Alan Halliday's review of 'Marie Nordlinger, la muse anglaise de Marcel Proust'.

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Dr Cynthia Gamble is an international authority on Marcel Proust and John Ruskin. How fortunate that, in the person of Marie Nordlinger, sometimes known as the Parisienne Maid from Manchester and Proust’s English muse, Dr Gamble has found a subject which incorporates both of her specialized subjects, since Marie Nordlinger, a French-speaking English girl, helped the non-English speaking Proust to translate Ruskin into French.

Marie and Marcel were particularly close because Marie was the cousin of Proust's close friend, the composer, Reynaldo Hahn. She was a fine artist, which meant that Marie and Marcel were speaking the same aesthetic language from the very start, because Proust himself was a great admirer of the visual arts. They went to see the old masters at the Musée du Louvre and thence to the studio of the American artist, Alexander Harrison, said to be one of several models for the artist Elstir in Proust's novel, À la recherche du temps du perdu (although Elstir seems closer to the more famous American artist of his time, Whistler).

Marie Nordlinger also helped Proust to hit upon an understanding of "involuntary memory," where the taste of a certain tea, the smell of mimosa en masse in spring, and the sight and smell of the white and pink hawthorn hedges which skirt the path that runs alongside the Pré-Catelan gardens at Illiers-Combray in May, had the power to bring back to mind long-forgotten memories, often from childhood.

It was from Christmas 1899 to the turn of the century in 1900 that Ruskin and his books on French medieval architecture dominated Proust's searching mind, and he wrote about them to Marie Nordlinger in a letter which became the starting point for his Preface to the translation into French that he was still preparing of The Bible of Amiens by Ruskin.

Marie Nordlinger at work in her studio near Manchester, working on the coat of arms. Undated but circa 1902. © Private Collection, not to be reproduced without permission.

And because of Marie Nordlinger’s own detailed knowledge of Ruskin's published books and unpublished letters, and the often-illuminating ephemera that were beginning to become available to scholars as Ruskin's life was coming to an end, Marie in her own day was not unlike the great Ruskin and Proust scholar, Dr. Cynthia Gamble, in ours. For Marie understood perhaps better than Proust where his own "Ruskinian" train of thought was leading him, which was towards the greatest French novel ever written. Truth to tell, Marie Nordlinger was an early pioneer in Proust and Ruskin studies, in distinct contrast with Dr Gamble who, in this book alone, has shown herself to be an absolute authority on the subject. Important letters and printed articles of interest, originally written in English, are quoted as such by Dr Gamble and then, very conveniently, translated into French to integrate them with the rest of her particularly lucid French text.

What could be more irresistible than the word picture, as in a sepia snapshot, of Proust and Marie together in Venice sitting in the Piazza San Marco, correcting proofs of "our" translation of The Bible of Amiens. Imagine them then, wandering through the streets and squares, and over the very stones of Venice, while Marie read aloud from Ruskin's St Mark's Rest, and Marcel took notes!

Even today, it is still possible to retrace Ruskin’s footsteps and recreate the impact of his first momentous encounter with Carpaccio’s early Renaissance Venetian paintings from the life of St Jerome in the jewel-like church of San Giorgio degli Schiavone: because the Carpaccios are still there in situ where Ruskin first beheld them! Then, on another occasion, Marcel and Marie took refuge from a storm from the Alps that was raging over Venice, and sheltered inside the Baptistry of St. Mark's and, above the noise of the pelting storm, read out to each other prose passages from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice.

Left: A glimpse of Carpaccio's St Jerome cycle in San Giorgio degli Schiavone (photo courtesy of FrDr, Wiikimedia Commons). Right: Looking into St Mark's Square, Venice, from the Grand Canal (photo by George Landow).

But now, the year is 1902 and the scene shifts back to Paris where Marie is pursuing an unlikely career as an art nouveau silversmith and jewelry designer, two professions which only the most dedicated, meticulous and entirely faceless follower of Ruskin might possibly consider, although what Ruskin might have thought about the art nouveau style is an entirely different matter....

Proust's astonishingly tolerant mother, herself an extremely well-read Ruskinian and in the original English too, welcomed the young Englishwoman into her home and allowed her to work alongside her son in his bedroom, to which he was confined by a severe asthmatic condition. There, Marcel and Marie worked on Ruskin's text with a passion which the English aesthete Swinburne would have called a fierce, gem-like flame that tore them in a moment from aesthetic ecstasy to helpless tears. It was precisely then that Proust managed to lose the proof sheets for his translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens with Marie's corrections and precious comments, neatly written all over them in her beautiful hand. Marcel was distraught, and it fell to Marie Nordlinger to put "Humpty" back together again. But Marcel's idea of an appropriate "thank-you" gift was to present her with, of all things, a copy of Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, a near synonym for Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

When the time came for him to translate Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies into French, Marcel at last appeared to be in love with Marie, declaring his passion for her and Sesame and Lilies in equal parts. But it was not long before she was demoted to the status of "dear friend," and so Marie Nordlinger accepted a job in America as a travelling saleswoman.  Eventually, she seems to have pulled herself together, brought to a conclusion her over-earnest, albeit literary relationship with Marcel Proust, who was after all, a well-known homosexual, and married Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, an important scholar who wrote two of the earliest articles of art appreciation on Vincent van Gogh and taught classes on the art of Islam which, in 1906, were to have such a seminal influence on Le Bonheur de Vivre by van Gogh’s successor Henri Matisse, especially in Matisse’s early "Fauve" phase.

Once again, Dr Cynthia Gamble has made a major contribution to Proustian studies by teasing out of the shadows that surround Proust's turbulent and ultimately tragic life, a living, feeling and entirely recognizable young woman of her time at the turn of the century, and  presenting in microcosmic and scholarly form an account which is itself like a painted portrait of Marie Nordlinger, executed, as it were, in words on paper, published by Classiques Garnier in 2024, and a masterpiece. As Charles Baudelaire used to say, “Hats off, gentlemen!”

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*Alan Halliday’s second novel, Letting Go, will be published shortly. It promises to be a great read.

Bibliography

Gamble, Cynthia. Marie Nordlinger, la muse anglaise de Marcel Proust. Paris: Classiques Garnier (Bibliotheque Proustienne, 54), 2024. 530 pp., with 64 illustrations (many of them published for the first time). Pbk, £41.54 ISBN: ‎ 978-2406165248.