Proust and America

Front matter

uA Aà

! Le ; Petit Journal

MICHAEL MURPHY

Contents

List of Plates Acknowledgments Notes on References and Abbreviations Introduction: The Spirit of Liberty 1 Le Côté de Nev’ York, or Marcel in America 2 The Impossible Possible Philosophers’ Man 3 A Bout de Souffle 4 Exquisite Corpses/Buried Texts 5 Proust’s Butterfly

Bibliography Index vii

242 250

CHAPTER I Le Côté de Nev York, or Marcel in America

Jentends déja le son aigre de cette voix 4 venir Du camarade qui se proménera avec toi en Europe Tout en restant en Amérique [Already I hear that shrill sound of the future voice Of the friend who will walk with you in Europe While he remains in America|

—Apollinaire, “Arbre”

With the exception of Elstir, Proust’s fictional painter, none of Proust’s characters is an Amerophile as Odette and others are Anglophiles. Yet there are no British characters in À /a recherche. The nearest we get is the Prince of Wales, who appears “off-stage” as a friend of Swann. When it comes to Proust’s depiction of Anglomanie, therefore, the term remains strangely disembodied. ‘This omission is all the more notable given Proust’s obvious sympathies with, and interest in, England and Englishness: he was a noted translator of Ruskin; he maintained close friendships with English-speakers, such as Willie Heath (to whom he dedicated Les Plaisirs et les jours), Marie Nordlinger (with whom, alongside his English-speaking mother, he collaborated on his translations of Ruskin), and Sydney Schiff (who was to translate into English Le Temps retrouvé). Conversely (we might say perversely) there are a number of walk-on parts for American characters in the novel. ‘They are all anonymous and in each case female: the American lady with her daughters staying at Balbec (743; I:528); the American girl with her chaperone going down for dinner (1333; [V:165); and the American woman who mistakes Marcel’s hotel room for her own, interrupting him while he is trying to persuade “le lift” to act as a go-between for him with Albertine (1354; IV:194).

In one sense what Proust is referring to with such “characters” is the stereotype of the American woman who visited Europe only in order to stay at luxurious hotels, go shopping, or as Paul Morand recollected “[queue] to have their bust sculpted [by Rodin] at a cost of forty thousand gold francs” (2002, 26). The life of energetic indolence and shallow indulgence is exemplified by Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton’s The Customs of the Country (1913), her satire on Americans in Paris:

Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the afternoon motorrush to some leafy suburb, where tea and music and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine; the whirl home through the Bois to dress for dinner and start again on the round of evening diversions; the dinner at the Nouveaux Luxe or the Café de Paris, and the little play at the Capucines or the Variétés, followed, because the night was “too lovely,” and it was a shame to waste it, by a breathless flight back to the Bois, with supper in one of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous progress through the midnight haunts where “ladies” were not supposed to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being occasionally taken for their opposites. (2000, 177)

Hermione Lee draws our attention to the “commercial imperialism” of this “self-engrossed American tribe exploiting, but not participating in” Parisian culture (2007, 264). An echo of this can be found in 4 /a recherche when, in addition to the characters mentioned above, American women appear by reputation or hearsay as representatives of the “dollar princess.” Particularly in the sections written after the outbreak of war in 1914, such women become a focus for the changing contours of French society: the rich American lady who because of her marriage to a Frenchman is able to greet Mme de Guermantes on familial terms (1156; III:535); the American-Jewish women “serrant sur leurs sein décatis le collier de perles qui leur permettra d’épouser un duc décave” [clutching to their withered bosoms the pearl necklaces that would enable them to marry a penniless duke] (2180; VI:67); an American lady who has taken ownership of the old hotel belonging to the Prince de Guermantes (2255; VI:166); and “la derniére des Américaines” [the latest American hostess] who, by casually greeting Charlus, signals the depths of his humiliation at the hands of the rapacious Verdurins (2257; VI:2257). These are women who, in Wharton's words, “created about them a kind of phantom America” (1970, 182).

