In 1989, @la_nrf published this fine volume with @editions_gallimard: the correspondence of Jean…
Translated from French.
In 1989, @la_nrf published this beautiful volume with @editions_gallimard: the correspondence between Jean Cocteau and Anna de Noailles 📔✨. This lavishly presented edition, annotated by Claude Mignot-Ogliastri, a specialist in the poet’s work, is also illustrated with a beautiful portrait of her by her friend Cocteau. This portrait comes from the volume “Portraits souvenirs”, published by @editionsgrasset in 1935, a few pages of which I have re-read for the occasion.
For example: (two extracts in the comments below) 📝
But let’s return to the correspondence, and to Proust’s little world 🤵🏻♂️ (which was the high society of Paris in a certain era): introduced by Reynaldo Hahn 🎹 at Madeleine Lemaire’s 🎨 (we recall that in 1896 Proust published “Pleasures and Days”, which contained his own writings, a few musical scores by the former and drawings by the latter), Cocteau also frequented the salon of Mme Straus (Genevière Halévy, one of the models for Oriane de Guermantes), where, in March 1910, he became friends with Marcel Proust, a confidant and ardent admirer of Anna de Noailles, whom he had met as a teenager in 1893. 👧🏻👦🏻
In these 150 or so pages, we encounter a fine array of Proust’s circle: the Bibesco brothers, Marie Scheikévitch, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (the friend who advised Proust to go back and see the Vermeers), Barrès, Péguy… and in 1928, Cocteau even spent some time at the Sollier Clinic 🏩 (where Proust stayed following his mother’s death, and which he mentions in “Finding Time Again”), all expenses paid by… Gabrielle Chanel. 👜
In the same series, many titles refer to the “glory days” of @nrf.larevue and, as you’ve no doubt realised, all roads lead to Proust. 🫶🏻
#MarcelProust #proustagram #AnnadeNoailles #JeanCocteau #NRF #CocoChanel #Paris #BelleÉpoque #Gallimard
And further down, on the subject of Anna de Noailles: “She was thought to be feigning illness. Marcel Proust was accused of feigning illness. 🤒🛌 To say, ‘I am dead’, instead of saying, ‘I am tired’, is a flight of fancy. Poets, imaginary invalids. And they die. What a surprise! What a scandal!
(…) She has died – the woman of whom Barrès said: “She is the most sensitive point in the universe”.
— Jean Cocteau, “Portraits souvenirs”, @editionsgrasset, 1935