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Proust, Marcel - Letter from Proust to Daniel Halévy 1888
Identifier
019787
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Halévy family constituted cultural aristocracy in mid and late-19th century Paris and played a major role both in Proust’s life and art.
Daniel Halévy’s great-grandfather Elie, the son of a rabbi and talented in music composition and choral conducting as well as literary exegesis, emigrated from Würzburg to Paris in the late eighteenth century.
Elie had two sons, Fromental and Léon, both of whom achieved fame in Parisian artistic circles. The former would compose several highly acclaimed operas, including La Juive, which Proust would use as a prominent and recurring motif in À la recherche du temps perdu, beginning with the narrator’s own grandfather humming an aria from the work when a friend of his grandson came to call.
Halévy La Juive - aria di Eleazar "Rachel..." Neil Shicoff
A description of the experience
Daniel Halévy archive in Dijon - published in Marcel Proust: Écrits de jeunesse 1887—1895, edited by Anne Borrel et al.
Letter from Proust to Daniel Halévy 1888 [translated by Terrence Kilmartin.]
“You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken.
If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes which reflect the grace and refinement of your mind with such purity that I feel I cannot fully love your mind without kissing your eyes, if your body and mind, like your thoughts, are so lithe and slender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap, if, finally, I feel that the charm of your person, in which I cannot separate your keen mind from your agile body, would refine and enhance ‘the sweet joy of love’ for me, there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words, which would have been more fittingly addressed to someone surfeited with women and seeking new pleasures in pederasty.”