1. Mme Bulteau, to whom I was presented at the age of seventeen, had, according to her close circle of friends, a great influence on my mind. The moment she saw me, knowing that I had composed some verse, she decided that my poems should be published. It was she who submitted them to M. Georges Calmann-Lévy. Thus Le Coeur Innombrable was published. Mme Bulteau has held in my life, and in those of my sister and friends, such an important place that I would not know how to explain briefly here the dominion which she holds, this woman of domineering genius, yet infinitely generous and sensitive.

2. Bittô, Le Coeur Innombrable.

3.Proust is quoting from a verse in Visage Emerveillé that Mme de Noailles attributes in the subsequent note to Jean Passerat (1534-1602).
L'enfer sera pour vous, et la peine et les feux
Punirent justement vos dédains, vos reffeus,
Le Ciel vous dardera les traitz de sa vengeance,
Vous péchez contre un Dieu qui pourroit sans torment
Vous donner du plaisir et du contentement
Au Paradis d'Amour qu'on nomme Jouissance.
Reffeus is a Medieval French usage meaning arrière-fief or an inferior area of land belonging to a land owner who "refuses" access. (Trans)

4. Jean Passerat, disciple of Ronsard.

5. Marcel Proust knew from me that the charming chapel in the park of Champlâtreux had inspired some of my descriptions of the little convent, for which the religious hostel of Evian and a cloister on the outskirts of Pau also served as models.

XVII (1904)

Thursday

Madame,

   How amusing this character that you have created is (like France's Putois) ¹: the Marquise d'Arpajon ² - Allow me to point out that there is a question of principle here: in order to sacrifice less of ourselves in one's work than over one's friends (without doubt that is to say over the works of one's friends) the works "of friends" ought to be more enduring than the works of "loved ones". Nobody reads The Legend of Centuries but everyone remembers the commentary from Nettement. What good fortune that Hippolyte Lucas becomes immortal in order that Baudelaire does not perish. The Marquise d'Arpajon's argument is the opposite of:

I give you these verses in order that if my name
Embarks happily at distant ages,
And one evening brings dreams to the human mind,
The favoured vessel of a great aquiline,
Your memory, like unreliable stories,
Tires the reader like a dulcimer,
And by a brotherly and mystical link,
Remains suspended over my haughty rhymes.

   In spite of my excessive tiredness, I can't help myself from writing out one verse more, then another one, from this marvellous piece so that in the end I've copied out the whole thing. Moréas finds ... Actually, I do not want to bring up the subject of Moréas, about whom you probably do not feel the same as I, who do not admire him much (maybe a little, but not enormously, very little actually).

   Goodbye, Madame, please accept my respectful admiration,

Marcel Proust.

1. Let us remember, even though it seems unnecessary, that Anatole France, in creating the imaginary character of Putois, wanted to stress the power of the word and the credulousness with which he is duped by it.

2. A newly written piece by me which only appeared in an English language newspaper.

XX (1905)

Madame,

   I thank you with all my heart (do not come) I shall write to you tomorrow. This evening my head aches too much. I have gone into certain rooms in my apartment which through chance I had not revisited, and I have explored unknown areas of my grief, which spreads itself ever more widely the more I go on. There are certain floorboards close to Mama's room which I cannot cross without making them creak, and as soon as Mama heard me she would make a little sound with her mouth which meant: come in and kiss me. It looks like I should leave this place which is now so sad because it used to be so happy and which forms a part of my heart. I shall write to you tomorrow or the day after and I am so sad that you might be unwell! If M. de Noailles could write me something on the respective worth of Sollier and Dubois and the comfort of their amenities he would be doing me a great service! Do you know if M. Sollier would consent to treat people at home? But do not ask him because I have already involved lots of others! The ideal doctor to my mind would be always stooping, like the one in Rheims cathedral, over a vial of ... ¹ and certainly not Vaschide.²

Marcel Proust.

1. Indecipherable word. (Actually the word is "urine" which Anna de N. chose to suppress. - Trans.)

2. Dr Vaschide, of Rumanian nationality, overflowing with intellectual ability; student of professor Pierre Marie.
It was Vaschide who gave me an account of the moving spectacle of Nietzsche in a clinic in Iéna, where this great lyrical dreamer was a prey to mental illness, shrouded in supreme nobility and gentleness; he made himself read pages of French literature, while his gaze like that of a dumbfounded eagle rested on the rustic horizon.
Vaschide wrote a volume about dreams which received interesting commentaries before the theories of Freud appeared. With a boundless generosity of spirit, he rapidly exhausted himself through over work and through kindness sacrificed his vigorous health. He died at the age of thirty three, true to a prediction made to me five years previously by Mme Fraya, a friend of his whose clairvoyant powers enthralled him. Confident of overcoming people's incredulity, he did not hesitate in bringing Mme Fraya into his hospitals, to the bedside of the sick, and he looked to her for a diagnosis by means of her astonishing inspiration.

