Truth is a stranger

"Ceci n'est pas un récit imaginaire. Tout ce que j'ai écrit s'est réellement passé, les personnages de cette histoire ont réellement existé." / "This story is not an invention. Everything I have written down did really happen; the protagonists of this story did really exist." This assertion, the author's plea to be believed (curiously absent from the English edition) is contained in the opening lines of a short Preamble (in the English edition, less poetically, Author's Note). Photographs interspersed throughout the story (for it is une histoire), starting with the glossy photographic band folded around the cover of the book like a vest, showing Monsieur Proust wearing the coat, are a tangible evidence of the reality of the narrative. Or are they?

The book opens with an exhumation: 

Ils sortent la boîte en carton. La descendent avec précaution, mais avec un certain détachement, comme si ce n'était pas à eux d'exhumer un si modeste objet. Moi je suis là, debout, dans la salle éclairée au néon. Un parent appelé à reconnaître le corps d'un proche.

       Ils posent la boîte sur la table au centre de la pièce. À peine ont-ils soulevé le couvercle qu'un odeur de camphre et de naphtaline me saisit. . . . Devant moi se trouve le manteau, étendu au fond de la boîte comme sur un linceul: raidi par le rembourrage de papier, on dirait l'habit d'un mort.

- trans. Danièle Valin

They bring out a cardboard box. They set it down gently, but with certain detachment, as if it weren't their job to exhume an object of such modest value. I stood in the middle of the room flooded with fluorescent light, like someone asked to identify the body of a relative.

      They placed the box on the table in the center of the room. As soon as they had removed the lid, I was overwhelmed by the smell of camphor and mothballs. . . .  Before me was the overcoat, laid out like a shroud at the bottom of the box: stiffened by paper padding, it seemed to be clothing a deceased.

[trans. modified from the Eng. edition]

This witness account is accompanied by three photographs: first a view of what looks like a storage room, with shelving lining the walls, and a plastic table in the center. On the table there is a white cardboard box, with tissue paper lining folded over the edges to reveal the content. The other two photographs are close-ups, showing the buttons and the loose threads, described and interpreted in detail. It is that description that confers on the photographs their documentary value.

The histoire is in fact made up of several stories, mises en abîme: the narrator's quest for Proust's overcoat, the story of its preservation, and her research into Jacques Guérin; Jacques Guérin's own fascination with Proust and his own quest for any physical trace of the writer; and incidental stories, fragments of other lives, or simply elements of Proust's biography gleaned from literature. And the thread running through all this is of course the story of the overcoat. Corroborating the cover photograph, there are quotes from À la recherche... featuring a coat; recollections of those who had known Proust, evoking his sensitivity to cold, and his ubiquitous fur-lined coat. When he wasn't wearing it, it "doubled as a blanket." After Proust's death, the already threadbare garment was packed away at his brother's house. And some time after Robert's death, it passed on to Werner, a dealer in antiques and the link between Guérin and Marthe Proust: she gave Werner the old covering apparently to keep his legs warm when he's on his boat, fishing. With some reluctance, more from disbelief that anyone could attach any value to such tattered piece of clothing than from a desire to hold on to it, Werner finally presented it to Guérin. And as Guérin's legacy, it passed on to the Museum Carnavalet, where it is now housed in a white cardboard box labeled, like Foschini's book, MANTEAU DE PROUST.

The document is subverted by the very proof of its reality and turned into fiction. And vice-versa, the narrative construction undermines the "purely evidential" function of the photograph which is drawn into a story where it does not inherently belong.