Marcel Proust

A family from two worlds

Marcel's father was Adrien Proust (1834–1903). He came from Illiers, a small town near Chartres, south-west of Paris. His family was Catholic and not rich. Adrien worked hard and became a famous doctor in Paris.

Adrien Proust studied hygiene, the science of keeping people healthy. From 1885 he held the chair of hygiene at the Paris school of medicine. He worked on ways to stop cholera and other diseases from moving from country to country. He traveled far for this work, and he wrote many medical books. In 1869, before Marcel was born, he crossed Russia, Persia, and Egypt, on horseback and by camel, to map the roads by which cholera moved toward Europe. He helped to build the idea of the "cordon sanitaire": a chain of countries working together, with strict controls at the borders, to stop a disease on its way.

Marcel's mother was Jeanne Weil (1849–1905). Her family was Jewish. The Weils were makers of faience and porcelain (fine pottery). They had come to Paris from the east, from Alsace and Lorraine, and further back from Württemberg in Germany. Jeanne's grandfather, Baruch Weil, ran a porcelain factory in Paris at the start of the 19th century. Her father, Nathé Weil, made his money in finance and lived on it. Her great-uncle was Adolphe Crémieux, a famous lawyer and minister who gave French nationality to the Jews of Algeria and helped to end slavery in the French colonies. Jeanne herself was gentle, clever, and very well read.

Jeanne's mother, Adèle, had grown up in the salon of her aunt, Madame Crémieux, where writers like Lamartine and Victor Hugo were guests. She loved the letters of Madame de Sévigné, a great writer of the 17th century, and she passed this love to her daughter and her grandsons. This grandmother later became the model for the narrator's grandmother, one of the most loved figures of the novel.

Adrien and Jeanne married on 3 September 1870. Adolphe Crémieux was one of the witnesses. Jeanne promised that her children would be baptized, but she refused to change her own religion. So Marcel grew up between two worlds: a Catholic world from his father and a Jewish world from his mother. This mixed family background remained important in his life and in his book.

Birth in 1871

Marcel was born in a terrible time for France. The country had just lost the Franco-Prussian War against Germany. Paris had been hungry and cold during a long siege. Then came the fighting of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871.

Because of the danger, Adrien Proust took his pregnant wife out of the city center. They went to Auteuil, a green area at the edge of Paris. There, in the house and garden that Jeanne's uncle Louis Weil had bought in 1857, at 96 rue La Fontaine, Marcel was born at eleven in the evening of 10 July 1871.

The baby was very weak. For a while the family feared he would die. He lived, and on 5 August 1871 he was baptized in the church of Saint-Louis-d'Antin in Paris.

His only brother, Robert, was born on 24 May 1873. Robert was strong and healthy. Later he became a famous surgeon, like their father. The family moved to a large flat at 9 boulevard Malesherbes in Paris.

Two gardens: Auteuil and Illiers

Marcel's childhood had two happy places outside the flat in Paris. Both were gardens, and both entered his novel.

The first was Auteuil. Every spring and summer the family stayed in the big house and park of great-uncle Louis Weil, where Marcel was born. Three generations of the family met there, around the joking old uncle and the grandmother full of stories. In the garden grew chestnut trees, lilacs, and hawthorns, the flowering bushes that fill the most poetic pages of the novel. In the summer of 1881 the grandmother even took the young Marcel, alone with her, to the seaside town of Cabourg.

The second was Illiers, his father's home town. From the time Marcel was six, the family went there at Easter. Marcel stayed in the house of his aunt and uncle, Élisabeth and Jules Amiot. He read for hours in the garden. He walked by the small river and in a park called the Pré Catelan.

Later, in his novel, Proust mixed Illiers and Auteuil together. From them he made an imaginary town called Combray. It is the town of the narrator's childhood. In 1971, a hundred years after Proust's birth, the real town formally changed its name to Illiers-Combray, in honor of the book.

A sick child

When Marcel was nine years old, something happened that changed his life. In the spring of 1881 he was coming home from a family walk in the Bois de Boulogne. Suddenly he could not breathe. He was choking so badly that his parents thought he was dying.

It was his first big attack of asthma. His father, a great doctor, could do little. Another doctor was called and gave the boy an injection of morphine, without any effect. That night, the story says, they had to sit the boy up straight in bed, held by piles of heavy medical books.

From then on, Marcel was a fragile child. Flowers, dust, smoke, and country air could start an attack. The Easter stays in Illiers had to stop. His mother watched over him all the time. This deep love between the sick boy and his worried mother became a key part of his novel.

The most famous scene of the novel draws on this childhood. The little narrator cannot sleep until his mother comes upstairs to kiss him goodnight. One evening she does not come, because there is a guest. The boy waits on the stairs, sick with sadness. This "goodnight kiss" scene opens the whole book.

School years

In the autumn of 1882, at eleven, Marcel entered a well-known school in Paris, then called the Lycée Fontanes. Soon afterwards it took back its old name, Condorcet. He often missed class because of his asthma. Still, he read a great deal and wrote very well.

At school he found close friends: Jacques Bizet, son of the composer of Carmen, whom he had already met in primary school; Daniel Halévy; Robert Dreyfus; and others. With them he talked endlessly about books. Together they also made little class magazines, copied by hand, with names like Le Lundi and La Revue lilas.

After class the boys played in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées. There Marcel fell in love, in a child's way, with a Russian girl named Marie de Benardaky. He never forgot her. She later gave some traits to Gilberte, the narrator's first love in the novel.

In his last school year, Marcel had a philosophy teacher named Alphonse Darlu. Marcel admired him greatly. After only two days of class, he wrote Darlu a long, strange letter about his own divided mind. Darlu made him love philosophy for life. Years later, Proust went back to him for private lessons while studying for his degree.

A year as a soldier

In November 1889, at eighteen, Proust joined the army as a one-year volunteer. On 11 November he signed up. Four days later he joined the 76th infantry regiment in the city of Orléans.

Everyone expected the worst for this fragile, dreamy young man. In fact the year went well. He was allowed to sleep in a rented room in town, and his officers were kind to him. At a dinner given by the prefect of the region, in February 1890, he met another young volunteer serving in Orléans, Robert de Billy, who stayed a friend for life. During this army year he also suffered a serious loss: in January 1890 his beloved grandmother Adèle died of uremia, the same illness that would later kill his mother. His slow, delayed sorrow for her already looked like what the novel would one day call the "intermittences of the heart".

