Читать книгу Marcel Proust, an English Tribute. The Portrait of the Man written by the People Who Knew him the Best онлайн

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His friends were in fact of all classes, but his friendship was accorded only on his own terms, and a condition of it was the capacity to bear hearing the truth. His friends knew themselves the better for knowing him, for he was impatient of the slightest insincerity or disingenuousness and could not tolerate pretence. Lies tired him. In a letter he alluded thus to one whom we both knew well:

Ce que je lui reproche, c’est d’être un menteur. Il a fait ma connaissance à la faveur d’un mensonge et depuis n’a guère cessé. Il trouve toujours le moyen de gâter ses qualités par ces petits mensonges qu’il croit l’avantager—tout petits et quelquefois énormes.

Proust’s insistence on truthfulness and sincerity caused him more than once to renounce lifelong associations. His sensibility was so delicate that a gesture or a note in the voice revealed to him a motive, perhaps slight and passing, of evasion or pretence. He was exacting about sincerity only. In other respects his tolerance was so wide that a hard truth from his lips, so far from wounding, stimulated. To his friends he was frankness itself, and spoke his mind without reserve. I once asked him to tell me if there were not some one, some friend of his, to whom I could talk about him. There was so much I wanted to know, and on the all too rare occasions when he was well enough to see me there was never time. In answer to this he wrote me: