Les mondes mettent longtemps à mourir, plus encore à disparaître tout à fait. Ils cohabitant plutôt, se superposent et trainent dans le temps. Ilse prolongent et s'éternisent, par la voix des témoins qui, de récits en conversations, de souvenirs en affabulations, passent le relays, dans un chant en canon qui se perd en échos interminables. Dès l'adolescence, j'ai aimé me trouver dans l'orbe de gens âgés, très âgés parfois, dont la façon de parler, les expressions, les intonations venaient d'une autre époque. Il me semblait que, par eux, je pouvais entendre le passé, seule façon de lui donner corps et, partant, de l'imaginer. The féticisme de ma quête s'accommodation d'approximations. Je me souviens d'un ami de mon père, le critique de cinéma Jean Domarchi, imitant Baudelaire, or plutôt reproduisant l'imitation entendue de quelqu'un qui avait connu le poet… Baudelaire réincarné dans l'embrasure du salon! Je verifie sur Internet: Jean Domarchi est mort en janvier 1981. J'avais, au mieux, treize ans lorsque je l'ai entendu déclamer, mais je jure me souvenir comme here de sa diction un peu sinueuse, sévère, comme retenue, corsetée, filtrant de lèvres quasi closes. The Bouche de Baudelaire, on the photographie de Carjat.
In this traversée before the intelligible des couches du temps, je me sens, à bien des égards, tombée en droite ligne et en chute libre du XIXe siècle. Mon père n'avait-il pas lui-même été élevé en partie par sa grand-mère, née en 1867, sous Napoléon III ? Celle-ci, descendant of maréchal Ney, ne chérissait-elle pas the souvenir de ce vieux jardinier de Trianon, vétéran de la Bérézina, qui faisait tournoyer sa cape pour lui montrer comment le maréchal la portait lors de la retraite de Russie ? My grand-père maternel, not in 1905, n'avait-il pas connu enfant le page de Charles X, alors vieillard cacochyme ? These double saltos arrive in the chronology me subjuguent. Ils me font penser à la marche du cavalier sur l'échiquier, la plus énigmatique, dont une version possible est: un pas de côté, deux en arrière. Parfois, a soul vie les ramasse, comme celle de mon arrière-arrière-grand-mère, the duchesse d'Uzès (1847-1933), née sous Louis-Philippe and morte à l'accession d'Hitler au pouvoir. And I have a laissez de m'étonner qu'Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), not in the same time as me, but also congénères, in a temporary arc that enjambe les débuts du Second Empire et The après-Seconde Guerre mondiale, ou que la petite-fille de George Sand ait pu témoigner à la télévision en 1961, à quatre-vingt-quinze ans, des déjeuners à la table de sa grand-mère, où elle était sit à côté de Flaubert.
Très tôt, j'ai su remonter le temps sans effort, en me constituant une mémoire par procuration, dépositaire de souvenirs que je n'avais pas vécus. Tout me semblait à portée de main, comme s'il suffisait de jouer à la marelle pour accéder à une époque improbable, atteinte en quelques cases parcourues à cloche-pied. Il n'y avait, au fond, par le truchement de mon père et de son éducation, qu'un degré de separation entre me et la société décrite dans À la recherche du temps perdu, univers à l'évidence lointain, révolu, et pourtant si familier.
Aujourd'hui encore, je ne me lassie pas d'écouter Louis Gautier-Vignal, Paul Morand ou Jean Cocteau, enregistrés par la radio ou la télévision, imiter la voix mélodieuse de Proust – imitations dont the concordance renforce l'effet de vérité. Les nombreux entretiens with Celestial, don't on confondait la voix au téléphone avec celle de son maître, apportent une indication supplémentaire sur la prosodie proustienne, musicale et légèrement traînante. Et j'eusse été mille fois plus émue d'entendre Proust dérouler sa phrase interminable, même sur un vieux gramophone grésillant, que de saisir sa (supposée) silhouette au vol dans ce petit bout de film de 1904 récemment retrouvé où l'on voit un jeune He presses his melon hat and descends the scale of the Madeleine to the marriage of Elaine Greffulhe and Armand de Guiche. Laure Murat, Proust, family novel (Robert Laffont, 2023)
All the témoins s'accordent sur un fait: Proust speaks in his language, but there is a difference between the oral phrase and the écrite phrase. « Sa parole lente et continue. Extraordinaire abondance d'incidentes, mais sans que jamais le fil se perdît », note Jacques Rivière. A single sentence and a similar phrase, Paul Morand confirms, "très chantante, qui n'en finissait jamais, pleine d'incidentes, d'objections qu'on ne songeait pas à formuler mais qu'il formulait lui-même. Elle ressemblait à une route de montagne qu'on gravissait sans jamais arriver au summer. Beaucoup d'incidentes, qui soutenaient la phrase comme des specèces de balloonnets d'oxygène et qui l'empêchaient de retomber, pleine d'arguties, d'arborescences, all ça très fluide, très doux. “Très doux et en même temps très viril ». Car la voix de Proust, qui roule dans mon oreille de lectrice et de voyageuse à l'intérieur du temps, était « insinuante mais autoritaire ».
