Louis de Robert: “Le Roman du malade”

On the occasion of the reissue, by Archipoche, in the “Le Domaine” series, of Louis de Robert’s Le Roman du malade (1871-1937), Olivier Philipponnat, who directs the “Le Domaine” series and unearthed this forgotten novel, and Jérôme Bastianelli, who wrote the preface to this new edition, spoke with Jacques Letertre, president of the Société des hôtels littéraires. The novel, which won its author the forerunner of the Prix Femina in 1911, occupies a special place in the history of À la recherche du temps perdu: Louis de Robert was one of Proust’s very first literary friends and the first reader of the proofs of Du côté de chez Swann.

Jacques Letertre — Welcome to the Hôtel Littéraire Le Swann. Tonight’s subject is one I care about a great deal, though for a slightly painful reason. A few years ago, a major Parisian bookseller offered me the copy of Le Roman du malade that Louis de Robert sent to Proust, along with the proofs of Du côté de chez Swann annotated by Louis de Robert. I hesitated too long, and so they are not in my collection: I regret it, almost to the point of remorse!

I want to thank our two guests for being here tonight: Olivier Philipponnat, who republished Le Roman du malade, and Jérôme Bastianelli, president of the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust, who wrote its preface — a preface that begins, in essence, by explaining that the title is dreadfully bad…

My first question is for the publisher: if Louis de Robert had never known Proust, would you still have republished this book?

Olivier Philipponnat — Not only because of Proust: it was all of Louis de Robert’s friends — male and female — who interested me. When the book came out in 1911, and even earlier, when they had discovered it serialised in Le Figaro, they sent him extremely admiring letters.

I discovered Louis de Robert almost by chance while looking for titles for “Le Domaine”, a series devoted to works that have entered the public domain. I ordered Le Roman du malade from a bookseller. The copy I received was an old reissue that included the letters sent to Louis de Robert when the book was published. One naturally has to allow for flattery, but a genuine current of warmth and sincerity runs through these letters, particularly those from Proust, Montesquiou, Anna de Noailles and Pierre Loti.

Then I read the novel. The title may be off-putting, but I was struck by the subtlety of the psychological analysis and by the themes it explores, many of which echo Proust’s own: jealousy, illness, death, love.

Jacques Letertre — Let’s come back to Proust. Under what circumstances did he meet Louis de Robert?

Jérôme Bastianelli — Their meeting unfolds, one might say, in four acts.

The first takes place in the early 1890s. Proust and Louis de Robert cross paths on the boulevard Malesherbes, without this encounter having any real sequel.

Second act: Louis de Robert becomes Pierre Loti’s secretary. In his library, around 1896, he comes across an uncut copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours. He remembers the young man he had met a few years earlier and reads the book, which he greatly enjoys.

Third act: they meet again by chance in Paris, at the Parc Monceau, through Edmond Sée. They discover a shared interest in the Dreyfus Affair, which they both follow passionately, on the Dreyfusard side. Then Louis de Robert falls seriously ill and lives for a time in seclusion; the two men lose touch.

Finally, the fourth act: Proust gets back in touch with him after the publication of Le Roman du malade, which he greatly admires. Their correspondence then begins around the publication of Du côté de chez Swann.

Jacques Letertre — At that time, then, the more famous of the two was Louis de Robert.

Olivier Philipponnat — Yes. He had already published several books, but Le Roman du malade brought him real recognition. In 1911 he received the prize that would later become the Prix Femina. He would go on to publish a great many other works, most of them now forgotten, as well as literary memoirs devoted to the many writers he had known.

Jérôme Bastianelli — And that position allowed him to try to help Proust. He notably attempted to get him published by Ollendorff. But the bulk of their exchanges concerned the manuscript itself and the advice Louis de Robert gave his friend — advice Proust did not always follow, particularly when it came to the title.

Louis de Robert detested the title Du côté de chez Swann. He wrote to him, in essence: open your volume, take the first sentence you find, it will always be better than that! Several other titles were considered over the course of their correspondence.

Olivier Philipponnat — Louis de Robert lists them in his memoirs: Avant que le jour soit levé, Jardin dans une tasse de thé, Le Passé intermittent, Les Colombes poignardées, Le Septième Ciel…

Jérôme Bastianelli — And also Dans le jardin de M. Swann. But Proust held firm: it would be Du côté de chez Swann.

