Matter and Memory
(The full review referred to in the Amazon abridgement)
A review of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
More readers begin Proust’s great novel than finish it. Was he afraid this would be so? Having found his Truth, he had related his search for it not in an abstract, schematic way but as he had lived that search, groping after the truth, and labouring under misapprehensions. These would finally be dispelled in Time Regained, whose title indicates the unifying theme of the whole work. But that volume and two of its predecessors would come out only after his death. Many of the novel’s first readers were bewildered by it. He himself felt they must think it an autobiography, consisting mainly of digressions. And he was anxious to explain that it was a novel constructed so carefully—though on too large a scale for his design to be grasped all at once—that every part got its meaning from its place in the whole, and the last chapter of the last volume was composed straight after the first chapter of the first volume [1].
In the ‘Overture’, uncertain, on waking, where he is, the narrator thinks he is staying at his friend Mme de Saint-Loup’s country house, Tansonville, from where he goes for walks in the evening along moonlit roads on which as a child he used to play in the sunshine. And the novel proper begins with a long account of those childhood days, ‘Combray’, days brought back to him by a chance memory when, after dipping a morsel of cake in a spoonful of tea, he recognizes the taste of the crumb of madeleine (a kind of pastry) soaked in her lime-flower tea which he used to be given on Sunday mornings in Combray by his aunt. It was memories of this sort that had provided Proust with his essential subject, deliverance from time. In those moments when time was restored by a sensation at once past and present, like the taste of the madeleine, a ‘self outside time’ seemed to experience ‘reality itself’, like a ‘taste of eternity’.
That is, it seemed so to the narrator in his book; in his correspondence Proust was a sceptic, so even if to know a reality other than this life and this world, a transcendent reality, is possible, whether Proust had done so is doubtful. Still the truth about what he had experienced then wasn’t important for the construction of his novel. As a principle of construction, the theme of involuntary memories, with their message that the past could be recovered, to be preserved in a work of art, was well suited to a book whose matter was the writer’s past life.
‘Swann’s way’ or the ‘Guermantes way’—holidaying in Combray the narrator and his family go one way or the other on their walks. (Swann is the name of some neighbours there, Guermantes that of their goal on the other walk and of the local great folk.) And it is one afternoon when they have gone ‘Swann’s way’ that Marcel sees for the first time, beyond the hawthorn hedge of her father’s park, the little girl who is to become that Mme de Saint-Loup, Gilberte Swann. When the last volume opens he is recalling again his stay at Tansonville and his room there from which he could make out, through the park greenery, the steeple of Combray church—the visible form of a distance of miles and years. The boy has grown into a man and become intimate with the Guermantes, indeed the closest friend of that scion of the family, Robert de Saint-Loup, whom he got to know at a little place on the Channel coast, Balbec (a subject of his daydreams in Paris), and whom Gilberte has married. The two ‘ways’ have met. And before the novel ends, Marcel is to discover at last why the taste of the madeleine had given him joy, a discovery which confirms him in his vocation as a writer. The message of the involuntary memories has finally been understood, ‘the vast structure of recollection’ is complete.
Then has that matter been given a definite form, an over-arching unity? Musical analysts have attributed an arch-form or bow-form to Wagner’s Ring, yet they themselves couldn’t actually hear this in it. Proust likened his own themes to leitmotifs that one can’t know to be such on hearing them first. He also likened his great work to a cathedral (much as Wordsworth, constructing with the same tools of retrospection and elaborate syntax an edifice out of his own past life, had said the preparatory poem was related to the rest as the ante-chapel to the body of a Gothic church.) New readers may feel it has the form of a wood that can’t be seen for the trees. But what does form matter in a novel? The circular narrative is in itself a source of aesthetic pleasure, and for the author had the advantage that it could be extended. Swann’s Way came out in 1913 as the first part of a trilogy, but the Great War supervening before The Guermantes Way and Time Regained could follow, the novel went on growing and dividing. The Guermantes Way became the third part, after Within a Budding Grove or ‘love at the seaside’. The theme of sexual inversion was developed—chiefly through the personage of the Baron de Charlus—in Cities of the Plain. Marcel’s jealous love for a new character, Albertine (now introduced retrospectively in the Balbec of the Budding Grove), produced two further parts, The Captive and The Sweet Cheat Gone. Finally, between the visit to Tansonville and a last party at the Princesse de Guermantes’, the War itself entered Time Regained, where too the ‘Opinions and pleasures of M. de Charlus’ completed the portrait of Saint-Loup’s mad, grand, disdainful and degraded uncle.
