Fresh off the press at Plon-Nourrit on June 28, 1922, Charles Du Bos sent Marcel Proust his Approximations, the first volume of a total of seven essays he published between that year and 1937. Du Bos dedicated it to him in black ink: “Pour Marcel Proust / accueillez, cher ami, ces pages” (For Marcel Proust / accept, dear friend, these pages), and dated it July 3.
Four months before his death, obsessed with finishing his work and bedridden almost 24 hours a day between cork-lined walls to keep out the noise, it is difficult to believe that Proust read the book. Céleste Albaret must have received it with the day’s mail (at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, perhaps between Tuesday, July 4, and Friday, July 7), and:
- perhaps she never gave it to Proust;
- she gave it to him and Proust didn’t even open it;
- she gave it to him, and Proust read the dedication, went to the index, and finally skimmed through the essay about him—pages 58 to 116.
Why do I rule out that he read it thoroughly? That copy is in my hands and has no marks of sustained reading; moreover, it still has some pages uncut at the top edge.
This copy is transformed, like any object that touches the threshold of death, into a negative relic. In its silence, it is a liturgical piece of the invisible republic of readers who, even if they have once shaken hands or exchanged words at a soirée, are ultimately only intuited—as if the true bond were woven not in social encounters, but in the mutual gravitation of their sensibilities.
Du Bos writes his dedication to Proust as if Plotinus had written to Plato, more out of metaphysical affinity than material contact. Between the paper and the cork, between Plon-Nourrit and the Boulevard Haussmann, a topography of non-conversation unfolds, of that lineage of artists whose communication resembles echo more than voice. Thus, the book joins that lineage of latent artifacts—such as the Vindolanda tablets, the Herculaneum codices, the paintings that Leonardo never painted—that contain more because they have not been consumed. What Proust didn’t read may be as significant as what he wrote. And perhaps, like every true reader, he preferred the desire for the text to the text itself.
Beyond the gesture and the (un)read book, the episode seems to come straight out of the inventory that Mario Praz would have arranged in his mental museum of morbid affinities: a critic as refined as Du Bos, writing with the pen of a goldsmith for a reader who was, deep down, already a specter. In that Paris where salons gave way to padded chambers, high culture was already being written as an epitaph. And this book, sleeping between uncut pages, has something of the objet trouvé, of a literary relic frozen at the exact moment when intention collides with biology. The taste for the unfinished, for the interrupted beauty, runs through this scene like a filigree needle: Proust, symbol of recovered memory, is frozen here in the act of not reading, which, for a sensibility that is rightly Proustian, is merely another, more tragic, more faithful form of reading.
In his delirious race against time, in the last nine months of his life, according to biographer George Painter, Marcel Proust only had the strength to put the final full stop to his temps perdu.
