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 During the final decade of Proust's life, when his health declined and he became progressively more withdrawn, even while working with continuing intensity on his writing, she became his nurse and "the writer’s most trusted conduit to the world beyond his reclusive,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. It was well received by critics. Albaret's recollections of her employer were more widely communicated through the 1982 release by Percy Adlon of the film Céleste which was based on Belmont's book.