Proust even kept a happy memory of the army. Years later, in a friend's question album, he was asked which military act he admired most. He answered: his own year of service. Question albums like this one were a fashion of the time. One of them later became famous as the "Proust Questionnaire".

His captain, Count Walewski, came from the family of Napoleon. Proust watched him with delight. This officer later helped to inspire the captain de Borodino in the novel.

A student without a plan

Back in Paris in November 1890, Proust signed up to study law. He also joined the École libre des sciences politiques, a famous school of politics, where he found his friend Robert de Billy again.

He was not a bad student. In 1892 he passed his oral exams in politics with good marks. Later he also got his degree in law. Then, at the end of 1893, he began a degree in philosophy, partly at the Sorbonne and partly through private lessons. He followed the courses of the philosophers Émile Boutroux and Paul Janet, and received his degree on 30 March 1895, ranked twenty-third among the 118 candidates.

But he did not want any of the jobs his father hoped for. He tried two weeks in a lawyer's office and hated it. He said no to diplomacy, no to the courts, no to business.

In 1895 he sat a small exam for an unpaid post at the Mazarine, a great library in Paris. He ranked third among the three successful candidates. There were three posts. He almost never went to work. He asked for leave again and again. On 1 March 1900 the administration finally counted him as having resigned.

To his father this looked like a wasted life. In truth, the young man had already chosen his real work: watching people, and writing.

Salons, first pages, and Reynaldo Hahn

In the Paris of that time, rich families opened their homes on fixed days. Guests came to talk, to hear music, and to meet famous people. Such a meeting, and the room it happened in, was called a salon.

Proust loved the salons. From the age of seventeen he went from one to another. People laughed at him a little and called him a snob, a person who runs after grand names. But he was also studying this world, like a scientist studies insects.

He was welcomed by Geneviève Straus, a woman of famous wit who had first been married to the composer Georges Bizet. He met the writer Anatole France in the salon of Madame Arman de Caillavet. At Madeleine Lemaire's, a painter of flowers, he heard the best musicians of Paris.

In April 1893, at Madeleine Lemaire's, he met Count Robert de Montesquiou, a proud poet and dandy with a sharp tongue. Through him Proust reached the oldest French nobility, including the beautiful Countess Greffulhe. Montesquiou later gave many traits to the Baron de Charlus, one of the great characters of the novel.

At the start of 1892 a group of young men, most of them old Condorcet friends, decided to start a small magazine: the poet Fernand Gregh, Daniel Halévy, Robert Dreyfus, Louis de La Salle and others. Jacques Bizet brought Proust to the first meeting. They called the review Le Banquet ("The Banquet"), after a book by the Greek philosopher Plato, and in honor of the teaching of their master Darlu. The first issue appeared in March 1892, printed in four hundred copies; Gregh soon became its editor. There were eight issues in all, until March 1893.

Proust wrote short pieces for it: portraits, little stories, thoughts about love and fashion. When Le Banquet died, he wrote for a bigger magazine, La Revue blanche. There his texts appeared next to those of famous writers such as Mallarmé and André Gide.

In those same weeks, Proust's path crossed the path of a man he would often be compared to. On 7 January 1892 his mother's cousin Louise Neuburger married the philosopher Henri Bergson, and Marcel was one of the attendants at the wedding. Bergson also wrote about time and memory, and many readers later looked for his ideas behind the novel. But the two cousins never became close, and in the long interview he gave when Swann's Way came out, Proust said plainly that his book was not a "Bergsonian novel".

On 22 May 1894, at an evening in the Paris salon of Madeleine Lemaire, Proust met a young musician named Reynaldo Hahn. He was still a teenager, born in Caracas, in Venezuela, and already a brilliant composer and singer. Hahn sang his own songs for Marcel, above all his settings of poems by Verlaine, in a soft voice that all Paris praised.

On 18 August of that year, Madeleine Lemaire invited them both for a month to Réveillon, her castle east of Paris. There the friendship of the two young men turned into love. Their romance lasted about two years. After it ended, they stayed the closest of friends for the rest of Proust's life.

Some pains of this love entered the novel. One evening Hahn refused to ride home with Proust after a party. Proust turned this small wound into a famous scene: Odette going home in the Verdurins' carriage instead of Swann's.

Hahn was one of the very few people allowed into Proust's room during his last illness in 1922.

First book: Pleasures and Days (1896)

On 12 June 1896 Proust published his first book, Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Pleasures and Days). It collected his short stories, portraits, and poems.

It was a luxury book, printed in only 1,500 copies. Anatole France wrote the preface. Madeleine Lemaire painted flowers for it. Reynaldo Hahn wrote four piano pieces for the poems. It cost 13 francs 50, at a time when a normal book cost 3 francs 50.

The book sold very badly: in twenty-two years, only 329 copies left the publisher's stock. Critics saw only a gifted rich young man playing at literature. Even his friends teased him. In the winter of 1897, in a private show of shadow puppets, they played a sketch laughing at the price of the book, adding up the famous names inside it franc by franc.

Today readers see the book differently. Its themes, time, memory, sadness, and forgetting, already point toward the great novel to come.

On 3 February 1897 the writer Jean Lorrain attacked Pleasures and Days in a newspaper. Worse, he hinted in an ugly way at Proust's private life and his friendship with young Lucien Daudet.

Proust answered in the way of the time: he challenged Lorrain to a duel. A duel was a formal fight, with strict rules, to defend one's honor.

The two men met on 6 February 1897 in the woods of Meudon, near Paris, with pistols, at twenty-five paces. Proust's witnesses were the painter Jean Béraud and a famous duellist, Gustave de Borda; Reynaldo Hahn came too. Both men fired, and neither was hurt. The matter ended there. Proust's friends were surprised by his calm courage that day.

The Dreyfus affair

In 1894 a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly found guilty of selling secrets to Germany. The fight over his case, called the Dreyfus affair, split France in two for years.

On 13 January 1898 the novelist Émile Zola published his famous open letter J'accuse...! ("I accuse...!") in the newspaper L'Aurore, defending Dreyfus.

Proust and his friends had already been at work for weeks. They were collecting signatures from writers and thinkers for a protest text asking for a new trial. It appeared in L'Aurore just after Zola's letter. Anatole France signed. Proust later said, with some pride, that he had been the first "Dreyfusard".

His own father refused to sign. Adrien Proust, like most of official France, believed Dreyfus was guilty. After his sons put their names to the protest, he did not speak to them for a week.

Proust went to the court every day during Zola's trial in February 1898, arriving in the morning with sandwiches and a small flask of coffee and staying until five in the afternoon. He watched the faces, the lies, the courage of Colonel Picquart. He wrote these scenes into his early novel Jean Santeuil. Much later, the Dreyfus affair became one of the great subjects of In Search of Lost Time. It shows how the affair broke friendships and changed the salons.

Jean Santeuil, the hidden first novel

From 1895 Proust worked in secret on a long novel about a young man named Jean Santeuil. He began it during a seaside holiday at Beg-Meil, in Brittany, with Reynaldo Hahn. The novel drew heavily on his own life: his childhood, his mother, his life in society, the Dreyfus affair. But it already changed and combined real events.

He wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages. But the manuscript stayed unfinished and loosely organized. Around 1899 he gave it up, unhappy.

The pages stayed in boxes for half a century. Jean Santeuil was finally published in 1952, thirty years after Proust's death. Readers found in it many first drafts of the great novel.

The Ruskin years

In 1897, in a French magazine article, Proust discovered a new master: the English art critic John Ruskin, who had taught people how to look at cathedrals, at paintings, at nature. In December 1899 he wrote to a young English friend, Marie Nordlinger, that he was now at work on something quite new for him, about Ruskin and certain cathedrals.

Ruskin died on 20 January 1900. Within days Proust published articles about him. Then he set out on "Ruskin pilgrimages": trips to see the cathedrals Ruskin had loved, at Rouen, Amiens, and elsewhere.

In May 1900 Proust went to Venice with his mother, following Ruskin's books about the city. Reynaldo Hahn and Marie Nordlinger were waiting for them there. He went back alone in October of the same year. Venice stayed in his memory as a dream of stone and water. It later fills some beautiful chapters of the novel. That same October the family left boulevard Malesherbes for a new flat at 45 rue de Courcelles.

Proust's English was limited. Even so, he decided to translate Ruskin into French. His mother wrote out first drafts for him. Marie Nordlinger checked the details.

His translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens (La Bible d'Amiens) came out in February 1904. His translation of Sesame and Lilies (Sésame et les lys) followed in 1906. For it he wrote a long and important preface about reading, first printed in the review La Renaissance latine on 15 June 1905 as "Sur la lecture" ("On Reading") and later called Journées de lecture ("Days of Reading"). The scholar Adam Watt sees this preface as a seed of the whole novel: the child reading in a garden, and the hours of reading as time both lost and saved, are already there.

These years of patient work were his real school. Translating Ruskin taught him to build long sentences and to think about art, memory, and time.

The death of his parents

On 24 November 1903 Adrien Proust was struck by a brain hemorrhage at the medical school, where he had gone to lead a doctoral exam. He never woke again. He died on 26 November 1903.

A huge crowd of doctors and officials followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Marcel dedicated his translation of The Bible of Amiens to his father's memory.

Two years later he lost his mother. At the very start of September 1905 Jeanne Proust traveled with Marcel to the spa town of Évian. As soon as they arrived she was struck by violent attacks of uremia, a poisoning of the blood from failing kidneys, the same illness that had killed her own mother. She was brought back to Paris and refused most food and care. She died on 26 September 1905.

She had never left the Jewish faith of her parents, so there was no church service. Her burial at Père Lachaise, on 28 September, was a civil one.

The loss overwhelmed him. He had lived with his mother for thirty-four years. She had been his nurse, his first reader, his closest friend. In December 1905 he entered a clinic at Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, run by Doctor Sollier, to treat his nerves. The cure did little, and he left after about six weeks.

His grief, and the memory of his mother, later became central to his writing: the dead mother, and the pain of losing her, stand at the heart of In Search of Lost Time.

The flat on boulevard Haussmann

At the end of 1906, after months spent in a hotel at Versailles, Proust moved into a flat at 102 boulevard Haussmann in Paris. He was installed there on 27 December 1906. The flat had belonged to his great-uncle Louis Weil, the same uncle in whose Auteuil house he was born; Proust and his brother each now owned a quarter of the building. His mother had often dined there, and Proust chose as his bedroom the very room where the old uncle had died. He said he could not bear to live in a home his mother had never known, even though the noisy street was bad for his asthma.

To protect himself from noise, in 1910 he had the walls of his bedroom covered with plates of cork, a soft bark that stops sound. His housekeeper said that entering the room felt like walking into the inside of a giant bottle cork.

In this brown, silent room he lived the other way round. He slept by day. He woke in the late afternoon. He worked all night, in bed, by the light of one small lamp.

He loved music but could rarely go out to hear it. So, from early 1911, he paid for the "théâtrophone", a service that sent live opera down the telephone line. Lying in bed, he listened this way to whole operas, among them Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.

Cabourg and the motor car

From 1907 Proust spent his summers at the Grand Hôtel of Cabourg, a seaside town in Normandy. Proust believed the sea air was good for his chest. From his room, and in the dining hall, he watched the rich guests, the young girls on the beach, the waiters, the little dramas of hotel life.

All this became Balbec, the seaside town of the novel, with its Grand Hotel and its "little band" of girls on the sea front.

To visit friends along the coast, Proust hired motor taxis from a company run by his old school friend Jacques Bizet. One of the drivers was Alfred Agostinelli, a nineteen-year-old born in Monaco to an Italian family, who drove a red taxi. Proust liked him at once.

In November 1907 Proust published an article in Le Figaro about these car trips, called "Impressions de route en automobile". In it, the church towers of Caen seem to dance and change places as the car turns. This moving picture later became the famous page about the three steeples of Martinville in the novel.

1908–1909: the book is born

The years 1908 and 1909 changed everything. Slowly, out of many small projects, the great novel took shape.

First came the pastiches. A pastiche is a text written on purpose in the style of another writer. In early 1908, in Le Figaro, Proust retold a small news story, the Lemoine diamond fraud, in the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, and other great authors. Readers loved these games. They showed his perfect ear for style.

In May 1908 he listed his projects in a letter to a friend: a study on the French nobility, a Paris novel, an essay on the critic Sainte-Beuve and on Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on homosexuality, studies on stained-glass windows and on tombstones. All these pieces were about to melt into one single work.

That same year he filled about seventy-five very large sheets of paper with scenes drawn from his own past: the evenings at Combray, the two family walks, the young girls by the sea, Venice. All these scenes later entered the novel. The sheets, known today as the "Soixante-quinze feuillets" ("Seventy-five sheets"), then disappeared into private hands for decades; they were only published in 2021. They are the oldest large piece of In Search of Lost Time that we have.

Then came the plan of an essay against Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve had judged books by the life of the author: his friends, his manners, his talk. Proust believed the opposite. A book comes from a deeper self, another "I", that friends never meet. This essay, Contre Sainte-Beuve ("Against Sainte-Beuve"), was written in 1908 and 1909 but never finished. It was only published in 1954.

In the draft opening of this essay, Proust presented an episode as something that had happened to him. One cold day his cook offered him a cup of tea, a drink he never took. By chance she brought some slices of dry toast with it. He dipped a piece of toast in the tea, and at the first taste, without warning, the summers of his childhood came back to him, whole and alive. Here, in the shape of a piece of toast, is the first version of the madeleine. Michael Wood points out how much Proust insists on chance in this scene: such a resurrection of the past can never be planned, only given.

In a notebook of 1908 he also wrote about the uneven stones of the floor of Saint Mark's in Venice, another memory of this kind. And he asked himself, in writing, whether he should make a novel or a philosophy book, and whether he was a novelist at all.

The answer came in 1909. The essay turned into a story. The story grew. By the end of the year, Proust was writing the childhood chapters of Combray.

The novel grows longer

From 1909 to 1912 Proust wrote without rest. He filled school notebooks with his fast, hard-to-read handwriting. He glued extra strips of paper into the pages when there was no room left.

At first he thought the novel would make one book of 800 or 900 pages. Soon it passed 1,200 pages, and it kept growing.

He tried different titles. For a time he thought of calling the whole work Les Intermittences du cœur ("The Intermittences of the Heart"), that is, the stops and starts of feeling. In the end he chose À la recherche du temps perdu, "in search of lost time".

Looking for a publisher

Finding a publisher was long and painful. Between 1912 and 1913, the biggest houses of Paris all said no.

The publisher Fasquelle asked a reader for a report on the manuscript. The reader wrote that after more than seven hundred pages he still had no idea what the book was about or where it was going. Fasquelle refused.

The young Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), the house of André Gide and Gaston Gallimard, said no on 23 December 1912; Fasquelle's refusal arrived the very next day. Gide had barely looked at the manuscript. He remembered Proust as a society snob, and he was put off by a few odd sentences.

The publisher Ollendorff refused too. Its director wrote to a friend that he could not understand why a man needed thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before falling asleep.

At last a young, new publisher, Bernard Grasset, agreed to print the book. But there was a condition: Proust himself had to pay all the costs. He accepted at once. He only wanted the book to exist.

Swann's Way (1913)

The first volume was called Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way). Proust corrected the proofs so heavily, rewriting whole pages in the margins, that the printers had to set much of the book twice. He paid extra for this too.

He dedicated the book to Gaston Calmette, the director of Le Figaro, who had long supported him. A few months later, in March 1914, Calmette was shot dead in his own office by the wife of the minister Joseph Caillaux, in one of the great scandals of the age.

Just before publication, the newspaper Le Temps printed a long interview with Proust. In it he explained his ideas about time, memory, and the many selves inside one person. He also warned that the narrator who says "I" in the book is not himself.

Swann's Way went on sale on 14 November 1913. A young woman named Céleste Albaret, the new wife of Proust's taxi driver, carried signed copies across Paris to his friends and to the newspapers. She did not yet know that she would spend the next nine years at his side.

The reviews were mixed. Some critics praised the new voice. Others were lost. Henri Ghéon, in the NRF's own magazine, called the book the work of a man with too much free time, and compared its sentences to a huge net dragging everything up from the sea floor.

Then, in January 1914, André Gide read the book at last. He wrote Proust a letter of apology that became famous. Refusing this novel, he said, was the worst mistake the NRF had ever made, and one of the great regrets of his life. The NRF now begged to publish the next volumes.

Alfred Agostinelli

In May 1913 Alfred Agostinelli, the young driver from Cabourg, had come back into Proust's life. He had no work. Proust took him in as a secretary, to type the novel. Agostinelli moved into the flat with his companion, Anna.

Proust fell deeply in love with him. It was a painful, jealous, impossible love. Agostinelli, a free spirit who dreamed of flying machines, felt like a prisoner in the dark flat.

On 1 December 1913, two weeks after Swann's Way appeared, Agostinelli ran away with Anna to the south of France. Proust was desperate. He sent a friend, Albert Nahmias, to Monaco with money and secret offers for Agostinelli's father, to bring the young man back. The mission failed. According to Jean-Yves Tadié, Agostinelli probably did return to Paris for a few weeks at the start of 1914, brought back this time by the driver Odilon Albaret, before leaving again for good in April.

In the south, Agostinelli joined a flying school near Antibes. As a pilot he took a new name: "Marcel Swann", from his old master and his old master's book. Proust, half forgiving, ordered a huge gift for him without telling him: an airplane worth 27,000 francs, and probably a Rolls-Royce car as well. Agostinelli refused the gifts. Proust even dreamed of having lines by his beloved poet Mallarmé painted on the machine.

On 30 May 1914, on only his second flight alone, Agostinelli flew out over the sea against his teacher's orders. The plane fell into the water off Antibes. He could not swim. He drowned before help came. His last letter to Proust, full of joy about his flying, arrived after his death. Proust helped pay for divers to search for the body, which was found on 7 June, wearing a gold ring with the young man's initials, and he sent a large wreath of flowers for the grave.

This death changed the novel. Proust's love for Agostinelli, and his grief after the young man's death, fed into the story of Albertine: the girl the narrator keeps almost as a prisoner, who runs away, and who dies in an accident. He even copied into the novel, almost word for word, a letter he had written to Agostinelli on the last morning of his life, about the plane and the car. It is the only letter between them that survives, found much later by the scholar Philip Kolb.

The war years

Two months after Agostinelli's death, World War I began. Printing stopped. The second volume, already in proofs at Grasset, could not appear; the house of Grasset itself closed, its staff gone to the army.

His brother Robert served as an army surgeon near the front. Close friends died in the fighting. Bertrand de Fénelon, whom Proust had deeply loved, was killed in battle on 17 December 1914, shot while leading his men; Proust only had sure news of it in March 1915. Gaston de Caillavet, the friend of his youth, died of illness in January of the same year. In the novel, the death of Saint-Loup at the front owes much to Fénelon. Proust himself, though far too sick for service, still had to appear before army medical boards, and was only declared unfit for good in 1916. He stayed in Paris through the air raids.

