Peering into writers’ rooms holds a peculiar fascination for it allows a glimpse of the writer’s interior world and of the creative process itself. In her The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped them, Diana Fuss offers an elegant and in-depth analysis of Proust’s bedroom at 102 boulevard Haussmann, the room that witnessed the writing of In Search of Lost time, the greatest novel of the 20th century.
Proust’s Bedroom as Shelter
Tortured by bronchial asthma and severe allergies since childhood, Proust created a space that sheltered him from dust, smells, noises and drafts. All of the room’s apertures are shielded: the two large sets of double doors are permanently shut or heavily curtained; a five-paneled Chinese screen stands behind the head of his bed; the single door that leads to his dressing room is strictly regulated; the two windows shuttered and curtained.
Proust’s bedroom most famous feature is the cork sheeting that covers the walls. To create the ultimate shelter, the ultimate defensive barrier against the dust and noise of the outside world, Proust cork-lined all four walls and the 6ft-high ceiling – “in effect dematerializing boundaries and creating a special void”. In fact, “only by closing himself off partially could Proust fully occupy the expanding world of his novel”.
Proust’s Bedroom as Memory
The importance of material objects to Proust as personal vehicles of memory and antidotes to lost time is demonstrated in his room. It is cluttered with bulky furniture: his mother's grand piano occupies a central place and is the most obtrusive object in the room; his father’s velvet armchair is facing his bed; his mother’s worktable in front of Adrien Proust’s two revolving bookcases are both partially blocking one of the double doors.
Other (in Proust’s own admission) “unattractive” family furniture include a never-opened mirrored wardrobe, an enormous rosewood chest with a marble top and a tall mirror above, a Chinese cabinet, a free standing clock and Proust’s uncle’s huge oak desk which is never used save for stockpiling books. The walls are bare; the mirrors reflect the interior. The objects are homage to his parents and “bear faithful testimony to the presence of the past."
Proust’s Bedroom as Study
Proust’s writing place is his bed, a brass bed placed strategically at the corner of the bedroom to enable the novelist to monitor all of the room’s entrances and apertures. Guarded against drafts by curtains and woolly jumpers and warmed by hot water bottles, Proust writes incessantly bolstered by pillows and using his knees as a desk.
All necessary implements are here placed on the three small tables around his bed: his books, handkerchiefs and hot water bottles lie on the carved bamboo table; his notebooks, pens, inkwells and bedside lamp on the rosewood table; his indispensable coffee for the day and the bottle of Evian for the night rest on the walnut table.
Sound and light are barred from Proust's bedroom at 102 boulevard Haussmann where In Search of Lost Time is being written. The heavy velvet curtains create a semi-dark interior further darkened by the brown woods of the furniture and the cork sheets that have turned black. At some point Proust stopped playing the piano, silenced the telephone by removing it and dispensed of the theatre-phone on which he used to listen to live opera in the past.
As he was striving to give voice to an interior life in the Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust saw light and sound as “an assault upon a defenseless interior”. As Diana Fuss points out “he saw deafness as the very precondition of writing” and believed like Descartes that “the only way to achieve thought is to numb sensation”.
Related Articles
On Proust's relation to food, see Marcel Proust and Food: Eating In Search of Lost Time; On writers' rooms, see the historic house of Charles Dickens and the historic interiors where Leo Tolstoy lived and worked.
Sources
Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior. Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped them, Routledge: New York and London, 2004.
Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust (as told to Georges Belmont), trans. Barbara Bray, William Collins Sons & Co, London and Glasgow, 1976.
O.P. Sharma, “Marcel Proust (1871-1922): reassessment of his asthma and other maladies”, European Respiratory Journal, no. 15 (2000), pp. 958-960.
Photo reproduced with permission.
Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
