@editionsdelarchipel recently sent me this lovely little volume by Proust 🩷, entitled “…

@editionsdelarchipel recently sent me this lovely little volume by Proust 🩷, entitled “Jalousie” and described as an unpublished work… from 1921!

An “unpublished and complete novel” by Marcel Proust? Is that conceivable? Yet that is precisely what the monthly magazine “Œuvres libres” promised in November 1921. With the author’s consent, though he was aware he was being disloyal 🫣 to Gaston Gallimard, who, in an attempt to mitigate what he saw as the disastrous effect of this publication, asked Proust to give it “a special title”.

This piece, entitled “Jalousie”, consists of two lengthy excerpts from “Sodom and Gomorrah II”, in an early version whose “extraordinary analytical power” and “ruthless insight” are highlighted. Here we see the narrator’s budding jealousy, upon his return from an evening at the Princess of Guermantes’s, gradually turning into “cruel mistrust” 💔: was it innocent of Albertine and Andrée to waltz “pressed close together” at the Incarville casino? Consumed by suspicion, he sets out to spy on her — and to spy on his own heart... 🕵🏻‍♂️

This literary curiosity ✨ is followed here by “The End of Jealousy”, an early short story taken from the collection published in 1896 at the author’s own expense, “Pleasures and Days”, which was already exploring this central theme of the Albertine cycle, and more broadly of the whole of “the Search”. ❤️‍🩹

On 13 October 1921, just as Proust was submitting this unpublished work to “Œuvres libres”, his publisher at the N.R.F., Jacques Rivière, told him:

🖋️ “Personally, as you know, it is your extraordinary analytical ability that amazes me most. And, in this volume I’ve just read, it’s the way you draw out your love for Albertine from your jealousy that struck me as the most marvellous thing of all.”

🗳️ Proust: the novelist of jealousy?

#ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #MarcelProust #proustagram #AlbertineSimonet #Albertine #RTP #Proust #JacquesRivière #NRF #Gallimard