He used the long, dark years to make the novel much bigger. Behind the cork walls he added many new characters, episodes, and themes, and the book grew from three planned volumes toward seven.

In 1916 he finally moved from Grasset to the NRF, the house of Gaston Gallimard, which had once refused him and now wanted him badly. Gallimard's firm published all the rest of his work.

During the war Proust also explored the hidden Paris of the night. He knew Albert Le Cuziat, who in 1917 opened a secret hotel for men at 11 rue de l'Arcade. Le Cuziat later gave some traits to Jupien in the novel. Céleste Albaret, in her memories, defended Proust against the darker stories told about these visits. She denied that he had given money to start the place, though she admitted that he had let Le Cuziat take a few pieces of old family furniture from storage.

Céleste Albaret

From 1913 Céleste Albaret, the driver's young wife, ran errands for Proust; from 1914, with the war emptying the household, she lived and worked in the flat as his housekeeper. For nine years, until his death, she was his cook, his nurse, his messenger, and his night-time listener.

She learned his strange rules. Only one kind of coffee, from one shop, made drop by drop in a special filter. A croissant on a fixed saucer, brought only when he rang twice. Smoking powders burned in the room against his asthma, filling it with thick fumes. No perfume, no flowers, no noise, ever.

She also kept his papers in order: the old notebooks, the new notebooks, the loose slips of paper covered with sudden ideas. She later told that during the war, on his orders, she burned thirty-two old black notebooks in the kitchen stove. It is one of the great losses of modern literature; some scholars think these notebooks may have held an early version of the later parts of the novel.

Proust put pieces of Céleste into Françoise, the servant of the novel, together with two earlier servants, Félicie and Céline. Céleste herself said, half joking, that she had well deserved the title of his book The Captive.

Fifty years later, in 1973, the old lady told her memories in a book, Monsieur Proust. It is one of the main sources about his daily life.

1919: new books, a new home, and the Goncourt Prize

In 1919 the building on boulevard Haussmann was sold, and Proust had to leave his cork-lined room. Before going, he burned old letters, private papers, and photographs he did not want to leave behind. He camped for some months in a furnished flat belonging to the actress Réjane, on the fourth floor of 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichat. Then, on 1 October 1919, he moved to his last home: a plain furnished flat on the fifth floor of 44 rue Hamelin. It was meant to be temporary. He died there.

In June 1919 Gallimard published three of his books at the same time: the second volume of the novel, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove); a new edition of Swann's Way; and a collection called Pastiches et Mélanges. Slowly, talk of genius began to fill the salons and the papers.

On 10 December 1919 the Prix Goncourt, the most famous book prize in France, went to Proust for À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. He won on the third round of voting, by six votes to four, against Roland Dorgelès, whose Les Croix de bois told the life of the soldiers in the trenches. Inside the small Goncourt academy, the writer Léon Daudet had led the campaign for Proust.

Part of the press strongly attacked the choice. How could the prize go to a rich, sick society man of forty-eight, against a book about the war? Old soldiers protested. The socialist paper L'Humanité ran the headline "Place aux vieux !" ("Make way for the old!"), and another paper wrote about "electoral cooking". The young poet Louis Aragon called Proust a hard-working snob.

The publisher of Dorgelès even printed a band around his book with the words "PRIX GONCOURT" in big letters and "four votes out of ten" in tiny ones. Gallimard took him to court and won.

Jacques Rivière, the young editor of the NRF magazine, defended Proust in print. He argued that a revolution in art can also look backward, toward the classic study of the human heart.

The scandal made Proust famous. On the evening of the prize, the men of the NRF, Gaston Gallimard and Jacques Rivière among them, were received in the bedroom of the rue Hamelin. In 1920 the French state gave him the Legion of Honour. Visitors, young writers, and translators now found their way up to the little flat of the rue Hamelin.

Last volumes and the yellow wall (1921–1922)

Sick as he was, Proust now worked urgently to finish and publish his book.

Le Côté de Guermantes I (The Guermantes Way I) came out at the end of October 1920. Le Côté de Guermantes II appeared together with Sodome et Gomorrhe I in one volume on 2 May 1921, printed in 8,000 copies. Sodome et Gomorrhe II followed on 29 April 1922, in three small volumes.

Sodome et Gomorrhe spoke openly about homosexual love, both between men and between women. Some readers of the old world were shocked. André Gide, who wanted a prouder, more open way of writing about the subject, came several times to the rue Hamelin to argue about it through the fumes of the smoking powders.

Gallimard also sold the rights for translations into English, German, and Spanish.

In the spring of 1921 a Paris museum, the Jeu de Paume, opened a show of Dutch paintings. It included the View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer, which Proust had seen at The Hague in October 1902, during a journey with Bertrand de Fénelon, and had called the most beautiful painting in the world.

One morning in May 1921, after a night without sleep, Proust asked the writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, whose articles on Vermeer he had admired, to take him there on his arm. That day the sick man saw the Vermeer, went on to a second exhibition, of paintings by Ingres, and even lunched at the Ritz. On the terrace beside the museum, someone photographed him in the sunlight; these are the last photographs of Proust.

Proust told that he had felt a frightening dizziness on the stairs before going out. He gave that dizziness, and the painting, to a character in the novel: the old writer Bergotte rises from his sickbed to see the View of Delft, fixes his eyes on a little patch of yellow wall, tells himself that he should have written like that, and dies in front of the painting. It became one of the most famous death scenes in literature. Tadié warns, though, against the legend that Proust himself almost fainted before the Vermeer, a story spread later by his brother: Proust had invented Bergotte's illness weeks before the visit, and after the museum he calmly acted out his whole day for Céleste, with shining eyes. Proust had written Bergotte's death before that day; afterward he went back to the page and made it richer with what he had just felt.

Last months and death

One day in the spring of 1922 Proust rang for Céleste. She saw at once that something had happened. He said to her: « Cette nuit, j'ai mis le mot "fin". » ("Last night, I wrote the word 'end'.")

He added that now he could die. The book existed, from its first word to its last. Céleste placed this scene in the spring of 1922. His biographer William C. Carter thinks it may have happened years earlier, perhaps already in 1916, when Proust told his publisher that the whole novel was now written from beginning to end. In any case he went on correcting and adding until his last hours. But the frame of the book was now complete.

