Marcel Proust: A Biography

304 MARCEL PROUST
endless green landscape of their youth.^1 Then night came, and
cold; it was after midnight when they reached Paris, and Proust,
utterly exhausted, took to his bed for several days.
By the middle of June his translation of The Bible of Amiens
was nearly complete. On the 28th he asked Mme de N oailles to
persuade her husband to lend him his Bible 'provided it isn't too
enormous', for the quotations in the foomotes, at which he had
been at work 'for the last few months'. 'At the moment of trans-
scribing them I find they seem quite colourless, owing to the bad
translation I've been using, and he told me he had an excellent
Bible.' He adds that his 'documentation is now complete'.
Perhaps it was at this time, when his erudition in Christian
iconography was at its height, that Proust had the conversation
recorned by Georges de Lauris with his former playmate of the
Champs-Elysees, Lucie Faure, now Mme Goyau, an ardent
Catholic and a scholarly student of Dante: 'he revealed a subtle
and finely shaded mastery of the most difficult problems of
religious philosophy and exegesis; could he have read the whole
of the Golden Legend, and all the works of the learned Bollandists?'
He now sent his manuscript to the publisher Charles Ollendorfl',
who kept it for five months without deciding whether to accept
or reject it, and then providentially went out of business to
become editor of Gil BIas, leaving his successor to go bankrupt.
'If this hadn't happened,' Proust told Antoine Bibesco two years
later, 'I doubt whether I'd ever have been able to recover my
Bible, at once so cruelly scorned and so jealously detained.' But
his memory was at fault when he told Antoine that Ollendorfl"had
my Ruskin in his hands for a whole year before I could extract
it from him'; for he had already recovered his manuscript and
signed a contract with the Mercure de France for its publication
as early as mid-December 1902.
On 29 June Proust wrote to Mme de Noailles: 'There's only
one person who understands me, and that's Antoine Bibesco: I
1 The tower of Couey was blown up by the Germans in their retreat to
the Hindenburg Line in March 1917. Perhaps it was the thought of this,
among other such incidents, which made Proust allow the church of Saint-
Hilaire to be destroyed in the Great War, when, as Gilberte wrote to the
Narrator from Tansonville, 'for a year and a half the Germans held one half
of Combray, the French the other' (III, 756), and according to the Baron de
Charlus, 'the church was demolished by the French and English because
the Germans were using it as an observation post' (III, 795).