XXI (1905)

Night of Saturday to Sunday

Madame,

   I received your book this very evening, I received it like the Spouse "who rises from the desert, like a column of smoke in the shape of a palm, perfumed with myrrh, of calumus with all the fragrant powders of the merchant" (The Song of Solomon), I received it and I have not yet left it. Your dizzying development astonishes me. The prodigious leap between Visage Emerveillé and this one is such that from here Visage Emerveillé and Nouvelle Espérance seem each as high as the other and yet Visage Emerveillé was itself very high. But still only a marvellous and  perfect cell. And now these cells have multiplied to millions, a world; Coeur Innombrable responds with an innumerable talent, a power such as has never before been seen; most certainly you too, all your incandescent books, you will be immortal, having thus penetrated, reversed life and death, played with their secrets which are inferior to those of your genius. Cruel power! Calm for many years, what sufferings of reading will it not now give me and for how many years to come! I am still too utterly shattered by the agony of Elisabeth¹ to write to you about all that. I don't believe I shall ever leave "Bruges, once strong and golden, now a mute, meditative shrine, hospice of peace and gold, autumn where the brisk air thrusts before itself nothing but shadows". I remain there, I feel that I do not have the strength to carry on further. What's the use? You yourself, what could you ever write which is so beautiful? Now, by sorrowful and sublime paths, to the heights to which you have led me I can hardly remember where I am and I am obliged to turn back the pages, each page disturbing my heart, to rediscover the words themselves. I have reached other stopping places which I thought I could never leave, after detaching myself from those hearts "dedicated to St Godeliève, St Valère to St Odilon". I thought I should stop for ever in ecstasy before "the immense square of rock, immobile Victoire", then before "rounded and hollowed out gold, the golden cells of Saint-Marc and the porcelain Alps". Sometimes it was over an astonishing adjective which I hung suspended, such as "the favoured flower". But cruelly you have made me give up nature for life. What a book! Perhaps its best and most beautiful sweep, will reveal itself to me more fully one day, I mean to say that of the soul of Antoine, who in his disdainful and insolent love for the first young woman (in actual fact the third after Mme. Maille and Corinne, I mean to say she who is not referred to as the Venus of Ypres) who admits to his amazement that she takes the trouble to speak for herself, goes as far as his affection for Elisabeth which infinitely exceeds his love for her, which nevertheless like Mme. de Rénal causes him to die three days after her. There without doubt is an immense grandeur, and it is perhaps the greatest piece of literary beauty I know. Antoine separated from her, that proud figure who understands sadness for others, and wishes for death, becomes human, becomes greater. But if that is an immense arch, the summit rising once again  from the heart, yet the abysses into which you continually feign to send us hurtling "into the azure, into the dazzlements"; what a wicked, outrageous book! When I saw the countess of Albi's shutters closed I believed that she was dead. And like Antoine over Elisabeth I was rather pleased about it. For whom do we not immediately wish death upon in this book in order to avoid having to experience such suffering, because your cruelty is greater than those very cruelties of life, because it combines a sadness unknown in nature which is yours alone, and is inflicted without respite. Only the atrocious Emilie does not make me despair and I hold that she does suffer. She is perhaps the most admirable character in the book, this maid who makes herself precious by her listlessness, that we must hold like an evanescent Esther, care for her like a Hébé who was let fall from the bed of the gods. The most marvellous place in the book is undoubtedly the garden of Eaden (Eden?) that day where azure is in the air like a garden of blue roses. But, Madame, you who certainly know those ladies' maids with the Princesse de Polignac, Mme Bulteau, I don't know who else, how can you dare to never see them? To imagine that they read these phrases about their dresses, which they have been given, and that they could think they were being scorned by you! And the commoners who dine with you and you place after Turenne. Madame, in order to be able to think this, I realize quite well that I am already coming back, that I am once more descending step by step down the golden sparkling staircase. But to what dizzy heights you have elevated me again. This is a great day. For all of us. Above all for language. At a certain point I had feared that you would not be able to write any more, forging words for the cravings of the ineffable. On the same subject, after reading an article (containing two sublime things) about Mme. Bulteau, I wanted to write to you but I did not dare. God is God. But now you have made a final leap and you have touched not the unknown but the absolute. A style that is more eternal by being more personal. Absolute certainty through extreme audacity. A style which, in your own words, promises more than beauty. What? Life and death? An anxiety worse than either. And which, I confess, prevents me from savouring beauty at the moment. How to find enjoyment in the world, when one sees it in wounded flight, like on a fine morning, when one starts to realize that one has been deceived, that the being whom one loves is going to die. All that is too sorrowful and I want to turn away from your books if the open wound inflicted by the divine arrow is curable. Take away life when there is nothing but life. Sublime words written by you yourself. I return them against you. Goodbye, Madame. Goodbye? For so long I would have loved to have seen you again. And such grief that you do not care at all. And your sister even less. But detested by the charming husband, who has such just and legitimate influence, hated by Mme Bulteau, how do you even come to send me your book? I only thank you once again, with the greatest respect

