Yacht

On August 9, 1904, Proust accepted Robert de Billy’s invitation to go sailing along the northern coast of Brittany on his father-in-law’s yacht Hélène. Just before leaving for Le Havre, he received the proofs from Le Figaro for his article “La Mort des cathédrales” (The Death of Cathedrals.) In his usual pre-departure stricken state, he returned the proofs without bothering to read them. At Le Havre Proust’s host, Paul Mirabaud, met him at the train station and took him by cab to the harbor. Mirabaud, governor of the Bank of France, struck Proust as being in excellent health. In a letter to his mother the author described the banker as an imposing figure, “magnificent, a huge and powerful Saxon god” with the bluest eyes. Proust was apparently the only male guest on board. The other passengers were Mme Fortoul, “extremely nice,” Mme Jacques Faure, “very pretty,” Mlle Oberkampf, who merited no description, and Mme de Billy “who is charming to me and charming in general.”

After a tour of the large, steam-powered yacht, Proust settled into his cabin at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. An asthma attack prevented him from sleeping; he felt so miserable that he did not bother to undress. Even a dose of Trional at 3 in the morning brought no relief; still awake at 5, he arose and went up on deck, two hours before the yacht set sail. Once they were under way, he felt well enough to take breakfast, and his asthma eased even more as the Hélène headed out into the calm sea in fine weather. The fresh air seemed to increase his appetite, enabling him to enjoy a “big lunch at 12:30,” which made his asthma subside even more. After twelve hours of sailing, at 7 P.M. the boat arrived off Cherbourg. Although the next day “turned out fine again,” Proust missed “the charm of sailing” once they were anchored. He considered leaving the sailing party and taking the train to Paris the following morning, with stops at Caen and Bayeux, to visit the medieval churches described by John Ruskin.

He decided to stay on board a few more days. A photograph taken by Billy shows him sitting in a deck chair and engaged in conversation. He is wearing his gray overcoat, a boater, and a scarf. Billy remarked that Proust made a poor subject for a photograph because it was difficult to get him to stop talking long enough to take his picture. As luck would have it, M. Mirabaud, who had appeared so fit, became ill. The banker had recently suffered a heart attack and been resuscitated by Dr. Merklen, the specialist Proust had recently consulted. Mirabaud, wishing to be prudent, ordered the Hélène to remain at anchor for two days at Dinard while he rested. On Sunday evening, August 14, Proust, having remained on board the yacht for the better part of a week, left and returned to Paris. Proust later described succinctly his yachting trip: “Pretty boat, pretty sailing, pretty women.”

Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life

See Photo Gallery 1 for a picture on Proust sailing on the Hélène.

In The Fugitive, after Albertine flees the Narrator’s apartment—her “prison”—he writes a letter in which he offers her a Rolls-Royce and a yacht, if she will return to him:

. . . I wished you to have that yacht in which you could go cruising while I, not being well enough to accompany you, would wait for you in port . . . and on land I wished you to have a motor-car to yourself for your very own, in which you could go out, could travel wherever you chose. The yacht was almost ready, it is named, after a wish that you expressed at Balbec, the Swan. And remembering that you preferred Rolls-Royces to any other cars, I had ordered one. But now . . . it would be madness, for the sake of a sailing boat and a Rolls-Royce, to meet again and to jeopardize your life’s happiness since you have decided that it lies in your living apart from me.

The Fugitive 5: 613-14

. . . j’avais voulu que vous eussiez ce yacht où vous auriez pu voyager pendant que, trop souffrant, je vous eusse attendue au port . . . Et pour la terre, j’avais voulu que vous eussiez votre automobile à vous, rien qu’à vous, dans laquelle vous sortiriez, voyageriez, à votre fantaisie. Le yacht était déjà presque prêt, il s’appelle, selon votre désir exprimé à Balbec, le Cygne. Et, me rappelant que vous préfériez à toutes les autres les voitures Rolls, j’en avais commandé une. Or, maintenant . . . il serait fou, pour un bateau à voiles et une Rolls-Royce, de nous voir et de jouer le bonheur de votre vie, puisque vous estimez qu’il est de vivre loin de moi.

Albertine disparue 4: 38-39

Yeux Bleus, Les

A novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), by Thomas Hardy.