What makes Remembrance of Things Past the novel of novels is its character as a sustained meditation on a life, but this comes at a price. The grandeur of Wagner’s music in The Ring can’t always prevent us from feeling the lack, which Wagner acknowledged, of any very fast music. And reflections haven’t the quality of notations; the special excellence of Jean Santeuil, the early study for Proust’s masterpiece, is that except for the contrived and literary prologue, it was all written as it was lived, so that the reworked episodes in the later novel seem by comparison overwritten. (If Jean Santeuil can give even more delight than Remembrance of Things Past, this is because it’s full of an artist’s delight in life. The older Proust was a greater artist, but he had learnt what everyone who thinks life is a gift must learn sooner or later, that in fact it has to be paid for.) It isn’t so with Time Regained, though. For one thing this volume is the most unfinished, but the positive reason is that in ‘Paris during the War’ we have a whole chapter written as it was lived, and this alone makes it impossible to regret that the novel in three parts was superseded.
The narrator had returned to Paris then after many years in a sanatorium, and in the last chapter has returned from another after many years more. As one of the guests at an afternoon party given by the Princesse de Guermantes, he at last resolves to begin the book he has long wanted to write—a book in which he will describe people as ‘occupying a place in the dimension of time’. This is just what Proust’s twelve volumes have done in linking with the changing scenes of Marcel’s life these members—changed now so drastically themselves—of a society shaken up by the War. And such a scene as this at the Guermantes’s is unforgettable, though it’s a question how successful is that ‘psychology in time’. It does accord with Proust’s conception of the self (of which more presently), but without continuity of self can there be consistency of character? Even in a two-dimensional description, Proust dwells on dissonances (‘a character’s most opposite facets’, he says himself), as if, having noticed that nobody is all of a piece, he thought such dissonances alone could ensure verisimilitude. In The Sweet Cheat Gone the latest changes in his best friend had pained and amazed even the narrator (Robert appears in his new character at the beginning of Time Regained); to readers they may suggest the use of different sitters for the same portrait. And in the narrator’s grandmother, in the girls of the little band at Balbec, we can see a related reason why Proust’s character-drawing isn’t always convincing. The narrator’s story is in the main the author’s story, and Proust draws from life (though Charlus is larger than life); and if Marcel’s friend Saint-Loup is too plainly a composite of some of Proust’s friends, just as the family servant Françoise is a composite of some real servants, so too perhaps such transposition as has made Proust’s chauffeur-secretary Albert Agostinelli into the woman-loving Albertine, or Proust’s mother into Marcel’s grandmother, is too transparent. (On this point in fact the author was rather touchy: the idea that his ‘jeunes filles’ were ‘hommes déguisés’ was ‘une hypothèse insensée’ (letter of 16 July 1922 to Jean Schlumberger, Corr. XXI, 356).)
These procedures work better with places than with persons. In a famous episode in The Guermantes Way, though the text tells you clearly whose this disembodied voice—this ‘real presence’—is, the emotion the text is charged with—‘but a premonition also of an eternal separation’—tells you otherwise. At the same time the town of Fontainebleau, where it was indeed Proust’s mother who telephoned him one autumn (at a period when telephone-calls were not yet common), and the town of Orléans, where his military service had begun one autumn more distant still, are blended perfectly in Saint-Loup’s garrison-town of Doncières, where this solicitous friend has arranged for Marcel to be telephoned by his grandmother.
The chief fruit of that ‘psychology in time’ as applied to the narrator himself is an analysis of ‘les intermittences du cœur’ (the phrase was to have been the work’s general title)—oblivions experienced by him notably in regard to his grandmother and then to that character whose story contributed most to spoiling the three-part balance. Having fallen for Albert, Proust had been multiplying his observations on possessive love; the young man’s flight and death prompted a comprehensive study of passion, loss and grief. And Gomorrah here makes a pendant to Sodom, but can we believe that Albertine is a young woman? Reading ‘Swann in Love’ we may have wondered at the insertion of this third-person story, told by an omniscient narrator, into Marcel’s story about himself: Swann was to have been the hero of Within a Budding Grove if not of the whole work. Reading about Albertine we may wonder to find jealousy anatomized at greater length still, and the theme of the heart’s intermissions treated all over again, in a ‘Marcel in Love’.
