Letters from Persia and elsewhere
Players from the drawing-room
Bernard d'Algouvres to Françoise de Breyves
Les Reis-Boisfrisieux, by La Roche-en-Marche.
My Dear,
you are a darling to have
had those strawberries and cream sent to us. They are exquisite. I wish
you could have seen me crushing the strawberries and then stopping at
exactly the right moment, when they were just the right pink, without
even needing to taste them, with the experience of a watercolourist and
the divination of a gourmand! Where you are less nice is when you want
to know everything that has made me jealous. You say that you don't want
me to be, but I know perfectly well that you do want me to be! And then
you are going to say: "Who told you that?" and yet I won't be able to
call off my spies, the spies I have, without wanting to of course,
because you know perfectly that I am not having you followed.
But there are people who pass in the street. There's
nothing remarkable about that but sometimes that is enough to cause much
pain. Also, since the worldliness of my sister and the obligations of
your life have sent us one to the North and the other to Touraine, like
some geographic necessity that flings two rivers, initially unified and
sharing a common course, to two different corners of France, I can't
tell you, just by reading the "out of town and vacations" columns, what
painful blows it makes me feel! Of course we don't get Le Figaro
here, but page four of Le Gaulois is enough. It makes
melancholy reading. Each time I see the name of somebody who might
appear alluring to you has gone to Indre-et-Loire, it hurts me! So much
so that I have only to read: "Never in the memory of any Tourainian,
have we had so much amusement as this year in Touraine; parties follow
one another without interruption", when I see that Tournefort was
dressed as a monkey and Mlle de Thianges as a gas lamp, it doesn't upset
me. But there are names of some guests which - if you were at the party
- would make me want to weep. And when they come to the time honoured
ending: "After a cotillion led with incredible gusto by Vicomte de
Tournefort and Mlle de Thianges, we part company off into the dawn, not
without having promised the very gracious mistress of the house that we
will give up one more day in the very near future to this supremely
elegant festivity; tomorrow the races etc.", even though I know that
it's a cliché, I rage against all those wretched guests who have
promised the mistress of the house to shortly renew my torment.
Whereas if, on the other hand, I was there, I would
find it charming and I would wait impatiently for the day to come when
we could dance together. In fact I bumped into Porbois (Guy de Porbois)
who came from there. What I wouldn't have given to question him about
all the people that had been there! There was one question in particular
that was burning on my lips. Was Thierry there? I was heroic. The
question was never asked. It goes without saying that if by any chance
my darling agreed to answer it herself I wouldn't stop her and that
would be an end to it. You see how I am begging you. I leave it to your
charity my good lady.
What! You don't know who Bonami is? Wooden Heel! But
primarily he is vice-president of the club, if you please. His wooden
leg has made his social fortune. In the first place it has given him an
identity in society, the first indispensable element in creating a
personality. Just think for how many years, if Bonami had had two legs,
the person about to inscribe his name on the list of society people
would have inquired about him to no avail. "I dined with a M. Bonami,
who is he by the way? - Oh yes, I know, was it Georges Bonami? - Oh I
don't know whether he's called Georges: a fair-haired chap. - Perhaps...
I'm not really sure." And the memory banks ready to welcome this
slippery waif, which no nail could fix in the sand, would have cast him
back on tides of doubt into the vast unknown. Bonami never had to go
through this first stage, and his disability, like injuries for
soldiers, made his advance more rapid. Even if one hesitated for a
moment "Bonami Jacques? - Jacques I don't know, but Wooden Heel, a
gentleman with a wooden leg? - Oh yes, that's him. Yes that's Bonami, a
great friend of the Estouflac la Tornes."
But that's not all. Bonami being a handsome man, and
above all having what we call style, and in which a shuffling gait could
be seen as an important element (giving him an air of "birth"), the
slight hesitation in his walk, his natty wooden leg draws women's
sympathy, or even more, their curiosity, just as a slight squint or a
carefully worn monocle have something more special about them than the
beauty of a clear eye, or a straight gaze. Beneath impeccable trousers,
in a little well-polished boot, to have a wooden leg and not to betray
its presence other than by a gait whose irregularity has an air of
elegance and its slowness one of refinement, is to possess something
more than distinction, almost a vice which seems to promise to a woman
caresses of a brutal slowness and unnatural resources that no one could
ever imagine. (I say this without fear, because I know that you only
love the natural.) Also, didn't it have to be said, only ten years ago,
to all the little snobs: "I can't understand how a woman can be
attracted to a man with a wooden leg." With what contempt they replied:
"Nobody has as much style as him", as if to say: "Not like you, with
your two legs!..."
