Ode to Marcel Proust

Ode to Marcel Proust 🖋️

“Shadow
arising from the smoke produced by your fumigations,
the face and the voice
eaten
by making use of the night
Céleste,
with its gentle vigour, it soaks me in the black juice
from your room
which smells of warm cork and a cold fireplace.
Behind the screens of their exercise books,
under the pale, sticky lamp, like jam,
Your face lies beneath a chalk pillow.
You hold out your hands, clad in filoselle gloves;
Your beard grows back silently
at the back of your cheeks.
I say:
— You look as though you’re doing really well.
You reply:
— My dear friend, I nearly died three times today.
Your windows, closed forever
turn you away on Boulevard Haussmann
filled to the brim,
like a gleaming trough,
the clanging of the trams’ metal bodywork.
Perhaps you’ve never seen the sun?
But you have reconstructed it, just like Lemoine, so faithfully,
than your fruit trees at night
have given their flowers.
Your night is not our night:
It’s full of white glows
Cattleya orchids and Odette’s dresses,
crystals from flutes and chandeliers
and General de Froberville’s piped ruffles.
Your voice, too, so soft, weaves a sentence so long
…it looks as though she’s bending, whereas in fact, like a madman
a dozing person who complains,
You say: that you’ve been deeply hurt.
Proust, what sort of parties do you go to at night?
to return with eyes so weary and yet so clear?
What fears – which we are forbidden to feel – have you experienced?
to come back so forgiving and so kind?
and knowing the workings of souls
and what goes on in people’s homes,
“and that love hurts so much?”

— Paul Morand, “Complete Poems”, 1924

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