On 18 May 1922 Proust went to a grand supper at the Hôtel Majestic, given by his English friends Sydney and Violet Schiff after the first night of Stravinsky's ballet Renard. Around the table sat Picasso, Stravinsky, the ballet director Diaghilev, and the Irish writer James Joyce, author of Ulysses. That same day, by a bad mistake, Proust had swallowed a dose of pure, undiluted adrenaline, which burned his throat and stomach; he went to the party all the same. For weeks afterward he could take almost nothing but ice cream and iced beer brought from the Ritz.

Proust and Joyce then shared a taxi home. It did not go well. Joyce lit a cigarette and opened the window, both bad for Proust's lungs. Proust said politely that he had not read Joyce. Joyce answered that he had never read Proust. Céleste said the meeting left no mark at all on Proust; he never even mentioned Joyce's name at home.

In early October 1922 Proust caught cold after going out to a party. The cold was followed by bronchitis, an inflammation of the airways in the lungs.

He refused almost all treatment. He would not rest, would not eat, would not let anyone change the way of life he had built. His brother Robert, the great surgeon, begged him to enter a clinic. Proust angrily sent him away.

He worked on. On 8 November Jacques Rivière came to collect the corrected text of La Prisonnière (The Captive) for the printer. In his last days, eating almost nothing, drinking only iced beer brought from the Ritz hotel, Proust was still revising Albertine disparue.

The bronchitis turned into pneumonia, a deadly infection of the lungs themselves.

In the night of 17 to 18 November 1922, Proust called Céleste to his bed. He told her that if he lived through this night, he would prove the doctors wrong.

Together they worked on corrections and additions to the novel. He dictated; she wrote. The sentences he dictated that night were for the death of Bergotte, the dying writer of his own book. When her frozen fingers could no longer follow, he took the pen back and went on alone. At half past three in the morning he stopped, too tired, and asked her to stay near him.

At dawn he asked for coffee, then for the iced beer. When told it had not yet come, he said quietly that the beer, like everything else, would arrive too late. At ten in the morning his doctor came; then his brother Robert. Nothing more could be done.

Marcel Proust died that afternoon, Saturday 18 November 1922, at the age of fifty-one, with Céleste and Robert beside him. When Céleste wanted to fold the dead man's hands, Robert gently stopped her: he had died at work, he said, and his hands should stay free.

Funeral and posthumous publications

The funeral took place on 22 November 1922 at the church of Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot. Instead of the usual church music, the organ played Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte. A huge and very mixed crowd came: dukes, writers, artists, and simple readers.

He received military honors, as a knight of the Legion of Honour. Coming out of the church, the writer Maurice Barrès, who had never taken Proust quite seriously, said: "So that's the end of our young man." In the crowd, unnoticed by Proust's friends, stood James Joyce, who had come to salute him.

Proust was buried in the family grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with his father and mother. His black marble tomb is visited every day by readers from all over the world.

Proust died with three parts of the novel still unpublished. They were printed from his manuscripts and typed copies in the following years: La Prisonnière (The Captive) in 1923, Albertine disparue (The Fugitive) in 1925, and Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) in 1927.

Proust himself had prepared this ending. In February 1922 he had hired a young typist, Yvonne Albaret, a niece of Odilon, to type the last part of the novel, and in 1922 he had chosen himself to cut it into two volumes called La Prisonnière and La Fugitive. Because he died in the middle of this work, the text of these volumes still gives problems to scholars. In 1986 a typed copy of Albertine disparue corrected by Proust was found; it is less than half the length of the text printed in 1925. This is why modern editions of this volume differ, and why it goes under two different titles.

In January 1923 the NRF magazine published a special number in his honor. Writers from many countries took part, among them Ernst Robert Curtius from Germany and José Ortega y Gasset from Spain. In England, a book of tributes appeared the same year, with texts by Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett.

Within a few years, Proust had become an internationally recognized writer, and his novel was becoming a modern classic.

One novel in seven parts

À la recherche du temps perdu is not a series of separate books. Proust always thought of it as one single novel, built like a cathedral, where the last stone answers the first; he said the cuts between volumes existed only because so long a book could not be printed as one. The final shape of seven parts also grew with time: the war stopped publication for years, the text kept growing, and the last three parts appeared only after his death.

In Terence Kilmartin's English edition it runs to about 3,300 pages. It has hundreds of characters. A special guidebook, with four indexes of its characters, real people, places, and themes, was made just to help readers find their way in it.

The seven parts

The dates and English titles follow the standard English edition. The last three parts came out after Proust's death.

The story, very shortly

The novel is the life story of the narrator, told by himself. It begins with one of the most famous first sentences in French literature: « Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. » ("For a long time I used to go to bed early.")

As a child in Combray, he waits every night for his mother's goodnight kiss. He walks with his family along two paths: "Swann's way", past the house of their friend Charles Swann, and the "Guermantes way", toward the castle of the noble Guermantes family.

A long middle section, "Un amour de Swann" ("Swann in Love"), goes back in time. It tells how the fine, clever Swann fell in love with Odette, a courtesan (a woman paid to be the companion of rich men), and how jealousy poisoned him.

The narrator grows up. He loves Swann's daughter Gilberte, then loses interest. At the seaside town of Balbec he meets a group of young girls, among them Albertine. In Paris he enters the glittering world of the Guermantes and watches the strange Baron de Charlus.

He takes Albertine to live with him in Paris, watching her like a prisoner because he is jealous. She runs away. She dies in a riding accident. Slowly he forgets her, and this forgetting hurts almost more than the loss.

Years pass, and the war passes. At a last great party, the narrator sees all the people of his life grown old, like actors wearing white wigs. Then several small accidents of memory, one after another, bring his whole past back to him. He understands at last what his life was for: to write the book of it. Many readers understand that planned book as the very novel they have just read, though critics do not all agree.

The narrator

The story is told in the first person: the narrator always says "I". He has no clear family name. Only once or twice does the text suggest that his first name might be Marcel.

He is very close to Proust: same childhood places, similar poor health, same world. But he is not Proust. Proust himself warned readers, in his 1913 interview, that the "I" of the book was not him. For example, the narrator is not Jewish, while Proust's mother came from a Jewish family. The narrator also presents himself as attracted to women, while Proust himself had relationships with men; though many critics find the novel's treatment of desire more complex than this simple contrast. The critic Leo Bersani gave a whole chapter to this puzzle of "Marcel the character and Proust the author": the narrator, he shows, is not a portrait of the author but the author's experiment, a self freed from facts so that it can find laws.

