Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen Read Free Page B

Some of his colleagues become quite obsessed with their particular speciality and just reserve a little corner to themselves, never venturing out beyond it. Adrien would never ask why there is not a standing commission for the defence against cholera, rather he hurries over to help with tuberculosis. He still has such energy. Dick inherits that. I only wish Marcel did. I had hoped the year away from us would strengthen him, teach him some measure of control, but often I fear the reverse will be true and he will return to us with his digestion ruined and his temperament yet more prone to extravagance.
    I went to Marie-Marguerite’s yesterday afternoon and enjoyed a really fruitful tête-à-tête, one of those conversations that remind you why you are such great friends. Not that you need reminding—my affection for Marie-Marguerite never wavers—but sometimes you have these flashes of insight into a friendship. I was discussing how muddled I feel at times, and unable to distinguish between grief for Maman and missing Marcel, and she understood perfectly.
    She was recalling an episode from the weeks before her wedding, on a day when she was supposed to see the dentist. Her mother decided that this was the time to impart to her some discreet details about what she might expect in the marriage bed. She said that in the carriage that afternoon, she had to keep reminding herself she was going to have a tooth examined—a nerve-racking experience in itself—not preparing for her wedding night. “Not that I wish to denigrate your tender feelings for Marcel and your late mother by comparing them to either toothache or nuptial bliss, but you know what I mean,” she concluded, and we both had quite a good laugh over the odd mélange of life’s trials we had somehow brought together in one conversation.
P ARIS . W EDNESDAY , N OVEMBER , 12, 1890.
    I received a letter from Marcel this morning. It will be his last, of course, and annoyingly it had crossed with the one I had posted last week. As Mme de Sévigné aptly noted: “The trouble with corresponding over long distances is that all the answers deal with the wrong cards.”
    If I recall correctly, however, she continued by saying that one must accept the gap as natural, for the stifling of one’s thoughts would be altogether too constraining. Unfortunately, I wish I had stifled my thoughts about Marcel’s diet, for now he reports that his bowels are loose again—if anything, tending too much that way—and I fear it would have been wiser to counsel him to eat a great deal of bread rather than avoid milk. My hope is that his return to Paris will enable us to control his diet more effectively and ensure that he gets enough sleep, so that he can conquer his tendency to infirmity once and for all. The poor boy has had a hard year of it, despite the visits home now and again. The idea of making a soldier of him is, in the end, a little bizarre. Never mind, the waiting is almost over and on Saturday he will be with me.
    T HE MANUSCRIPT ROOM in the old Bibliothèque Nationale smells of leather and dust. The buttery scent of literature wafts out from shelves of thick, calfskin-bound volumes arranged all the way down one long wall. A sharp whiff of history blows up from behind the decorative grilles that hide creaking iron radiators from both the eye and the broom. The one lush, the other acrid, the two odours meet and mingle, filling the narrow space with a single elusive perfume.
    A reader, lifting his nose to the air, might savour the scent and puzzle, for a fleeting moment, over its origins. But none does. Here, heads are bowed to their reading, bodies hunched over the long tables, minds occupied, and senses inattentive. Smells go unsmelled and the sunlight is not missed in the oddhalf-darkness of this room. On the wall facing the bookshelves, high windows would let in the poignant sunshine of a September day to bathe the scholars’ tasks in a pure bright glow were there not