This was the same Céleste who devoted her life to his service for many years and was with him to the last. After his death she wrote of him: “Monsieur ne ressemblait à personne. C’était un être incomparable—composé de deux choses, intelligence et cœur—et quel cœur!”
Knowing the intensity of his interest in and sympathy with humble lives, the suggestion of snobbishness in connexion with such a man is ridiculous. Proust, like all great artists, needed access to all human types. It is one of the drawbacks of our modern civilisation that the opportunities for varied social intercourse are limited and beset with conventional prejudices. No man went further than he did to surmount these. He knew people of the “monde” as he knew others. As he writes in Sodome:
Je n’avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j’aurais pris indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis avec une certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour les grands seigneurs, non par goût, mais sachant qu’on peut exiger d’eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers qu’on ne l’obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font les bourgeois, ou bien parce qu’ils sont volontiers polis envers n’importe qui, comme les jolies femmes heureuses de donner un sourire qu’elles savent accueilli avec tant de joie.
His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was accorded only on his own terms, and a condition of it was the capacity to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well:
Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes.
Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was never time. In answer to this he wrote me:
Si vous désirez poser quelque interrogation à une personne qui me comprenne, c’est bien simple, adressez-vous à moi. D’ami qui me connaisse entièrement je n’en ai pas.... Je sais tout sur moi et vous dirai volontiers tout; il est donc inutile de vous désigner quelque ami mal informé et qui dans la faible mesure de sa compétence cesserait de mériter le nom d’ami s’il vous répondait.
Thus in his words we reach the final conclusion that, even if Proust’s friends had the power of expressing all that they feel about him, they would still be “mal informés,” and would have to return to him for that deeper knowledge which only he could impart. As to this, there is his further assurance that his work is the best part of himself. Providentially, he was spared until that work was done and “Fin” on the last page was written by his own hand.
STEPHEN HUDSON.