By the time the last volume opens, although the narrator acknowledges that Albertine will have inspired some of the pages he will write (in fact she has been the subject of the previous two volumes), we find him already so indifferent to her memory that were she to return from the dead he would receive her without pleasure. And we learn that he has ceased to mourn for his grandmother. Jean-Yves Tadié thought that in the famous part of Cities of the Plain where, as the narrator stoops to unbutton his boots, a spontaneous memory of his grandmother makes her seem to be alive again, at the same time as he understands he has lost her for ever, it is indeed Proust’s grandmother who has become that of the narrator, and not Proust’s mother. M. Tadié thought so because in a letter of June 1890 Mme Proust urges Marcel not to let his grief for his grandmother make him ill, and this six months after her death, whereas ‘lorsque Proust a perdu sa mère, la douleur a tout de suite été immense’ (Marcel Proust, 135). Even assuming, as M. Tadié has done, that the narrator here is Proust, still may not Proust have really been writing about his mother, though departing from the facts in this particular? As to which, too, is it certain that he felt no grief at first for his grandmother? The period from November 1889 to November 1890 was that of his military service, and Philip Kolb was able to find (for his edition of the correspondence) only one letter written by Proust that year (Corr. I, 15, 160), a letter to his father in which his grandmother isn’t mentioned. Without her daughter’s letter we shouldn’t know he had grieved for her at all, but then again we don’t know he hadn’t been grieving for her long since.
Anyhow, though the narrator’s grief is a grief delayed, it is dissected under the title ‘The heart’s intermissions’—those intermissions with which (we are told rather vaguely) ‘the troubles of memory are closely linked’. And though we do know from letters (to Montesquiou and others) and memoirs (by Reynaldo Hahn and Anna de Noailles) that Proust’s grief for his mother was immediate, it isn’t difficult to believe him capable of forgetting it: a grief intermitted may be none the less genuine and, on its return, intense.
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!
What is difficult to believe is that any man ever felt so passionately about his grandmother. (On her rejoining him, soon after their arrival in Balbec, in his room at the Grand Hotel, where, while she has been shopping, he has been waiting for her ‘half dead with exhaustion, burning with fever and longing to die’, Marcel throws himself into his grandmother’s arms. ‘And when I felt my mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew from them something so beneficial, so nourishing, that I lay in her arms as motionless, as solemn, as calmly gluttonous as a babe at the breast.’) And we can readily understand that the writer should have transposed his feelings about his mother so as to objectify them. M. Tadié (553) sees a first sketch of ‘The heart’s intermissions’ in a letter to Anna de Noailles, but this refers to Proust’s mother, lost memories of whom had come back to him on New Year’s Day [2]. It is his mother who appears in the dreams recorded in the Carnet de 1908, dreams in which a reader of the novel can recognize those in ‘The heart’s intermissions’ concerning the grandmother. In his first reference to the account of her death in The Guermantes Way, Philip Kolb comments that it combines details of both Mme Weil’s death and Mme Proust’s (Corr. I, p. 134); subsequently, after noting that (as we have seen) Proust was soldiering in Orleans at the time of the former, he observes: ‘Proust takes as his model his own mother and not his grandmother’ (Corr. V, Avant-propos xxv-xxvi). According to Mme de Noailles, the account of the grandmother’s death in the novel repeats almost word for word Proust’s account of his mother’s death as she had it from him in a letter.
And it’s just the same with the related episode of the photograph in Within a Budding Grove II—the photograph which, during their visit to Balbec, with a childish pleasure that irritates him, Marcel’s grandmother is looking forward to having taken of her by Saint-Loup. In the next volume Marcel learns from Françoise that, feeling death close at hand, his grandmother had wanted him to have a last picture of her, yet feared she was looking so ill it would be worse than none. It was, perhaps, Félicie Fiteau—a model for Françoise and still in Proust’s service two years after her mistress’s death—who provided him with Françoise’s speech here; but when we find him saying much the same thing in a letter to his mother’s old friend, Mme Catusse, he is speaking of a photograph Mme Catusse took, of his mother (November 1910, Corr. X, 215).
The evidence for the ‘transposition’ is conclusive, but only confirms what a reader can feel without knowing any of it. And paradoxically or not, it is fatal to the illusion of reality to feel that a character in a work of fiction is a real person.
