Marcel Proust died on 18 November 1922, in the afternoon, at an hour that remains unknown…

Marcel Proust died on 18 November 1922, in the afternoon, at an hour that remains unknown: those closest to him – his brother Robert Proust and his maid Céleste Albaret on the one hand, and his oldest friend Reynaldo Hahn on the other – disagree on the exact time of his final breath. And it doesn’t really matter. 🕰🤷🏻‍♂️

Above all, this indecision helps us to grasp just how much of a shock his death was to those around him, to the small literary circle, to his few friends and to the general public. 🗞😢

From the very first evening, there was a veritable stream of visitors in the small flat on the fifth floor of 44 Rue Hamelin, in Paris. The following day, post-mortem photographs were taken, along with sketches of the author lying dead in his bed, and it is clear that his beard was shaved off after the initial photographs had been taken, no doubt so that his face could be more easily recognised. ⚰️🪦

Jacques Rivière, his editor at @la_nrf, had to announce his death to the literary world and the public, as shown in the draft reproduced above. 📝

Paul Morand drew the portrait you can see above in pen 🖋, and made a serious mistake with the date, no doubt in the heat of the moment. 🥺

On 2 May 1933, his brother Robert Proust delivered his inaugural lecture at the Paris Faculty of Medicine: “I was very young (…) when my father was appointed professor, but this memory has remained so vivid in my heart that, for me, the time that separates me from it is as though it had been wiped away. It had been such a joy that my brother and I were literally overjoyed. In our family life, joys and sorrows were entirely shared between the two of us; what was true of our youth remained so throughout our lives until the day I had the misfortune of losing my brother. His friends, who have continued to hold him in the highest regard, share my belief that he would be experiencing such complete joy today.” 👨🏻‍⚕️👨🏻‍🎓👨🏻‍🏫

— this text is quoted in the foreword by @thierrylaget to Marcel Proust’s volume, “Lettres à Horace Finaly”, @editions_gallimard 2022, pp. 32–33

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