There is also a rather amusing exchange between them about footnotes. Proust, fresh from his translations of Ruskin, was still considering including some in his novel. Louis de Robert talked him out of it. So we may owe him our escape from footnotes in Du côté de chez Swann!

Olivier Philipponnat — The question of cuts is more complicated. It is often said that Louis de Robert encouraged Proust not to cut his text. But in Comment débuta Marcel Proust, he explains, on the contrary, that too thick a volume risked discouraging “the very people best suited to understand and admire it.” And he writes: “In the end, after much hesitation, he agreed to close his book at page 532.”

So he does seem, after all, to have pushed Proust to reduce its length.

Jacques Letertre — The annotated proofs actually let us follow this work. The copy I so regret not having bought contained a note from Proust beginning “Mon chéri” — “My darling.” We had long wondered about this “Mon chéri” addressed, we thought, to Louis de Robert… until Nathalie Mauriac explained to us that the note was in fact addressed to Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother, who had also been sent these proofs.

Olivier Philipponnat — As for his dealings with publishers, Proust had first been turned down by Fasquelle and was considering publishing his novel at his own expense. Louis de Robert advised against it. He himself had been approached by Alfred Humblot, director of the Ollendorff publishing house, to publish another novel, and took the opportunity to speak to him about Proust.

Humblot read the manuscript and sent him this now-famous reply: “Dear friend, I may be thick as a plank, but I cannot understand how a man can take thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep.”

Louis de Robert at first thought it best to hide this letter from Proust. He nevertheless eventually learned of it, and was furious.

Jacques Letertre — We have explained why Proust scholars should take an interest in Louis de Robert. But let’s talk now about the book itself. If you had to give us the “pitch”, what would you say?

Jérôme Bastianelli — I write in my preface that Le Roman du malade bears a poor title, because it is not entirely a novel, nor is it quite the book of a man who could be reduced to his illness.

It is not entirely a novel because the narrative is regularly interrupted by meditative chapters, bearing titles such as “La Sagesse” (“Wisdom”) or “La Jalousie” (“Jealousy”). Louis de Robert then abandons the story almost completely to reflect on illness, the approach of death, the body, love or desire.

This recalls, incidentally, a question Proust himself once asked, writing to Anna de Noailles a few years earlier, that he was torn between writing a novel and a philosophical essay. We know how Proust would resolve that dilemma: he would, in a sense, do both. Louis de Robert, too, seeks — differently, and more directly — to bring novel and meditation together.

Finally, it is not simply the novel of an “invalid.” The character lives through a particular experience: that of the approach of death, and the new lucidity that an illness one believes will be fatal can bring.

Olivier Philipponnat — There is also a genuine love plot. One could speak of a drama with four characters.

The narrator, André Gilbert, is obviously very close to Louis de Robert: like him, he has tuberculosis. He first stays in Davos, where a walk through the foreigners’ cemetery leads him to discover the graves of young people who died far from home. Then, as his condition improves slightly, he joins his mother at Val-Roland, a health resort behind which one recognises Cambo-les-Bains.

There he finds his friend Paul again and meets Javotte, undoubtedly the most vivid character in the book, but also the most unstable and the most frivolous. She wavers between the two men. For a long time, one wonders whether she truly loves this dying man, who falls for her at the risk of his health, while his mother jealously tries to keep the young woman away.

As for Paul, I recently discovered an interesting detail. Thirteen years later, Louis de Robert published Paroles d’un solitaire, which he himself presented as the natural sequel to Le Roman du malade. The book is dedicated to Paul Faure, a close friend of Edmond Rostand, and Louis de Robert specifies that the Paul of his novel is precisely this Paul Faure. One may therefore wonder whether, behind the book, there lies a genuine love triangle between Louis de Robert, Paul Faure, and a young woman whose identity we do not know.

Jérôme Bastianelli — Several literary echoes come to mind. There is something of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in this reflection of a man watching his own death approach. Something, too, of The Magic Mountain, with its stay in Switzerland. And Javotte sometimes brings Albertine to mind: the same elusive, light, changeable character; she plays with other people’s feelings without perhaps knowing herself exactly what she feels.

