Beg-Meil, late summer 1895 🌅: Marcel Proust is in Brittany with Reynaldo Hahn 🎼.
Translated from French.
Beg-Meil, late summer 1895 🌅: Marcel Proust is in Brittany with Reynaldo Hahn 🎼. It was there, a year before publishing the collection “Pleasures and Days” with @calmann.levy and before discovering the works of John Ruskin (two of whose translations he would publish in 1903 and 1906), that he began writing his first novel. 🖋️
He abandoned it around 1899, and the manuscript remained unfinished 🤷🏻♂️. Rediscovered and published by @editions_gallimard in 1952 📚 by Bernard de Fallois, thanks to André Maurois and Suzy Mante-Proust (the author’s niece), “Jean Santeuil” (the title was not chosen by Proust) was subsequently published in the Pléiade series in 1971, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. ✨
Finally, the book was republished in 2001 as part of the @quarto_livres collection, again by @editions_gallimard: it features a foreword and a few revisions by the indispensable Jean-Yves Tadié. 🙌🏻
Indeed, as @thierrylaget points out in an article – the exact source of which I have misplaced – the opening sentence of “In Search of Lost Time”, “For a long time, I went to bed early”, implies that for a long time, the author went to bed without having devoted himself to his work. For his work, which he often compares to Scheherazade’s tales, demands to be written at night, out of step with the world.
Writing is the night. For Proust, to write is to move towards one’s night. 🌌🌙🖋️
— Marcel Proust, “Jean Santeuil”, @quarto_livres 2001, p. 73