Read The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust Online
Authors: Joachim Neugroschel
The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
T
HE
C
OMPLETE
S
HORT
S
TORIES
OF
M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
HE
C
OMPLETE
S
HORT
S
TORIES
OF
M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
Compiled and Translated
by Joachim Neugroschel
Foreword by Roger Shattuck
First Cooper Square Press edition 2001
This Cooper Square Press hardcover edition of
The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
is an original publication. It is published by arrangement with the translator.
Translation copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel
Foreword copyright © 2001 by Roger Shattuck
Translator’s Preface copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel
This edition copyright © 2001 by Joachim Neugroschel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical
means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Published by Cooper Square Press
An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911
New York, New York 10011
Distributed by National Book Network
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922.
[Short stories. English]
The complete short stories of Marcel Proust / compiled and translated by Joachim Neugroschel
; foreword by Roger Shattuck.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-8154-1264-9
1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922—Translations into English. I. Neugroschel, Joachim. II.
Title.
PQ2631.R63 A265 2001
843'.912—dc21
00-065739
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
ONTENTS
F
OREWORD
: P
ROUST
’
S
O
WN
S
OUND
by Roger Shattuck
T
RANSLATOR
’
S
P
REFACE
: P
ROUST AND THE
M
YTHOLOGY OF
P
ARIS
P
REFACE
by Anatole France
The Death of Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania
Fragments of Commedia dell’Arte
Social Ambitions and Musical Tastes of Bouvard and Pécuchet
The Melancholy Summer of Madame de Breyves
Portraits of Painters and Composers
Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time
P
ROUST
’
S
O
WN
S
OUND
Homer still suits us just fine. We turn to him for larger-than-life tales of bravery
in battle and for the adventures of a resourceful hero finding his way home again
after years of war. Odysseus’ exploits will stay with us because Homer gave them the
sturdy shape of epic. The
Odyssey
has come to look like part of the landscape we live in.
We tend to neglect Homer’s principal rival, Hesiod, another great collector of stories.
In
Works and Days
, Hesiod wrote both poetically and practically about the seasonal round of work on
a farm. In the
Theogony
, he produced the first gathering of divine myths constituting Greek religious beliefs.
Compared with Homer, Hesiod aimed either too low or too high to capture the stuff
of epic poetry for the ages. Therefore, we are a bit surprised that in a moment of
need Marcel Proust turned not to Homer but to Hesiod for help. Proust was just starting
out.
Barely twenty and taking courses in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, Proust began
publishing stories and articles in literary reviews. Admired for his wit and his talents
as a mime, he was invited to exclusive literary salons. He managed to find a “job”
as a librarian—with no salary, few duties, and a year’s leave of absence to start
off. Still, the best way to establish himself as an author would be to publish a book.
He succeeded in doing so, but only after four years of planning and shamelessly
using his connections. His salon hostess, Madeleine Lemaire, who was also a flower
painter, agreed to illustrate the book. He obtained a preface from a celebrated novelist
he had met some years earlier in another literary salon, Anatole France. A gifted
young friend and musician, Reynaldo Hahn, provided a musical setting for several poems.
Just a few months before publication, Proust decided he must find a new title for
his book. This is the juncture where Hesiod enters the story. Proust had read him
in Lamartine’s flowing translation. The Greek author’s title,
Works and Days
, could suitably be borrowed for a miscellaneous collection dealing with modern experiences.
But Proust did not want to emphasize the motif of working for a living to which Hesiod
attached great importance. Proust’s sly revision,
Pleasures and Days
, gives a reverse, almost a perverse, twist to the classic title. It is true that
a yearning for pleasure runs like a colored thread through most of the stories and
pieces. Even so, Hesiod’s title modified to suggest a garden of delights does not
entirely suit the contents. The bulk of writing Proust put into this volume concerns
frustration, disappointment, and death. At this early age, Proust did not yet know
or could not acknowledge that his true theme was not pleasure but suffering.
Pleasures and Days
contains five substantial stories interspersed with fragments, parodies, portraits
in the style of the seventeenth-century moralist La Bruyère, nature descriptions,
and philosophical meditations. Calmann-Lévy, a leading publishing house of the era,
brought it out in a deluxe edition at a high price. Framed by a trophy preface, illustrated
by a society painter, and containing music by a young prodigy, Proust’s writing was
overwhelmed as much as it was enthroned. As William Carter writes in his fine biography,
“Friends and reviewers . . . wondered whether
Pleasures and Days
was a book or a social event.”
The book was launched by the publication, on the same day and on the front page of
two Paris dailies, of Anatole France’s preface. It was a splendid publicity coup.
With just a
hint of detachment, even irony, France referred to Proust’s charm and grace and to
the sadness of the book’s hothouse atmosphere. “The book is young with the youth of
the author. Yet it is old with the oldness of the world.” The half-dozen reviews ran
from outright mocking of “these elegant nothings” to measured judgment of a promising
talent to full endorsement of the book’s wisdom and originality. Priced out of the
range of most readers, the book sold hardly any copies. At the time, Proust himself
spoke disparagingly about the whole undertaking. Twenty years later he compared this
early writing favorably with his later style. It would be seventeen years before he
published another book of his own.
The five major stories that provide the armature of
Pleasures and Days
all deal with some form of moral weakness that brings corruption: vainglory, snobbery,
emotional caprice, voluptuousness, and jealousy. And all end in death or some equivalent—boredom
and the yoke of habit. The most shocking story, “Confessions of a Young Girl,” entails
a double death. A young woman dying by a half-botched suicide relates how her mother’s
seeing her with a lover
in flagrante delicto
causes the apoplexy that kills her mother. The theme of matricide remained with Proust
to the end of his life. Several times he accuses himself of being guilty of the crime,
at least indirectly.
The last and longest story, “The End of Jealousy,” comes close to shifting the meaning
of death from curse to salvation. The lover whose passion metastasizes into an all-devouring
jealousy finds some consolation when an accident first maims him and then takes his
life. But there is an irresolute, sentimental gesturing in the closing pages that
will disappear when Proust fleshes out this story into
Swann in Love
, the opening volume of
In Search of Lost Time
.
