The Mysterious Correspondent

New Stories

Marcel Proust, Charlotte Mandell

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780861540150
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

'Startlingly audacious.' Literary Review

New writing from the literary master

Throughout Proust’s life, nine of his short stories remained unseen – the writer never even spoke of them. Perhaps he was not ready to share the early themes he was nurturing for his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Or perhaps, in dealing directly with gay desire, they were too audacious – too near to life – for the censorious society of the time.

In these stories, published in English for the first time, we find an intimate portrait of a young author full of darkness, complexity and melancholy, longing to reveal himself to the world.

‌The Mysterious Correspondent

[This complete story, which was for a time included in Pleasures and Days and was then dedicated to the pianist Léon Delafosse (1874–1955), despite a few unfinished details, has this in common with other published stories: avowing the unavowable at the approach of death, an approach that reshuffles all the cards and unburdens the secret of all its moral weight.

The title is reiterated once during the story, and indicates that everything occurs via letters mysteriously found in the apartment of the heroine, Françoise, who imagines these letters come from a soldier.

Around this same time, during the summer of 1893, Proust and some friends began to write an epistolary novel, in which Proust took on the role of a society lady in love with a non-commissioned officer: she opens up to her confessor (whose role was played by Daniel Halévy, with Louis de La Salle taking that of an officer; see Correspondance, Vol. IV, pp. 413–21). This novel, written by many hands, was never finished, but while he was writing his part, Proust composed another story, possibly in secret, in which Françoise’s confessor, the Abbé de Tresves, appears only in the final pages. The main part of this story is a non-epistolary narrative.

The mysteriously appearing letters indirectly evoke Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Purloined Letter’, which Proust admired (see Correspondance, Vol. X, p. 292). Something from Poe’s Extraordinary Tales also occurs in Proust’s story, through the dying woman (Christiane) who at one point transmits her consumption to her friend Françoise. The same half-light that occurs at the heart of the story echoes Nerval’s opposition between reality and dream (in one variation, it’s a question of a second life).

This story from Proust’s youth lets us glimpse the budding novelist trying out formulas for a story that he would only rarely use later on. Near the beginning, he tries to convey all his character’s psychology through the carefully wrought description of her hands (we are reminded of Charles Bovary’s famous hat). Soon after, Proust (clumsily) attempts suspense writing, about the letters found in Françoise’s dining room. Here we can see sentences crossed out and interlinear additions that reveal in the narrator a certain difficulty in setting up and describing the necessary narrative situations. This difficulty would remain in the author of In Search, where many a sentence is weighed down because it is a matter of justifying, in a concrete situation that is difficult to set in place, the reflection at which the narrator seeks to arrive.

In In Search, a letter will appear from a mysterious correspondent: the telegram that th...

Table of contents

• Introduction • by Luc FraisseProfessor at the University of Strasbourg
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Pauline de S.
• The Mysterious Correspondent
• The Mysterious Correspondent [Unfinished Variation]
• A Captain’s Reminiscence
• Jacques Lefelde (The Stranger)
• In the Underworld
• After Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony
• The Awareness of Loving Her
• The Gift of the Fairies
• ‘That Is How He Loved…’