The question is whether the narrator’s grandmother is still Proust’s mother—or putting it another way, whether the narrator is Proust—in his account of the process of oblivion. If objectifying his feelings about his dead mother was necessary for their use in a work of literature, the theme of the heart’s intermissions is naturally bound up with those other great themes of his, that of involuntary memories and that of the illusory self. To Pascal the self was hateful, Hugo had celebrated his self, Rimbaud’s was alienated; Proust ingeniously abolished the self by multiplying it—so here we have read about past selves, successive selves, new selves, spare selves, ‘one of my selves’. The Proustian hero recording how he had ceased to love this woman or that seemed modern enough after all those Romantic heroes lamenting having ceased to be loved, and the more so for Proust’s formulation—‘the “I” that had loved her having ceased to exist’. Involuntary memories restore to the narrator the living reality of his grandmother, they also restore him to himself—not to ‘the “I” of today’ but to the suffering, loving self he had long been a stranger to; so only now, more than a year after her burial, does he really grieve for her. The same theme, of becoming another, is developed inexhaustibly in relation to Albertine—we find him spelling it out even in the last few pages of all: ‘Yet now I no longer loved her, I was no longer the person who loved her but a different person who did not love her, and it was when I had become a new person that I had ceased to love her’. And meanwhile his love for his grandmother too, at the end of a few years, has ‘vanished from his heart’. ‘There would be no more trace of my love for Albertine than there had been, in the time past I had just traversed, of my love for my grandmother’. Again, ‘I was no more capable by an effort of memory of being still in love with Albertine than I was of continuing to mourn my grandmother’s death’. (He had already foretold that that grief would pass as quickly as it had been slow to come.)
So he ceases to grieve (‘Grief leaves fewer traces even than beauty’) and even to love, and finally forgets. Or so he says. Thus when, having lost Albertine, he tries to console himself rather as Catullus consoled his friend Calvus for the loss of Quintilia, he is at once alarmed to think that if the dead do exist somewhere, his grandmother is ‘as well aware of his oblivion as Albertine of his remembrance’. Oblivion? Every time he says, whether of his grandmother or of Albertine or of Mme de Guermantes or of Gilberte, in this work which is virtually one great act of recollection,—every time he says he has forgotten her, he shows us he has not. We even hear towards the end that on his seeing sometimes in imagination both Albertine and his grandmother—these ‘poor dead creatures’—, his heart ‘leaps forward to greet them’. And if oblivion is worse than remorse, remorse precludes oblivion. After Albertine’s death, we find him reflecting on that and his grandmother’s death as on a double murder: ‘it seemed to me that by my entirely selfish affection I had allowed Albertine to die just as I had murdered my grandmother’; he is still reproaching himself so near the end of the whole work: ‘My grandmother, whom with so little feeling I had seen agonize and die beside me!’
And Proust himself? He did tell Antoine Bibescu that with him an attachment lasted only about eighteen months (10 August(?) 1902, Corr. III, 87). But his mother was more than a friend to him, and if—in Contre Sainte-Beuve, where, although she has died, she has not become his grandmother—he tells her he could go on by himself for ever, he has first told the reader they had pretended to love each other less than they really did and so to believe that whichever survived the other wouldn’t find life unbearable. When, in the great novel, Marcel tells us that, with his grief for his grandmother now torturing him, he asked nothing better of God, if a Paradise existed, than that He would let him remain with her throughout eternity, ‘which would not be too long for us’,—can we doubt that Proust was thinking here too of his mother? ‘The heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune’, we hear in Swann’s Way; subsequently the changes are recorded without being deplored; but surely he has exaggerated them in attributing them to Marcel, because he found it painful to think that his memory of his mother could be eclipsed at all; and if he has Marcel reproach himself for having regretted his grandmother so little, it’s surely because he felt he could never regret his mother enough. ‘A slander on Proust’, Denis Saurat called the narrator, adding ‘the mistake of equating the two must not be made’ [3]; then immediately after listing Marcel’s faults: ‘No wonder Proust recoiled in horror from this monster, which is himself’. Certainly Proust used his ill health against his mother (see for example his letter of 9 March 1903) [4], but then she gave him a bad conscience. ‘’Twas my distress that brought thee low’: it was from a belief that the anxiety and unhappiness he had caused her by his tyrannical illness and emotional dependence on her, by his ‘intellectual inactivity’ and ‘wasted life’, by his unfitness for life, had helped to kill her,—it was precisely from remorse that Proust has punished himself in Marcel. But ‘a perfect egoist’ (Saurat, 97) is not a being whose own egoism dismays him.
