How Proust Can Change Your Life

thoughts like: “Friendship doesn’t exist,” and “Love is a trap and only reveals itself to us by making us suffer.”

Don’t you think?

However charming Proust’s manners, they might unkindly have been described as overpolite, so much so that the more cynical of Proust’s friends invented a mocking term to describe the peculiarities of his social habits. As Fernand Gregh reports:

We created among ourselves the verb to proustify to express a slightly too conscious attitude of geniality, together with what would vulgarly have been called affectations, interminable and delicious

.

A representative target of Proust’s proustification was a middle-aged woman called Laure Haymann, a well-known courtesan, who had once been the mistress of the Duc d’Orléans, the King of Greece, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, and, latterly, Proust’s great-uncle, Louis Weil. Proust was in his late teens when he met and first began to proustify Laure. He would send her elaborate letters dripping with compliments, accompanied by chocolates, trinkets, and flowers, gifts so expensive that his father was forced to lecture him on his extravagance.

“Dear friend, dear delight,” ran a typical note to Laure, accompanied by a little something from the florist. “Here are fifteen chrysanthemums. I hope the stems will be excessively long, as I requested.” In case they weren’t, and in case Laure needed a greater or more enduring token of affection than a collection of long-stemmed plants, he assured Laure that she was a creature of voluptuous intelligence and subtle grace, that she was a divine beauty and a goddess who could turn all men into devoted worshippers. It seemed natural to end the letter by offering affectionate regards and the practical suggestion that “I propose to call the present century the century of Laure Haymann.” Laure became his friend.

Here she is, as photographed by Paul Nadar at around the time the chrysanthemums were delivered to her door:

Another favored target of proustification was the poet and novelist Anna de Noailles, responsible for six collections of forgettable poetry, and for Proust, a genius worthy of comparison with Baudelaire. When she sent him a copy of her novel La Domination, in June 1905, Proust told her that she had given birth to an entire planet, “a marvellous planet won over for the contemplation of mankind.” Not only was she a cosmic creator, she was also a woman of mythic appearance. “I have nothing to envy Ulysses because my Athena is more beautiful, has greater genius and knows more than his,” Proust reassured her. A few years later, reviewing a collection of her poetry, Les Éblouissements, for Le Figaro

, he wrote that Anna had created images as sublime as those of Victor Hugo, that her work was a dazzling success and a masterpiece of literary impressionism. To prove the point to his readers, he even quoted a few of Anna’s lines:

Tandis que détaché d’une invisible fronde

,

Un doux oiseau jaillit jusqu’au sommet du monde

.

“Do you know an image more splendid and more perfect than this one?” he asked—at which point his readers could have been forgiven for muttering, “Well, yes,” and wondering what had possessed their besotted reviewer.

Was he an extraordinary hypocrite? The word implies that, beneath an appearance of goodwill and kindness, lay a sinister, calculating agenda, and that Proust’s real feelings for Laure Haymann and Anna de Noailles could not possibly have matched his extravagant declarations, and were perhaps closer to ridicule than adoration.

The disparity may be less dramatic. No doubt he believed precious few of his proustifications, but he nevertheless remained sincere in the message that had inspired and underlay them: “I like you and I would like you to like me.” The fifteen long-stemmed chrysanthemums, the marvelous planets, the devoted worshippers, the Athenas, goddesses, and splendid images were merely what Proust felt he would need to add to his own presence in order to secure affection, in the light of his previously mentioned, debilitating assessment of his own qualities (“I certainly think less of myself than Antoine [his butler] does of himself”).