Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (40 page)

I imagine there will be no further friendship between the two of them. These young noblemen, with their mistresses and motor cars, they may all laugh at Marcel’s passionate approach to friendships, but
isolated as he is by his disease, it is no wonder his friends matter so much to him. I have calmed Adrien, who decided to go into the Faculty for distraction, and will try to soothe Marcel as soon as he wakes.

Just when I had thought we had achieved some peace. As Bossuet wrote: “It takes so many pieces to make human happiness, there’s always one missing.”

It was borne in on me yesterday what has happened. Marie has not had the heart to tell me—although I had noticed her visits were less frequent of late—and Marcel has hidden his decision from me. However, when he went out for dinner with d’Albufera last night, I took the opportunity to look over the proofs and realized he has made no progress at all since the scene with his father. I suspect he has abandoned the translation, and I plan to confront him with my discovery as soon as possible.

Dick says Marthe hopes for a girl, as she feels a boy would be too much trouble.

Marcel will not listen to reason. It was as I suspected, and I pleaded with him to take up the task once more. I sympathize that the correcting is the most tedious part, but we are within sight of publication, and cannot abandon now. He is quite depressed about the whole thing, half guilty for hiding it from me, half angry that I discovered it myself, but says there are
just too many mistakes to make it possible, and that every session Marie delicately corrects yet more, while he starts to feel that his own French eludes him. “At the end of three years’ work, I speak no language, know nothing about art, and even less about Ruskin or Amiens,” he told me. I had to quote his master back to him: “To know anything well involves a profound sense of ignorance.”

Marie and I have hatched a plan to get Marcel back to work: she will compare the proofs to the English and mark with a red star any phrase she feels needs further attention from Marcel the translator, while I will read the French alone, and mark with a blue star any phrase I feel is less than felicitous and might want some work from Marcel the writer. This way, we hope to present the problem to Marcel in a more manageable way, simply as a list of decisions that need to be made.

She is such a large-hearted girl, and without meaning any disloyalty to Marthe who is displaying every patience at this difficult time, although she is somewhat prone to fragility, I often think what a delight of a daughter-in-law the “bluestocking” would make. (She rides a bicycle, no less. I do not remember that Marcel had told me that.)

After Marcel’s letter yesterday, I spent the whole afternoon debating with the doctor what I should do.
My immediate reaction was that I should book this morning’s train back to Paris, help him locate the missing proofs—they must be in the apartment after all, he has not taken them out anywhere—and then he could accompany me back here, arriving around the time we had planned anyway. The de Noailles are in residence at Amphion now and have a dance planned for the eleventh, so he will want to be down here next week at the latest. Adrien would not hear of such a plan, and said I could not be rushing off to Paris to help him find his socks—the proofs are surely not trivial things, I countered—and must stay put. He even said he may have done it on purpose—or at least that these doctors of the mind whom he and Dick find so fascinating would argue that Marcel had misplaced the proofs because he really wishes to abandon the translation. Such nonsense, my doctors talk sometimes. I am sure the proofs will turn up under a pile of papers soon enough and have agreed I will not return to Paris just yet, but I feel for my little wolf, and sent a telegram this morning before breakfast.

Weather continues fine.

Telegram (a very expensive one!) from Marcel saying the heroic Marie saved the day, finding the proofs bundled up with the day’s newspapers that Marcel had been reading, and hidden away in a corner of the room. He will be with us Monday evening, and will secrete his papers in a document case he has borrowed from his uncle Georges. I hope the journey does not overly tire him, and have consulted the hotel
about the room in the far wing. Invitations from the de Noailles have arrived.

