The Difficulty of Being (9 page)

That caliph’s black beard—Proust would put it on and take it off as quickly as those provincial comedians who impersonate statesmen and orchestral conductors. We knew him bearded, we saw him beardless, just as Jacques-Emile Blanche portrays him, an orchid in his buttonhole and a face like an egg.

We were talking about Marcel Proust one evening in the presence of my secretary, who knew little of the man or his work. ‘Your Proust,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘makes me think
of the brother of the sequestered woman of Poitiers.’
^§
Astonishing remark. It sheds a light on this boulevard Haussmann apartment. One pictures that brother, his big watery eyes, his policeman’s moustache, his stiff collar, his bowler hat; he goes into his sister’s room and, in the voice of an ogre taking part in a ceremonial: ‘Ho! Ho! This goes from bad to worse.’ It must have been these words endlessly repeated that the wretched girl distorted in the course of time from her dream and which became Malempia. How could one not think of this ‘dear deep sanctum’ of ‘this dear little grotto’ in that fusty room where Proust would receive us lying on his bed, dressed, collared, cravatted, gloved, terrified by the fear of a scent, a breath, a window ajar, a ray of sunlight. ‘Dear Jean,’ he would ask me, ‘have you not been holding the hand of a lady who had touched a rose?’—‘No, Marcel.’—‘Are you sure?’ And half serious, half in jest, he would explain that the passage in
Pélleas
, where the wind has passed over the sea, was enough to give him an attack of asthma.

Lying stiffly and askew, not among that sequestered woman’s oyster shells, but in a sarcophagus of the remains of personalities, of landscapes, of all that he could not use in Balbec, Combray, Méséglise, in the Comtesse de Chevigné, the Comte Greffulhe, Haas and Robert de Montesquiou, looking, in short, very much as later we were to revere, for the last time, his mortal remains beside the pile of note-books containing his work which, for its part, continued to live to his left, like a dead soldier’s wrist watch, Marcel Proust would read to us, each night,
Du côté de chez Swann
.

These sessions added to the noxious disorder of the room a chaos of perspectives, for Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. ‘It’s too silly,’ he kept saying, ‘no … I won’t read any more. It’s too silly.’ His voice once more became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. ‘It was too silly. He was ashamed of making us listen to such silliness. It was his fault. Besides he could not reread himself. He should never have begun to read …’ And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl, and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurin household. After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again. He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly. Sometimes he would get up, take off a short jacket, run his hand through the inky locks that he used to cut himself and that hung down over his starched collar. He would go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall. There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, a purple waistcoat on the torso of a mechanical toy, holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.

Do not expect me to follow Proust on his nocturnal excursions and describe them to you. But you may know that these took place in a cab belonging to Albaret, the husband of Céleste, a night cab truly worthy of Fantômas himself.
^‖
From these trips, whence he returned at dawn, clutching his
fur-lined coat, deathly pale, his eyes dark-circled, a bottle of Evian water protruding from his pocket, his black fringe over his forehead, one of his button boots unbuttoned, his bowler hat in his hand, like the ghost of Sacher Masoch, Proust would bring back figures and calculations which allowed him to build a cathedral in his bedroom and to make wild roses grow there.

Albaret’s cab took on a particularly sinister appearance in the daytime. Proust’s daytime outings took place once or twice a year. We made one together. This was to go and look at the Gustave Moreaus at Madame Ayen’s, and afterwards, at the Louvre, Mantegna’s
Saint Sebastien
and Ingres’s
Turkish Bath
.

To come back to measurements. I linger over describing Proust, because he illustrates my thesis so well. And his handwriting, what does it look like on the pages of those exercise books, which all the members of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
would collate, cut out, paste in, try to decipher, in the rue Madame? Like ciphers as the word decipher indicates.

By dint of adding, of multiplying, of dividing in time and in space, Proust brings his work to a close by the simplest of methods, of casting out the nines. Once more he finds the figures with which his work began. And this is where he captivates me.

For his intrigues have lost some charm, his Verdurins some comedy, Charlus some tragedy, his duchesses some of the prestige of Mesdames de Maufrigneuse and d’Espars. But the structure of his measurements remains intact. Freed from anecdotes they interweave. They become the work itself. They are a scaffolding which obscures the monument.

Swann, Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, Oriane, Vinteuil,
Elstir, Françoise, Madame de Villeparisis, Charlus, the Queen of Naples, the Verdurins, Cottard, Morel, Rachel, Saint-Loup, la Berma, what do all these puppets mean to me? I see the framework that connects them, the joints of their encounters, the elaborate lace-work of their comings and goings. I am more struck by the interlocking of organs than by that of emotions, by the interlacing of veins than by flesh. My eye is that of a carpenter looking at the King’s scaffold. The planks interest me more than the execution.

YOU CANNOT HAUNT YOUR HOUSE AT WILL. IT IS A
question of storm and fire. There have been times when mine rejected me. It withheld its assistance. The walls absorbed nothing. They lacked the great shadows of fire, the sheen of water. The more my house ignored me, the more I ignored it. This lack of exchange caused a deadlock. No longer could we lay traps for one another. No trap, no game. That means to live with an empty bag. My friends felt this. And they withdrew like the walls. I had to wait for the emanations to return, to counter one another, to form this explosive mixture which causes our dwellings to blaze. For they imitate us and only offer us what we give them. But this echo speaks and insists on dialogue.