In 1902, the blond, blue-eyed Vicomte Bertrand de Fénelon captured Proust’s heart. The writer began to refer to his new friend as His Blue Eyes. (Jean-Yves Tadié provides a more likely inspiration for the nickname: Henry Bernstein’s play Ses Yeux bleus. See Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life.) Because nearly all of Proust’s letters to Fénelon remain in the hands of private collectors, who refuse to share their contents, it is difficult to reconstruct the relationship with any certainty. What we do know is that His Blue Eyes became the object of one of Marcel’s great crushes, and although Bertrand seems not to have reciprocated the sentiments, he did not totally discourage the attention. Sometime in the spring of 1902, Bertrand made some gesture that Marcel interpreted as “affectionate.” Marcel confided this incident to Antoine Bibesco, using their code for “top secret” (tombeau secret) meaning information you would take to the grave (tombeau) without divulging. What was not secret and especially irksome had been Fénelon’s imitation of him and his refusal to accept the kind of friendship Proust always sought from those he adored: exclusivity, confessions, all sealed by a mutual pact. Marcel’s obsession became even more evident when he asked Antoine to spy on Bertrand. He wanted to know how Fénelon had spent a particular evening and, above all, where he dined. Marcel signed the letter Leckram; perhaps the anagrams (he sometimes called Fénelon Nonelef) served the purpose of giving anonymity to a grown man behaving like a lovesick adolescent because of supposed neglect by another man. When Antoine, a relentless tease who delighted in torturing Marcel, became even more aware of the latter’s besotted condition, Marcel insisted emphatically that his great affection for His Blue Eyes was strictly platonic. Proust’s future characters who are consumed by jealousy—Swann, the Narrator, and Charlus—ask friends, or hire detectives, to spy on the men and women who become objects of their obsessions. (For more details, see Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life and Proust in Love.)

In the novel, Proust uses Hardy’s novel to support a key aesthetic idea. When the Narrator talks about art, music, and literature, he is speaking for Proust:

. . . I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring to the world.

The Captive 5: 505-06

. . . j’expliquais à Albertine que les grands littérateurs n’ont jamais fait qu’une seule œuvre, ou plutôt réfracté à travers des milieux divers une même beauté qu’ils apportent au monde.

La Prisonnière 3: 877

The Narrator then describes to Albertine the “identical beauty” to be found Thomas Hardy’s novels:

. . . I returned to Thomas Hardy. “Do you remember the stonemasons in Jude the Obscure, and in The Well-Beloved the blocks of stone which the father hews out of the island coming in boats to be piled up in the son’s work-shop where they are turned into statues; and in A Pair of Blue Eyes the parallelism of the tombs, and also the parallel line of the boat and the nearby railway coaches containing the lovers and the dead woman; and the parallel between The Well-Beloved, where the man loves three women, and A Pair of Blue Eyes, where the woman loves three men, and in short all those novels which can be superimposed on one another like the houses piled up vertically on the rocky soil of the island.

The Captive 5: 507

. . . je revins aux tailleurs de pierre de Thomas Hardy. «Vous vous rappelez assez dans Jude l’obscur, avez-vous vu dans La Bien-Aimée, les blocs de pierre que le père extrait de l’île venant par bateaux s’entasser dans l’atelier du fils où elles deviennent statues; dans les Yeux bleus le parallélisme des tombes, et aussi la ligne parallèle du bateau, et les wagons contigues où sont les deux amoureux et la morte, le parallélisme entre La Bien-Aimée où l’homme aime trois femmes, les Yeux bleus où la femme aime trois hommes, etc., et enfin tous les romans superposables les uns aux autres, comme les maisons verticalement entassées en hauteur sur le sol pierreux de l’île?

La Prisonnière 3: 878-79

Other examples where one finds an “identical beauty” in various works are books by Stendhal, and Dostoyevsky. The Narrator also cites Vermeer’s paintings:

“You told me you had seen some of Vermeer’s pictures: you must have realised that they’re fragments of an identical world, that it’s always, however great the genius with which they have been re-created, the same table, the same carpet, the same woman, the same novel and unique beauty, an enigma at that period in which nothing resembles or explains it, if one doesn’t try to relate it all through subject matter but to isolate the distinctive impression produced by the color.”

The Captive 5: 508

“Vous m’avez dit que vous aviez vu certains tableaux de Ver Meer, vous vous rendez bien compte que ce sont les fragments d’un même monde, que c’est toujours, quelque génie avec lequel elle soit recréée, la même table, le même tapis, la même femme, la même nouvelle et unique beauté, énigme à cette époque où rien ne lui ressemble ni ne l’explique, si on ne cherche pas à l’apparenter par les sujets, mais à dégager l’impression particulière que la couleur produit.”