While Wharton’s characters are not wholly insulated against being changed by their encounters with France, as Lee says she “hardly ever shifts the vantage-point to look at how the French characters have their lives altered by the influx of Americans” (2007, 265). Such a vantage, however obliquely, is provided by Proust. One example is the incident in Sodome et Gomorrhe when an American woman steps by mistake into Marcel’s hotel room. Why does Proust have this take place, and why exactly is it an American woman who interrupts Marcel in his negotiations with “le lift”? The woman’s appearance — brief as it is — leaves Marcel flustered and confused. ‘The effect is comic, yet it is a moment strikingly similar to an incident described by Georges Duhamel in his provocative prose memoir of a visit to the United States, Scenes de la Vie Future (1930). Nearing the end of his trip, Duhamel is staying in a hotel. He is relieved to have escaped the all-pervading noise and crush of American urban life:

... Solitude, solitude!

Then suddenly the door, which by chance I had forgotten to lock, came open. A lady appeared in it — shingle, short skirt, rouge, powder, pearls and diamonds.

She contemplated with interest the person thus surprised in his privacy, and observed with the completest calm, “My mistake. Beg pardon.”

Would I not be thoroughly justified, I thought, in dragging that lady into court and demanding heavy damages? Oh if only I had witnesses! (1931, 177-178)

Duhamel’s response to the “invasion” seems excessive to say the least. Published almost a decade after Sodom et Gomorrhe, however, it alerts us to an aspect of the corresponding scene in Æ la recherche which would otherwise pass us by: that Marcel, if only for a moment, finds himself in a Balbec where all the social protocols that assert his superiority no longer apply. The effect, as with the encounter with a revolving door discussed in my introduction, is that Marcel is made less secure, less assured of his place in the world. Modernity in the guise of an unaccompanied American woman stepping into his room challenges his sense of who and what he is. Whispered negotiations give way to his slamming the door with all his strength — the noise of which brings a further interruption in the form of a chasseur to make sure no windows have been left open.

Later in the novel Marcel has another “encounter” with an American woman. This time it takes the form of a letter addressed to someone who lives in the same building as Marcel. The letter is written “en style convenu et qui disait” [in a coded format] and Marcel, ever on the look out for evidence of Albertine’s duplicity, is convinced it is for her. He is mistaken: “La lettre n’était pas en signes convenus mais en mauvais français parce quelle était d’une Américaine ... Et la façon étrange dont cette Américaine formait certaines lettres avait donné l'aspect d’un surnom à un nom parfaitement réel mais étranger” [The letter was written not in a coded format but in poor French, because it had been written by an American lady ... And the strange way in which this American lady formed some of her letters had given the appearance of a nickname to a perfectly authentic but foreign surname] (1924; V:394).

That a letter from an American woman should cause such confusion was not untypical of exchanges between the sexes of the two nations. As Clair Hughes writes with regard to the often simplistic link made between consumer capitalism and female entrapment: “American women [were] not ... simply passive in their consumption or display of wealth. Their role was complex and, in European eyes, often extremely confusing.” Proust was obviously aware of such stereotypes, as he must also have been of the

1 Hughes 2001, 15. Ulrich Lehmann, meanwhile, argues that the feminine article in “la mode” meant that “women’s fashion — that is, the objectification of the female — would flourish within the establishment of an unqualified form of capitalist and patriarchal society, out to dominate the female sex. The emphasis is on equating /a mode within the ephemeral and the futile ... as the woman does not really dominate anything but the consumption of an artificial reality of luxuries and vagaries” (Lehmann 2000, 19). What is interesting here with regard to A la recherche is that it is Marcel who insists on purchasing such bonbons: “Les brimborions de la parure causaient 4 Albertine de grands plaisirs. Je ne savais pas me refuser de lui en faire chaque jour un nouveau” [The “little touches” of dress gave Albertine enormous pleasure, and I could not resist making her a small present of this kind every day] (1626; V:24). While there certainly are strong elements of patriarchal dominance at play here, the keen interest Marcel and Elstir show in /a mode complicate Lehmann’s rather too insistent gendering.

confusion alluded to by Hughes. Indeed there are times in 4 /a recherche when America is all but synonymous with mistaken identities and whatmight-have-been: Mme de Cambremer is made to change gender and nationality by virtue of sporting an “American” moustache (1377; [V:223); a well-turned-out footman is mistaken for “un Américain trés chic” [an ultra-smart American] (1499; IV:383); his receiving regular supplies of fruit from a young telegraphist and former “protégé” for whom he has secured “une place aux Colonies” [an opening in the colonies] leads Mme Verdurin to innocently conclude “Vous avez donc un oncle ou un neveu d’Amérique, M.de Charlus, pour recevoir des ananas pareils!” [“You must have an uncle in America, or a nephew, M.de Charlus, to get pineapples like these!”] (1851; V:304); while Odette tells Marcel of her affair with a young man with whom she agreed to travel to America, only at the last minute (and after a final night of passion) to give away her ticket to “un voyageur que je ne connaissais pas” [a traveler I didn’t know] (2380; VI:330).