But what admirer of a great actress would love her
quite so much were it not for her flawed pronunciation? Yet, around the
ladies, Bonami has encountered adversaries, old-fasioned partisans with
fine equipages and their own legs, who can't understand why people sell
their carriages to buy motor cars. Did you know that he married a niece
of old Duc de Tournefort! Born d'Étampes, as luck would have it she is
dead and even just after her marriage it seemed that she was not
submitting to Bonami's charms as much as did the young women who only
saw his studied gait at his strutting arrival at the turf. Alas! when it
comes to in intimacy, little by little things lose the attraction of
their singularity for us and, at the end of the day, it is no longer a
stylish gentleman that his wife has before her, when she sees his
abscesses, his fear of arriving late, the dye he uses every morning to
make his greying hair look younger.
You grumble about the flies; we have lots of them too;
but I like to hear them in the bedroom where the curtains have been
drawn to try to keep out the heat.
It is one of the sensations of summer and it is divine
because we would never have it had summer not arrived. It is not the
open-air concert of robin redbreasts, or of nightingales, which is like
singing. No, the buzzing of flies is nothing but the chamber music of
summer. But it is enough just to hear it to regain the whole summer. And
they invoke it so much more of course in that they not only sum up the
poetry of summer, but proclaim its presence. And do you know, when it is
very hot and you are lying on your bed, it is very pleasant when they
settle upon you. Try it. That will remind you of something rather nice,
I hope.
Your Bernard.
Certified true and accurate:
Marcel Proust.
Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam.
My Dear,
what a week! To begin with, as soon as Mme de
Tournefort saw the announcements for the party at Eaux de Saint-Cloud,
which you must have heard all about in the papers, she was determined to
take us all there. While we were there, by the way, I saw the original
whose portrait I had seen at your cousin's house. Do you remember it? It
was painted by Hubert Robert more than a hundred years ago. But it still
looks just the same. It shows the great fountain at Saint-Cloud. From a
distance I recognized the ancient charm of the heights surrounding it, and
there it was at the centre, quivering in the breeze and the sunshine like
a huge white plume. I recognized it for what it is, that is something more
than water constantly renewed over the intermittent course of its
venerable and yet momentary life. It has lost none of its nimbleness or
its freshness, and, erect in its trembling impetus and its melting
smoothness, letting drift its restless and murmuring plume which the sun
gilds like a beautiful cloud, crossing it in its ascent at each moment, or
rather, so immobile does it appear, at every point it seems to furiously
discharge into the lake, like a ballast, in small watery masses that drop
down and carve out individual ripples, with a small sound that enhances
the following silence and on which, making itself heard as it rushes
forward, in greater harmony, the shaft of water splinters and regathers.
And all the length of its aerial course little droplets fall back as they
run out of momentum. It was absolutely charming.
Then we discovered that the Van Dyck exhibition at
Anvers was about to finish; old Tournefort was absolutely determined to go
so we pressed on as far as Amsterdam, from whence I am writing in a room
overlooking the canal and huge gulls are passing by so quickly as they
slowly beat their great wings, and which, down in the streets, at the
corner of the squares, appear to seek out, to scent out, to sense the sea
as if their instincts were telling them that there it is beneath them,
giving to this town a feeling of the seaside where they bring with them,
as if they were above the clouds and in the wind, their untiring
restlessness, the joyous intoxication of their strength of their
acknowledged element, the town inhaling and being greeted with their
cries.
What an eloquent and soaring coat-of-arms these birds
would be for a town! But it's you I want to talk about, about your letter
in which I was so proud to find my darling so knowledgeable, quoting the
very tone of the eighteenth century. The things that I taught you to love,
which I have come to know through you, all the gifts which we take from
our love, are like precious jewels to me which have a glow of ancient
tenderness and which are sweet to hold. Alas! there are in the one that I
foolishly call my Françoise so many things that are before my
eyes, that I don't know and over which I have no control, so that I prefer
the things where I find myself again through you and which in moments of
fatigue or doubt are like a material pledge of a love which is not to be.
