In the letter below, Marcel Proust writes to Anna, Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles, bemoaning, with elaborate declarations of sentiment, how seldom he sees her. Proust weighs in on rumors of an mutual acquaintance’s homosexuality, before closing with an earnest request for Mme. de Noailles to “burn this letter in heaven’s name.”
20 March 1908
Madame,
Did I not know that the greatest are the simplest and the best, by virtue of a natural and eternal law, I should be overwhelmed by your kindness and the trouble you took to write to me so sweetly. But like its predecessor, this letter has its cruel shaft. Last time it was ‘I’m departing for Greece.’ This time it’s ‘I’m departing for Italy.’ And it’s true that I don’t see you in Paris. But nevertheless this news destroys the possibility which every day I hope to realize the day after without the accumulated disappointments in the least impairing my hope:
And youthful hope forever cries
My sisters, let us start again.
Good-bye Madame. At the moment in my meditations about it is of Wagner that you remind me. I hope this doesn’t annoy you and is not insulting to the immensity of your dreams and the omnipotence of your orchestration, you who are Siegfried, even more than Isolde and whose verses on the Gardens of Lombardy combine the myriad tones of a multitudinous orchestra
like a celestial choir
Stirring a thousand voices that sing within one’s heart.
Madame, how I admire you, how I love you, and how harsh my constant separation from you is to me. To have lived in the same age as you, in the same city, and never to see you! I no longer dare think of you because of the shocks it gives me:
I even issued an express decree
Against your name being said in front of me.
I told the Princess de Chimay that I’d tell her—and you—about a conversation I had with [Abel] Hermant. And how nice I thought his son was. For I refuse to believe in the appalling supposition. Although the solemnity of sacraments of a legal kind like adoption no longer serves much purpose except to add a bit of spice to the banality of irregular situations, I cannot believe that he wanted to disguise a commonplace homosexual adventure with the infinitely respectable trappings of incest. I’m absolutely convinced that he doesn’t have those tastes. And, like him, the young man certainly only likes women. Adopt! But one doesn’t marry. It’s true that homosexuality shows more delicacy, for it remains under the influence of its pure origin, friendship, and retains some of its virtues.
Madame, burn this letter in heaven’s name and never divulge its contents!
Your respectful friend,
Marcel Proust
FURTHER READING
For a NYT book review of Edmund White’s seminal biography of Proust, click here.
Click here for an excellent review of Marcel Proust and Swann’s Way: 100th Anniversary, an exhibition of the author’s journals currently on view at the Morgan.
Additionally, a detailed biography of Anna de Noailles can be found here.