"je leur souhaite toutes les voluptés depuis les plus hautes jusqu'aux plus grossières"

Autograph letter signed by Marcel Proust, addressed to René Peter. Twelve pages written in black ink on three bifolia framed in black.
Tears at the ends along the folds of the bifolia, not affecting the text.
Published in Kolb, IV, n°168.

Proust, eternally plagued by ailments, remains a recluse and apologizes for missing the rehearsal of Peter's new play, Le Chiffon. Peter's three-act comedy, with music by Reynaldo Hahn, premiered at the Athénée the following month and was a huge success, with around sixty performances before the end of the year. The young Proust relies on the glowing opinion of Hahn, who had attended the rehearsals, and the missive becomes a love letter for the composer and his impeccable judgement: "Reynaldo told me that your play was delightful and ravishing, which is not quite the same thing, that he laughed and cried in it as he never laughs or cries in the theater and that the language was exquisite. Of that I was certain. But knowing nothing about you, I couldn't know if you had dramatic genius. I am certain of it now because even if I do not know a judge as severe, as ridiculously severe as Reynaldo, I also do not know one who has more taste, giving his enthusiasm very great value in my eyes.”

In a characteristic tangle of confession and denial, Proust barely hides his ambitions and his quest for recognition. He hopes and prays for the same laurels he places on Peter's head: “your poor and charming mother who, like all those who love and who have lived, life bruising all our tenderness, has suffered so much, is witnessing this great happiness, these first rays of glory on your charming forehead, which Vauvenargues says softer as the rising sun. I only speak of them in quotations, having never known them myself!” He will even end up instilling his own literary vocation into the fictional life of the narrator of In Search of Lost Time – although the narrator's journey as a man of letters is more marked by disappointments than “rays of glory” so long awaited by Proust himself. However, it culminates in Time Regained with an epiphany: the narrator now knows what to write and, above all, how to write it.

The letter marks the beginnings of the Proust-Peter-Hahn trio whose complicity was such that they formed a special vocabulary of which only they had the secret. The river of words in this letter perfectly illustrates the undeniable link between desire and intellectual admiration: “Because I also want success, I am extremely material in my wishes for those I love and I wish them every pleasure from the highest to the crudest.” Despite these displays of generosity, the writer cannot, however, mask a certain jealousy towards Robert Danceny, the fictional co-author of Le Chiffon who was none other than Peter's mistress, Mme Dansaërt. Proust elegantly but explicitly refers to her: “It makes me happy to think that the charming woman who, I am assured, is hiding under the male name of your collaborator, shares half of your work. I am not talking about your success, because whether she worked with you or not, she would always have shared your success with her heart, having, I believe, a deep friendship for you.” Typical of a Proust transposing his desires through fiction, the writer will form various dramatic and morbid scenarios between Peter and this young woman in the following years: “I'm afraid that once married, his wife will take offence at Mrs Dansa[ë]rt, that he will distance himself from her and that she will kill herself”, he wrote to Reynaldo Hahn in 1911. Proust even went so far as to suspect an affair between Peter and his secretary Robert Ulrich, to which he violently reproached the playwright in passionate letters.