Do you remember the day when you recited some verses
which I had taught you? I have never loved you so much. Listen to this
letter written at Mont-Dore and see whether it does not resemble yours and
the things you say about the hotels of Auvergne, Mont-Dore and Royat:
"Everyone greets me with an 'is Madame unwell' which I lose patience with,
even though I am not too convinced by it. There is a vast crowd at the
waters, which grieves me. A legion of hungry fleas has made my bed into a
hell. I wanted to see the walks. They showed me a dozen paces one could
take in a quite disagreeable spot. I am returning sadder than when I left.
By dint of moving up a step and taking advantage of the departures, I
found myself in a quite acceptable room with a fire, at least by
Mont-Dore's standards, opposite the fountain which people drink from." "By
taking advantage of the departures!" "The departures!" Don't you remember,
Françoise, the same thing being said by a porter at the hotel we were
staying in when he said to us: "There are a lot of departures this week."
And yet this letter, written from Mont-Dore, is dated
August 1803. And the porter never suspected that he was using the same
expression as Madame de Beaumont. Because it was indeed she who wrote
those things to Joubert. Yes it is she, 'that Herculaneum figure, who
glides noiselessly through the air, scarcely sheathed in a body', that
Pauline de Montmorin, who is so like my darling, because of which for a
long time when I still dared not call you Françoise, I used to call you
Pauline. It was her Christian name. But it was not yours. But to call you
by a Christian name all the same, to touch you in effigy, I was already
half way down the road. In any case isn't it astonishing that at that time
she was saying 'departures', just as we say today.
Because as my darling pupil knows things change very
little, she who knows better than some old scholar that page in Aristotle
where, in order to show that one cannot experience at one and the same
time pleasures of a different order, he gives this example: "It is when
the play is bad, when one's interest begins to wander, that we start
eating sweets in our boxes." I know of another place where Madame de
Beaumont's chamber still exits. It is the odious novelist X... who lives
in it. As the chateau tour guide says: "This is the spot where Mary Stuart
used to kneel, which is now the place where I keep my brooms." The
Auvergne novel that you told me about is very pretty. The one that took
place in the hotel at Mont-Dore in 1803 was quite worthy of those of
today: it was the novel Atala. It was in order to devote it to
Chateaubriand that Madame de Beaumont wanted to prolong her life. It had
been two years earlier that she had rented a house to Savigny so that he
could finish the Génie du Christianisme there in peace. He was
deceiving her already, getting Chênedollé write to tell her that he had
not left Avignon when he was in Brittany with Madame de Chateaubriand, who
he had not seen for ten years.
But she was made to believe from his books that he led
far too Christian a life to trample under foot in her lifetime a sacrament
like marriage. Madame de Beaumont left Mont-Dore to go to Rome, much to
the scandal of the diplomatic world, to seek the person who would dare to
say later, after her death, that he had never felt any true attachment
before he knew Madame Récamier. How tiresome! I have a thousand things to
tell you but if I don't stop myself this letter won't get sent. I shall
write to you tomorrow with regard to M. de Thianges and a thousand other
things. The day after tomorrow I shall be back at Boisfriseux. One silly
little thing before I finish. Just imagine, Lapenard is furious that he
was not warned that there was a plot, or at least an alleged plot. He
would have given a hefty sum and would have made some very distinguished
connections out of it.
Instead of applying to their supporters Princes will have to tap up snobs.
They will donate their money to the plot just like they would donate to a
charity sale. There are plenty of people for whom changing the makeup of
the government is nothing to them if it can get them invited to hunts.
They would make a play of a return to the monarchy. But do you really
believe that they would concern themselves with the reconstruction of the
basilica at your house? They would like to be invited to your garden
parties and would give to the plot just as they would give to a sale where
one is less concerned with the interest of the work than the quality of
the patronesses. Regards to the prince, when you see him.
Your Bernard.
Certified true and accurate:
Marcel Proust.
First letter appeared in La Presse 19 September, which was followed on 20 September by a reply from Françoise signed: Robert de Flers. The third and final letter appeared 12 October 1899.
Reviewed and updated 07.04.20