Proust first introduced the motif of wealthy American heiresses who, like Daisy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, lured on their French lovers with “voices ... full of money” in Jean Santeuil. As in a number of Wharton’s novels, we find Proust touching on the experience of women who, like Undine Spragg, marry into the “brilliant,” “inaccesible,” “tantalizing” Faubourg and who “led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealey House”? As did Wharton, Proust uses the material for satirical purpose. In Jean Santeuil, then, we have “une Américaine ravissante, richissime, qui adorait le monde” [a ravishing and enormously rich American woman who adored Society] who marries the Marquis de Réveillon. From being a “simple cadet de sa maison” [a member of the younger branch of the family], the Marquis, bankrolled by his wife’s greenbacks, buys back the ancient family seat and begins throwing lavish parties. The effect of such an experiment in cultural amalgamation proves unsettling to the older, impoverished branch of the family:

Même quand il ny avait pas de fête à Soubise, le malheureux duc de Réveillon ne pouvait ouvrir Le Gaulois ou Le Figaro sans y lire

2 Wharton 2000, 179. With its “comparative gentility” and centrally heated rooms, Mealey House represents everything about the United States that Undine Spragg flees to Paris to escape.

que le nouveau cheval de son cousin venait de gagner aux courses, et la description, de la longueur d’un article, de la toilette que la marquise de Réveillon portait à telle comédie de château, à telle réunion hippique ...

Peu à peu les vrais Réveillon étaient devenus pour les fournisseurs ceux à qui ils vendaient tant de voitures, tant de chapeaux, tant de bijoux, pour le public ceux dont ils lisaient sans cesse le nom dans les journaux.

[Even when there was no party at Soubise, the unhappy Duke could not open the Gaulois or the Figaro without seeing that his cousins horse had won several races, or coming on a description — as long as an article — of what the Marquise de Réveillon had worn at the Horse Show, or when attending private theatricals at a neighboring Great House ...

Gradually the shopkeepers had come to regard as the “real Réveillons” those of the family to whom they sold such quantities of carriages, hats and jewels, while the general public seeing their names figure so prominently in the news made the same mistake.] (JS, 503; JS English, 413)

This passage anticipates the role of the dollar in the later volumes of 4 la recherche. One difference, though, is that while the rich American woman goes unnamed, her new-found circle of friends and relations is carefully delineated, allowing Proust to exercise his considerable comic skills:

Miss Footit, la pimpante Clara Timour, Tekita inconsolable du lachage de G., côté des femmes du monde, Mme Cuyper, la femme du richissime banquier és Israél [et] Mme Bering-Granval, la vaillante créatrice de Vers de hontel.]

[Miss Footit, the delicious Clara Timour, Tekita, who has never got over G~’s defection, Madame Guypper, wife of Israel, the enormously rich banker ... and Madame Bering-Granval, author of Vers de honte] (JS, 504; JS English, 414)

This delightful concoction blends fact, fiction, and literary allusions: “Miss

The English translation omits the irony of Proust describing Madame Bering- Granval as “la vaillante créatrice” [the worthy/first-rate author].

Footit” owes her name to the character played by the English Whiteface clown, George Footit; “Clara Timour” is a reference to the eponymous hero of Monk Lewis’s Gothic melodrama; “Tekita” (te kita) may refer to the Japanese verb “to become”; Sir Rufus Israel is based on Hugo Finlay, a wealthy banker and the father of one of Proust’s classmates; while Mme Bering-Granval’s Verses of Shame mark her out as a minor Decadent poet. Such names not only tell us something about the range of references at Proust’s command, and a great deal about his sense of humor, they also personify the world the Marquis de Réveillon’s American wife inhabits. It is a dynamic, cosmopolitan universe on a collision course with the old.

