![]() ![]() The passion with which she shuts out all others from that corklined room is magnificent and horrible.Ĭéleste's life is magnificent, not only in its self‐sacrifice, or perhaps, we shall now feel, not at all in its self‐sacrifice, which resembles too much those Dickensian denials of self -Little Nell's service of her selfish grandfather. Proust's life since she had been ordered never to let the daylight in? Hundreds of egoists, of course-invalid mothers and worn‐out daughters-have lived in such a dismal symbiosis, but few ignorant young girls and dying ge niuses. ![]() How could there be any lovers (male or female), or friends, or pleasures, save ghosts, in M. She was the museum attendant of time regained. until 2 P.M., listening to the story of the occasional party he attended in order to retouch the memories of his lost youth. She would give to the world her memory of his world of memory as she had known it, bringing him his white coffee and roll at dusk, talking with him in the small hours at the end of his working day, sleeping from 10 A.M. But in 1973 she decided that too much untruth had been told about him. Yet, overall, anyone who has known delight from the 20th century novel, let alone any novelist, must accept the repugnant prison cell gratefully, for it gave us a great and liberating work of art.Īfter the death of Proust, Madame Albaret intended to live only in her memories. For every artist, this book must be a strange experience, for it describes, in the most extreme form, the one‐sided relationship that Proust, voluntarily or involuntarily, seeks to secure from the world around him, but seldom admits to. It is the strangest story to read, because it can be read, I think, only with the most continuously warring emotions - admiration for Proust's courage to endure the slow suicidal routine on which he believed the unity of his great novel depended admiration for Céleste's courage in adapting herself to such a monstrous service gratitude that together they made possible all the pleasures we get from his work growing horror at the way in which he used cold‐bloodedly everyone he knew as creatures for his art and growing horror, too, as we realize how she delighted to watch her revered master use them at last, a deep physical revulsion from the sickroom as one would from a brilliant evocation of a madman's padded cell by his mental nurse and a strange embarrassment at being privy to a relationship at once so intimate and so deforming. of his will and her determination, she became the sole servant of his elaborate, invalid's ritualistic nightmare life. She became bound to him, almost casually at first because of his desire to give work to a lonely young woman and then, by tighter and tighter bonds. So Céleste's fate was not to be devoured by Paris-she saw little of it outside Proust's flat, save when he sent her on a hasty errand-it was to be devoured by one of the greatest novelists the world has known and one of the greatest egoists and, necessarily, she also enveloped him in his dependence on her. Her huband's taxi business was a very select one, and the most important of all his clients was Marcel Proust. There was, however, a difference in Céleste's case. Told like this, the story would seem to be an introduction to one of a hundred French novels, imitations of Zola or Daudet, black romantic epics of ambitious country people devouring the city and, in turn, devoured by it. She lived a lonely life: not daring to go out of her apartment, waiting for her husband's return each day or night, for his job necessarily meant uncertain hours. Not surprisingly, she found the great city of Paris alarming in the first months of her marriage. It is a remote, rather harsh part of France now much more se in 1913, when Céleste married a Parisian taxi driver, Odilon Albaret, an occasional holiday visitor to her village. Céleste Gineste was born in 1891 in Auxillac in the Lozère, a Department of the Languedoc in south central France, through which the mountainous spine of the land runs-the Cevennes.
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