Céleste Albaret laughed at readers who took the novel as a simple diary of Proust's life. That, she said, was to forget how much imagination he had.

Main characters

The novel has hundreds of characters. Here are the most important ones.

Charles Swann is a rich, elegant friend of the family, a lover of art. His unhappy love for Odette opens the way for all the loves of the book. Odette becomes his wife; their daughter is Gilberte, the narrator's first love.

The narrator's mother and grandmother are the two great loving figures of his life. The slow death of the grandmother, and the pain that returns long after it, fill some of the deepest pages of the novel.

Françoise is the family's servant: hard-working, proud, full of old country wisdom and old country cruelty. Many readers find her one of the funniest characters in the book.

The Baron de Charlus is a proud nobleman of the Guermantes family, brilliant, insulting, and secretly homosexual. His rise and fall run through the whole second half of the novel.

Oriane, Duchess of Guermantes, is the queen of Paris society, famous for her wit. The narrator worships her from afar before he sees the emptiness behind the shine.

Albertine is the girl of Balbec whom the narrator loves, keeps, loses, and mourns.

Three invented artists appear through the book: Bergotte the writer, Elstir the painter, and Vinteuil the composer. A short melody by Vinteuil, the "little phrase", becomes the secret music of Swann's love and of the whole novel.

The Verdurins are a rich couple who run a "little clan" of guests. Madame Verdurin, half comic and half frightening, climbs through the whole book, from her small salon to the very top of society.

From real life to the novel

Readers in Proust's own time loved to hunt for the "keys" of the book, the real people behind the characters. Proust always answered that a character is made from many models, not one.

Still, some models are clear. Illiers and Auteuil, mixed together, made Combray. Cabourg and its Grand Hôtel made Balbec. The proud Count Robert de Montesquiou gave much of himself to the Baron de Charlus; to protect himself, Proust pretended in public that the model was another man, the Baron Doazan.

The Duchess Oriane de Guermantes mixes three real women: the bird-like profile of the Countess de Chevigné, the bearing and the famous eyes of the Countess Greffulhe, and the sharp wit of Madame Straus. The Countess Greffulhe gave even more of herself to the Princess de Guermantes, and her husband, Count Greffulhe, a rich and terrible man nicknamed "thundering Jupiter", gave much to the Duke.

Laure Hayman, a famous beauty whom young Proust had courted, lent much to Odette, above all to the "lady in pink" of the narrator's childhood. Madame Verdurin, the terrible hostess, was built from several real hostesses of Proust's youth, among them Madeleine Lemaire and Madame Arman de Caillavet. The old Anatole France lent many traits to the writer Bergotte. The old diplomat Norpois owes much to Camille Barrère, a French ambassador who was a friend of Proust's father. Proust himself said that Vinteuil's "little phrase" began with a passage from a violin sonata by Saint-Saëns, mixed with other music he loved. Alfred Agostinelli was one of the main sources of Albertine. And Céleste Albaret, with two other servants, gave life to Françoise.

The madeleine and involuntary memory

The most famous pages of the novel tell a very small event. The adult narrator, tired and sad, drinks a spoonful of tea in which he has softened a piece of madeleine, a little shell-shaped cake. Suddenly a strange joy fills him. He searches inside himself. And all at once his whole childhood in Combray rises out of the cup: the house, the garden, the town, the people.

Proust explained the idea himself when the book came out. Voluntary memory, the memory we call up on purpose, gives us only dry facts about the past. But a taste or a smell, met again by chance, can bring back a whole piece of lost time, alive and complete. He called such memories involuntary, because we cannot call them up at will; they come to us.

In the early draft of 1908–1909, it is not a madeleine but a piece of toast dipped in tea, brought by a cook on a cold day, that plays this part. In the finished novel the humble toast became the more poetic madeleine.

The novel is full of such moments: a napkin, a spoon striking a plate, the uneven paving stones of a courtyard that suddenly give back Venice. Roger Shattuck, in his guide to the novel, even drew up a full table of these "moments bienheureux" ("blessed moments"), from the madeleine to the final chain of memories, to show how carefully they are placed across the seven parts. The critic Jean-Pierre Richard noticed a telling detail: the madeleine only works once it is broken and half melted in the tea. The past hides in matter, and matter must open for the past to come out. The flash alone does not make the book: the narrator must still search his joy, understand it, and turn it into sentences through long work. Critics like Leo Bersani have stressed this second step.

Time

Time is the deepest subject of the novel: it is in the title, in the first sentence, and in the last word of the book, which is « Temps » ("Time").

Time destroys. It changes faces, kills loves, empties salons. At the final party the narrator sees his old friends as if disguised as old people, and at first does not recognize them.

But time can also be found again. Involuntary memory joins a moment of the past to a moment of the present. For a second, the narrator stands outside time. Art can fix this miracle on paper. That is why the last part is called Time Regained. Michael Wood measures the size of this circle: near the end, the narrator returns to the evening of the goodnight kiss, now some 3,000 pages away, in the French text, from its first telling.

The critic Antoine Compagnon pointed to another idea, even deeper for Proust: the "intermittences of the heart". Our feelings do not flow smoothly; they stop and start. The narrator only truly feels his grandmother's death a year later, when he bends down to take off his boots in the hotel where she once helped him. For a while Proust even wanted to call the whole novel The Intermittences of the Heart.

Art

For Proust, art is the most serious thing in the world. The scholar Richard Bales writes that probably no other great novel gives the arts so central a place. Life passes and lies to us. Only art can catch the truth of a moment and keep it.

Near the end of the novel the narrator says that real life, life at last discovered and made clear, is literature. Every reader of Proust, he adds, reads first of all inside himself. Reading is itself one of the novel's great subjects: Adam Watt has shown how the boy's readings in the garden of Combray, down to the old novel his grandmother gives him, already carry the whole program of the book.

The three invented artists of the book show three arts: Bergotte for writing, Elstir for painting, Vinteuil for music. Their works teach the narrator, step by step, what he must do. For Leo Bersani, this is the real point of involuntary memory: the blessed moments matter less for the past they return than for the lesson they give about what a work of art must be. Bergotte's death in front of Vermeer's little patch of yellow wall says it plainly: his own books fall short of the perfection he sees in the painting.

Love and jealousy

Love, in Proust, is not a happy meeting of two people. It is something that happens inside one person's head. We do not love the real other; we love a picture we have made of them.

