Part I: Quest for the Lost Proust
The Bain du Ballon d'Alsace was situated in the narrower and quieter part of the Rue Saint-Lazare, at the far end of a courtyard that one reached by going through the archway of the main building's entrance on the sidewalk. In the yard, potted plants gave the entrance to the bath-house the appearance of an old-fashioned private home or of a Roman pensione where the heroine of a Henry James novel might have stayed on her grand tour of Europe. On the ground floor of the baths and near this entrance, Albert generally sat at a kind of counter, serving customers as soon as they came, acting as cashier and guarding their valuables in a safe-deposit box.
Customers who were not yet personally known to Albert or recommended to him by regular patrons were generally led by one of the attendant masseurs to a small bathroom on the ground floor. Often, such customers wanted only a bath, with or without a regular massage. Like Madame Sesostris, the "famous clairvoyante" in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Albert knew that "one must be so careful these days”: only to patrons already known to him did be grant the privilege of choosing their masseur from a group of idle attendants who generally waited, draped only in towels, in a small room where they read the sports-news or played cards and argued rather listlessly. For such patrons who knew "the custom of the country,” larger rooms upstairs were furnished with double beds and offered more privacy.
When I was introduced to him by letter by Léon Pierre-Quint, Albert was already growing bald, with greying hair on the sides. He was tall, blue-eyed with what is known as "watery” eyes, and rather stout. His manner was extremely ceremonious, like that of a liveried footman announcing distinguished guests by the door to a very formal reception. As he spoke, he chose and pronounced his words very carefully. At times, his manner and his unctuous voice suggested that he might be an unfrocked priest.
But Albert' s two establishments, the hotel that he had previously managed and the Bain du Ballon d'Alsace, were not the only real-life models for the "Temple of Immodesty” described in Time recaptured. Though Proust relied mainly on Albert as courrier [sic] and procurer, he appears to have also visited another Paris establishment of much the same nature, the Hotel du Saumon situated in the Passage du Saumon, one of the more abandoned and dilapidated covered arcades of Nineteenth-century Paris that, somewhere between the Rue Réaumur and the former area of the Halles, still seem to be haunted by the ghosts of the gaslit “Ville-lumière" of yore…
Customers who were not yet personally known to Albert or recommended to him by regular patrons were generally led by one of the attendant masseurs to a small bathroom on the ground floor. Often, such customers wanted only a bath, with or without a regular massage. Like Madame Sesostris, the "famous clairvoyante" in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Albert knew that "one must be so careful these days”: only to patrons already known to him did be grant the privilege of choosing their masseur from a group of idle attendants who generally waited, draped only in towels, in a small room where they read the sports-news or played cards and argued rather listlessly. For such patrons who knew "the custom of the country,” larger rooms upstairs were furnished with double beds and offered more privacy.
When I was introduced to him by letter by Léon Pierre-Quint, Albert was already growing bald, with greying hair on the sides. He was tall, blue-eyed with what is known as "watery” eyes, and rather stout. His manner was extremely ceremonious, like that of a liveried footman announcing distinguished guests by the door to a very formal reception. As he spoke, he chose and pronounced his words very carefully. At times, his manner and his unctuous voice suggested that he might be an unfrocked priest.
But Albert' s two establishments, the hotel that he had previously managed and the Bain du Ballon d'Alsace, were not the only real-life models for the "Temple of Immodesty” described in Time recaptured. Though Proust relied mainly on Albert as courrier [sic] and procurer, he appears to have also visited another Paris establishment of much the same nature, the Hotel du Saumon situated in the Passage du Saumon, one of the more abandoned and dilapidated covered arcades of Nineteenth-century Paris that, somewhere between the Rue Réaumur and the former area of the Halles, still seem to be haunted by the ghosts of the gaslit “Ville-lumière" of yore…
When I first visited the Hotel du Saumon with the Earl of Tredegar, it was run by a Tunisian Arab named Saïd, who must then have been in his late thirties. I went there several times in 1935 and 1936, hoping in vain to obtain from Saïd, who was friendly in every other respect, some information about Proust. Though Said allowed me willingly to explore the whole of his hotel, so that I was able to identify several minor details described by Proust in the "Temple of Immodesty" Saïd was much more reticent than Albert about the identity of his patrons. Like Jupien, Albert could never refrain from boasting about his high-born patrons, taking you into his confidence and revealing to you some detail of their genealogy or of their less clandestine life, together with highly spiced anecdotes about their secret vices.
