Louis Martin-Chauffier
(1894-1980)
I just read the most delightful letter from Marcel Proust. [1] He wrote it two years before his death, in January of 1920, to the twenty-five-year-old archivist, paleographer, and aspiring novelist Louis Martin-Chauffier. Martin-Chauffier had inhaled the second volume of In Search of Lost Time when it came out the year before, in 1919. He then went back and read the first volume and was so “intoxicated” by them both that he sat down and wrote a pastiche of Proust’s style as a way of expressing his admiration. He mailed the pastiche to Proust and Proust wrote him back immediately.
“Monsieur,
I am extremely ill. I have 800 letters to answer.[2] But if I make an exception for you and respond to you tout de suite, you will draw the appropriate conclusion. It is this: your letter enchanted me. Your pastiche made the enchantment complete.”
Having begun his own career by publishing pastiches of other writers, Proust had very high standards when it came to this genre. [3] He had read many attempts to imitate his own style and found most of them appalling. Martin-Chauffier’s attempt was not without its flaws. It was a little “languid” sometimes, he said, for reasons he was too ill to go into, although he suggested it had something to do with missing the forest for the trees. But “what astonishing delights” the young man’s pastiche contained all the same!
“You have discerned, with aptness, and parodied, with infinite drollery, some particularities of syntax that I believe are known to you and me alone. You mock my comparisons deliciously. The gentleman who receives a medal from a minister who is his friend, the resemblance of fathers and sons, the different veils that women wear, the positive and the negative, all of this made me die with laughter.”
Proust then tells the young archivist that he has a question for him. He wants to know about a certain aristocratic woman in the seventeenth century who finished her days as an abbess at a very exclusive convent. Was she a Montmorency? Or perhaps the widow of a Montmorency whose maiden name was Condé? Proust needs to know because he wants to give his character, Madame de Villeparisis, the chance to impress her guests by showing them a portrait that she owns of this lady. The one they have in the Louvre is a copy but she has the original! Proust wants to get her name right.[4]
He needs this information for his novel. But he stresses to the young recipient of the letter that this is not the reason he is writing. If it were just a matter of finding out a fact, he has plenty of friends he could ask. He wants to learn this fact from Martin-Chauffier in particular. This is the reason he has written to him, even though “writing a letter for me in this moment is horrifically fatiguing.”
“…your letter was so lovely, and your modesty so exaggerated, that I have set myself the task of thanking you for the one and curing you of the other.”
In Proust’s novel, Madame de Villeparisis is a former bluestocking who is writing her memoirs about all the famous writers and aristocrats she has known. In the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, which Proust was working on at the time, she hosts a party that lasts hundreds of pages. The young narrator has come to the party because he has been told she can help him in his ambition to become a writer. When Proust writes the name “Madame de Villeparisis” in his letter to Martin-Chauffier, he adds, in parentheses, “I was about to say “de la Villetournois.” This is the name that the young writer had used to pastiche her. Proust really knew how to make a person feel good.
I think what I love most about this letter, aside from Proust’s charming capacity to flatter people he admires with total sincerity, is the idea that information on its own is not what matters. Proust could have asked any number of friends to tell him what he wanted to know. But he wanted to find out this woman’s name from this young man. Today, we can google almost anything. But what Proust is saying here is that sometimes it’s not just what you know, but the people from whom you learn it that makes all the difference.
Here is this story of how I found this letter. As I wrote in my last post, my undergrad Professor Ted Johnson gave me a book of essays last summer that the Proust scholar and translator Suzuki Michihiko had given him in 1986. I then learned that Professor Suzuki published an article in 1959 about the importance of reading Proust’s work as fiction and not going in search of real-life models for his characters, including Proust himself. The person who says “I” in Proust’s novel, Suzuki argued, is not Marcel Proust. He should not even be called “Marcel.”[5] When Suzuki was working on this article in 1955, he had a conversation on New Year’s day with another Proust scholar named Jacques Nathan who told him he must read an article that Louis Martin-Chauffier had published on the same subject in 1943. Suzuki read it, and later wrote that it was the best article ever written on how important it is not to conflate the “I” in Proust’s novel with Marcel Proust himself.
This was quite an endorsement. So I read Martin-Chauffier’s article too, in an English translation published in 1947 with the title “Proust and the Double I.” Later, I read that Martin-Chauffier was also a hero of the French Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp the year after this article came out. Happily, he survived to live until 1980.
The argument that Martin-Chauffier makes in “Proust and the Double I” is indeed brilliant. Suzuki may still be right in saying that it’s the best piece on this topic that has ever been written. But what I loved most about the piece was how the style reminded me of Proust. This sentence, for example, which ends with one of those inimitable Proustian comparisons that take your breath away:
“…the models supplied by the acquaintances of Marcel Proust lend him only the least part of themselves, only the visible edge of their being, something like the crest of a submarine reef unexplored, unexplorable, in whose stead Proust, as creative as nature, fashions a new one.”[6]
Sentences like this, and the early date of the article, made me wonder if Louis Martin-Chauffier might have known Proust personally. So l looked him up in Proust’s correspondence and there I found this letter.
“Monsieur, je suis extremement malade. J’ai 800 lettres en retard…”
[1] Marcel Proust, “509: À Louis Martin-Chauffier,” in Marcel Proust: Lettres (1879-1922), ed. Françoise Leriche (Paris: Plon, 2022), 946–47.
[2] The note in the correspondence says that this is a reference to the letters of congratulation he had received after winning the Prix Goncourt for Within a Budding Grove.
[3] Charlotte Mandell has translated Proust’s pastiches into English. Not an easy task! See Marcel Proust and Charlotte Mandell, The Lemoine Affair, Art of the Novella (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House Pub., 2008).
