Céleste Albaret

Céleste Albaret ( Gineste; 17 May 1891 – 25 April 1984) was a country woman who moved to Paris in 1913 when she married the taxi driver Odilon Albaret; she is best known for being the writer and essayist Marcel Proust's housekeeper and secretary. Lonely and bored in the capital, and at her husband's suggestion, Albaret began to run errands for Proust, who was her husband's most regular client. Before very long she became his secretary and housekeeper. During the final decade of Proust's life, when his health declined and he became progressively more withdrawn, even while working with continuing intensity on his writing, she became his nurse and "the writer’s most trusted conduit to the world beyond his reclusive, cork-lined bedroom".

Marcel Proust died in 1922 and Albaret moved on to run a small Paris hotel, together with her husband and daughter. Odilon Albaret died in 1960, by which time the hotel had been sold and Albaret had become the caretaker-guide at a museum at Montfort-l'Amaury, on the western edge of Paris. In the early 1970s she was persuaded by the Laffont publishing company that she should disclose what she could concerning the private life of Marcel Proust, who was still an iconic literary figure among the intellectual classes. She dictated seventy hours of taped material to Georges Belmont, a journalist-translator with a reputation built on interviews with American movie-stars and translations into French of anglophone novels by Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, Henry James, Henry Miller and others. The resulting biographical portrait of Proust provided many hitherto unknown details, although the overall picture was in most respects reassuringly consistent with information already provided by Proust in his novels and elsewhere. Albaret's recollections of her employer were popularised through the release of Percy Adlon's film Céleste (1982) which was based on Belmont's book.

Life Augustine Célestine Gineste was born into a "peasant family" at Auxillac, a small village (subsequently subsumed for administrative purposes into La Canourgue) in the hills inland from Montpellier in central southern France. The owner of the taxi business that employed him was none other than Jacques Bizet, a childhood friend of Marcel Proust and son to Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen.

In 1913 Célestine Gineste left the village of her birth for the first time in her life. (although Odilon Albaret was almost at once called away for the next four years by the war). A key point came when Albaret was invited to involve herself in the great man's "breakfast" ritual, which took place at or soon after four o'clock each afternoon, as Proust rang his bell two times in order to be served with two large bowls of strong milky coffee and two croissants. Breakfast was served in his darkened bedroom and in silence.

Albaret remained fiercely loyal to her famous employer until (and long after) his death in 1922. As his posthumous reputation soared Albaret made a point of shunning publicity and avoiding any mention of her former employer's personal life that might have been construed as disloyal. With her husband she opened a hotel along the Rue des Canettes, the Hotel Alsace Lorraine, later renamed the Hotel La Perle, which the couple ran with their daughter, Odile.

The hotel was probably sold around 1954, by which time Odilon Albaret was close to retirement age. Albaret worked with her sister, Marie Gineste, between 1954 and 1970 at Le Belvédère in Montfort-l'Amaury (Yvelines). This was the house where Maurice Ravel had lived between 1921 and his death, and which now functioned as a small museum dedicated to the composer. Under the terms of a "convention de gardiennage" which the sisters signed with Edouard Ravel, they agreed to look after the house for a term of twenty years. Their responsibilities also involved showing visitors round. Later Albaret would admit to having talked far more about Proust than about Ravel when visitors came ("y avoir beaucoup plus parlé de M. Proust que de Ravel aux visiteurs"). Someone else who showed an interest in Albaret's recollections of Proust was the collector-philanthropist (and passionate bibliophile) Jacques Guérin, described by one reviewer as "not just a collector but a rescuer of all things Proustian".

It was on the advice of Guérin that during the early 1970s Albaret broke her fifty years silence on her time working for Marcel Proust. "After observing that others, less scrupulous than she, had talked and written about Proust things that were not always true, she decided to fulfill this one last duty to the one who had always said to her 'you are the one who will close my eyes [when I die]' and who had always addressed her as 'My dear Céleste'". She dictated seventy hours of taped material to the journalist-translator Georges Belmont. The result, appearing in 1973, was the book "Monsieur Proust: Souvenirs recueillis par Georges Belmont" ("Monsieur Proust: Remembrances collected by Georges Belmont."). She also agreed to sell to Guérin several items that Proust had given her: these have subsequently become some of the most sought after Proustian treasures among French book fanatics.

The Belmont book was well received by critics, and also resonated beyond the literary elite; it was translated, amongst other languages, into English.

Works

Legacy

Marcel Proust knew how important Céleste Albaret was to him. He told her husband: "Just tell her that if ever she left I would not be able to go on with my work." "Dites-lui bien que, si jamais elle partait, je ne pourrais plus continuer à travailler."

He wrote a poem to her:

Grande, fine, belle et maigre, Tantôt lasse, tantôt allègre, Charmant les princes comme la pègre, Lançant à Marcel un mot aigre, Lui rendant pour le miel le vinaigre, Spirituelle, agile, intègre, Telle est la nièce de Nègre.

Tall, elegant, beautiful and thin Sometimes worn out, sometimes animated Charming princes, like the underworld Throwing Marcel [Proust] an acid comment Trading honey for vinegar, Spiritual, adept, incorruptible That's Albert Nègre's niece