Saïd always behaved as if he knew nothing about anyone who had ever frequented his hotel. No matter how often you came, he would always greet you, in the presence of a third party, as if you were a stranger, even if you happened to greet him by name. I once showed him a photograph of Proust, hoping that he might admit having known him. His only comment was: "So man: people come here, how can I remember them all?" Only once did I hear Saïd break this rule of tactful ignorance. I had last seen him in 1936 and, ten years later, happened to be in his neighborhood of Paris, on leave from Germany and wearing an American uniform. Out of sheer curiosity, as I had time to spare, I went to see if the Hotel du Saumon had survived the War and the German occupation. Saïd was still there, very much aged, in his tiny and crowded street-level office, on the immediate right as you entered the hotel from the covered arcade. He recognized me at once, smiled and exclaimed: "Well, you took your time before coming to liberate us!" He then called one of the boys and sent him out to buy a bottle of champagne, which we all three drank together. After that, we were real friends, and I made a point of visiting him every once in a while.
In the late afternoon or the evening, Saïd often went on expeditions to the cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse, later too to those of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He also made a habit of covering considerable distances on foot in the more populous working-class districts of Paris and its industrial suburbs, where he forayed to recruit boys and renew his stock-in-trade. If he then met one of his patrons, he never greeted him unless he himself had first been greeted. Though less reticent, Albert was, on the other hand, at all times more concerned with preserving his own dignity, whereas Saïd could be, among friends, a real comedian, with a fine sense of "camp." On one occasion, I found him celebrating Spring, after a particularly cold Paris winter, by wearing, like a young shepherd in his native Tunisia, a sprig of jasmine tucked coquettishly over his ear and under the Basque beret that he always wore to conceal his baldness. I made some remark about the flower and Saïd, with an arch smile and an air of affected modesty, replied: "Un rien me pare….a mere nothing can doll me up." He had a very fine sense of idiom and brevity in French and only a very slight Arab accent if he was angry with one of his boys. He was less obsequious than Albert.
He had never been, like Albert, a flunkey in aristocratic homes. I tried to make Saïd speak about his own past, but without much success, except when he spoke nostalgically of his own pastoral boyhood in Tunisia. I was able to gather, however, that had run away from home, after some adolescent escapade, and enlisted in Tunisia in a French colonial regiment. After becoming an officer's orderly and fighting too in France in World War I, he was demobilized in France and settled there as a civilian somewhere in the provinces. Obviously, he had lived for many years on very intimate terms with one of the French officers whose orderly he bad been, and from whom he seemed to have acquired his somewhat aristocratic sense of the niceties of the French language, as well as distinctly elegant, though provincial and old-fashioned, tastes in interior decoration. His hotel’s best room was like a guest bedroom in a modest French chateau. The double bed was entirely upholstered with toile de Jouy of an eighteenth-century pattern, block-printed in red on white linen cloth and representing two almost identical allegorical scenes that were fantastically appropriate to the purposes this room generally served: in a classical landscape adorned with trees and a few ancient columns of a ruined temple, a boat ferried two passengers across a stream. In alternate scenes, a winged Eros ferried a bearded Chronos or a bearded Chronos ferried a winged Eros. Beneath each of these scenes, a printed dictum reminiscent of the one that Chaucer's Prioress wore on her broach, elucidated this very Ovidian allegory: "L'Amour fait passer le Temps" and "Le Temps fait passer l'Amour”.