Olivier Philipponnat — I too thought of The Death of Ivan Ilyich — that life watched from inside the tomb by a man who knows he is condemned. Another book, a much later one, seems to me to bear a kinship: La Sœur, by Sándor Márai, the account of an invalid whose whole world shrinks to his room, and whom illness renders extraordinarily sensitive to the slightest signs of life.

Jérôme Bastianelli — This nearness to death brings us straight back to Proust. In a reply to the newspaper L’Intransigeant, which in 1920 had asked him what he would do if he knew the world was about to end, Proust answers that such a certainty would entirely change our existence: we would want to travel, to see our friends again, to savour everything we hold dear. But since the catastrophe is not announced, we put all of that off until tomorrow.

That is very close to what happens in Le Roman du malade. The approach of death suddenly gives things an extraordinary flavour. What seemed banal to us becomes infinitely precious the moment we know we are about to lose it.

Jacques Letertre — Another point in common with Proust: doctors…

Jérôme Bastianelli — Neither À la recherche du temps perdu nor Le Roman du malade exactly makes one want to study medicine! In Louis de Robert’s book, the doctors are, at best, likeable. They accompany the progress of the illness without being able to do much about it. André Gilbert, for that matter, no longer expects much from medicine.

Jacques Letertre — Among the letters reproduced at the end of the volume, Colette’s is rather terrible for a writer. She tells him: “It is possible that you will never surpass Le Roman du malade.” To be congratulated in this way for a book one has just published is almost like hearing it announced that everything that follows will be worse!

Olivier Philipponnat — Yes, it’s a terrible line. But she also tells him: “No one has surpassed this, and how many have even reached it?” Another letter gave me a great deal to think about, that of Anna de Noailles, who asks, in essence: “Is this book, without precedent, really a book?”

That question echoes the one Jérôme raises in his preface about the title. What exactly does Le Roman du malade mean? Is it the story of an invalid? Or the novel that only illness allows one to write, the kind of literature it brings into being? The title is perhaps far more ambiguous than it appears.

Jérôme Bastianelli — Yes, exactly. It is “the invalid’s novel” not only because it tells the story of an invalid, but because it is the novel that illness inspires in the invalid.

There are some very fine pages in the book on death and on the body. André Gilbert notably tries to imagine what will become of the body he inhabits once he is dead, the slow process of decay that will transform this flesh that is still his.

He also imagines his own funeral. And what overwhelms him is not so much the idea of the funeral itself as that of his mother who, once it is over, will have to leave his grave and go home. I see in this an almost Proustian scene taken to its ultimate conclusion: no longer the mother who leaves the bedroom after the good-night kiss, but the mother who leaves the grave. That this should be what makes him suffer, as he imagines his own death, is deeply touching.

Olivier Philipponnat — The mother is indeed a very present character, and jealousy is perhaps the feeling that binds all four characters together. The two men are jealous of one another; the mother feels a genuine maternal jealousy and goes as far as forbidding Javotte to enter her son’s room; Javotte herself sometimes seems almost jealous of the love she inspires.

There is also a very strong sense of solitude and of an inability to communicate, particularly in the letters the narrator imagines writing to Javotte once he has returned to the Paris region and distance has grown between them. This reminded me of a line that Patrick Modiano, in his conversations with Emmanuel Berl, presents as the shortest sentence in La Recherche: “Chacun est bien seul” — “Everyone is truly alone.” I don’t know whether it really is the shortest, but it would suit Louis de Robert’s book perfectly.

Jérôme Bastianelli — There is still “Zut, zut, zut” in Proust, all the same!

Jacques Letertre — Let’s talk about the dedication to Pierre Loti.

Olivier Philipponnat — Loti played a considerable part in Louis de Robert’s career. The dedication, in fact, immediately sets the tone of the book:

“Those who look to reading for light entertainment will not come to me. But those with grave souls, those who savour autumn, silence, meditation, solitude, and who sometimes think of death — those, should my book happen to fall into their hands, will read it as you do, my dear friend, without haste, with the feeling it deserves; they will love it, they will love me.”

That last phrase, “they will love me,” is striking. When one looks into Louis de Robert’s biography, one gets the impression of a fragile, sickly man, who seems to show a very great need to be loved.