The passage also functions in ways analogous to what Rhonda K.Garrelik says about how the dandy blurs distinctions between the natural and the unnatural, the fictional and the everyday. “Dandyism,” Garrelik writes, “dismantles social distinctions by creating an aristocracy of the self that does not require nobility of birth. The dandy exists in a parallel hierarchy based on personal attributes rather than genealogy or property’ (2001, 35-36). The dandy would appear to be Americanization personified. And for many, as we will see in Chapter 5, he went by the name of James McNeill Whistler. Certainly Proust’s own “dandified” text displays an interest in the coming together not only of France and America, but fact and fiction when he has Yvette Guilbert, the real-life star of the Montmartre café-concert scene, speak on behalf of her fictional American friend:

“Ce que je pense de Mme de Réveillon, ami ? nous a dit la toute gracieuse divette. D’abord cest quelle est avant tout, passez-moi l'expression, bon zig, et pas duchesse pour deux sous.”

[“You ask for my views on Madame de Réveillon,” said the gracious luminary of our theatrical firmament, “well, the chief thing about her is that she’s — if you'll pardon the expression — a dam’ good pal. There’s nothing of the duchess about her.”] (JS, 504; JS English, 415)

The American duchess, or “Mme” as Guilbert pointedly and democratically refers to her, “speaks” in the colloquial voice of a performer who, in her own words, wanted to “assemble an exhibition of humorous sketches in song, depicting all the indecencies, all the excesses, all the vices of my contemporaries, and to enable them to laugh at themselves.” 4 It is to be wondered how the duchess’s planned rendition of Guilbert’s “Ah! laissez mois me tordre” would go down before those who assemble to hear her at Réveillon, “ce château gothique où vécut Louis XIV et est enterré saint Françoise de Sales” [the Gothic Château where Louis XIV lived and Saint Francis de Sales lies buried].

It is a shame Proust didn’t see fit to include a version of this material from Jean Santeuil in A la recherche. With its portrait of the cosmopolitan and bohemian world that gravitated around American money and influence, it would have offered a fascinating alternative to the insular worlds of the Verdurin and Guermantes circles. Proust didn’t, however, altogether do away with the idea that American influences were turning Parisian society into a kind of Gilbert and Sullivan-esque world of Topsy-Turvy. In Le Temps retrouvé there is a long section in which Proust describes how the seemingly fixed and determined roles of French aristocratic families intersect with those of the novel’s characters, creating a landscape in which age-old certainties are in the process of being reinscribed. And as in Jean Santeuil, his doing so allows him to draw attention to the art in artifice: “C'est tout un roman” [It’s just like a novel] (2336; VI:271).

The “author” of this nouveau roman is a young female acquaintance of Marcel’s old friend, Bloch. Unsure as to why Gilberte de Saint-Loup is on such friendly terms with “la plus brilliante sociéte,” she asks an American woman who, the Narrator informs us, “était mariée au comte de Farcy, parent obscur des Forcheville et pour lequel ils représentaient ce qu’il y a de plus grand au monde” [was married to the Comte de Farcy, an obscure relation of the Forchevilles, for whom they represented all that was grandest in the world] (2334; VI:269). The American’s ill-informed reply — “Quand ce ne serait que parce qu’elle est née Forcheville. C’est ce qu'il y a de plus grand.” [“Wouldn’t it be because she is a Forcheville by birth? There’s nothing grander than that.”] — betrays her ignorance of Gilberte’s family history, and further contributes to the ongoing process by which Swann is erased from the collective memory of Parisian society. Her words are taken as gospel by Bloch’s friend, who inadvertently passes the information on to a gentleman who “adopta l’erreur et ne tarda pas à la propager” [adopted the erroneous idea and lost no time in propagating it]. Thus the comedy of the corresponding scene in Jean Santeuil takes on a

4 www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2005/toulouse/guilbert.shtm (accessed Sept. 20, darker and more philosophical hue in À /a recherche. The bonhomie of the café-concert is replaced by an elegy for the effects of time and traduction:

Les diners, les fêtes mondaines, étaient pour l’Américaine une sorte d'école Berlitz. Elle entendait les noms et les répétait sans avoir connu préalablement leur valeur, leur portée exacte ...

Du reste, il faut bien dire que cette ignorance des situations réelles qui tous les dix ans fait surgir les élus dans leur apparence actuelle et comme si le passé n'existait pas, qui empêche pour une Américaine fraîchement débarquée, de voir que M.Charlus avait eu la plus grande situation de Paris à une époque où Bloch n’en avait aucune, et que Swann, qui faisait tant de frais pour M.Bontemps, avait été traité avec la plus grande amitié, cette ignorance n'existe pas seulement chez les nouveaux venus, mais chez ceux qui ont fréquenté toujours des sociétés voisines, et cette ignorance, chez ces derniers comme chez les autres, est aussi un effet ... du Temps.

