PROUST, Marcel.

Lot 1572
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3000 - 4000 EUR
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Result : 4 550EUR
PROUST, Marcel.
Letter to Henry Bernstein. [Circa 1904-1905]. Autograph letter signed "Marcel Proust", 3 pages in-12 on mourning paper. Very amusing unpublished letter from Marcel Proust to Henry Bernstein: the novelist thanks his correspondent, not without ironic reproaches. The novelist thanks Henry Bernstein, "unfaithful but sumptuous friend", and congratulates him on his letter published in Le Figaro, while regretting not to be able to share flowers and fruits of the Midi. Addressed to "Mon petit Bernstein", the letter begins with two famous verses of Paul Verlaine from Green : You send me 'fruits, flowers, leaves and branches', and it is 'my heart that beats only for you !' What does never more mean, pig ? (not Picard epistolary style). I wrote to you about your admirable article, I sent you the Amiens Bible, I had you telephone 900 times to see you. To all this you have only answered, like Alfred de Vigny's deity, 'with a cold silence'. If I hadn't been stung, I would have written you back for the wonderful, dazzling letter in the Figaro. Mr. Donnay asks for three months to make up his mind about the subject he is treating. So what more do I have to do? But I must (all these reproaches made in counterpart response to the classic 'never more?', to the slanderous never more of the skillfully offensive defenses), thank you frantically, with confusion for this royal dispatch which would be acceptable if I were Combes [?or Me de Chevigné but which is addressed to me has something so exorbitant that I don't know what to say to you, except that I am delighted, that it is ravishing, that you are an unfaithful but sumptuous friend and that you make me sick by evoking me with too much power, with these violets of Nice and these oranges of the orange trees, a paradise to which I can never be admitted, because the fever of the hay, the fever of the fruits and the flowers would change it for me if I put the foot there, in the cruelest hell. Put me at the feet of Mademoiselle Lucy Gérard if she is near you and believe in the deep and admiring friendship of your Marcel Proust. Henry Bernstein's article on "Les religions au théâtre" appeared in Le Figaro. It had aroused criticism and the playwright chose to respond to three of their authors, sending a very ironic letter to the director of the daily newspaper from Cap-d'Ail on March 27, 1904. His answer in Le Figaro is dated March 30. The first person Bernstein attacked was Maurice Donnay, whose anti-Semitic play, Le Retour de Jérusalem, was triumphant at the time: he "asked for four months to make up his mind on the question he had just dealt with. Nothing could be more natural, and we are waiting patiently for M. Donnay will be fixed." Obviously, Proust tasted the pique, turning it skillfully against his correspondent. Linked with Henry Bernstein (1876-1953) thanks to their common friend Antoine Bibesco, Marcel Proust supported the playwright on several occasions, lending him money on occasion to settle his gambling debts or, in 1911, taking his defense on the occasion of a cabal of the Action française: the Camelots du roi reproached the author, a Jew and former Dreyfusard, for having deserted in 1900 during his military service. "Henry Bernstein shared Proust's hypersensitivity to noise: according to Anna de Noailles, it was he who first had the walls of his apartment lined with cork, and provided Proust in 1910 with the address of a supplier for his room on Boulevard Haussmann" (Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, pp. 137-138). Proust's letters to the playwright are rare: the correspondence established by Kolb reproduces only four of them.
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