Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (46 page)

“Yeah, so, I am doing some drug research, you know, providing clinical information… um, my patients… well, research, as well as my work at the hospital.”

Daniel suddenly fell serious and silent, his smile faded.

“It seems so silly now, nothing more than measles, but I was really quite ill with it. I fainted one day in the street and…”

Daniel reached over and touched Sarah’s arm, stopping the flow of her memories. Maxime continued.

“You know they have the immunodeficiency clinic there, but there’s also this lab…”

“Well, that’s interesting.” Sarah was puzzled. “I thought…”

“What kind of research, Max?” His father prompted him firmly.

“Vaccine research for HIV… HIV research. That’s what I’m doing.”

“But, Maxime.” Sarah, her attention suddenly focused, switched to French and stared at her son. “Those… they… You might catch…”

“No, it is perfectly safe. We are very careful with the blood.”

“But, those men…”

“Yes, those men.”

Sarah laughed nervously and then choked on her laugh.

“It’s a surprise. A surprise…” Her voice trailed off.

Mother and son stared at each other for a while in belated recognition, and then in the silence there was a sound, the harsh rasp of Sarah’s chair scraping back.

Daniel, who had been waiting for several years for some kind of announcement or explanation, the suspicions he had never dared voice to Sarah now confirmed, his bedside manner firmly in place, promptly said the right thing: “We love you, Max.”

But Sarah, a thousand new fears, hurts, and anxieties churning up from the pit of her stomach and clogging her throat, found tears in her eyes, and tears were something that pride had seldom let her shed. She rose and left the room without speaking.

“Y
OUR PAPERS, PLEASE
.”

The request is routine but there’s a threat somewhere behind it. One must follow the regulations, carry the right identification. The official does not smile as I rifle nervously through my briefcase.

I have been summoned into the head librarian’s private office by the North African clerk. The unctuous assistant assistant librarian has watched me go with amusement, as I pass into the mysterious world beyond the glass door at the end of the manuscript room. The anxious M. Richaud has bustled after me and now hovers in his boss’s presence, finally sure that he has made a mistake in permitting me to keep working in the library. It is the third week of October, and I have been here for almost a month.

“Je pensais, M. Valéry…”

M. Valéry, a patrician Frenchman with a large head covered in salt-and-pepper hair and an air of easy authority, dismisses the anxious M. Richaud with a wave of his hand and concentrates on me. I have made a mistake. I have applied for a second renewal on the permitted eight-day reserve on File
263 of the Marcel Proust papers (miscellaneous letters and notebooks belonging to the author’s mother, Jeanne Proust). Once was permissible, but twice? More than sixteen working days with the minor Proust documents in File 263? Well… I have drawn attention to myself. I am to explain.

I show M. Valéry the letter, a crumbled piece of fax paper, with which I originally obtained my library card.

“You work at this institution?” He raises an eyebrow as he reads, seeing right through Justine’s carefully worded letter of introduction.

My heart pounds as though I have been caught in a grotesque lie, but I swallow and, estimating that truth is the best hope here, reply honestly, “No. I am a translator, an interpreter.”

He dismisses the profession with a shake of the head.

“What is your interest in Proust?” he asks.

What is my interest in Proust? I hesitate.

Do you have time for a story? I was fifteen when I first encountered… well, I have told you that already. But I returned to Proust, in the years after the night of the wedding reception.

It was five years ago now, when I was launching my career as an interpreter in Montreal and Max had just moved back to Toronto to start his residency, that I remembered my girlhood love of Proust. Looking for some diversion from my own affairs, I recalled that I had always promised myself that I would finish the whole novel, and so I began reading, returning to the story started years before in school.

