the spirit that contemplates them. At that moment, his youth was over: and he could begin to collect the countless epiphanies that illuminate the dense fabric of our universe.
Essay collected in Il tè del Cappellaio matto (Adelphi, 1972).
Translation from Italian: Rafael Cienfuegos Lamberti.
