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Letter to Jacques Truelle(?)

[shortly after 30 June 1919]   

   My dear Jacques,

   I am only writing you a few lines so unwell am I today (after having been ill for a month without interruption). But as (after having hidden from the whole world, and even my brother, that I have come to live at Jacques Porel's house, because I've been suffering so much from household removals that I could neither receive visitors or write so no one comes), I have only told a few rare friends (two perhaps), I want you to know. But above all I don't want you to think it a duty of friendship however long-standing to come one night over such a remote question, when I can't even have you brought by Célèste's brother-in-law because his motor car is broken down and the workmen who could repair it are on strike! To give you some idea of my fear of seeing anybody, my friend of twenty five years Robert de Billy wrote me that he was in Paris, avenue Malakoff (that is to say only a few steps away from me). So I didn't reply to him for fear that he would come and he never knew that he was my neighbour. The same goes for Mme de Noailles who wrote to me at the same time. Yesterday I received a letter from Mme Hennessey addressed to the Ritz which was forwarded on to Bd Haussmann, not knowing my address (which I believe to be quite temporary). All this is to say that if, after dinner, you are ever passing near to 8-bis rue Laurent-Pichard where I am still, to come up in the knowledge of the pleasure you would be giving your friend

   Marcel Proust.

I'm sending these few lines by pneumatique because I see letters are taking 9 days and pneus, alas, 3 days.

Letter to a friend

   You would be doing me a great kindness if you do not have the verses and your evaluation sent up (have them left with my concièrge) so that the door-bell doesn't wake me up. If you have Milsand absolutely to hand you could include that as well but in the end I don't think I really need it. To verify some quotations I would need to have L'Éducation sentimentale, Germinie Lacerteux, (preferably the whole thing) for an hour and Montégut's study of George Eliot (you don't have to have Scenes of Clerical Life by G. Eliot). But for all that the simplest thing would be for you to come and see me yourself at about 3 o'clock (but ask the concièrge if I am up because I might have taken trional) and then you can take your books back with you. And so you don't lose your books please would you put the quotation in an envelope for me. In L'Éducation it's at the beginning when he gives a louis as an offering on behalf of Mme Arnoux. In Germinie it is the phrase at the end in the cemetery about the dead in unmarked graves and in whose names we pray for small mercies. Montégut is too drawn out to explain to you.

    A thousand thanks,

   Marcel Proust.