[4] Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, D.J. Enright, and Terence Kilmartin (Modern Library, 1998). 265.
[5] Michihiko Suzuki, “Le «je» Proustien,” Bulletin de La Société Des Amis de Marcel Proust 9 (1959): 69–82.
[6] Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Proust et Le Double Je de Quatre Personnes,” Confluences, no. 21 (1943): 55–69. I quote from the translation into English that appeared in 1947. Louis Martin-Chauffier, “Proust and the Double ‘I’ of Two Characters,” Partisan Review, no. October (1949): 1011–26. 1023.
Wonderful, Keith. Thank you. I am bounding around between inspiration, futility, and the dream that perhaps one day, even one time, my fingertips will graze the tip of Proust mountain. I appreciate your forays into that mountain.
Thanks Sherrill!
Hey Keith, I also love the way this post orbits the same peekaboo game Proust plays when it comes to real vs. fictional people (including that vertiginous line “if one were to give me the same name as the author of the book you’re reading,” or however he puts it).
On the one hand, it doesn’t matter who Proust’s real-life models were — come on, this is fiction! On the other, it does matter which family the 17th-century abbess belonged to, since Proust’s fictional character needs to connect herself to this actual person (and if he got the family name wrong, that would be a thorn in the … fiction).
AND it does matter who looks up a supposedly indifferent fact for you, as you say — or who gave a book of essays to whom, and who passes on that book to someone else. It matters who recommends an article that sets someone else on a new path. And, of course, if we didn’t have writers’ correspondence with real persons (like Proust’s with Martin-Chauffier) to read alongside their imaginative inventions, what an impoverishment.
(The worst effect of email — “TL;DR.” It’s clear-cut the forests.)
Thanks Will! Orbiting the peekaboo game. Yes! The letters are really the place where you see this dizzying oscillation between fiction and real life. They are all signed by the human being named Marcel Proust but they sometimes start to take off into the realm of art. So they are like this transitional or hybrid space between life and fiction. For me, I guess, the story of the research on Proust is also a narrative full of interesting characters. The 1950s were the time when Proust was being recognized as (much) more than a gossipy socialite and the question of the extent to which the “I” was Proust himself was key in this development. Already in his senior thesis, in Japan in 1953, Suzuki argued that Proust did not want to give his narrator his own name, or any name, and that this was an ethical question for Proust, who says over and over in the novel that we can never really know other people in real life. Only art can grant access to “the ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt.” Giving the narrator his own name would tie the novel down to an unknowable reality (his own). Suzuki made this argument first on ethical and philosophical grounds, using evidence from the published text. (He was also reading and translating Jean Santeuil at the time, which helped!) For Suzuki at the time, his point about the anonymity of the narrator had nothing to do with narratological notions of the author/narrator distinction or the idea of the “death of the author.” All that would come later. His thesis came out of a relatively “naive” ethical question about the self and the other. But he did want more evidence to demonstrate that Proust did not intend to call his narrator “Marcel.” As you know, there are just two places, both in The Captive, where the name “Marcel” appears. The first is the “vertiginous” one you mention and later there is a moment where Albertine calls the narrator her “cher Marcel,” and “quel Marcel!” Suzuki examined the early drafts of the novel and found several other places where Proust had used “Marcel” but then marked it out. For example, in the spot where Albertine says, “But where are you off to my darling? (calling me by my Christian name) 162)” the typescript initially had “Marcel,” which Proust replaced with “my Christian name.” Since the “Captive” was published posthumously and Proust died before he finished his corrections, the argument is that Proust would have removed the references to “Marcel” if he had lived. Perhaps not the first “vertiginous” one, which is in the conditional, but most likely the latter “cher Marcel” and “quel Marcel.” (Although the “quel Marcel” could be another instance of vertiginous mixing of ontological levels…) Having found this evidence to back up his theoretical argument, Suzuki published his article in 1959. He tells a wonderful story about going to Paris and having lunch with Proust’s niece, just the two of them at either end of her huge dining table in her apartment overlooking the Seine on the Isle Saint Louis, and asking her to let him see the microfilm of the typescripts with Proust’s corrections for “The Captive.” He was convinced that this volume, centered on the unknowability of Albertine, held the key to Proust’s ethics and to his theory of art and he wanted to see how it evolved over successive drafts. Madame Proust says yes, and he commutes every day for months to the offices of the NRF where the typescripts were kept at the time. Of course Martin Chauffier had already made a similar argument without relying on the manuscripts. (And before that, Proust himself makes it pretty clear!) But Martin-Chauffier, unlike Suzuki, does call the narrator “Marcel,” as do many critics and readers do even today. Suzuki is a purist on this matter. In any case, yes, thank god for the correspondence and the manuscripts! I guess now we do have writers’ hard drives! But it’s just not as fun..
I really enjoyed reading this, Keith! The only thing you left out is who translated the Martin-Chauffier article. But how could you know, when there are only initials? I looked up the initials. I have the feeling they are a woman’s, one of those early to mid-century women who labored for writers they loved, like Constance Garnett and Helen Lowe-Porter. But who knows. Perhaps someone who reads this comment will know…
Thanks Janine! And thanks for pointing this out! Great example of the invisibility of the translator. Whoever did it was very good and I love the idea that it was someone like Garnett or Lowe-Porter. Other possibilities might be Gerard Hopkins or Sylvia Townsend Warner, who were about to translate Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, respectively, in the early 50s. But the initials are “A de B” and it’s 1947. Who could it be? Sounds like a French aristocrat? Maybe someone will know!