La Prisonnière 3: 878-79

Yquems or Château-Yquem

, a famous wine that had vintage years in 1893, 1900, and 1906. A Proust Dictionary by Maxine Arnold Vogely.

In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, however small the party, to these repasts at which I had at one time imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. They did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, which was incidentally exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of my hosts, friends to whom they presented me with a tinge of benevolent patronage so marked (as a person for whom they had always had a sort of parental affection) that there was not one among them who would not have felt himself to be somehow failing the Duke and Duchess if he had given a ball without including my name on his list, and at the same time, while I sipped one of those Yquems which lay concealed in the Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed according to a variety of recipes judiciously elaborated and modified by the Duke himself.

The Guermantes Way 3: 702-03

Je ne devais plus cesser par la suite d’être continuellement invité, fût-ce avec quelques personnes seulement, à ces repas dont je m’étais autrefois figuré les convives comme les apôtres de la Sainte-Chapelle. Ils se réunissaient là en effet, comme les premiers chrétiens, non pour partager seulement une nourriture matérielle, d’ailleurs exquise, mais dans une sorte de Cène sociale; de sorte qu’en peu de dîners j’assimilai la connaissance de tous les amis de mes hôtes, amis auxquels ils me présentaient avec une nuance de bienveillance si marquée (comme quelqu’un qu’ils auraient de tout temps paternellement préféré) qu’il n’est pas un d’entre eux qui n’eût cru manquer au duc et à la duchesse s’il avait donné un bal sans me faire figurer sur sa liste, et en même temps, tout en buvant un des yquems que recelaient les caves des Guermantes, je savourais des ortolans accommodés selon les différentes recettes que le duc élaborait et modifiait prudemment.

Le Côté de Guermantes 2: 802

Yseult

Heroine of a medieval legend who was bound in an eternal and irresistible love to Tristan because they shared a love potion which her mother had prepared for her to drink with her husband, King Mark, Tristan’s uncle. In Wagner’s opera, based on the legend, she is sailing to see the dying Tristan in the first scene of Act 3. In the following passage, Proust likens the effects of caffeine and his longing for Gilberte to those of the love potion in the legend:

Because of the violence of my heart-beats, my doses of caffeine were reduced; the palpitations ceased. Whereupon I asked myself whether it was not to some extent the drug that had been responsible for the anguish I had felt when I had fallen out with Gilberte, an anguish which I had attributed, whenever it recurred, to the pain of not seeing her any more or of running the risk of seeing her only when she was a prey to the same ill-humor. But if this drug had been at the root of the sufferings which my imagination must in that case have interpreted wrongly (not that there would be anything extraordinary in that, seeing that, for lovers, the most acute mental suffering often has its origin in the physical presence of the woman with whom they are living), it had been, in that sense, like the philtre which, long after they have absorbed it, continues to bind Tristan to Isolde. For the physical improvement which the reduction of my caffeine effected almost at once did not arrest the evolution of that grief which my absorption of the toxin had perhaps, if not created, at any rate contrived to render more acute.

Within a Budding Grove 2: 254

À cause de la violence de mes battements de cœur on me fit diminuer la caféine, ils cessèrent. Alors je me demandai si ce n’était pas un peu à elle qu’était due cette angoisse que j’avais éprouvée quand je m’étais à peu près brouillé avec Gilberte, et que j’avais attribuée chaque fois qu’elle se renouvelait, à la souffrance de ne plus voir mon amie, ou de risquer de ne la voir qu’en proie à la même mauvaise humeur. Mais si ce médicament avait été à l’origine des souffrances que mon imagination eût alors faussement interprétées (ce qui n’aurait rien d’extraordinaire, les plus cruelles peines morales ayant souvent chez les amants l’habitude physique de la femme avec qui ils vivent), c’était à la façon du philtre qui longtemps après avoir été absorbé continue à lier Tristan à Yseult. Car l’amélioration physique que la diminution de la caféine amena presque immédiatement chez moi n’arrêta pas l’évolution du chagrin que l’absorption du toxique avait peut-être sinon créé, du moins su rendre plus aigu.

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs 1: 599

Before the great orchestral movement that precedes the return of Isolde, it is the work itself that has attracted towards itself the half-forgotten air of a shepherd’s pipe.

The Captive 5: 208-09 (The scene in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is in Act 3, scene 1.)

Avant le grand mouvement d’orchestre qui précède le retour d’Yseult, c’est l’œuvre elle-même qui a attiré à soi l’air de chalumeau à demi oublié, d’un pâtre.

La Prisonnière 3: 667