I start in French at the beginning, rereading the first book quickly and then turning, more slowly, to the
remaining six. I savour the description, linger over the satire, longing to dwell in this world of dove-grey gloves and white orchids. Finishing
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
, I pick up a paperback edition of the English translation, entitled
Remembrance of Things Past
, and begin the voyage again, comparing the vocabularies, testing my own knowledge of the two languages. I am not a fast reader: as though compensating for the swift decisions required by my profession, I approach the written word with hesitant leisure, never quite sure in either language that I have fully grasped the true value of a phrase and may proceed to the next. The novel measures more than three thousand pages, and, with work, household chores, the occasional family obligation or mass on Sundays, dinner with Justine and her husband, or a visit from an old school friend, this doubled reading project fills my life for a whole three years. Perhaps I purposefully prolong it, for Proust has become my favourite companion, my solace in an empty place. He consoles me and advises me too.

Knowing the stabbing pain of separation from a lover and the gnawing guilt he felt at the worry he caused his mother, Proust believed every love was filled with agonies. Great invalid that he was, he concluded romantic love was a fatal illness, a passage from pain to defeat. In the second part of the first volume of
A la Recherche
, entitled in English
Swann in Love
, Proust told the story of the erudite and cultured Swann’s obsession with his mistress, the vulgar, demimondaine Odette. After years of jealous pursuit, Swann finally awakes from his fever with a cry:

“Dire que j’ai gaché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu
mourir, que j’ai eu mon plus grand amour pour une femme que ne me plaisait pas, qui n’etait pas mon genre!”

In my Penguin edition, the passage is rendered thus: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I have experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”

Once finished my reading, I feel bereft and buy yet another copy, the most recent revision of the English translation in hard cover. I admire the silvery dust jackets that surround six compact little volumes and weigh each satisfying book in my hand. Their title is now
In Search of Lost Time
. Proust himself considered the Shakespearean title chosen by his first translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, to be inaccurate and would perhaps be pleased to find the English translation of his novel finally, in the 1990s, more sensitively named.

I turn next to the biographies. They are also in English—George D. Painter’s 1959 classic
Marcel Proust;
Ronald Hayman’s more recent
Proust
—and in French—
Proust
by Ghislain de Diesbach.

Here, I discover the Proust never taught in school, the lover of men and boys who fantasized about living with his friend Reynaldo Hahn and who would later turn an obsession for his chauffeur Alfred into the narrator’s passion for Albertine. A sensual man who knew the inside of male brothels well enough he could easily create an aging sado-masochist called Baron Charlus, based on the real Comte de Montesquiou. A flirtatious and flattering man who had some kind of misunderstanding with his dear friend Marie Nordlinger, the English artist who helped him with his Ruskin translations.

I dig out my old school reader and flip through the excerpts it offered a girl, passages in which cakes were nibbled, seasons savoured, women loved. Its brief biographical note
makes no mention of Proust’s own great loves, other than his mother. On the same page, the author’s pale portrait in the guise of fragile dandy stares out at me. I can just make out the faint pencil markings where Justine once darkened the circles under his eyes.

And so, I began a quest for the adult Proust, the hunt that eventually brought me here.

“What is your interest in Proust?” M. Valéry repeats the question.

“My interest is not in Proust himself. Well, of course, I am interested, I have read… but I have become a student of the work of his mother.”

“His mother?”

“Jeanne Proust. That’s what is in File 263—Mme Proust’s papers. Her notebooks.

“Yes, yes, it has all been published.”

In fact, this is not true. It is precisely because these papers have not been published that I convinced M. Richaud to sign my request form in the first place. The Bibliothèque Nationale directs readers towards printed books or microfilm whenever possible, to avoid unnecessary wear and tear on the manuscripts. M. Richaud explained that at our initial meeting as we ran through the library’s catalogue of Proust holdings. Each file has a full call number—the Proust archive covers dozens of numbers in the sixteen thousands—but is usually known by the Roman numeral assigned to it, from I to CCLXIII, or File 263. We eventually go through the whole list, file by file.

Files 1–19 contain small notebooks in which Proust composed his first drafts of
A la Recherche
.

