Marcel Proust

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Proust was born on 10 July 1871 in the Auteuil quarter of Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist who studied cholera in Europe and Asia. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family from Alsace. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith and was baptized on 5 August 1871 at the Church of Saint-Louis-d'Antin. By age nine, he had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter was considered a sickly child, with his education disrupted by illness. He excelled in literature at the Lycée Condorcet, receiving an award in his final year. As a young man, he cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. His sexuality and relationships with men were an open secret among his social circles, though Proust himself never publicly acknowledged being homosexual. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of stories 'Les plaisirs et les jours', were published in the 1890s to little public success.

Reader's Guide

In 1908, Proust began work on 'À la recherche du temps perdu' when he was 38. The novel was partially published in his lifetime, with the initial sections appearing in 1913. The first volume was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922 shortly before Proust's death. The remaining volumes were revised and published posthumously by his brother Robert based on Proust's drafts and proofs. 'La Recherche' helped pioneer the stream of consciousness literary technique. The novel's length, complexity and meditation on themes such as desire, artistic creativity, sexuality, and class rendered it a significant work in the development of literary modernism. Though confined by illness for the last three years of his life, Proust completed advanced drafts of the final parts of 'La Recherche' before his death. He died of pneumonia and pulmonary problems in 1922, aged 51, and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Proust served a year (1889–90) in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in 'The Guermantes' Way', part three of his novel. He was among the earliest Dreyfusards, attending Émile Zola's trial and claiming to have been the one who asked Anatole France to sign the petition in support of Alfred Dreyfus's innocence.

Did You Know?

• Proust's birth on 10 July 1871 coincided with the beginning of the French Third Republic, during the violence surrounding the suppression of the Paris Commune.
• He served a year in the French army (1889–90) at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in 'The Guermantes' Way'.
• Proust fought a duel in 1897 with writer Jean Lorrain, who publicly questioned the nature of Proust's relationship with his lover Lucien Daudet; both duellists survived.
• On the night of 11 January 1918, Proust was one of the men identified by police in a raid on a male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat.
• Man Ray photographed Proust on his deathbed in 1922.