[Dinner parties and fashionable gatherings were a sort of Berlitz school for the American woman. She heard the names and repeated them without having first understood their value, and their precise significance ...

Moreover, it must be said that this ignorance of the true situation which every ten years makes individuals suddenly emerge in their current guise, as if the past never existed, which prevents a newly disembarked American woman from seeing that M.de Charlus had held the highest social position in Paris at a time when Bloch had had none, and that Swann, who put himself to such trouble for M.Bontemps, had been treated with the greatest friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance does not exist only among the newcomers, but among those who have always frequented adjacent sections of society, and this ignorance, in the latter as in others, is also an effect ... of Time.] (2335, 2338; VI:269, 273)

For the first and only time in his writings, Proust has allowed one of his American characters to speak. The result is that the fabric of that novel, and of society, is rent. Does this make Proust anti-American?

2 In a note to his translation Ian Patterson writes: “Proust does not actually say ‘by the Prince of Wales’ ... but this is generally thought to be an omission” (VI:366 n. 104).

Certainly the question is not so easily answered as when we are talking, say, of the Baudelaire of Journal Intime (“we shall perish by that which we have believed to be our means of existence. So far will machinery have Americanized us”), or the Baudelaire whose defense of Poe took the form of an attack on all things American (“that rabble of buyers and sellers, that nameless thing, that headless monster, that convict deported beyond the sea”).5 If there is any antipathy to the United States in 4 da recherche, it is joined to Proust’s wider concerns with the “democratization” of the French language. This affects characters as widely divergent as Francoise, Albertine, “le lift” at Balbec, or, as here, M.de Guermantes:

que de temps en temps, comme font leur apparition et s'éloignent certaines maladies dont on n'entend plus parler ensuite, il naît on ne sait trop comment, soit spontanément, soit par un hasard comparable a celui qui fit germer en France une mauvaise herbe d’Amérique dont la graine prise aprés la peluche d’une couverture de voyage était tombée sur un talus de chemin de fer, des modes d’expressions qu’on entend dans la méme décade dites par des gens qui ne se sont pas concertés pour cela.

[from time to time, just as certain diseases appear, vanish and are never heard of again, there somehow arise (either spontaneously or by some accident like the one that brought into France that American weed the seeds of which, caught in the wool of a travelling rug, fell on a railway embankment) modes of expression which one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have in no way concerted their efforts to use them.] (926; III:233)

Elsewhere, M.de Guermantes’ younger brother, the Baron de Charlus, extends a double-edged welcome for America’s delayed entry into the war:

« Je ne veux pas dire de mal des Américains, monsieur, continua-t-il,

6 Baudelaire thought better of the indigenous Americans. In 1846 he praised a portrait by the American artist George Caitlin of a Native American shown at the previous year’s exhibition of “Indian” art at the Louvre (Higonnet 2002, 328). He also recognized in the Native American a fellow dandy: “Dandyism is a mysterious institution ... Chateaubriand having found it in the forests and by the lakes of the New World” (1964c, 26).

il paraît qu'ils sont inépuisablement généreux et comme il ny a pas eu de chef d'orchestre dans cette guerre, que chacun est entré dans la danse longtemps après l’autre, et que les Américains ont commencé quand nous étions quasiment finis, ils peuvent avoir une ardeur que quatre ans de guerre ont pu calmer chez nous. Même avant la guerre, ils aimaient notre pays, notre art, ils payaient fort cher nos chefd'œuvre. Beaucoup sont chez eux maintenant. [ »]

[“I do not wish to speak ill of the Americans, Monsieur, he continued, it seems that they are inexhaustibly generous and, as there has not been a conductor in this war, and each performer has joined in long after the last, and the Americans have come in when we are almost finished, they may have an enthusiasm which four years of war have somewhat dulled in us. Even before the war they exhibited a love for our country and our art, and paid high prices for our masterpieces. Many of them are now in their country”] (2207; VI:103)

Charlus speaks, however, with the benefit of his author’s experience. For though the scene is set in 1918, Proust wrote it in the early 1920s after the disappointment felt by many in France with the outcome of the treaty talks held in Paris between January and July 1919. Proust’s earlier enthusiasm for America joining the war is testified by his dedicating Pastiches et mélanges to Walter Berry:

A Monsieur Walter Berry, avocat et lettré, qui, depuis le premier jour de la guerre, devant Amérique encore indécise, a plaidé, avec une énergie et un talent incomparables, la cause de la France, et l’a gagnée.

