I. In physique. Léon Radziwill is not one of those
beings who - like those "spiritual" and boring salon busts at the bottom
of which is conspicuously displayed the rosette of The Légion d'honneur in
marble - at first passing glance presents a foolishly fixed appearance and
an expression that is easily understood from the start. Like all fine and
beautiful things - like a gothic sculpture, like a Rodin, - he is, as well
as being infinitely delicate, so coarse that he has the appearance of a
block of stone2 rather than a statue, and it is up to the
delicacy, the comprehension of the observer, up to the sculptor, to
recognize his true form, and to determine his beauty. "What is your name?"
said a poet to a goddess whom he could hardly make out in the shadows. -
"Tell me yours," said she. "To stupid people I am stupidity, to
intelligent people, intelligence." A stupid view taking in the face of
Loche3 point by point will easily see stupidity in it. The
"noble modesty" that colours the face of this emancipated Hippolytus4
will appear to him as the vulgar ruddiness of the man who abandons himself
exclusively to the sensual life. His eyes, so expressively unexpressive,
like those of Greek statues, small hollows in which the sea, as it
recedes, has left two small pools the colour of precious stones, emeralds
or sapphires according to the time of day, take on the dull idiocy of
obdurate cretinism. His very diction, of an amusing sluggishness and of a
false good-nature seems to be coarsened by foolishness and naïvety. But
for those who know how to put themselves at a distance from things at the
point of generation from which proceed lines in all their graphic
significance and their spiritual capacity, everything in that face speaks
of both power and delicacy, calmness of nature and sensitivity of
feelings, natural charm and depth of thought. And this very body of a
giant will reveal extreme delicacy of attitude and rank that make of a
greeting, of a gesture of deference or earnestness something full of grace
and moral meaning. Such, according to how he appears to an imbecile or an
artist, is the twofold figure of Léon Radziwill. Women, by a bias that
seems to have anticipated Plato in his Banquet, align
themselves, even though they mostly have the mentality of imbeciles, with
the opinion of artists. Because desire is a kind of sightless
comprehension.
II. Intellectually. We are dying of a malady that Renan
has classified as morbus litterarius. Although fatal to all our
vital breath, it is accommodating to all, in that it allows the most
foolish to distinguish from afar, under the flag of culture that to a
greater or lesser extent they proudly fly from their mast, the most
intelligent people, the most mediocre people, the imbeciles. No doubt
Balzac, Stendhal, and plenty of others, would not have been ranked in the
last category. Sometimes we pay the same honour to Loche, probably
undeserved, because he never wrote Le Curé de Tours or La
Chartreuse de Parme. We will explain why. - Besides even those who
are most gifted are very far from beginning with naïve observation of
nature. It is after long voluntary exile in idle fancy that they prove -
in nostalgia - their love of the real. Loche, exquisite observer of
mediocre reality at twenty five years old, observer of everyday life, of
small characters and small minds, observer of the reality that Chardin
depicted before Balzac, is from the very first a marvellous case. To
orchids that bring nothing to our minds, he prefers the "really French"
cheerfulness of the flowers in a parish priest's garden, the waggish
dandelion, the cowslip that knows its own worth, the snapdragon, which we
cannot endure. If it wasn't so late, if I wasn't so cold in this
dining-room, if I wasn't so exhausted, I would say why I fear that these
delightful qualities are not realized. It seems to me that Loche is
wanting in culture to a degree that suggests indifference to literature
and indifferent to beauty. While so many others have the material, the
substance from which to incarnate a piece of work, but none of the Spirit
for it to live, I see him rich with a soul that is eternally seeking a
body in which to be incarnated. I'm freezing. To be developed another
time.
III. Morally. He shares the banality of the shortcomings
of his times, from which he differs intellectually by such an interesting
and robust originality, the promise of a piquant talent. Heart of a whore,
attaching himself to the first person to come along, or, rather, incapable
of giving himself, full of noble things, generous, sensitive, pursuing
nothing vulgar, neither money nor celebrity, nor society (with that
reserve with which he detests and scorns people of the fashionable world,
but fears them, those that deprive him of his sovereign ease of demeanour,
that even people in society possess - I'm too cold to elaborate, I hardly
know what I'm writing any more), capable of doing a thousand things for a
friend, except being his friend, if that word implies preference,
faithfulness, confidence, perseverance, etc. On the other hand certain bad
habits of language lead him to use the classic words of the envious and
the cheat. "For myself with my great friendship for Y..., and my extreme
affection for him, may I say, because it gives me enormous pains to do so,
that he is incapable of, etc..." But above all lacking in phraseology. -
Yet lacking in watchfulness. Readiness to absent-mindedly thread together
like pearls phrases whose exact meaning his mind has no control over and
that now lend him the appearance of a cheat, now the appearance of a fool.
Once in this way he told me that Ruskin's great merit was in making the
loftiest ideas accessible and agreeable to everyone. Is it literary
inferiority, too great an insufficiency of culture other than human and
psychological over the living that makes him say such a thing, or rather
"speaking to say nothing"? If lack of will-power, even the view
of reality that nevertheless does not engage with action to him is almost
as unbearable as the glare from the sun. You send him into a stupor very
quickly if you speak to him about reality. In an instant the blue eyes
glaze over, the anaesthetic begins to take hold. At that moment you can
say something utterly shocking, he no longer notices anything, you can't
draw attention from an unseeing eye. If you persist too much, in a supreme
convulsion he turns to one side. At that particular moment you could cut
off his leg and he wouldn't feel it. As for myself I have infinite
admiration for him, through a very painful nervous phenomenon, as soon as
he is there, my mind wanders, I can't say anything, I become stupid. I
have wanted to overcome this enchantment, it redoubles its force, like the
effort you make not to fail with a woman makes you more impotent, or
trying to fall asleep increases insomnia. After three or four times, when
somebody was ringing and somebody said: "Prince Léon Radziwill", I was
irked to think of the painful state I was going to be in, and irked too in
my self-respect, thinking that he would find me so stupid, that one of the
people I loved more than can be imagined would not have the faintest idea
of what I am. This began to kill any pleasure in seeing him. But on his
arrival it was thus combined with a painful feeling, friendship was
wounded by imminent death. Affection is contrary to the association of a
name to a pleasure. Then by dint of repetition this state becomes chronic,
like a cardiac illness endured too often ends up by becoming a
cardiopathy. First cause of the destruction of friendship. There were
others, such as the feeling, which was very painful to me in the
beginning, of the impossibility of having his. To love someone, it is not
enough for them to be intelligent. Not for utility's sake, but out of
inconsolable moral loneliness and sadness, I need people of a stable
nature with whom one is able to maintain a solid pact and to have a
lasting relationship. The ephemeral and contradictory rules that follow on
from each other in the name of Loche are ones we cannot ally ourselves to,
because at every moment you are speaking to a new person, to be freely
excused for not keeping appointments that his predecessor, and not he, has
made. There are other excuses that I could supply here as well for his
natural inconstancy, but I can do no more...
Marcel.
1. Prince Léon Radziwill was part of a small group of young people of noble families into which Proust was introduced at the beginning of the century. One winter's evening in 1903 or 1904, at the château that prince Constantin, Léon's father, owned at Ermenonville, Proust stayed up alone in the unheated dining-room and sketched this unfinished portrait.
2. Prince Léon was enormous, as tall as he was large.
3. Prince Léon Radziwill's nickname.
4. Hippolytus in Phèdre.