Rose

The Goncourt brothers may have been Proust’s favorite authors to parody, but that may be because they are such fun to read. Take these two journal entries, on the death of their beloved servant Rose.

16 August

It was this woman, this admirable nurse, whose hands our dying mother put into ours. She had the keys to everything she decided and did everything for us. For as long as we could remember we had made the same old jokes about her ugliness and her ungainly body, and for twenty-five years she had given us a kiss every night. She shared everything with us, our sorrows and our joys. Hers was one of those devotions which one hopes will be there to close one’s eyes when death comes…

Thursday, 21 August

Yesterday I learnt things about poor Rose, only lately dead and practically still warm, which astonished me more than anything else in the whole of my life; things which completely took away my appetite, filling me with a stupefaction from which I have not yet recovered and which has left me positively dazed. All of a sudden, within a matter of minutes, I was brought face to face with an unknown, dreadful, horrible side of the poor woman’s life.

Those bills she signed, those debts she left with all the tradesmen, all had an unbelievable, horrifying explanation.. She had lovers whom she paid. One of them was the son of our dairywoman, who fleeced her and for whom she furnished a room. Another was given our wine and chickens. A secret life of dreadful orgies, nights out, sensual frenzies that prompted one of her lovers to say: ‘It’s going to kill one of us, me or her!’ A passion, a sum of passions, of head, heart, and senses, in which all the unfortunate woman’s ailments played their part: consumption, making her desperate for satisfaction, hysteria, and madness. She had two children by the dairywoman’s son, one of which lived six months. When, a few years ago, she told us she was going into hospital, it was to have a child. And her love for all these men was so sickly, excessive, and overwhelming that she, who was the very soul of honesty, robbed us, yes, robbed us of a twenty-franc piece out of every hundred francs, and all in order to keep her lovers and pay for their sprees.

Then, after these involuntary offences, committed in violent contradiction to her upright nature, she would sink into such despondency, such remorse, such self-reproach, that in this inferno in which she went from one lapse to another without ever finding satisfaction, she started drinking in order to escape from herself, to postpone the future, to flee the present, to sink and drown for a few hours in one of those slumbers, those torpors which used to lay her out for a whole day on a bed on to which she had collapsed while making it.

And what did the unfortunate woman die of? Of having gone to Montmartre one night eight months ago, during the winter, unable to repress her curiosity, in order to spy on the dairywoman’s son, who had thrown her out; a night spent standing at a ground-floor window, trying to see who the woman was who had replaced her; a night from which she had returned soaked to the skin and mortally sick with pleurisy.

Poor woman! We forgive her. Indeed, seeing something of what she must have suffered at the hands of those working-class pimps, we pity her. We are filled with a deep commiseration for her, but also with a great bitterness at this astounding revelation. Remembering our mother, who was so pure and to whom we were everything, and then thinking of Rose’s heart, which we believe belonged to us, we feel something of a disappointment at the discovery that there was great part of it which we did not occupy. Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives: a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity. (75-76)

The Artist as Mirror

At Tansonville Marcel pulls down a volume of the Goncourt brothers journal from Gilberte’s library. Proust here writes a delicious pastiche of a Goncourt entry on a dinner at the Verdurins. I enjoyed the passage, but I like the real Goncourt better. My favorite entry was about their discovery of the true life of their housekeeper, their “Francoise.” The brothers were devastated with grief at her death, which was tempered a bit when they learned from a household staff member that she had over the years stolen money from the house budget to pay for elaborate orgies, of which she was the center of attention. But back to Proust.

Marcel feels pangs of inadequacy as a would-be writer after reading the entry on the Verdurins. He had known them as insignificant social climbers, certainly, he thought, unworthy of being the object of serious art. What did he miss? Does he have an “illness” that keeps him from seeing the richness of the world around him? Why can’t he remember the kinds of sparkling conversations recorded by the Goncourts? His responses to these questions take him a giant step closer to knowing what and how to write, a process completed later in Time Regained.

We can begin with the question of his “incapacity for looking and listening”:

…which the passage from the Journal had so painfully illustrated to me, was nevertheless not total. … the stories that people told escaped me, for what interested me was not what they were trying to say but the manner in which they said it and the way in which this manner revealed their character or their foibles, or rather I was interested in what had always, because it gave me specific pleasure, been more particularly the goal of my investigations; the point that was common to one being and another.  As soon as I perceived this my intelligence–until that moment slumbering, even if sometimes the apparent animation of my talk might disguise from others a profound intellectual torpor–at once set off joyously in pursuit, but its quarry then…was situated in the middle distance, behind actual appearances, in a zone that was rather more withdrawn.  So the apparent copiable charm of things and people escaped me, because I had not the ability to stop short there–I was like a surgeon who beneath the smooth surface of a woman’s belly sees the internal disease which is devouring it. If I went to a dinner party I did not see the guests: when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact examining them with X-rays. (VI, 39).

This discovery about himself frees Marcel to pursue a psychological rather than “copiable” descriptive language of society. His next puzzle is the proper subject of art. Recall Marcel’s frustration, in Combray, at not being able to imagine a subject for writing that was lofty enough. Some of this attitude  ”>carrys over from his childhood when he reads the Goncourt Journal and wonders how the Verdurins could a subject for art.

Marcel recalls paintings of drawing rooms and ladies in lace that left him with sense of longing to visit and see with his own eyes. Yet he knows that these are places and people that he has known to be common and boring. He recalls how the artist creates beauty:

For I had already realized long ago that it is not the man with the liveliest mind, the most well-informed, the best supplied with friends and acquaintances, the one who knows how to become a mirror and in this way can reflect his life, commonplace though it may be, who becomes a Bergotte (even if his contemporaries once thought him less witty than Swann, less erudite then Breaute)… Will not posterity, when it looks at our time, find the poetry of an elegant home and beautifully dressed women in the drawing-room of the publisher Charpentier as painted by Renoir, rather than in the portraits of the Princesse de Sagan or the Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld by Cot or Chaplin? (VI,44)

These two insights, the power of his psychological insights and the artist as mirror, still leave Marcel with self-doubt. He retreats to a sanatorium, leaving the final self-discoveries to come later, when he wrestles with time and memory.