Of all my homes, rue Vignon was the most haunted. It was almost at the corner of the Place de la Madeleine, up under the roof, and had no pretensions to being pleasant. But there was flood and fire. I could not describe it. It was its emptiness that was full. Furniture, objects came there of their own accord. One did not see them. What one saw was this emptiness, an attic of emptiness, a dustbin of emptiness, an emptiness full to the brim. The ghosts queued up in it. The mob stood tight-wedged. There was no floating whatever. A crowd of shadows propped you up. The main body of the army occupied my room. The rest camped right down to the hall and
on the stairs. Elbow to elbow. In heaps, in clusters. These on the floor, those on the walls or on the ceiling. Their tumult was a silent one. Guests liked this room. They did not notice anything peculiar except the whole thing. This whole comforted them, put them at their ease, relaxed them, cut them off from the outside. Those invisible people were my responsibility. They saw to the service, hotted up the drama to the right point. Horrors would break out. The emptiness would then make such eddies that one had to cling to some piece of wreckage. But my company would come into action, smother the flames, stamp out the embers.

And tranquillity itself, once it had returned, looked like Phaedra, seated in her chair.

A song of Marlene Dietrich’s was often heard there. The one beginning
‘Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht’
. Recently I was dining at her table. I asked her for it. She sang it to me. The restaurant became my room. It emptied itself, it glorified itself. And the ancient ghosts appeared. And the dead rose from their tombs.

Beside this room and that of Proust and that of Picasso, rue Schoelcher, which overlooked the Montparnasse cemetery and where the emptiness was inhabited by a mass of objects and forms, I have known haunted houses in which our phantoms played no part. They were haunted by the pleasing craziness of their owners. Their emptiness was full of another sort of emptiness: that of the obsession with emptiness and of a morbid desire to escape from it. The setting here was all-important and the strange appearance of these houses proceeded rather from the presence of things than from their invisibility.

Good taste never produces spectres of this kind, and if
Edgar Allan Poe had designed a house for himself, doubtless instead of being built on the pattern of his cottages, it would have taken its style from the House of Usher.

If we must have ugliness, I have always preferred to good taste, which depresses me, the violent bad taste of those women who are actresses without a theatre, tragedians without tragedy, and with a physique predisposing them to extravagance. Such was the case of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and of Rachel when, too ill, she no longer acted. Then the dreams of such great ladies, in quest of dramatic action, materialize and become a setting for them. The one spends her energies on English Gothic, on trapezes, on columns, on plaster mouldings, the other on grottoes and monograms, on tortured bedsteads and on scroll-work anticipating ‘modern style’, oddly combining Greece with the Synagogue, the face of Antinoüs with a Jewish profile.

The Marquise Casati owned a haunted house. It was not so before it was hers. It was the old Palais Rose which had belonged to the Comte Robert de Montesquiou.
^*
The Comte de Montesquiou claimed that it was haunted. Haughty, a stickler for his due, this man who would have wanted both Mohammed and the mountain to come to him, pursued the acme of bad taste, and it repelled his advances. His mauve gloves, his basket of hydrangeas, his air of mystery and arrogance, put it to flight. Did he think he could seduce it or did he realize his efforts were vain? He died embittered and his house became the property of the Marquise.

Luisa Casati was originally a brunette. Tall, bony, her gait, her great eyes, her teeth of a racehorse and her shyness did
not accord with the conventional type of Italian beauties of the period. She astonished. She did not please.

One day she decided to exploit her type to the full. It was no longer a matter of pleasing, displeasing or astonishing. It was a matter of dumbfounding. She came out of her boudoir as from the dressing-room of an actress. She was red-haired. Her locks stood on end and writhed round a Gorgon’s head, so painted that her eyes, that her mouth with its great teeth, daubed black and red, instantly turned men’s glances from other mouths and other eyes. And as they were beautiful the men took in this. They no longer said: ‘She is nothing to write home about.’ They said to themselves: ‘What a pity that such a beautiful woman should daub herself in this way!’

I imagine that her dresses too were the subject of long study. Like the Casati Isis which adorned a room in the Palais Rose and which we saw in 1945 at José-Maria Sert’s, she was coated in cloth of gold.

I am reminded of Georgette Leblanc, of her trains of gold and her chasubles, climbing hills on a bicycle behind Maurice Maeterlinck. Artless women, courage personified, marvellous, you loved gold on your fabrics. You could never keep a sou.

As soon as she came out of her dressing-room, the Marquise Casati received the applause usually given to a famous tragedian at her entry onto the stage. It remained to act the play. There was none. This was her tragedy and why her house became haunted. The emptiness had to be filled whatever the cost; never for a moment could one stop bringing down the curtain and raising it again on some surprise: a unicorn’s horn, dressed-up monkeys, a mechanical tiger, a boa constrictor. The monkeys developed tuberculosis. The unicorn’s horn became coated in dust. The mechanical tiger was eaten by moths, the boa constrictor died. This sinister bric-à-brac
defied ridicule. It left no room for it. It reigned in the house of the Comte de Montesquiou. For indeed extravagances are paid for dearly, even in a frivolous world. Montesquiou collected other people’s extravagances and in this too he missed the mark. How could I not be reminded of the last scene of
La Fille aux yeux d’or
??
^†
Like the Marquise de San Réal, the Marquise Casati, in the midst of the blood of objects and of animals, victims of her dream, adds more black and more red, disguises herself and turns round and round.

May these lines be a tribute to her. I suspect that wherever she is, she carries, embedded between her shoulder blades, the Empress Elizabeth’s knife.

For a house to be haunted there must be commitment. The Marquise was committed in her own way. The Comte de Montesquiou was not. For one can commit oneself at any rung of the ladder. From top to bottom.