Madame Proust: A Biography (review)

Proust has become a larger-than-life icon. His readers, like those of Joyce, can hardly learn enough about him. George Painter, Jean-Yves Tadié, William C. Carter, and their numerous predecessors have demonstrated adequately that there is a creative mismatch between Marcel Proust's actual experiences and those of "Marcel" of In Search for Lost Time. Yet the fascination grows. Bloch-Dano's 2004 biography of Proust's mother bears out what many Proustians had long suspected: Proust's parents found in each other the perfect trophy. Adrien Proust (1834–1903), who rose through his leadership in public health, had roots too humble for a Catholic heiress; he needed a beautiful, wealthy, cultivated wife for a truly brilliant career. Jeanne Weil (1849–1905) could not have achieved such protective security in the Jewish upper middle class, and she had resisted arranged marriages still typical in it.

(It must be particularly gratifying for Kate Taylor, Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, 2002, to find that the verifiable facts fit her speculations so well.)

Religion was not an issue for either of them personally. Neither Adrien nor Jeanne believed in God. Only her family attended the wedding ceremony. Their marriage on September 3, 1870, was the day of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and Jeanne became pregnant a month after her marriage. The harsh conditions in Paris after the armistice and during the Commune are considered to have played a nefarious role in the gestation of the novelist.

The Dreyfus Case, a major mobile for the novel In Search for Lost Time, played out in a muted fashion in the Proust household. (Adrien's relatives at Illiers-Combray were another matter.) Dr. Proust sided with Felix Faure, who upheld the army and the government; Madame Proust and her two sons, properly baptized and confirmed as Roman Catholics, sided with Dreyfus. When identified as Jews, Robert and Marcel thought it poor form to deny it. They were quite familiar with Jewish practices.

What emerges quite clearly, however, is the shared principles by which Adrien and Jeanne Proust reared their two sons, even though the brunt of the rearing was left to Jeanne. They were quite cognizant of their sons' health, their studies, and their leisure preoccupations. Robert's behavior in sowing wild oats was considered "normal." As for Marcel, Adrien and Jeanne were concerned and open not only about his nervousness, tantrums, and asthma but about his masturbation and homosexual inclinations. In the end they accepted him as he was, but the erratic and childish behavior they tolerated within the household was egregious, and the bonding of Proust and his mother appears to have been more troublesome in life than in the novel.

What besides mutual respect held Adrien and Jeanne together as a couple? Bloch-Dano believes it was their shared conception of marriage as an institution. Was Jeanne really too ill to attend Robert's wedding to a daughter of Adrien's mistress? Marcel the novelist would have readers believe that his father became more tender and solicitous as the marriage continued, but on the November following Robert's wedding, Adrien had a cerebral hemorrhage while chairing a dissertation defense. Jeanne had only a brief period of extremely wealthy widowhood with her eccentric son before dying herself.

Bloch-Dano begins and ends with a biblical note. In Jeanne's parents' apartment there was a painting of Esther preparing to marry Ahasuerus. Her attention had been riveted when she heard Adrien, describing his travels for epidemiology, mention Tehran. She had thought of herself in the beginning as going to marry "the foreigner they had chosen for her" (p. 43). Her sons gave her a Jewish burial. Bloch-Dano's final sentence returns to the setting: "Esther had gone to meet her Ahasuerus" (p. 240).

Kaplan's sensitive translation includes an exemplary translator's note.