細節
PROUST, Marcel. Autograph letter signed to Lucien Daudet, n.p. [Paris], n.d. [11 May 1918], writing on the death of Joachim Clary, 'Je pense à toi dans un sentiment de prière et d'indicible communion, en ce jour si triste', and of the difficulty of accepting that the life of a friend is over; he returns each night not only to the deaths of Fénelon and of Emmanuel Bibesco, but to those of long ago; and the sorrow of those who truly miss them sometimes makes him grieve for the deaths of people he has not known; sending also his sympathy to Frédéric de Madrazo and recalling his last visit to Clary and the untruth he was forced to tell him, 'si je ne lui avais pas fourni l'explication favorable que je lui avais promise, mon silence lui aurait ôté ses dernières illusions, 3½ pages, 8vo.
'Ce n'est pas seulement les morts de ces années-ci, les morts de Fénelon, d'Emmanuel Bibesco, que chaque nuit je tourne et retourne douloureusement en moi, mais de biens plus anciennes. Et la douleur de ceux qui regrettent vraiment arrive quelquefois à me faire me désoler aussi de la mort d'êtres que je n'ai pas connus'.
The letter was written on the day of the burial of Count Joachim Clary, son of the Prince Imperial's aide-de-camp and Lucien Daudet's close friend. Like Daudet, he had been a cavaliere servente to the Empress Eugénie, and had lived at Farnborough Hill. For some years now half-blind, he lived in the Rue Galilée, cared for by a Japanese servant, to whom Proust had given a copy of Du Côté de chez Swann. After much prompting from Daudet, he had visited Clary and being unable to answer him truthfully about his (i.e. Clary's) health, had as described in the letter told an untruth.
The letter was published by Lucien Daudet as the 60th and last in the sequence of letters by Marcel Proust in Autour de Soixante Lettres, and he used a facsimile of the letter as a frontispiece to the book. Kolb however, in dating the letters, places two others in chronological sequence after this one. Kolb, XVII, 241; Cahiers, V (LX).
'Ce n'est pas seulement les morts de ces années-ci, les morts de Fénelon, d'Emmanuel Bibesco, que chaque nuit je tourne et retourne douloureusement en moi, mais de biens plus anciennes. Et la douleur de ceux qui regrettent vraiment arrive quelquefois à me faire me désoler aussi de la mort d'êtres que je n'ai pas connus'.
The letter was written on the day of the burial of Count Joachim Clary, son of the Prince Imperial's aide-de-camp and Lucien Daudet's close friend. Like Daudet, he had been a cavaliere servente to the Empress Eugénie, and had lived at Farnborough Hill. For some years now half-blind, he lived in the Rue Galilée, cared for by a Japanese servant, to whom Proust had given a copy of Du Côté de chez Swann. After much prompting from Daudet, he had visited Clary and being unable to answer him truthfully about his (i.e. Clary's) health, had as described in the letter told an untruth.
The letter was published by Lucien Daudet as the 60th and last in the sequence of letters by Marcel Proust in Autour de Soixante Lettres, and he used a facsimile of the letter as a frontispiece to the book. Kolb however, in dating the letters, places two others in chronological sequence after this one. Kolb, XVII, 241; Cahiers, V (LX).