But one should not give the impression that Le Roman du malade is an entirely morbid book. What won me over above all was Louis de Robert’s prose: it is simple, fluid, sometimes with very fine poetic touches, particularly in the descriptions of nature. That is what held my attention far more than the plot, which is, in the end, fairly slight. And it is probably also what had won over Proust: the poetry of this prose and the properly literary quality of the text.

Jérôme Bastianelli — It is indeed not a light book, but nor is it a heavy one. It reads very pleasantly, and one occasionally comes across beauties that can bring Proust to mind.

There is one convergence, above all, that struck me. In Les Plaisirs et les Jours, which Louis de Robert had discovered at Pierre Loti’s, Proust writes: “Desire makes things blossom, possession makes them wither.”

Now, in Le Roman du malade, one reads:

“Everything we lose, our soul calls back, would wish to seize again. How many mediocre objects, or ones that disappointed us, turn into marvels the moment they move away from us! Those endowed with a little imagination, above all, are the dupes of this cruel game whereby a thing shrinks as soon as we possess it, and grows the moment we no longer have it.”

One might consider the idea universal enough to have arisen independently in the two writers. But one might also wonder whether Les Plaisirs et les Jours, which Louis de Robert had read and admired, did not leave a trace here. Either way, the convergence is remarkable.

A member of the audience — Could you tell us more about Louis de Robert himself, his family, his education?

Jérôme Bastianelli — Louis de Robert was born in Paris in March 1871, a few months before Marcel Proust. He lost his father when he was about twelve and cut short his studies fairly quickly because of poor health. He became a clerk at the Edison company, but dreamed only of theatre and literature. He wrote a first play with a friend, then managed to place articles in Gil Blas.

His meeting with Pierre Loti proved decisive. He approached him, told him of his admiration, and Loti, who happened to be looking for a private secretary, took him along to the south-west of France. It was in Loti’s library that he discovered Les Plaisirs et les Jours. The two men remained close, which explains the dedication of Le Roman du malade.

Louis de Robert began publishing novels, went through a few unhappy love affairs, notably with Yvette Guilbert and Jeanne Granier, then fell seriously ill. Unlike André Gilbert, his character, he recovered. He went on writing and later settled in Sannois. There, a young woman thirty years his junior came to rent part of the family property. This time, the story ends well: he married her. Louis de Robert died in 1937.

Olivier Philipponnat — It should be added that, by then, he was thoroughly established in literary circles. He knew Edmond Rostand, Zola, Alphonse Allais, Octave Mirbeau, Jules Renard…

Jérôme Bastianelli — Yes, his admiration for Zola was such that, one day, in order to meet him, he walked the whole way from Paris to Médan — some thirty kilometres. That rather corrects the image of a purely sickly writer: Louis de Robert was also capable of extraordinary enthusiasm and passion.

Olivier Philipponnat — His memoirs bear witness to this extraordinary literary sociability. He would go on to publish, in 1928, De Loti à Proust. Souvenirs et confidences, which no doubt also deserves to be rediscovered.

We should also recall his closeness to Dreyfusard circles. He frequented, among others, the Charpentier salon, and is said to have introduced Proust to Colonel Picquart. This gives some idea of his place in the Parisian literary world of the time.

A member of the audience — We should also mention the very thorough study that Pyra Wise devoted to Louis de Robert in the proceedings of the conference organised for the centenary of Proust’s death.

Jérôme Bastianelli — Quite right. That conference was part of the series of meetings initiated by Jean-Yves Tadié, and its proceedings have recently been published by Honoré Champion. Pyra Wise’s study allows one to go much further into Louis de Robert and his relationship with Proust.

A member of the audience — Listening to you speak of this literature of illness, I thought of Alphonse Daudet’s La Doulou.

Olivier Philipponnat — The nature of the text is rather different. La Doulou consists of notes that were probably not intended for publication and that appeared only after Daudet’s death. But the comparison is an interesting one: in both cases, illness is not simply a subject. It becomes a vantage point for observing oneself, and the world.

Jacques Letertre — All that remains for me now is to thank Olivier Philipponnat and Jérôme Bastianelli. I hope, above all, that this conversation has made you want to read Le Roman du malade. The book is not very long, and it is very well written: despite its title, it is far less forbidding than one might think.