Files 20–71 contain the actual handwritten manuscripts for all the books of the novel with Proust’s many additions and revisions, including his famous
paperoles
, the long strips of paper he would glue onto existing pages. It was File 20, which contains the first pages of
A la Recherche
, that I originally requested. M. Richaud is so appalled by my gall in this regard that he has asked to see me so that he may personally dismiss me. Files 1 through 71 are available only to an exclusive list of well-recognized Proust scholars. There’s a copy of the microfilm downstairs, in the audiovisual department. End of discussion.

“What about Files 72 to 135?” I ask, gently urging him down the list.

Files 72–135 contain the original printer’s galleys with more revisions in the author’s hand. They are also available only to Proust scholars; they are also on microfilm downstairs. Warming to his subject, M. Richaud relents a little and confides in me that the library is planning to build an electronic version of the archive. Hypertext will be particularly useful in rendering the effect of the
paperoles
accessible to the public. Not for several years, of course, but it will be a magnificent thing when it is accomplished. I smile wanly. I had wanted to see the actual ink Proust had penned, to see his hand in the flesh. I encourage M. Richaud onwards.

Files 135–139, the manuscripts of Proust’s two translations of Ruskin,
The Bible of Amiens
and
Sesame and Lilies
. The translations, dating to 1903 and 1906, are now out of print, but are widely held in library collections. They can be had downstairs, on the ground floor, in the
salle des
imprimés
, the room where printed books are kept. The introduction to
Sesame and Lilies
has itself been translated into English. M. Richaud eyes me carefully: he believes that slim volume is still in print. So, the answer on Files 135–139 is no.

File 140, the draft of
Jean Santeuil
, an early unfinished autobiographical novel dating to the late 1890s. Published posthumously and still in print. An English translation is also in print. The microfilm of the manuscript is downstairs. No again.

File 141, the manuscript for
Les Plaisirs et les Jours
, a collection of juvenilia with original illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire published in 1896. Out of print, but the library itself has two copies of the book. Downstairs.

File 142, two drafts and a final manuscript for a short story, “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” published in the
Revue Hebdomadaire
in 1895. M. Richaud concedes that collections of the
Revue Hebdomadaire
are scarce, and that the Bibliothèque Nationale’s own copies have been packed for the move to the new building and so are currently not available. “Perhaps, mademoiselle could be allowed…” By all accounts, the story may have been beautifully written but was improbably romantic. I could look at it, but I had hoped for more, and push M. Richaud on down the list.

Files 142–258, the correspondence, from a childhood note to a cousin dating to 1880 up to the author’s last letters to friends before his own death in 1922, all of it collected up from his many correspondents by the assiduous staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale who have matched the blandishments of American universities with calls to national pride and the occasional cheque. A popular three-volume edition of selected letters is widely available in both French and English; the complete twenty-one-volume scholarly edition in the original French
can be had in many university libraries, even in North America. The microfilm of the original letters can also be viewed here at the Bibliothèque Nationale. M. Richaud gives me another piercing look.

And so we come to the miscellaneous files:

File 259 (oversized), newspapers found in the author’s bedroom at the time of his death.

File 260, household notes found in the author’s apartment at the time of his death.

Files 261–262, rough translations of Ruskin’s
The Bible of Amiens
and
Sesame and Lilies
executed by the author’s mother, Jeanne Proust.

File 263, the contents of a small desk found in the author’s apartment at the time of his death and containing papers belonging to his mother, Jeanne Proust, including letters from the period 1878 to 1904 and notebooks from 1890 to 1904. (I am to learn that the cataloguer has made two mistakes here. There are no letters in the file; perhaps they have been moved over to the boxes containing the collected correspondence. And the sixteen leather-bound journals that are here do not stop in 1904, but continue until Jeanne Proust’s death in 1905.) Pausing here at File 263, M. Richaud raises his head from the paper quizzically. Mme Proust’s original versions of the Ruskin translations have not been microfilmed, neither have her notebooks. Yes, I will take the ill-catalogued and much-neglected File 263.