Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor Read Free Book Online

trying to explain his theories to me. It is about the way we experience our memories of the past, but I was not sure I was grasping it at all. Louise looked lovely, her dress had the most exquisite beading.
    M. Blanche is really pressing Marcel on this issue of the portrait. He is a youngish man, yet already he has something of a reputation as a painter, so I urged Marcel to go ahead and agree to sittings. It is a distraction from his studies, this is true, but it would be regrettable to pass up such an opportunity. M. Blanche would undertake the portrait of his own volition—apparently, he likes Marcel’s Italian eyes, so a mother must surely feel he is a man of discernment—but I suggested to Adrien that if the portrait is a success, we might even buy it. This summer, my little wolf will be twenty-one, and what a present it would make!
P ARIS . M ONDAY , M ARCH 7, 1892.
    We had a great family debate about the merits of thetelephone at dinner last night. Dick is all for it, and says one day every house will have one. He was even trying to convince Adrien it would be very useful for his practice, pointing out that in America doctors are now all on the line. Marcel is skeptical and was arguing strongly for the pneumatic, saying there was nothing a telephone could do that a
petit bleu
could not achieve just as fast. Dick replied that if you were sending an invitation, and the other person could reply just as soon as the question is put to him, it could actually speed things up. Marcel cleverly pointed out that often you do not want to reply right away, but want to delay a few days and consider your social schedule and the other invitations you have received. I have never much taken to sending messages by the pneumatic, always preferring a letter, but perhaps it really will be as Dick says and we will get used to the telephone.
    Now that he’s chez Straus so often, Marcel is very much back in with Jacques Bizet and Daniel Halévy. The old Lycée Condorcet set apparently wants to launch a literary journal, and Marcel is now busy at inaugural meetings and the like. He also wants to have a dinner for his friends this season and now I have only to convince the doctor that he should be allowed it. After all, he is young, it is natural to want to go into society when one is young, and one cannot be always visiting without ever opening one’s own doors.
A UTEUIL . M ONDAY , A PRIL 25, 1892.
    Will we never be free of this demon asthma? It was not a bad attack, just wheezing and gasping and it passedquickly enough, but the anxiety it causes my poor little Marcel is almost unbearable for me to watch. It will be monstrously unfair if he is still held back by his health even as he grows up.
    Ever since that day in the Bois, we have lived under this cloud. I realize it must be exactly eleven years ago now, for we were spending the Easter holidays at Uncle Louis’s when it happened and he was nine at the time. There we all were, a perfectly lovely spring day in the Bois de Boulogne, and suddenly he was gasping and choking and writhing about on the ground, clutching at his chest. The image will always remain with me, the way a perfectly innocent, sunny day can suddenly, in one moment, become a nightmare. You look up expecting somehow the weather will have changed to account for such sorrow, and now the blue sky mocks you and the clarity of the air seems almost evil.
    I suppose it is the trees—they are just coming into full leaf this week, late after that hard winter. I was set to return to Paris at the end of the week, but told Uncle Louis I will return right away, in the hopes Marcel will be more comfortable if he stays indoors in the apartment. How funny that we think of the country air at Auteuil as being healthy, yet for him it is the cause of disease.
P ARIS . F RIDAY , M AY 27, 1892.
    I went to the Louvre alone yesterday afternoon and spent most of it lost in contemplation of Caravaggio’s
Fortune Teller
. I must have seen the