[To M.Walter Berry, lawyer and man of letters, who from the first day of the war, confronting an indecisive America, argued France’s case with an incomparable energy and talent, and won.]

After the war the American President, Woodrow Wilson, arrived at the peace talks as the first serving president to travel to Europe.” Wilson’s

7 Thomas Jefferson had lived in Paris during the late eighteenth century and had been an habitué of the Paris salons. John Adams was a diplomat in Paris in 1783. Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, went on the record as saying that every man had two homelands: his own and France.

hard-line approach toward the defeated German and Austro-Hungarian empires struck an obvious sympathetic chord with the French public. For a while the attraction was mutual. Wilson, quipped a British diplomat, was drawn to Paris “as a debutante is entranced by the prospect of her first ball” (MacMillan 2001, 3); while the newspaper L'Humanité brought out a special issue in which the leading lights of the French left lined up to praise Wilson. Neither was Proust himself immune to the fervor that gripped the city. When Harold Nicolson, one of over 400 British officials alone present at the talks, met Proust — “white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced” — Proust pumped him for information about how the Peace Conference was proceeding. Typically for Proust, Nicolson’s replies were too generalized: “Be specific, my friend, be specific,” he demanded (MacMillan 2001, 149-150). The phrase is significant, and perhaps tells us that what Proust feared about America was that it was in danger of generalizing the specific. The effect, as with the American woman who is mistaken about Gilberte, is that such generalities would serve to erase the Paris Proust knew and loved as effectively as Swann becomes first overlooked and then forgotten.

This is certainly reflected in Joseph Roth’s report in the Frankfurter Zeitung, written less than three years after Proust’s death in 1922:

This summer Paris is neither hot nor cold nor rainy; it is American. Everywhere you go, you hear the twang of American English, everywhere you encounter lanky figures in flat shoes, with big hornrimmed glasses ... extrawide suits, red Baedeker guides in their hands ... Along all the avenues there are tour buses, each crammed with fifty or sixty Americans sitting obediently and with folded hands, almost as if they were at school ... The elegant and subtle line of French designers and couturiers in summer becomes lavish and ostentatious: American, in a word. (2005, 30-31)

André Maurois Le Côté de Chelsea (1929) provided a gentler if no less pointed satire on a Paris caught up in the throes of the Jazz Age. A pastiche of À /a recherche, we find Marcel and M.de Norpois dining at the Pré Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne where the entertainment is initially provided by a violinist who “looked like Morel,” and who performs for an audience of “goldenhaired American girls whose vivid dresses encircled the dais of varnished wood in their herbaceous border of animated flowers” (1966, 19). The girls are obviously direct descendants of both “le petite bande” from A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and the stereotype of “The American Girl Abroad.” Further allusions, however, alert us to the fact that the Belle Epoque has undergone more violent change. For while the violinist performs melodies from operas by Saint-Saéns and Leoncavallo that summon up the familiar ghosts of the nineteenth century, France’s more recent dead are evoked in Maurois’ description of his Morel look-alike as a “sonorous outpost ... mobile scout” who “couched his bowpoint like a guardsman saluting with drawn sword.” In turn, the musicians accompanying him “launch a new harmonious offensive” (1966, 13, 14). Soloist and orchestra alike are represented as relics of a culture torn apart by the mechanized carnage of the First World War. And it is to the legacy of the war that Maurois next turns. For while the violinist has been performing “the most antiquated of pre-war refrains,” endowing them with “a tone of authentic and even beautiful despair” (1966, 15), all that is changed when he comes under “friendly fire” from a jazz band:

But as ten o'clock drew near a group of tall negroes in dinner-jackets made their appearance ... deposit[ing] a saxophone near the ‘cellist and a drum by the viola-player ... At the precise moment when the first stroke of ten o’clock was heard to sound, one of the negroes ... grasped his drumsticks, bent downward, and announced with a loud and prolonged tattoo that the time had passed for a life of indolent ease, with its ingenuously voluptuous cadences, and the motley, barbaric and mechanical hour of swift rhythms, skyscrapers and racing cars had at last arrived. (1966, 15)