66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I

“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco

What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is!

Episode 66: “Marcel & Celeste, Part I”

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and before I get started, I’d like to give a big welcome to new listeners! For those who don’t already know, this week I was able to live out one of my childhood dreams. Growing up, my favorite section of the newspaper was always the advice columns. What can I say -I love telling people what to do! My friend, Danny Lavery, is better known as Dear Prudence over on Slate, and this week they invited me to be their guest host! For my longtime listeners, if you’ve ever thought, “Hmm, I really love Diana’s weird anecdotes about French history, could she tell me how to raise my children?” then it’s a banner day for you. You can listen to the episode at slate.com/podcasts/dear-prudence, and I’ll put the link in this episode’s show notes. Meanwhile, if you’re a Dear Prudence listener tuning in for the first time, thank you and welcome! With that happy announcement out of the way, let’s turn to today’s episode. Listeners, we have come to the end of a very, very long year. I’m cranky, I’m bored, I’m really really really good at baking now and I miss my friends terribly. One of the only ways I’ve gotten through 2020 with my sanity arguably intact is by experiencing it side-by-side with my loving boyfriend, Daniel, or as he prefers to be known, the much-abused unpaid intern and occasional producer of this show. He has been the bright spot of my year, and I wanted to pay him back by giving him a little Christmas gift: an episode all about his favorite person in the world, and perhaps the person best suited to comment on this strange period of history, the great French writer, Marcel Proust. 2020 was a year of seclusion and confinement, and it was also a year of transition. We speak of the Before Times, and a world, a whole way of life, which feels like it’s slipping out of our reach. At the same time, we hunker down, sheltering ourselves against an invisible enemy, staying within the safe confines of home and wiping down the groceries. Who could better understand the story of this year than a man conceived during a siege, who spent the last third of his life as a recluse, terrified of infection, dreaming of a lost world and mourning the impossibility of return? But there is one aspect of Marcel Proust’s life which feels especially relevant to us today, a part of his story which is often skipped over. While Proust famously loved and adored his sainted mother, his later years are inextricably linked to Proust’s father: the world-famous epidemiologist, Adrien Proust, pioneer of the modern cordon sanitaire. Today, we will navigate between the inner world and the outer, between safety and exposure, between past and present, between reality and memory, between sickness and health, between the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris and the dark chamber in which our story is set. The chamber in question was a refuge, it was a nest, and in many ways, it was a cage. This is the story of Proust’s bedroom. I. Open with impending siege (so he thinks) of Paris in September 1914, culminating in the flight to Cabourg II. Flashback to 1870 and the Siege of Paris III. Proust’s childhood illnesses (what is dad doing during this time?) IV. November 1913 – Swann’s Way is published. IV. Says goodbye to the Paris that he knew and leaves for Cabourg. But the hotel is no escape (soldiers etc) and so he must return home. Coughing fit on the way home resigns him to the idea that he doesn’t have much longer – and so he must devote his remaining time to finishing his great work. Begins life as a recluse. One evening in September 1914, Marcel Proust woke in the middle of the night and took a last look at Paris. It was the opening salvo of World War One, and Paris, everyone assumed, was doomed. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops on the march, it would only be a matter of time before glittering fin-de-siècle Paris found herself ground under German boots. It should have been a joyous time for Proust. Six years previously, he’d begun working on what he believed would be his masterpiece: a sprawling multivolume meditation on time and memory. After a string of rejections, he published the first volume, Swann’s Way, in November 1913, to wild acclaim. But he had little time to savor the victory – only a few months later, France found herself preparing for war. On August 2nd, just before Germany issued a formal declaration of war, Proust wrote a letter to a friend. “My petty interests…seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred.” Three million Frenchmen received mobilization orders that day, including Proust’s friends and family. Though he’d done routine military service as a young man, Proust was far too ill to fight now, and he found himself left behind in a city full of women, children and the elderly, all of whom were preparing to flee. On August 29, Proust witnessed the first breach: a German monoplane flew over Paris and dropped a few bombs. By September 6th, the German army was only 30 miles outside Paris, all the taxis in Paris were barreling to the front lines carrying reinforcements, the government was packing up for Bordeaux, and Marcel Proust stood in the moonlight, making his farewells. He was leaving for Cabourg, a fashionable resort town on the coast where he’d stayed every summer with his family. With his genteel wardrobe folded gently into trunks, his manuscript gathered securely in his battered old suitcase, and his medications close at hand in his trusted housekeeper’s purse, Proust was one of a million Parisians saying goodbye. “In seeing this immense Paris that I did not know I loved so much, waiting, in its useless beauty, for the onslaught that could no longer be stopped, I could not keep myself from weeping.” Almost exactly forty-four years earlier, another man had faced almost identical circumstances: an invading army on the doorstep, Paris preparing herself for a siege, a city unsure whether to stay and fight or flee for safety. Like Marcel, this young man was at a turning point: after rising steadily through the ranks of his profession, he was on the cusp of a great breakthrough. Like Marcel, he would use the war to come as fodder for his career, and by the war’s conclusion, he would enjoy international fame. But as the Prussians advanced towards Paris on that sunny afternoon, the young man had only one thing on his mind: it was September 3rd, 1870, and Doctor Adrian Proust was getting married. At the age of 32, Adrian Proust embarked on the adventure of his life. For the past ten years, he’d been a rising star: graduating with honors from the Academie de médecin, before defending his doctoral thesis in 1866. After passing one final exam, Adrian was certified for a teaching post at the Academie de médecin – but a medical catastrophe that summer changed the course of his career. For the third time that century, a dreaded monster reared its head: cholera. Cholera was a disease of cities, found where too many people cluster together and contaminate the water supply. Originating out of India, the disease made its way to Europe by boat, and as trade between Asia and Europe grew, so did the threat of an outbreak. In 1832, cholera arrived in France and killed 100,000 people. In 1849, it returned and killed three times that many. In 1866, as Dr. Proust began weighing the option of a teaching position or a practice, cholera returned to Paris, deadlier than ever. That year’s outbreak had a fatality rate of 50%. All summer, Dr. Proust worked long hours, caring for patients while maintaining strict personal hygiene standards to keep himself from getting infected. As hard as he tried to save his patients, there was only so much Adrian could do – once infected, patients often died within 72 hours, by which point their family members would usually arrive with symptoms of their own. The only way to beat cholera, he knew, was to prevent it from happening in the first place. Adrian Proust belonged to a burgeoning discipline we would eventually come to know as epidemiology. Studying under his mentor, Adrian learned about the concept of a cordon sanitaire – a means of keeping infected persons isolated to prevent the spread of disease. While John Snow had famously shut off the Broad Street Pump in London during its 1854 cholera outbreak, the jury was still out about what exactly caused cholera, and it would be another 20 years before a German scientist discovered the guilty bacteria. In the meantime, Doctor Proust experimented in his own clinic, by isolating his cholera patients away from everyone else, to great success. After seeing the results on such a small scale, Proust wondered whether big results could only come from big measures: what if you could apply a cordon sanitaire to a whole country? What if a country with an outbreak could be hemmed in, to prevent outsiders from getting in to contract an infection, and to prevent infected people from getting out? In 1869, Doctor Proust represented France at the International