A heavenly love

A heavenly love 🌟

“The Search for…”, “A Love of…”, “In the Neighbourhood of…”: fill in the blanks as you please. In 110 years of Proust worship, all these titles have been worn down to the bone. ☠️

And anyway, who exactly was Proust’s greatest love? Jeanne Pouquet, his confidante from Neuilly 🏸? Jacques Bizet, his schoolmate and first openly homosexual love 👦🏻? Reynaldo Hahn, with whom he travelled to Brittany and who remained his loyal friend until his death 🎼? Bertrand de Fénelon, the aristocrat, one of the models for Robert de Saint-Loup 🏰? Or perhaps Alfred Agostinelli, the taxi driver from Balbec ⛱️, one of the secretaries in the Search and one of the models for Albertine? Or, quite simply, ‘Maman’, Jeanne Weil, the Jewish mother, whose love and devotion form the starting point of the novel? ❤️‍🩹🖋️

What if it was a bit of all of that? What if Proust’s greatest love had been at once a confidante, a comrade, a model of loyalty ‘through thick and thin’, a figure who was half-aristocrat, half-working class AND a surrogate mother? In that case, she would be a sort of Prisoner and her name would probably be… Céleste Albaret. 🙌🏻

It’s an appealing theory, isn’t it? Enchanting and deceptive, like a spell from “One Thousand and One Nights” 🌙✨

But when we ask the woman herself, she tells us this even harsher truth: “I don’t think Proust liked very many people…” 💔 Between 1913 and 1922, a nine-year period during which Céleste Albaret worked for Marcel Proust, the latter was concerned solely with developing his work and preparing it for publication. 📚

One day, in early spring 1922, he told her, “I’ve written the word ‘THE END’.” But he continued to make changes and additions to the manuscript of “The Prisoner” 🛏️🚪 right up until his final night, on the morning of 18 November.

Céleste is the only one present. She sends for Marcel’s brother: Robert Proust, a doctor. For at least two weeks, Marcel had refused treatment 💉. He dies in their care. Reynaldo arrives a little later and alerts Jacques Rivière and the literary world. 🗞️😢

#CélesteAlbaret #Proust #proustagram