That is why jealousy matters so much. The jealous lover, Swann with Odette, the narrator with Albertine, wants to know everything, and can never know everything. The other person always keeps a hidden life. Jealousy is painful, but for Proust it is also the moment when the jealous lover thinks and searches hardest. Leo Bersani devoted a chapter to this "anguish and inspiration of jealousy": in Proust, he argues, the tortured questions of the jealous lover are the training school of the future novelist, who will spend his life imagining the hidden lives of others.

The novel also says something sadder: we are cured of love by forgetting, and forgetting is a small death of the self who loved.

Society and snobs

Half of the novel is a huge, funny, cruel picture of Paris society between about 1880 and 1920, the world of the Belle Époque and after.

Proust paints the small clan of the Verdurins, who pretend to find the great nobles "boring". He paints the noble Guermantes, whose politeness is a fine art and whose hearts are often dry. He shows how the Dreyfus affair, and then the war, break and remake this world. At the end, Madame Verdurin has become Princess of Guermantes: society has changed from top to bottom.

A snob is a person who values people only by their rank. Proust was called a snob all his life. In the novel he studies snobbery in great detail, showing its every move from the inside.

Homosexuality

Proust gave male and female homosexuality an unusually large place in a major novel of his time. The volume Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–1922) takes its title from two cities of the Bible and treats the subject on a grand scale.

The Baron de Charlus is the center of this theme: a great nobleman whose desires must stay secret, and whose pride, jealousy, and social position slowly break down. Proust shows the fear, the codes, and the secret society of men like Charlus with a mix of comedy and deep pity. His picture belongs to its own time: it joins sympathy and humor to medical ideas of the 1900s, and readers still discuss it today.

Proust himself had relationships with men, and did not hide it from close friends such as André Gide. The narrator, in contrast, usually presents himself as attracted to women and observes this world from outside, though his relation to it is more complex than it first appears. Gide thought this reserve was a lack of courage, and the two writers argued about it in Proust's smoky bedroom.

The long sentence

Proust's sentences are famous for their length. Some run for half a page or more. They open, turn, add a thought inside a thought, and close far from where they began.

This is not carelessness. A Proust sentence follows the real movement of a mind: a feeling, then a doubt about the feeling, then a memory that the doubt wakes up. Readers who accept its slow rhythm often compare it to music.

Not everyone accepted it at first. In 1914 the critic Henri Ghéon compared Proust's sentence to a huge fishing net, endlessly long, that drags the bottom of the sea and brings up everything at once. He meant it as blame. Today it reads almost as praise.

Metaphor

A metaphor is a picture in words: saying one thing through another. For Proust, metaphor was the heart of style, because it does what involuntary memory does: it joins two different things and strikes a truth from them.

In his pages, church towers become flowers, then golden pivots, then shy girls. A steeple looks like a golden cake. The sea and the land trade their colors. Jean-Pierre Richard showed that a Proust metaphor is rarely a single flash; it unfolds step by step, like a walk through a landscape of images. Roger Shattuck went one step further and made the double image the key to the whole book. Like our two eyes, which see one thing from two slightly different places, Proust always shows a person or a feeling twice, at two moments of time, and truth appears in the space between the two pictures. Shattuck called this "Proust's binoculars".

A world of the senses

Richard's whole book, Proust et le monde sensible ("Proust and the World of the Senses"), maps the novel through the body: tastes, smells, textures, light.

He shows a writer in love with matter: soft things and hard things, velvet and silk, foam of the sea, melting ices, the smell of a closed room that suddenly makes the narrator deeply happy. In Proust, thinking always begins in the body. The famous madeleine is only the best-known example of this.

Humor

People who have not read Proust often expect only sadness and long sentences. In fact the novel is very funny.

Françoise's kitchen speeches, the village priest's endless talk about his church, the fake modesty of Legrandin, the wars of the Verdurin salon: these are famous comic scenes. Proust also kept his gift for pastiche. Inside the novel he placed a long fake page of the Goncourt brothers' diary, so perfect that it fools the narrator himself.

Proust in English

The Scottish translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff began putting the novel into English in Proust's own lifetime. His version of Swann's Way appeared in September 1922, only weeks before Proust died. Scott Moncrieff gave the whole work an English title taken from a line of Shakespeare: Remembrance of Things Past. Proust lived just long enough to react: in October 1922 he wrote to thank his translator, but he was unhappy with this general title, because the "lost time" of the French title, found again at the very end of the book, had disappeared from it.

Scott Moncrieff died in 1930 before finishing the last part. In the early 1980s Terence Kilmartin revised the whole translation, using the corrected French text. Later editions use the more exact title In Search of Lost Time. In 2002 a completely new English version appeared, made by a team with a different translator for each volume. Through these translations, Proust became a central author for readers of English, praised early on by writers such as Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett.

Places to visit

In Illiers-Combray, the house of "Aunt Léonie" where the child Marcel spent his Easters is now a Marcel Proust museum. The town added "Combray" to its name in 1971, to mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

In Paris, the Carnavalet museum shows his last bedroom: the small brass bed, darkened by years of fumigations, in which he revised and completed the later parts of his novel, and in which he died. His grave is at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

A word in the language

Proust gave the French language an everyday expression. A "madeleine de Proust" now means any taste, smell, or small object that suddenly brings back one's past.

Proust in films and other arts

Artists of many kinds have tried to bring the novel to the screen and the stage. The British playwright Harold Pinter wrote a complete film script of the whole novel in 1972, The Proust Screenplay; the film was never made, but the screenplay was adapted for the London stage in 2000. Volker Schlöndorff filmed Swann in Love in 1984, Raoul Ruiz Time Regained in 1999, and Chantal Akerman La Captive in 2000, each taking one part of the novel. Since 1998 the French artist Stéphane Heuet has been retelling In Search of Lost Time as a series of comic-book albums.

The Proust Questionnaire

As a teenager and again as a young man, Proust filled in printed question albums, a game much loved in the salons of the time, with questions such as "What is your idea of happiness?". The oldest known album, a small book called Mes confidences ("My confessions"), is dated 25 June 1887, a few days before his sixteenth birthday; it stayed unknown for more than a century, and Jean-Yves Tadié has given it a whole study. The answers of a second album, filled in when he was about twenty-one, became famous later under the name "Proust Questionnaire". Magazines and television shows have used versions of it ever since to interview famous people.

Books about Proust

Chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Proust