The curtains of the room were of the same toile de Jouy. Above a Directoire black-marble mantlepiece, a mirror set in an antique guilded [sic] frame stood behind a Second-Empire ormolu clock and its matching pair of vases filled with faded artificial flowers, and all three pieces were mounted on marble bases and protected beneath dusty glass globes. The washstand was old-fashioned, without running water. It was built of massive mahogany, with a white marble top, on which stood a basin, a big pitcher of cold water and a set of soap-dishes and other accessories that all matched. Beneath the wash-stand, a portable bidet and a slop-bucket to match the basin and pitcher were modestly concealed behind a small curtain that matched the bed and the window-curtains.
It one wanted hot water, one rang a bell. and one of the boys brought it in a big pitcher. Saïd admitted to me in 1946 that his business was not very active. Too many of his old patrons had died in the Resistance or in concentration-camps or were still in the armed forces or in prison as former Collaborationists. Many of his older boys too had disappeared. "That fool Vincent," a former Foreign Legionary whom I had known there before the War and who, half Arab and half Sicilian from the Soukh Al-Granah quarter of' Tunis, had abandoned Saïd in 1937 to become "Mon legionnaire" in La Môme Piaf’s song and her love-life, went and joined the Fascist Militia under the German Occupation, Saïd told me, and was lynched by the Resistance boys at the time of the Liberation. Saïd indeed seemed to be so depressed and so glad to see me again that I moved into his hotel the next day for the rest of my leave.
Few other modestly priced Paris hotels, in a cold winter so soon after the War, could offer any heating: here I had every evening a wood-fire, which Saïd supplied at a reasonable price with logs from the black market. For breakfast too, I was brought real black-market coffee, no wartime substitute of roasted barley-seeds. I have rarely known in Paris a quieter hotel-room. I was able to correct there in peace the German translation of my book on Oscar Wilde.
I continued for several years to visit Saïd fairly regularly, until I happened to remain absent from Paris for two years. On my return, I delayed coming to see him until I chanced to be again in that section of Paris, where I rarely had other reasons to go. When I then called at the Hotel du Saumon, I was told that Saïd had retired from his business and gone to live elsewhere near the Etoile, but had recently died there. The new proprietor of the Hotel. looked at me with suspicion, behaving as if he were anxious to steer me away as tactfully and as soon as possible: his hotel now appeared to have really become as respectable as it had seemed to be when I briefly lived there in 1946.
Saïd always behaved as if he knew nothing about anyone who had ever frequented his hotel. No matter how often you came, he would always greet you, in the presence of a third party, as if you were a stranger, even if you happened to greet him by name. I once showed him a photograph of Proust, hoping that he might admit having known him. His only comment was: "So man: people come here, how can I remember them all?" Only once did I hear Saïd break this rule of tactful ignorance. I had last seen him in 1936 and, ten years later, happened to be in his neighborhood of Paris, on leave from Germany and wearing an American uniform. Out of sheer curiosity, as I had time to spare, I went to see if the Hotel du Saumon had survived the War and the German occupation. Saïd was still there, very much aged, in his tiny and crowded street-level office, on the immediate right as you entered the hotel from the covered arcade. He recognized me at once, smiled and exclaimed: "Well, you took your time before coming to liberate us!" He then called one of the boys and sent him out to buy a bottle of champagne, which we all three drank together. After that, we were real friends, and I made a point of visiting him every once in a while.
In the late afternoon or the evening, Saïd often went on expeditions to the cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse, later too to those of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He also made a habit of covering considerable distances on foot in the more populous working-class districts of Paris and its industrial suburbs, where he forayed to recruit boys and renew his stock-in-trade. If he then met one of his patrons, he never greeted him unless he himself had first been greeted. Though less reticent, Albert was, on the other hand, at all times more concerned with preserving his own dignity, whereas Saïd could be, among friends, a real comedian, with a fine sense of "camp." On one occasion, I found him celebrating Spring, after a particularly cold Paris winter, by wearing, like a young shepherd in his native Tunisia, a sprig of jasmine tucked coquettishly over his ear and under the Basque beret that he always wore to conceal his baldness. I made some remark about the flower and Saïd, with an arch smile and an air of affected modesty, replied: "Un rien me pare….a mere nothing can doll me up." He had a very fine sense of idiom and brevity in French and only a very slight Arab accent if he was angry with one of his boys. He was less obsequious than Albert.