Marcel Proust.

1. Heroine of La Domination.

XXII (1905)

Sunday evening

Madame,

   You can well imagine that what Antoine¹ feels when he is invited to that great writer, Corinne's father's, cannot give any idea of my emotion. When I think that it is you, the sublime point to which the mentality of the species has arrived at in its understanding, who writes me that. Not that I believe for a second that you think that. I know that it is a part of your nature to wish to do good to people's feelings and intellect, and more especially as it uses up still more of your strength to be sparing with it during the churching of your fertile thought. But it is even more beautiful that way; because it is this gift of knowing what can touch everyone's heart which is the element, the pure substance which is the basis of your genius. And the wish to be so good, to create this goodness is the door through which you reach all our hearts, all universes. (I do not say how you win hearts, naturally! but how intellectually you penetrate their secrets, it is first of all necessary that you are them, and you can only be that through sympathy, which as Schopenhauer says, breaks down artificial barriers which exist between individuals and creates unity in the world). I hardly see anyone, but by three or four representative tokens, can discern the immense feeling produced by La Domination, and how much we can appreciate the distance separating this book from its predecessors, which for all that we are not betraying.

Anna I shall love everything in the things created
By you.

   And I think that La Domination will feel the same fraternity between itself and its brothers Nouvelle Espérance and Visage Emerveillé and will not be like Victor Hugo's cedar:

A cedar does not smell a rose at its roots.

   A cedar! How far away is the poetry of Victor Hugo! Was not the cedar created solely for that wonderful phrase in La Domination? Perhaps the most beautiful in the book. In short the judgement of M. Rageot appears to me to be perfectly just. Except maybe his Barrèsist analysis. To me nothing could be more wrong. I think it is a lack of perspicacity in his critical spirit. He feels quire rightly that there is some of Barrès there; but through not knowing well enough how to analyse it, he does not take account of the fact that it is not in the author in La Domination that there is something of Barrès, but in the principal character. Yes, I believe (and I say this I think through no lack of respect for Barrès, for his marvellous writing, for his immense influence on our times, for his exquisite personal charm) I believe that certain aspects of Antoine's pride and boredom, and of his scornful disdain for the feelings of his first mistress (the one from Bruges) and yet of the latent force through which he gives way to an immense affection for the great soul of Elisabeth, these are things which you have been able (even if that is not the case) to see in M. Barrès' work. But Barrèsist analysis in the book I do not see. And yet I do see things in it which could be Barrèsist. And if that is so, you must not give in to it² and if on the other hand that is within you, and on your own terms, do not resist it. It is the abrupt usage of present to indicative, where one would normally use the imperfect and the perfect. "Now Elisabeth feels that ...., etc." It is even unthinkable to consider at which point your wonderful Venice differs from his wonderful Venice, and your wonderful Bruges from his wonderful Bruges, when the image that he has given to these two cities is so particular that it has seemed to govern literary sensibility for so long. And will govern them indeed, barring this exception and the miracle of this view of genius which has now intervened. From now on everything that will be written about Venice or Bruges will derive from what you have both written about them, whether it is your vision or his. Regarding your Bruges, I think that Huysmanns said in La Cathédrale (and I have felt this myself) that at Chartres there is such a wind in the streets that one is swept to the church (don't worry, what he said has no relation to what you say). So then we ask ourselves if piety would not exist other than in the towns where it is impossible to move in the streets and where one is blown by force into the naves where the air is soft and warm, without breeze, where one can breathe, put one's hat back on properly, get your breath back whilst on your knees. I don't need to tell you that I believe nothing of that and that you who have felt such austerity, but also efficacy in cathedrals of which you have spoken better than it doesn't matter who (just like the way everything in the world you have ever spoken about is unlike anybody else) you know that piety has a higher source like its "mystic trials" and that we must at least look at "the moonlight in the rose windows".

