In December 1896, Marcel Proust was introduced to a captivating young Englishwoman in Paris.
Marie Nordlinger was 20 – five years younger than the author, who nicknamed her the “French rose from Manchester” – and would become his confidante and muse for the next decade as he wrote his finest work.
The platonic friendship was an inspiration to Proust, but outside a small academic circle, the Englishwoman has been forgotten. Now, a new book by author and academic Cynthia Gamble examines their relationship in the years before the writer published his seven-part novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
“It’s a terribly poignant story,” Gamble told the Observer. “Some have suggested Marie was in love with Proust, but she was not.”
In fact, Nordlinger and Proust had been introduced at the Paris home of the writer’s close friend, the musician and composer Reynaldo Hahn, who was his secret lover. “[Marie] was in love with Reynaldo Hahn all her life; I have seen letters in which she says she will do anything for ‘dear Reynaldo’,” Gamble said. “He, of course was not at all interested in her, and neither was Proust.”
Nordlinger, born in 1876, was the third of seven children of an Italian father, who had made his fortune in textiles and shipping, and a German mother. She studied painting, design and sculpture at the Manchester School of Art. After a spell in Hamburg as an apprentice with the arts and crafts movement – which came to influence art nouveau – she arrived in Paris in 1896, chaperoned by her wealthy aunt.
The period between the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, later called the Belle Époque, was a time of optimism in France in which the arts, technology and science flourished.
Venezuelan-born Hahn, whose relationship with Proust is believed to have started in 1894, was Nordlinger’s second cousin and he invited her and her aunt to his home off the Champs-Élysées where they met his wealthy, cosmopolitan friends.
“Reynaldo introduced her to a new world,” Gamble said. “The group would go to the Louvre, to the opera and concerts, cultural events … it was mostly these men and Marie.”
In her notes, Nordlinger wrote of Proust: “At all times, [Marcel’s] eyes were his most striking feature, they were large and brown, the lids were heavy, the lashes long, the brows uneven – strangely luminous omnivorous eyes, eyes I can recall alight with fun and mimicry or suddenly, unashamedly, suffused with tears. He was not well-proportioned, his head unduly large for his shoulders – although expensively dressed … and well groomed, his appearance lacked elegance. His hands were small and ineffectual – this obviously must sound paradoxical. Marcel’s voice was indescribable, darker than his hair, more luminous than his eyes, radiating all the colours of the rainbow. I never heard another like it.”
At the time, Proust was translating the works of British polymath John Ruskin and sought Nordlinger’s help. In 1900, again chaperoned by her aunt, she and the writer spent several weeks in Venice.
“They had a marvellous time,” Gamble said. “Proust and Marie would take gondolas to visit St Mark’s basilica and visit places and art galleries to see and study paintings Ruskin mentions.
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“She was a very beautiful young woman who spoke several languages and was extremely independent. She would travel back and forth from Germany and France to Manchester and even went to the US unchaperoned, which was extremely unusual for a woman at that time.
“Proust’s letters to her when she was not in Paris were often questions about little points of language in his translations. In one letter in 1903 he called her his ‘French rose from Manchester’ … and sometimes after she had sent a present, he would write and thank her in the most poetic terms,” Gamble said.
Then, in 1908, the correspondence ended. Three years later, Nordlinger married German academic Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl in Paris and had two children, Albert and Pauline.
“I don’t know why Proust stopped writing to Marie,” Gamble said. “One can be a bit unkind and say by 1908 he had no need of her, because his two Ruskin books had been published.
“He did write a strange letter to her in 1911 at the time of her marriage in which he was not at all flattering about her husband, but he never posted it.”
Proust died in 1922, Hahn in 1947, and Nordlinger, who was awarded the Légion d’honneur for her services to France, died at her daughter’s home in Altrincham in October 1961.
Gamble, an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of several works on Proust, hopes her book, La Muse Anglaise de Marcel Proust, which was published last month in French, will find an English publisher. “I do think this is a unique work that puts Marie back in her rightful place,” she said. “So few people know of her and yet the more I discovered the more I realised what an amazing woman she was.”