He had never been, like Albert, a flunkey in aristocratic homes. I tried to make Saïd speak about his own past, but without much success, except when he spoke nostalgically of his own pastoral boyhood in Tunisia. I was able to gather, however, that had run away from home, after some adolescent escapade, and enlisted in Tunisia in a French colonial regiment. After becoming an officer's orderly and fighting too in France in World War I, he was demobilized in France and settled there as a civilian somewhere in the provinces. Obviously, he had lived for many years on very intimate terms with one of the French officers whose orderly he bad been, and from whom he seemed to have acquired his somewhat aristocratic sense of the niceties of the French language, as well as distinctly elegant, though provincial and old-fashioned, tastes in interior decoration. His hotel’s best room was like a guest bedroom in a modest French chateau. The double bed was entirely upholstered with toile de Jouy of an eighteenth-century pattern, block-printed in red on white linen cloth and representing two almost identical allegorical scenes that were fantastically appropriate to the purposes this room generally served: in a classical landscape adorned with trees and a few ancient columns of a ruined temple, a boat ferried two passengers across a stream. In alternate scenes, a winged Eros ferried a bearded Chronos or a bearded Chronos ferried a winged Eros. Beneath each of these scenes, a printed dictum reminiscent of the one that Chaucer's Prioress wore on her broach, elucidated this very Ovidian allegory: "L'Amour fait passer le Temps" and "Le Temps fait passer l'Amour”.
The curtains of the room were of the same toile de Jouy. Above a Directoire black-marble mantlepiece, a mirror set in an antique guilded [sic] frame stood behind a Second-Empire ormolu clock and its matching pair of vases filled with faded artificial flowers, and all three pieces were mounted on marble bases and protected beneath dusty glass globes. The washstand was old-fashioned, without running water. It was built of massive mahogany, with a white marble top, on which stood a basin, a big pitcher of cold water and a set of soap-dishes and other accessories that all matched. Beneath the wash-stand, a portable bidet and a slop-bucket to match the basin and pitcher were modestly concealed behind a small curtain that matched the bed and the window-curtains.
It one wanted hot water, one rang a bell. and one of the boys brought it in a big pitcher. Saïd admitted to me in 1946 that his business was not very active. Too many of his old patrons had died in the Resistance or in concentration-camps or were still in the armed forces or in prison as former Collaborationists. Many of his older boys too had disappeared. "That fool Vincent," a former Foreign Legionary whom I had known there before the War and who, half Arab and half Sicilian from the Soukh Al-Granah quarter of' Tunis, had abandoned Saïd in 1937 to become "Mon legionnaire" in La Môme Piaf’s song and her love-life, went and joined the Fascist Militia under the German Occupation, Saïd told me, and was lynched by the Resistance boys at the time of the Liberation. Saïd indeed seemed to be so depressed and so glad to see me again that I moved into his hotel the next day for the rest of my leave.
Few other modestly priced Paris hotels, in a cold winter so soon after the War, could offer any heating: here I had every evening a wood-fire, which Saïd supplied at a reasonable price with logs from the black market. For breakfast too, I was brought real black-market coffee, no wartime substitute of roasted barley-seeds. I have rarely known in Paris a quieter hotel-room. I was able to correct there in peace the German translation of my book on Oscar Wilde.
I continued for several years to visit Saïd fairly regularly, until I happened to remain absent from Paris for two years. On my return, I delayed coming to see him until I chanced to be again in that section of Paris, where I rarely had other reasons to go. When I then called at the Hotel du Saumon, I was told that Saïd had retired from his business and gone to live elsewhere near the Etoile, but had recently died there. The new proprietor of the Hotel. looked at me with suspicion, behaving as if he were anxious to steer me away as tactfully and as soon as possible: his hotel now appeared to have really become as respectable as it had seemed to be when I briefly lived there in 1946.