From the Bookshelf of The Year of Reading Proust…

Monsieur Proust

Céleste Albaret,

Barbara Bray (Translator)

Discussion: Auxiliary Reading (w/Spoilers)

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Auxiliary Reading (w/Spoilers)

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Dec 01, 2013 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: proust-and-related, read-in-french

When a magnum opus is born to the world, it doesn’t happen by magic. In the case of A la recherche du temps perdu, there was no instant delivery by stork and no cabbage leaves involved either. Instead, it took a long time and involved a lot of labour, the author horizontal on his bed, giving birth slowly and with huge effort to the book of his life. While he laboured, semi-propped against his pillows, determined to deliver his work onto the page perfectly formed, he had the services of an excell When a magnum opus is born to the world, it doesn’t happen by magic. In the case of A la recherche du temps perdu, there was no instant delivery by stork and no cabbage leaves involved either. Instead, it took a long time and involved a lot of labour, the author horizontal on his bed, giving birth slowly and with huge effort to the book of his life. While he laboured, semi-propped against his pillows, determined to deliver his work onto the page perfectly formed, he had the services of an excellent midwife. She brought him warm shawls and hot water bottles. She brought him coffee and tisanes. She protected him as much as possible from disturbances. She turned unwanted visitors away at the door. She helped sort the quantities of loose notes which he kept adding to his manuscript. She wrote his words from dictation when he was too feeble to hold a pen.
Her name was Céleste Albaret.

Céleste Albaret first met Marcel Proust in April 1913, when she was twenty one and the author already forty two. It would be normal to imagine that neither of them could have realised at that moment the extent to which their lives were to be influenced by this meeting, but I suspect Proust, keen beholder of beauty that he was, may have foreseen the future a little, perhaps even desired to possess a Joconde of his very own...

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Céleste, the new bride of Odilon Albaret, had just arrived in Paris from her native Languedoc when she was first introduced to Marcel Proust; her husband was a taxi driver in the city and counted the author among his most frequent clients. Within a few months of her arrival, Proust had found employment for her; she became his courrière, travelling all over Paris to deliver his letters and other missives, including dedicated copies of the newly published Du côté de chez Swann, one of which she remembers delivering to the Comtesse Greffulhe, one of the principal models for the Duchesse de Guermantes.
Before the end of the year, Céleste had been drafted in to replace Proust’s housekeeper, Céline Cottin. The more famous Félicie Fitau, the model for Françoise in the novels (along with Ernestine Gallau, his aunt Elizabeth Amiot's housekeeper), had retired in 1907 after thirty years with the Proust family.
The last months of 1913 marked the beginning of Céleste’s life in Proust’s household. She became his housekeeper, his valet, his secretary, and more or less his constant and only companion during the next nine years, the most productive in terms of writing.
She led her life to the rhythm of her employer’s, turning day into night just as he did, in order to be available during the long hours of darkness to listen to his books take shape in his mind. The fact that her husband was called up to fight during 1914 and was away for most of the next four years allowed her to devote herself exclusively to her employer under whose spell she clearly fell almost immediately on meeting him. She became a willing prisoner of his demanding schedule as she admits herself: Je n’ai rien à voir avec celui de ses livres qu’il a appelé La prisonnière, et pourtant j’en aurais bien mérité le titre. She took care of him when he suffered a malaise after visiting a Vermeer exhibition in 1921, she was by his side when he wrote ‘fin’ on his manuscript, she was still beside him when he died some weeks later in November 1922.
She was thirty and she thought her life was over.

But Céleste lived on to be ninety-two and kept her memories to herself for most of that period in spite of many requests for intimate details of her life with Marcel Proust. When she was 82, she finally agreed to share those memories, and she told her story to Georges Belmont over many hours. Her account of those years is full of echoes of the world of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, from descriptions of Proust’s pleasure at a simple bunch of hawthorn blossoms to his bliss before the sunset in Cabourg/Balbec, to his account of the last great gala he attended among the Parisian beau monde.
Georges Belmont seems to have delivered the story to us more or less as she recounted it - he says he did little more than organise the information in a coherent way. The result is very readable and we suspect that Georges Belmont is the very best kind of ghost writer, almost invisible yet very present in a practical way.

For those who have read and revelled in Proust’s work, Céleste’s memories are the perfect way to regain a little flavour of the world of A la recherche du temps perdu. ...more

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Oct 18, 2012 William Dearth rated it really liked it

Shelves: french

This is not really a review, but I would like to add a few comments. As others have stated, it is a shame that 50 years went by before Celeste felt the need to tell her story. It is also unfortunate that she did not keep the requested diary. The fact that she was 80 years old should not necessarily be an issue as I have met a few folks that are still very lucid at that age i.e., long-term memory is not the issue that short-term memory is.

There are others that have written some things that are no ...more

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