Adrien returned late last night, quite disheartened by his trip to Illiers for the prize-giving. The old
curé
is no longer invited to the school under any circumstances, as if religion itself would pollute the boys, while Jules, all puffed up with his mayoralty, delivered a speech to these future citizens about the necessity of separating Church and State. Adrien was revolted but could not bring himself to remind his brother-in-law that the same
curé
saw Elisabeth through her long illness with devotion and patience. It is all very well for Jules Amiot to decide he has no immortal soul worth worrying about, but to deny others things of the spirit is unconscionable. Well, we have Emile Combes and his ghastly attacks on the Church to thank for this monstrosity. Adrien is just sick about it, for in his heart he now knows that Dreyfus is innocent, although he will never say it, yet he sees the triumphant Dreyfusards punishing the Church for a crime she never committed.

He was angry with Dick and Marcel last night, and told me, “You see where their bloody Dreyfusism has brought us,” but I begged him not to repeat the story to Marcel especially, who would be so upset. He always loved the old
curé
, who taught him his catechism, and Adrien knows the boys are as opposed as he is to Combes.

If these Philistines are victorious, there will be no more Chartres, no more Amiens. By the time
they are finished separating Church from State, they will have ripped down the Crucifixions and Nativities from the walls of the Louvre, arguing no doubt that it is a state museum.

Marcel says all that is higher and larger in France resides in the Church, and surely believer and non-believer can agree. I think with such admiration of our Ruskin at these times. If a Jewess can transmit a Protestant’s understanding of a Gothic arch or rose window, that these great achievements are an expression of our yearning for the spiritual, then surely the Catholic church can be kept safe from overzealous Dreyfusards.

I can barely put pen to paper my hand shakes so as I recall yesterday’s events. I tremble, but not in fear nor sorrow. It is still anger that moves me. Regret may come, perhaps forgiveness too, but it will have to be later. Today, I am on fire. I am betrayed by his selfishness, his thoughtlessness, his single-minded pursuit of his own desires without care for what grief they may cause me. Yet even as I write these words I know that I love him, more than I should.

As always, I thought only of him. I began with his best interests at heart, I began with love to translate
Sesame and Lilies
, that he should have the rough draft available as soon as he was ready, that when critics heaped praise on our
Bible of Amiens
he might reply easily, in the manner of a much-published author, that
Sesame
was now forthcoming. With all the quietness of August leaving me time at my disposal since our
return from Evian, I had managed to finish a good twenty pages or so when I thought yesterday to offer him my efforts as a gift. I asked Eugénie to fetch me some nice piece of ribbon from her sewing basket, and she proffered a lovely pink one, which I used to tie the pages into a tidy bundle that I left on Marcel’s desk so he would find it when he awoke.

He rose after lunch, and I was sitting here in the salon as I heard his footsteps approaching and anticipated his reaction with delight. But it was not with gratitude nor joy that he came to me. Furious instead, he accused me of meddling, of machinations, of setting him against work by thoughtless urging on. I have tired of this argument, which he has used against me before, especially in the matter of our triple reform, maintaining that my slightest encouragement towards an agreed-upon plan acts instead as new impediment to his resolve. So, I rejected it forcefully this time, said what nonsense it was to blame his tragic lack of will on others, that if he wasted time, it was his own fault, that I had done everything in my power to help him towards achievement. That I had watched as he indulged his sickness and dallied with his
cocottes
, that I had watched as he failed in his studies, abandoned the law, absented himself from the library, and now refused to finish the only task he had ever managed to push at least halfway to completion, that I had watched in sadness but had never given in to despair, that I had always found new remedies, new schedules, new strategies, new plans, and new hope, and this was how he treated me in return, with callousness and ingratitude. But my anger served only to inflame his
and he yelled at me: “Now, I will never, ever touch
Sesame
. I abandon it,” he cried before he rushed from the salon.

I was so impassioned now I could not leave it there and ran out after him, pursuing him to his room, where I found him with his back to me standing at the window, his body shaking, his head turned to look down towards the street, although I doubt he can have seen anything that passed before his eyes.

