Proust did not date his letters, but this two-page letter has been dated Saturday 29 November 1913.

Proust did not date his letters, but this two-page letter has been dated Saturday 29 November 1913. This was 15 days after the publication of “Swann's Way” by Grasset. 📗

The paper is folded, and at first glance, a hastily scrawled message, written without any accents, appears on the outside of the paper: “Ou eliez-vous?”, without even a stroke on the “t”. 📝

When you unfold the document, it reads:

🖋️“My dear Alfred,

I’d started writing a note to you this morning (which I’ll give you, by the way, if you’d like) in response to a letter I’d received. But I’ve received a second one and no longer have the heart to carry on. We’ll have to part ways. All this has been weighing so heavily on my mind that I haven’t been able to get ready in time. I wasn’t worried about it because I thought it was pouring with rain, but Nicolas tells me the weather’s fine. I don’t want my tiredness to deprive you of fresh air, so I’ve phoned Albaret to ask him to come straight away: go for a little drive with him, but I urge you, for this last trip, not to run any errands, not to tell anyone, and to get out of Paris as quickly as possible. Spend two hours on the road, then come back to pick me up at half past five as I’ve got a few errands to run. I’ll pop round to Delfin’s to pick up my milk and we’ll discuss the essentials. I might set off for Fontainebleau this evening, but without you.

"Where were you?"

The letter is addressed to Alfred Agostinelli 💌, a chauffeur and mechanic whom Proust met in the summer of 1907 at the @grandhotelcabourgmgallery. In 1913, he put him up at his home at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. But on 1 December 1913, Alfred fled from the gilded cage in which Proust had confined him. In the months that followed, he returned and then fled once more. On 30 May 1914, he died in a plane crash off the coast of Antibes. 🌊

From the summer of 1914 onwards, Proust would channel his grief into the “Albertine cycle”, for which Alfred was the main inspiration. ❤️‍🔥💔❤️‍🩹

#proustagram #MarcelProust #AlbertineSimonet #AlfredAgostinelli