Proust’s ‘Remembrance’ in black and white

The World of Proust

As Seen by Paul Nadar

Edited by Anne-Marie Bernard

MIT Press: 160 pp., $34.95

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Toward the end of a tour of Marcel Proust’s childhood home in Illiers-Combray, the visitor is led up a stairway into a large empty attic where four walls are lined with unframed photographic portraits of some of the most eminent socialites of fin de siecle Paris. These black-and-white figures, whom Proust had known, still convey the luster of bygone antebellum European splendor, but they also stare at the Proustian aficionado with the humbled gaze of people who, with the passage of time, have become mere stand-ins for the complex, larger-than-life picture Proust drew of them when he immortalized them in his epic novel, “Remembrance of Things Past.”

“So this is So-and-so,” one muses, not without a note of disappointment. “And this is Such-and-such.” And this arrogant young man whose sharp, gaunt features betray the dissolute sensuality of an ordinary lout would one day inspire the novel’s aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup, Marcel’s best friend, who marries Marcel’s love Gilberte and who then dies in the trenches of World War I. And this woman, whose dreamy features are about to soften into the very essence of human kindness, is none other than the model for the unregenerate Odette de Crecy, Gilberte’s mother, who cheats on her husband Swann -- Gilberte’s father -- and on everyone else she sleeps with as well. And this, we realize, could only be the model for Gilberte herself, with whom a young Marcel tussles in the park one afternoon after school and in the process of pinning her down has an orgasm. Finally, the most foppish of the lot, the Baron de Charlus -- who could forget him? There he is, with his inseparable walking stick, in the person of Count Robert de Montesquiou, daunting and dapper, a glimmer of impatience about to cross his features if the photographer takes a moment longer.

Could any of these real-life characters live up to what Proust did with them? One might as well ask the same of the town of Illiers, which renamed itself Illiers-Combray to commemorate Proust’s fictional Combray. Could the drab, gray, slate-roofed town ever live up to the childhood paradise Marcel Proust made of it in his novel? The question is unfair and should never be asked, but the answer lies at the heart of Proust’s aesthetics. Art uncovers meanings and harmonies that real life wouldn’t know the first thing about. A portrait may vie with the model; with great artists, it’s frequently the other way around. The original pales before its replica.

Proust loved photographs. Indeed, he liked nothing better than to obtain, however obliquely -- and sometimes to his great shame -- photographic portraits of those individuals he felt he couldn’t possess other than on paper. With most people, the simulacrum ranks second best. But for Proust, who almost never found real intimacy, the photographic portrait of someone he worshipped in secret may have been the only option.

Now, all the people whom Proust transposed into his novel and who were photographed by the French socialite photographer Paul Nadar (1856-1939) have been culled into a book, “The World of Proust.” This is a very valuable -- and luxurious -- accompaniment to Proust’s novel and does with images what so many CDs have tried to offer with compilations of music drawn from Proust’s immediate world: the songs of his friend and sometimes lover Reynaldo Hahn, the violin and piano sonatas of Cesar Franck or of Gabriel Faure -- depending on which of the two sonatas one believes may have served as the soundtrack to Swann’s love affair with Odette.

Not much is stated about Nadar’s technique, nor about his father, Felix Tournachon, whose studio and clientele the son inherited in 1886. What we are told, however, is that “all the portraits are modern prints faithful to the original plate, just as it came down to us from the Nadar studio.” The English of this short 160-page volume is sometimes stilted, betraying the language of the French original.

Nadar’s portraits can be broken down into four categories. First are family pictures. Proust’s brother, his authoritarian father and a rather beefy Madame Proust, shown both retouched and un-retouched, looking nothing like the delicate mother we’ve always imagined her to be. Then there is the picture of Marcel as a boy. Who would have known that this slim, crew-cut, doe-eyed boy would devote the most ringing pages of his novel to just that little boy staring at us from the cover of Nadar’s book?

Then there are portraits of the French aristocracy, this highly exclusive world that flung open its doors to the young Proust when he was little more than a professional charmeur with a rich daddy’s allowance and a pronounced taste for things aesthetic: the Prince of Wales, the Duke de Rohan, Charles Boson de Talleyrand-Perigord, Prince de Sagan, the Count and Countess Greffulhe, to name but a few.

Then comes a series of photographs of artists, writers and composers: Claude Monet, Anatole France, Emile Zola, Jean Cocteau, Claude Debussy, Faure, Hahn, Alphonse Daudet, Stephane Mallarme. Others: the actress Sarah Bernhardt and, more stunningly attractive yet, comedienne Gabrielle Reju, known as Rejane, who leased an apartment to none other than Proust himself.

More inexplicable are those in the fourth group: portraits of the Agostinelli father and sons. (Alfred Agostinelli, the son, would become Marcel’s lover and a model for the ever-elusive and unfaithful Albertine.) Then there is a picture of Nicolas Cottin, who worked in the Proust household. What is unclear about Cottin and Agostinelli is why a photographer of Nadar’s stature would take pictures of such humble working-class folk. Had Proust commissioned these photographs? Could the men have afforded the photographer? Why are we not told?

Nadar had an eye for detail: eyes, mouth, especially hair are captured with exacting precision, as is the texture of an individual’s skin, even when retouched. Clothing, for all of its fustian chic, tends to be perennially crinkled, a detail director Luchino Visconti always tried to capture whenever filming the patrician turn-of-the-century elegance of a world in which permanent press hadn’t yet been invented. On each face is the unmistakable Nadar signature: arch as each person may have been, under Nadar’s lens there is almost always a troublesome hint of kindness and humility verging on the sort of sweetness one often finds among French aristocrats when, after having had tea with you and having regaled you with an intimacy the likes of which you haven’t encountered in decades, the elder of the family stands up, walks you to the door, holds the door for you, waits with you on the landing and, when the elevator finally comes, even hastens to put his hand in and presses the down button for you, all the while leaving you feeling that, once the elevator door is closed, everyone in the living room will instantly guffaw and promise never to have you over again.

Welcome to the world of Monsieur Proust, a world where all that’s wonderful and legendary can never quite transcend the ugly, petty side of human life, where all things, good and bad, close and not so close to the heart, must ultimately remind us that we, like everyone else in these photographs, like everyone in Proust’s novel, young, wealthy and privileged as so many of them were, must eventually grow old and move on. In the process, though, some may learn the most paradoxical lesson of all: that for all the timelessness of art, life is an earthbound affair but that if one looks long and hard enough, one finds in our day-to-day existence an echo, an image of what is indeed eternal.