Whilst looking for a publisher in 1912 for “In Search of Lost Time” 🕰️, Proust wrote to Jacques Copeau (one of the…
Translated from French.
Whilst looking for a publisher in 1912 for “Le Temps perdu” 🕰️, Proust wrote to Jacques Copeau (one of the founders of @la_nrf) about Gaston Gallimard: 🖋️ “I met him once and was left with such a good impression of him that, for someone like me who is ill 🛌 and for whom dealing with a publisher is already daunting, everything becomes simple and delightful if he is the publisher.”
Proust and Gallimard did indeed meet in an informal setting in Bénerville on the Normandy coast 🏯⛱️, in the summer of 1908. The author is said to have walked there from Cabourg (seventeen kilometres – which seems unlikely to me, and I imagine an ‘Unic’ taxi must have been parked nearby) to invite Robert Gangnat, a friend of the publisher and lover of Louisa de Mornand 💅🏻 (one of Rachel’s models), to dinner at the @grandhotelcabourgmgallery where he was staying. Out of politeness, and perhaps out of self-interest, Proust also invited Gallimard.
Gaston Gallimard never forgot that first meeting, and recounted it in the issue of @la_nrf entitled ‘Tribute to Marcel Proust’, dated 1 January 1923:
🖋️ “I was leaving with Robert Gangnat the villa he had rented that summer (the ‘Russian chalet’, from the 1900 Paris Exposition that had been reconstructed in Bénerville) on the edge of the road to Villers, when I saw a man of incongruous yet charming appearance 🤵🏻♂️ coming towards us. Marcel Proust was walking from Cabourg, having come specifically to invite my friend to dinner at the Grand Hôtel where he was staying. At the time, I didn’t even know his name. But I was struck by the extreme tenderness in his gaze, and even today I can still picture him as he appeared to me: in his tight, ill-buttoned black clothes, his long velvet-lined cape, his stiff, stand-up collar, his tattered, too-small straw hat, which he wore pulled well down over his forehead, his shoulders held high, his thick, coarse hair, and his dust-covered patent leather shoes. Such attire might have looked ridiculous in the sunshine; yet it was not without a certain touching grace.” 👀
👇🏻 Another extract in the comments 👇🏻
#MarcelProust #GastonGallimard #proustagram #LouisadeMornand #RobertGangnat #Bénerville #Cabourg #1908 #HommageàProust #NRF @editions_gallimard
“Meanwhile, L. de M., R. G.’s mistress, had joined us. Marcel immediately sensed that a rather heated discussion had taken place between the young men. But he did not seem to have noticed it; and I can still picture the delicate way in which he placed his hand on the nape of L.’s neck, stroking her like a young foal, yet at the same time listing, teasingly and with a good-naturedly questioning air, all her faults, which he knew only too well. He scolded her sternly in a very soft, measured voice, but with an authority full of irony and a stubbornness that surprised me. He only returned to his invitation once he was quite certain that the tension had definitively eased.”
#RobertdeSaintLoup #Rachelquandduseigneur