PROUST Marcel (1871-1922)

Lot 182
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PROUST Marcel (1871-1922)
L.A.S. "Marcel Proust", Wednesday evening [May 8 ? 1905, to Gabriel MOUREY]; 4 pages in-8 (mourning; some slight cracks in the folds). On his translation of Ruskin's Treasures of the Kings, and his love of flowers thwarted by asthma. [The letter refers to the proofs of the last part of his translation of John RUSKIN's Treasures of the Kings published on May 15, 1905 in the magazine Les Arts de la Vie, edited by Gabriel Mourey]. Proust thanks Mourey "in the midst of all your occupations for having taken the trouble and found the time to return this manuscript to me. I immediately corrected the proofs, which were absurd because of the fault not of your protests but of my typist", and he sent them back to Mr. Davoust. "I did not confuse your handwriting with my own (unfortunately for me there is no confusion possible!) you restored a paragraph number that I had forgotten. So you correct this on the English text! That's wonderful! This way of conducting our poor little instruments, with an open book, on the orchestral score, amazes me". He recommends not to correct chanter: "It's not a mistake, I put "chanter" once and "château" the other time. There is "cantel" and "castel" in the text and I have thus preserved, even reinforced, the alliteration. I know that chantau is not very popular, but neither is cantel. It's the same word and the same derivation". Finally, he evokes Mourey's "Verger" (Orchard) "that undoubtedly the spring dews and Japanese of these flowers that I loved so much and that I can no longer approach since they give me terrible asthma attacks, punishment for having loved them too much, which in my case takes on something even more mythological than pathological, and from which I would easily extract, it seems to me, the legend of a Nemesis hidden in the starry heart of the apple trees, who forbids to overstep the normal limit of admiration and desire towards them and stops in front of their flowers the indiscreet lover
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