“How can you be so ungrateful?” I demanded, but he would not reply nor turn to face me. So, desperate somehow to capture his attention, to impress my sense of betrayal on him, I did as he once had, and thoughtlessly grabbed the first object that came to hand. It was that little wooden long-necked Virgin that Fénelon once gave him, surely thinking more to please Marcel’s eye than his soul. And so, I raised my hand and flung it to the floor, hurling it some distance as though I knew it would take force to break the wood. Sure enough, its dainty head splintered from its graceful body with a sound that may have only been small but that seemed deafeningly loud in the midst of our silence. And then, I turned and ran from the room.

I wonder now whether we will ever be able to say that little figure was our wedding cup, its shattering the symbol of our unity.

C
HRIST SUFFERS
. His twisted body groans. His face collapses as though the very flesh were giving way. His eyelids flutter for he is now half unconscious from the pain. A strand of blood, deep red, almost black, trickles down his plaster
cheek. Vicious nails skewer his sculpted flesh, pinning him to this gilt cross.

I come here often on my lunch break. I eat a sandwich in the library courtyard and then walk down the Rue de Richelieu, past the Palais Royal and turn the corner onto the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Eglise Saint-Roch and its gory Crucifixion. But today, I have wandered in here in the middle of the afternoon, seeking distraction—or even comfort, I suppose. I am somehow dispirited by what I have written. What I have translated, that is. I don’t want you to think Mme Proust did not love her son, that their life together was some kind of purgatory. As Marcel stalks out of a room crying
“J’abandonne!”
I don’t want you to accuse me of overdramatizing their disagreements. Of course, I have built to a climax here, intentionally, dropping all those irrelevant diary entries through the month of August and hiding her work on
Sesame
from you until, in September, I have brought mother and son face to face. This is my doing.

But they did fight, however much they loved each other. The battles over the shattered Venetian vase, grandmother’s lap desk, and Fénelon’s top hat are a matter of historical fact. And Proust did abandon his translation of
Sesame and Lilies
for some months in 1903. It’s only the truth that I am translating, and I sit here in one of the pews at Saint-Roch thinking a bit about the truth and our duty to it.

This is not the most beautiful church in Paris, nor even in the neighbourhood, but it feels familiar to me. Saint-Roch was established by Louis XIV in 1653 but it was fifty years before the money was raised to build the church, so it is designed in the baroque style of the eighteenth-century and packed with the cloying art of the Counter-Reformation.

The crucifix is by Lemoyne. It reminds me of home, I guess. The churches of Quebec are not medieval cathedrals, after all, but eighteenth-and nineteenth-century buildings erected by the same aggressive Jesuit faith that drove Saint-Roch, and filled with extravagant religious art in the French style. Indeed, the Christ at Saint-Roch is the same one who presided over my teenage years.

Childhood belonged to the tender figure of
Bébé Jésus
, the little bean in the manger in the Christmastime crèche, but adolescence was the territory of the bleeding Christ. He is made of white plaster that the artist has not coloured but rather covered in a translucent glaze, giving his skin a deathly glow. His body is cruelly emaciated as though his Roman captors had starved him before the Jewish crowd pronounced his sentence and the centurions nailed him up. His eyes are almost shut, his cheeks are sunken, his face is gaunt. A dribble of blood flows down his forehead from beneath his crown of thorns. Under his hallucinatory gaze, Father Ambrose preached a doctrine of suffering and guilt, sacrifice and debt, original sin and perpetual repayment, from the pulpit of Notre-Dame-des-Douleurs on Dorchester Boulevard in Montreal.

In the midst of my university years, I suddenly saw him one day with an art student’s eye, noted the exaggeration of proportions, the hysteria in the colouring, the sentimentality in the sculpting of the face. He is too manipulative a figure to be considered great art, yet his suffering holds sway. He looks like a corpse in a death camp, a starving Ethiopian, an addict on the street. I still long to reach up and touch his face, to make it better, to heal the son and comfort the mother, to stop history in its tracks. If only I had been there, if only I could help…