Remembering that the narrator both is and isn’t Proust, we can believe that Proust had never ceased to love his mother, and that it’s only because she never, as his mother, dies in his novel that he doesn’t dispel our doubt. She dies as the grandmother though, and if Proust did not resemble the narrator in this, and perhaps as a further reason if he did, he has made him hard-hearted for effect, as Byron made his poetic heroes cynical for effect. For that matter, we read in the novel that friendship is folly, and its pleasures are unreal, though it’s otherwise in Proust’s letters. ‘I did not believe in friendship’, Marcel tells us after his discovery about Robert, but adds—as though Proust himself had never learnt the painful truth Jean Santeuil had learnt: ‘our sympathy has no power over hearts that feel none for us’—, not ‘nor did I believe that Robert had ever felt any real friendship for me’, but ‘nor did I believe that I had ever felt any real friendship for Robert’ [5].
Proust’s great work is exceptional among novels in the degree to which the matter is supplied by memory. And the signs of his substituting memory for imagination are so many and obvious, it may be asked why he didn’t choose rather—what was plainly in his power—to write a greater Praeterita or even a prose Prelude. But it’s just because he has fictionized his own life, and his personages are not invented, that if you sometimes doubt whether fiction can satisfy mature minds, and feel there is more profit in reading biographies and autobiographies, you may well prefer this novelist to any other. When at the end his former schoolfriend Bloch bounds like a hyena into the Guermantes’ drawing-room, Marcel reflects that Bloch is at home now in houses he would never have been invited to twenty years before; and indeed, because it is at least twenty years since she first set eyes on him, the Duchesse de Guermantes would have sworn he had actually been born in her world. Owing to the vast span of Proust’s narrative, the depth of his analysis and the minuteness of his explanations, to the very qualities which may have seemed excessive or even exasperating, you may feel, if you have read so far, that all these people in Marcel’s thoughts, the dead ones like Swann and Albertine and Robert, the past selves of Bloch and Gilberte and his other fellow guests disguised by age, have been acquaintances of yours too, and that memory is now showing them to you—familiar and yet distant like those places whose names, Doncières, Balbec, Combray, Tansonville, are now as evocative for you as for him—in the perspective of your own lifetime.
Remembrance of Things Past, vols I to XI trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, vol. XII trans. Andreas Mayor, Chatto & Windus, 1922-70
Correspondance de Marcel Proust, 21 vols, ed. Ph. Kolb, Plon, 1970-93
Contre Sainte-Beuve, précédé de Pastiches et Mélanges et suivi de Nouveaux Mélanges, ed. P. Clarac and Y. Sandre, Bibl. de la Pléiade 1971
Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, ed. P. Clarac and Y. Sandre, Bibl. de la Pléiade 1971
Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, Gallimard, 1996
Denis Saurat, Modern French Literature, J.M. Dent, 1946
[1] Et au point de vue de la composition, elle est si complexe qu’elle n’apparaît que très tardivement quand tous les «Thèmes» ont commencé à se combiner. (To René Blum, 23 Feb. 1913, Corr. XII, 92).
D’ailleurs presque tout ce que vous avez lu ne prendra son sens qu’alors [in the then remaining two volumes], et si j’ai parlé des noms de pays dans ce volume, ce n’est pas une digression, le dernier chapitre s’appelle : Noms de pays : le Nom. Le principal chapitre du second volume s’appelle: Noms de pays : le Pays. (To Lucien Daudet, Sept. 1913, ib., 258-9
Enfin je trouve un lecteur qui devine que mon livre est un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction! […] J’ai trouvé plus probe et plus délicat comme artiste de ne pas laisser voir, de ne pas annoncer que c’était justement à la recherche de la Vérité que je partais, ni en quoi elle consistait pour moi. […] Ce n’est qu’à la fin du livre, et une fois les leçons de la vie comprises, que ma pensée se dévoilera. […] Mais cette évolution d’une pensée, je n’ai pas voulu l’analyser abstraitement mais la recréer, la faire revivre. Je suis donc forcé de peindre les erreurs, sans croire devoir dire que je les tiens pour des erreurs; tant pis pour moi si le lecteur croit que je les tiens pour la vérité. Le second volume accentuera ce malentendu. J’espère que le dernier le dissipera. (To Jacques Rivière, 6 Feb. 1914, Corr. XIII, 98-100.
