🖋️ “Dear Proust, so wise – as I have demonstrated – yet already blending wisdom with sensitivity through the…

🖋️ “Dear Proust, so wise – as I have demonstrated – yet already blending, within that wisdom, a nascent and painful sense of alienation, perceptible through the most witty fantasy. From that moment on, he stood amongst us as a sort of restless, unsettling archangel. 🪽

We liked him, we admired him, yet we remained surprised and uncomfortable at the sense of a difference, a distance, an immeasurable gap – invisible yet real – between us.

There we were in the school playground 🏫 – three or four strapping lads: Jacques Bizet, Fernand Gregh and Robert de Flers – when we suddenly sensed a presence; we felt a breath near us, a light brush against our shoulder.

It was Marcel Proust, who had arrived silently, like a ghost; it was him, with his large, oriental-looking eyes, his high white collar and his fluttering tie. 🤵🏻‍♂️ There was something about him that we didn’t like, and we’d respond with a curt word or give him a light shove. We never actually gave him a shove: shoving Proust was impossible; but still, we made a move as if to, and that was enough to upset him. 💔 He was decidedly too unboyish for us, and his kindnesses, his tender care, his caresses (unable as we were to understand such a wounded heart), we often dismissed as affectations or posturing, and we sometimes told him so to his face: his eyes would then grow even sadder. Yet nothing discouraged him from being kind.” 🤍🕊️

— Daniel Halévy,
“Memories of Proust”
The Parisian Countryside, 1929

#DanielHalévy #MarcelProust #proustagram #LycéeCondorcet #JacquesBizet #RobertDreyfus #FernandGregh #RobertdeFlers