PROUST, Marcel (1871-1922)

PROUST, Marcel (1871-1922)

Autograph letter signed « Marcel Proust » to Fernand Gregh
N.p.n.d. [shortly before 24 Dec. 1904], 1 p. 1/2 small in-8° on mourning stationary
Watermarked laid paper
Usual fold mark

Proust, or the Art of Declining an Invitation – That New Year’s Eve to which “our imagination still lends, after all, a legendary charm”

« Mon cher Fernand, veux-tu faire accepter à madame Gregh mes respectueux remerciements pour l’invitation du réveillon. J’ai bien peur qu’il ne me soit pas possible d’y aller. Pourtant j’aurais été content de passer une soirée avec toi, surtout celle-là à laquelle notre imagination conserve malgré tout un charme légendaire. Si je pouvais venir te serrer la main vers onze heures, je n’y manquerais pas.
Tout à toi,
Marcel Proust »

Proust had been invited to Dammarie-les-Lys to spend New Year’s Eve, where Fernand Gregh’s in-laws had rented a Louis XVI house. Too ill, he had to decline in an epistle—brief, yet instantly recognizable by its style.
In his letter of December 20 to Madame Straus, however, Proust wrote: “I may one day go to the countryside for Christmas.”

Fernand Gregh (1873–1960) met Marcel Proust in January 1892, among the students of the Lycée Condorcet who ran the literary review Le Banquet. He soon became the director of this periodical, while Proust published there some of his first important literary and theoretical texts. Together with two other Lycée students and fellow members of Le Banquet, Louis de La Salle and Daniel Halévy, Proust and Gregh embarked in 1893 on the writing of a four-handed novel. This collaborative text, conceived in the model of La Croix de Berny (written by Gautier and three other authors), was never completed, but Proust was its main contributor and already introduced themes that would later resurface in In Search of Lost Time. Fernand Gregh then devoted himself almost exclusively to poetry, winning a prize from the French Academy in 1896. He played a certain role in literary life through his position as managing editor of the Revue de Paris (1894–1897) and as editor of Les Lettres (until 1909). His friendship with Proust, however, was marked by intermittent strains, notably due to aesthetic disagreements. Moreover, like many “established” writers, Gregh initially regarded Proust with a touch of condescension, while Proust in turn mocked the somewhat “charming” ridiculousness of his friend’s character. Fernand Gregh entered the French Academy in 1953 and left behind significant literary recollections, including a volume entitled My Friendship with Marcel Proust (1958), in which he published the letters he had received from the author of In Search of Lost Time.