J’aurais beaucoup à vous dire de ce roman [Les Caves du Vatican], plus passionnant qu’un Stevenson, et dont les épisodes convergent, composés comme dans une rose d’Église. C’est à mon goût la composition la plus savante, mais je n’ai peut-être pas le droit de dire cela, puisque, ayant mis tout mon effort á composer mon livre, et ensuite à effacer les traces trop grossières de composition, les meilleurs juges n’ont vu là que du laisser-aller, de l’abandon, de la prolixité. (To André Gide, 6 Mar. 1914, ib., 108).
Au reste, je crains que l’architecture de À la recherche du temps perdu ne soit pas plus sensible dans ce livre [À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs] que dans Swann. Je vois des lecteurs s’imaginer que j’écris, en me fiant à d’arbitraires et fortuites associations d’idées, l’histoire de ma vie./Ma composition est voilée et d’autant moins rapidement perceptible qu’elle se développe sur une large échelle… (To Paul Souday, 10 Nov. 1919, Corr. XVIII, 463-4).
Cet ouvrage [RTP] (dont le titre mal choisi trompe un peu) est si méticuleusement «composé» (je pourrais vous en donner de bien nombreuses preuves) que le dernier chapitre du dernier volume a été écrit tout de suite après le premier chapitre du premier volume. (To the same, 17 Dec. 1919, ib. 536).
On méconnaît trop en effet que mes livres sont une construction, mais à ouverture de compas assez étendue pour que la composition, rigoureuse et à qui j’ai tout sacrifié, soit assez longue à discerner. On ne pourra le nier quand la dernière page du Temps retrouvé (écrite avant le reste du livre) se refermera exactement sur la première de Swann. (To Benjamin Crémieux, 18 or 19 Jan. 1922, Corr. XXI, 41).
[2] ‘Moi qui ne croyais pas aux anniversaires, le jour de l’an a eu sur moi une puissance d’évocation terrible. Il m’a tout d’un coup rendu les mémoires de Maman [died 26 Sept. 1905] que j’avais perdues, la mémoire de sa voix.’ (To Mme de Noailles, Feb. 1906, Corr. VI, 32)
[3] Saurat, 96. At any rate it’s a slander on some of his readers, since it’s not just his own heart we find indicted:
‘Yes, I recalled the fact [that the Duke and Duchess had brought him home on the evening when Albertine had come to see him after the Princess’s party], for, long after our poor dead friends have lost their place in our hearts, their unvalued dust continues to be mingled, like some base alloy, with the circumstances of the past.’ (Time Regained, 422)
‘But since we live at a great distance from other human beings, since even our strongest feelings—and in this class had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine—at the end of a few years have vanished from our hearts and become for us merely a word which we do not understand…’ (TR, 273)
[4] ‘J’ai en ayant beaucoup de fièvre travaillé cette nuit á Ruskin… Je te disais… quand tu te plaignais de mon inactivité intellectuelle que tu étais vraiment bien impossible,… il te fallait aussitôt que je me remette au travail. Je l’ai fait cependant et au travail que tu désirais. […] Au lieu de dormir tantôt je t’ai répondu et je suis brisé. Je ne sais encore si je pourrai dîner dans la salle à manger. Tâche qu’il y fasse bien chaud. Avant hier il y faisait si froid que j’y ai pris froid, fatigué comme je suis en ce moment. […] Tu ne peux, ni n’es sur le chemin de pouvoir, me faire du bien positif. Mais en m’évitant des refroidissements trop fréquents tu m’en feras négativement et beaucoup. […] La tristesse dans laquelle je vis n’est pas sans donner beaucoup de philosophie. Elle a l’inconvénient de vous faire accepter aussi naturellement presque, [sic] la tristesse des autres que la vôtre propre. Mais du moins si je t’attriste c’est par des choses qui ne dépendent pas de moi. Dans toutes les autres je fais toujours ce qui peut te faire plaisir. Je ne peux pas en dire autant de toi. […] Mais je ne t’en veux pas et te demande seulement de ne plus m’écrire de lettres nécessitant des réponses car je suis brisé et n’aspire qu’au plus complet éloignement de toutes ces fatigues.’ (Corr. III, p. 266-68)
[5] The Sweet Cheat Gone, 370. But already in the preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies (the preface which when it appeared alone in 1905 was called ‘Sur la lecture’, and which became ‘Journées de lecture’ when it appeared in Pastiches et mélanges) we are told: 'Sans doute, l’amitié…est une chose frivole’(CSB, Pl., 186).