   Madame, it is so sweet to play with all these words from your books, which are now the sacred alphabet of all thought, that I could write to you for ever without dreaming that it is absurd, audacious and derisive to detain your attention like this. I thank you once again, Madame, for that letter of ineffable saintliness, and ask you to accept with my unfailing gratitude my respectful admiration,

Marcel Proust

   I wanted to write to you the other day about La Domination, but having gone out in the morning to see the Whistlers, I was in an indescribably terrible state for four hours. Blanche's article about Whistler is very pretty, a little cruel.

1. Hero of La Domination, novel admired by Marcel Proust. Without having had the occasion to reread this book, because I did not authorize a reprint, I cannot therefore comment on the accuracy of Marcel Proust's quotations from a novel expelled from my memory, and which in spite of me he loved exaggeratedly and frequently discussed with me.

2. I agree with the impeccable and scrupulous reasoning of Marcel Proust. He was so often a lucid judge!

XXIII (1905)

Sunday night to Monday

Madame,

   Still under the oppression of this great book, I should like to speak to you again about it, so I will do so. It is simply that I do not think I have expressed to you sufficiently how beautiful I find it. Because yesterday, when I wrote to you I was not even sure myself that it was. It was my divine Elisabeth, I knew that here was a soul at the centre of the universe, I did not know if it was pretty or average or great. I know it today and I still love it more and more. Perhaps you would like to know the sentences which I have liked the most. I know I have already said much about this yesterday. The most beautiful of all without comparison seems to me to be: when their tears flowed one on the other and united together like a long river two mysterious towns. More lovely because what she says is more beautiful, more inventive, more profound. But all the expressions about the journey in the North are also lovely, the geraniums between the porcelain tiles, beside a wicker chair, and all of the pages on the wind, Flemish nuns (and the open door in the Memling) and their modest knees. Their modest knees are the equal of the busy, good-natured inhabitants, the decorative épicerie, the neutral face, the prudent cloak, the ring of small pearls on the round swollen finger. The whole chapter about France (?) is extraordinary. But all the same it is at Venice that all the wonder begins and with Elisabeth all the superhuman. The butterflies (the first ones, those with the abrupt descent, and the second ones, those in the garden of Eaden) and the extraordinary days, those with the blue roses (garden of Eaden), of blossoming roses (Florence) where the earth is like a ship, where heaven draws its own happiness (ah!) to separate the azure parts! the heavenly little birds, and the hare and the doves, and the exchanged flowers (pink and tuberous centaurea) what to pick out from this ocean of beauty? If only I had the time to think about this, so absorbed by the sublime ending, so obscure in its marvellous light, so outrageous, so sweet.

   Goodbye Madame, I admire you much more than Arnault, Corrine's father, and than Arnault  admires himself.

   Your respectful friend,

Marcel Proust

XXV (1905)

Madame,

   Forgive me (I have been so unwell) for not having replied to you till now (you understood that our letters crossed). I am too tired to be able to come to dine on Saturday. Besides I have vowed that I shall not come to dine with you until I have been able to replace the Tanagra that I had the misfortune to break on the 17th of July last, the day I dined at your house with Guiche. Note this augural character - and perhaps rather ill-fated - of Guiche's¹, present at all out meetings, at that dinner; then I did not see you again before his marriage. And I have not seen you again (nor him either apart from maybe a few times) since. I think you will write something sublime about music, its appearances in La Domination like modellers of sorrowful mouths, like (in the style of Goncourt) (when I say in the style of Goncourt I mean to say of the like that I began with², and naturally not of your extraordinary, sublime style, three thousand metres above Goncourt with which it has no resemblance) travelled to its heights by Wagner's Muse which cries out, Yseult and Joan of Arc, the infinite promise of music, all this is what I believe to be most beautiful about music (and I do not mention the muscular singing in the night in Venice which is extraordinary). (Encountered Croisset distraught at not having received La Domination). Madame, it seems to me that I have desire and veneration for the great things you have named, like God who created by naming things. And I went by motor car to experience "the white road which rushes forward in an azure arch". And if one day I am able to take a trip it will be to go and sleep at the Noble-Rose hotel. Madame, how good you are to have written to me, to have pretended to have read my letter, from which the incense does not reach up to you but which in spite of it my heart breathes, consumed with admiration for these beauties without equal,