Worlds take a long time to die, and even longer to disappear completely. Rather, they coexist, overlap, and extend through time. They prolong and perpetuate themselves through the voices of witnesses, who pass the baton from narratives to conversations, from memories to fables, in a canonic chant that dissolves into endless echoes. Even as a teenager, I enjoyed being surrounded by older, sometimes very old, people whose way of speaking, whose expressions and intonations came from another time. It seemed to me that through them I could hear the past, for only in this way could I give it form and thus imagine it. My fetishistic search accepted inaccuracies. I remember how a friend of my father's, the film critic Jean Domarchi, imitated Baudelaire, or rather, repeated the imitation he had heard from someone who had known the poet… Baudelaire as a reincarnation on the doorstep of the living room! I look it up online: Jean Domarchi died in January 1981. I was at most thirteen years old when I heard him recite, but I swear I remember his somewhat convoluted, austere, almost restrained, corset-like diction as if it were yesterday, oozing from his nearly closed lips. Baudelaire's mouth in the Carjat photograph.
In this almost incomprehensible traverse of time, I feel, in several respects, as if I've fallen straight down and in a nosedive from the 19th century. Wasn't my father himself partly raised by his grandmother, who was born in 1867 under Napoleon III? Wasn't she a descendant of Marshal Ney, and didn't she cherish the memory of the old gardener at Trianon, a veteran of the Berezina, who twirled his cloak to show her how the Marshal wore it during the retreat from Russia? Didn't my maternal grandfather, born in 1905, meet the page of Charles X as a child, who was then an old man? These double somersaults in chronology overwhelm me. They remind me of the enigmatic path of the knight on the chessboard, whose possible movement is: one step to the side, two steps back. Sometimes a single life gathers them all, like that of my great-great-grandmother, the Duchess of Uzès (1847-1933), who was born under Louis-Philippe and died when Hitler came to power. And I am always amazed that Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), born eighteen months apart, were contemporaries in a timeframe spanning the beginnings of the Second Empire and the post-World War II era, or that George Sand's granddaughter, at the age of ninety-five in 1961, was able to recount on television the lunches at her grandmother's table, where she sat next to Flaubert.
From an early age, I could effortlessly travel back in time by constructing a vicarious memory that preserved recollections I hadn't personally experienced. Everything seemed within reach, as if playing Nine Men's Morris was enough to transport me to an improbable era, reached by simply stepping across a few squares. Essentially, thanks to my father and his upbringing, there was only a narrow crack between me and the society that existed in In search of lost time It describes a universe that was obviously far away, past, and yet so familiar.
Even today, I never tire of listening to Louis Gautier-Vignal, Paul Morand, or Jean Cocteau imitate Proust's melodious voice on radio or television—imitations whose accuracy only amplifies the effect of the truth. The numerous interviews with Céleste, whose voice was mistaken for that of her master on the telephone, provide further evidence of Proust's musical and slightly languid prosody. And it would have moved me a thousand times more to hear Proust himself reel off his endless sentence on an old, crackling gramophone than to catch his (supposed) silhouette in the recently discovered film clip from 1904, in which a hurried young man in a bowler hat is seen descending the stairs in the Madeleine after leaving the wedding of Elaine Greffulhe and Armand de Guiche.
All the witnesses agreed on one fact: Proust spoke as he did in his book; there was no difference between his spoken and written sentences. “His slow and continuous speech. An extraordinary abundance of asides, but without ever losing the thread,” observes Jacques Rivière. One and the same sentence, confirms Paul Morand, “very songlike, never ending, full of incidents, objections that one didn't intend to formulate, but which he himself formulated. It was like a mountain road that one climbs without ever reaching the summit. Many asides that supported the sentence like a kind of oxygen balloon and prevented it from falling again, full of arguments and trees, all very fluid, very smooth. Very smooth and at the same time very masculine.” For Proust's voice, which resonates in my ear as a reader and time traveler, was “indicative, but authoritative.” 1
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- "A novel that reflects on the emancipatory power of literature, which is also a power of solace and reconciliation with life. — Rentrée littéraire 2023 — Throughout my youth, I heard about the characters in In Search of Lost Time. and was convinced they were cousins I hadn't yet met. At home, Charlus's pronouncements and the Duchess of Guermantes's barbs mingled with the witty remarks overheard at the dinner table, without any continuity between fiction and reality. For the past world in which I grew up was still the world of Proust, who knew my great-grandparents, whose names appear in his novel. At about 20, I finally read In Search of Lost Time. And then my life changed. Proust knew better than I did what I was going through. He showed me how much the aristocracy is a universe of empty forms. Even before I had broken with my own family, he offered me a meditation on the inner exile experienced by those who are put off by social and sexual norms. Proust didn't just enlighten me about my origins. He made me a subject, an active reader of my own life, by revealing to me the emancipatory power of literature, which is also a power of solace and reconciliation with time.” (Translation of the publisher's announcement.)>>>
