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Monsieur Proust: A Memoir By Céleste Albaret

McGraw-Hill, 416 pp., $12.50 From 1913 until the novelist’s death at the end of 1922, Céleste Albaret was housekeeper, cook, confidante, and, although much younger than he, surrogate mother to Marcel Proust. For more than fifty years, Mme. Albaret firmly resisted all efforts to persuade her to reveal her intimate and presumably unique knowledge of the daily life, the personality and character, the tastes and habits of one of France’s greatest modern literary masters. Now, she has at last permitted publication of Monsieur Proust: A Memoir, a distillation of seventy hours of recorded interviews conducted, transcribed, and edited by Georges Belmont, a well-known French editor. Mme. Albaret’s motive in abandoning her self-imposed rule of reticence after so many years of faithful adherence to it is set out in Belmont’s introduction: “If she has changed her mind at the age of 82, it is because she has come to the conclusion that others less scrupulous have betrayed Proust grossly, either because they lacked her access to the truth, or through excessive imagination or the temptation to promote their ‘interesting’ or self-interested little theories.”

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Rene Kuhn Bryant

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Monsieur Proust: A Memoir By Céleste Albaret

McGraw-Hill, 416 pp., $12.50 From 1913 until the novelist’s death at the end of 1922, Céleste Albaret was housekeeper, cook, confidante, and, although much younger than he, surrogate mother to Marcel Proust. For more than fifty years, Mme. Albaret firmly resisted all efforts to persuade her to reveal her intimate and presumably unique knowledge of the daily life, the personality and character, the tastes and habits of one of France’s greatest modern literary masters. Now, she has at last permitted publication of Monsieur Proust: A Memoir, a distillation of seventy hours of recorded interviews conducted, transcribed, and edited by Georges Belmont, a well-known French editor. Mme. Albaret’s motive in abandoning her self-imposed rule of reticence after so many years of faithful adherence to it is set out in Belmont’s introduction: “If she has changed her mind at the age of 82, it is because she has come to the conclusion that others less scrupulous have betrayed Proust grossly, either because they lacked her access to the truth, or through excessive imagination or the temptation to promote their ‘interesting’ or self-interested little theories.”