Letters to the Lady Upstairs

Madame,

I thank you with all my heart for your beautiful and good letter and come to ask you on the contrary to allow all possible noise to be made starting now. I had in fact not anticipated a shortness of breath so severe that it prevents me from trying to sleep. Noise will therefore not bother me in the least (and will be all the more relief for me on a day on which I could rest).

It saddens me very much to learn that you are ill. If bed does not bore you too much I believe that in itself it exerts a very sedative effect on the kidneys. But perhaps you are bored (though it seems to me [word skipped: difficult?] to be bored with you). Couldn’t I send you some books. Tell me what would distract you, I would be so pleased. Don’t speak of annoying neighbours, but of neighbours so charming (an association of words contradictory in principle since Montesquiou claims that most horrible of all are 1st neighbours 2nd the smell of post offices) that they leave the constant tantalizing regret that one cannot take advantage of their neighbourliness.

Be so good Madame as to recall me to the Doctor and accept my respectful and grateful greetings.

MARCEL PROUST

Despite the gloomy days, would some flowers please you. And ‘which’ as Verlaine says?

3 (#ulink_07557d5c-1706-59a3-9116-1bbd61ea4937)

[end of 1908 – beginning of 1909?]

Dear Monsieur,

I beg you please to present to Madame Williams with all my respect these flowers which without wearying you with vain speeches will convey my gratitude for the delicate goodness which you employ with regard to me and of which I would ask you to find here the most sincere and most distinguished expression.

MARCEL PROUST

I absolutely expect you to tell me what I owe you for the expenses I occasion you by these shifts in the workers’ hours.

4 (#ulink_4bedba68-c113-59f8-be0a-1ab28187b27e)

[summer 1909?]

Madame,

I envy your beautiful memories. No doubt that magnificent home which reminds one of Combourg in a less sombre site but which certainly has its poetry too, is not the only one that belongs to you. When one is endowed with imagination, as you are, one possesses all the landscapes one has loved, and this is the inalienable treasure of the heart. But really a home where you have memories of your family, a home which you cannot see except through reveries which recede into the distant past, is a very moving thing. I do not know Bagnoles but I so love Normandy that it is, I think, very pleasant.

And then like all those who are ill I have learned to spend my life surrounded by ugliness where through an irony of fate, I am generally in less bad health. I hope Bagnoles does you good, I also hope that you have with you your son whom I regret not having seen in Paris. You are very good to think of the noise. It has been moderate up to now and relatively close to silence. These days a plumber has been coming every morning from 7 to 9; this is no doubt the time he had chosen. I cannot say that in this my preferences agree with his! But he has been very tolerable, and really everything has been. Please accept Madame my respectful greetings and sincere obeisance.

MARCEL PROUST

I hope you have good news of the Doctor, I beg you to remember me to him.

5 (#ulink_f9c3c294-a18c-5d4d-a568-995a2e8078ea)

[mid-August 1909?]

Madame,

Alas your note sought me in Paris and reaches me in Cabourg … just as I am getting into the train! Otherwise, since my incessant attacks find in this air an abatement which causes me to seek it out, I would have tried to go and thank you for your charming letter. I would have tried and I do not flatter myself with the hope that I would have succeeded, knowing from experience how impossible it has been for me to receive very dear friends, come from quite far away to see me. But still I would have made the attempt. I am saddened to learn that you, too, have been suffering. It seems natural to me that I should be ill. But at least illness ought to spare Youth, Beauty and Talent! At least you have the support of a loving heart! I hope with all my heart that you will be completely healthy this year and I beg you Madame, in asking you please to remember me to Doctor Williams, to accept for yourself my most respectful greetings.

MARCEL PROUST

Excuse this letter written at the moment of getting into the train.

6 (#ulink_f324489a-2ede-519b-99bd-eea7df0af294)

[autumn 1909?]

Dear Monsieur,

I am sending you my little (and very old!) Portraits of Painters.

You have them already in my illustrated volume Pleasures and Days (I think you have received it, not through the post like the Ruskin, it must have been conveyed to you by hand) but the music is very difficult to read in the book, and is much better engraved in these little pieces into which, if Madame Williams, whose admirable talent I know, is curious to cast a glance, she will not be unpleasantly bothered as in the book, by the rather fuzzy look of the fac simile [sic]. Today’s fog is provoking in me such attacks that I scarcely have the strength to trace these words, so that I’m afraid I will be even more illegible than the musical fac-similes [sic]. It is this that is preventing me, exhausted by suffering and having wanted all the same before trying to rest a little in the evening to send up to you the pieces which I have received only just now, so late, from expressing to you the thanks which I owe you for a charming letter already a little old to which I would have liked to respond in a manner a little more detailed, but I am enduring at the moment such bad days that I am a very bad correspondent. Always prepared however to respond to you with exactness if you had something to ask me.

Please be so kind as to accept Monsieur the expression of my very devoted feelings.

MARCEL PROUST

7 (#ulink_49159c02-9ef0-5d8c-ab0f-9753b62c57e8)

[autumn 1909?]

102 Boulevard Haussmann

Monsieur,

As I so often expose you to the effects of my troubles by asking you when my asthma attacks are too intense to procure me a little silence, – I think it is only fair that when I have something agreeable I ask you to share it with me. I hope that you will be willing to accept these four pheasants with as much simplicity as I put into offering them to you as neighbour. I will also permit myself to send you a few of my works. Unfortunately my articles from the Figaro are not yet collected in books and it is perhaps this that would most have interested you.

But I will be able meanwhile to present you with the rest. I implore your help for Monday the 19th the day after tomorrow. I must make the great effort to try to go out in the evening and as I have attacks of asthma all night long, if in the morning there is hammering above me it’s all over for the whole day for resting, my attack will not stop and my evening out is impossible.

Please accept, Monsieur, the expression of my highest regards.

MARCEL PROUST

8 (#ulink_e86aa6e9-0550-59eb-a882-32df8b51f91d)

[December 17, 1909]

Friday

Marcel Proust begs Madame Williams to be so kind as to accept his respectful and enchanted thanks, for the beautiful and artistic letter which she has had the grace and has done him the honour of writing to him. He would be most grateful to her if she would be his spokeswoman with the Doctor to request that there not be too much noise tomorrow Saturday, since he has to go out for a while in the evening. He will not fail as soon as his friend Mr Hahn is back from Aix la Chapelle where he has gone to conduct Prométhée to communicate to him the gracious praise.

9 (#ulink_aaa6ab22-3ca1-56bc-b6d4-0bc0936dfceb)

[October 1914?]

Madame,

It is always a very great pleasure for me to receive a letter from you. The latest was particularly sweet for me in these terrible times in which one trembles for all those one loves, and I do not mean by that only those one knows. It is however permitted without being too selfish to have exceptional worries, and the fate of my brother who is operating in the line of fire, has had his hospital bombed, the shells falling even on the operating table so that he has been obliged to take his wounded down into the cellars, is particularly close to my heart. Happily he has been completely safe up to now and has been mentioned in the army’s ordre du jour.

I hope that you too have good news of your family. As for me I will imminently be going before the military service review board. I don’t know if I will be taken or not. I had wanted to write you last summer to hear your news. But even well before the War I was overwhelmed with worries. First, I was more or less completely ruined, which I found extremely painful. But shortly afterwards my poor secretary was drowned by falling from an aeroplane into the sea.