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Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: ​[maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.
Biography</SPAN>

Proust was born in Auteuil (the southern sector of Paris' then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War.
His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.
Proust's father, Achille Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia; he was the author of many articles and books on medicine and hygiene.
Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a rich and cultured Jewish family from Alsace.[2] She was literate and well-read; her letters demonstrate a well-developed sense of humour, and her command of English was sufficient for her to provide necessary assistance to her son's translations of John Ruskin.[3] Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith.[4] He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practiced that faith.
By the age of nine, Proust had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child.
Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.)
In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet, but his education was disrupted because of his illness.
Despite this he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. It was through his classmates that he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time.[5]
Despite his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) as an enlisted man 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. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. At this time, he attended the salons of Mme Straus, widow of Georges Bizet and mother of Proust's childhood friend Jacques Bizet, and of Mme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models of Madame Verdurin, and mother of his friend Gaston Arman de Caillavet, with whose fiancée (Jeanne Pouquet) he was in love. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet that he made the acquaintance of Anatole France, her lover.
In an 1892 article published in Le Banquet entitled "L'Irréligion d'&Eacute;tat" and again in a 1904 Le Figaro article entitled "La mort des cathédrales", Proust argued against the separation of Church and State, declaring that socialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church and emphasizing the latter's role in sustaining a cultural and educational tradition.[6]
Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead.[3]
Proust, who was a closetedhomosexual,[7] was one of the first European novelists to mention homosexuality openly and at length in the parts of &Agrave; la recherche du temps perdu which deal with the Baron de Charlus. Lucien Daudet and Reynaldo Hahn were noted to be his lovers.
His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year.[8] Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.
Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel.[9] He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris
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French novelist, best known for &Agrave; la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), his autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style. The work collected pieces from Proust's childhood, observations of aristocratic life-style, gossip, recollections of the closed world, where the author never found his place. The key scene is when a madeleine cake (a small, rich cookie-like pastry) enables the narrator to experience the past completely as a simultaneous part of his present existence:
"And suddenly the memory revealed itself: The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." (from Remembrance of Things Past)
Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil, near Paris, the son of an eminent doctor, Adrien Proust, and his wife, Jeanne Weil, who was from a well-to-do Alsatian Jewish family. The village of Auteuil, where Proust spent his holidays as a child, was described in an 1855 guidebook as "out of a comic opera." Later Auteuil and Illiers became the Combray of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust was baptized as Catholic, but he never practiced the religion. From 1882 to 1889 Proust attended the Lycée Condorcet, where he felt isolated and misunderstood. "We were rough with him," recalled one of his classmates. In spite of his severe asthma, from which he had suffered since childhood, Proust did his one year military service at Orléans.
Proust studied law at the famous Sorbonne at the &Eacute;cole des Sciences Politiques. He contributed to Symbolist magazines and frequented the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the wealthy and aristocratic area of Paris. During the late summer of 1895 he started to write Jean Santeuil, which he later abandoned. In 1896 his first books appeared: Portraits de peintres and Les plaisirs et les jours, with drawings by Madeleine Lemaire. Proust's unpublished texts from this period, Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve, an attack on the biographical criticism of Sainte-Beuve, were discovered in the 1950s.
"It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?" (Proust in Reading in Bed, selected and edited by Steven Gilbar, 1995)
From 1895 to 1899 Proust worked on an autobiographical novel that remained unfinished. In 1899 he started to translate the English art critic John Ruskin, without knowing much English. His earliest love affairs, which had been heterosexual, changed later into homosexual affairs. Among them was Alfred Agostelli, who was married and was killed in an air accident.
According to some sources, Proust frequented Le Cuziat's male brothel, but although these details have fascinated his biographers, they have shed little light on his on his literary accomplishments. To the age of 35 Proust lived the life of a snob and social climber in the salons. For a short time he worked as a lawyer and was active in the Dreyfuss affair, like &Eacute;mile Zola and other artists and intellectuals.
"A great part – perhaps the greatest – of Proust's writing is intended to show the havoc wrought in and round us by Time; and he succeeded amazingly not only in suggesting to the reader, but in making him actually feel, the universal decay invincibly creeping over everything and everybody with a kind of epic and horrible power." (Georges Lemaitre in Four French Novelists, 1938)
Throughout his life Proust suffered from asthma. He was looked after by his Jewish mother, to whom the writer was – neurotically – attached.
After the death of his father in 1903 and mother in 1905, Proust withdrew gradually from high-society circles.
Until 1919 Proust lived in a soundproof flat, at the 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he devoted himself to writing and introspection. When James Joyce met Proust at a midnight supper in the fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922, the two great innovative writers did not speak more than a few words with each other. "Of course the situation was impossible," Joyce recalled later. "Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end."
Proust was financially independent and free to start on his great novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which was influenced by the autobiographies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and François Chateaubriand. From 1910 he spent much time in his bedroom, often sleeping in the day and working at night. "For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V."
In 1912 Proust produced the first volume of his seven-part major work, &Agrave; la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). The massive story of 3 000 pages occupied the last decade of his life. Its first volume, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way), was printed at Proust's own expense in 1913, after Andre Gide advised the Gallimard publishing house to reject it. Swann's Way gained a modest success. Gide made later an offer to publish the subsequent volumes. Another famous writer, E.M. Forster, had his doubts about the whole work: "The book is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm." (from Aspects of the Novel, 1927) The second volume, which was delayed by the WW I, appeared in 1919, but the next parts made Proust finally internationally famous. He was still correcting the typescript on his deathbed, but did not manage to finish the final volumes before his death on November 18, 1922.
Remembrance of Things Past does not have a clear and continuous plot line. The first two sections can be – and often are – read separately. Marcel, the narrator is not Proust but resembles him in many ways. Marcel is initially ignorant – only slowly does he begin to grasp the essence of the hidden reality. Through a series of loves and disillusionments he finds his true vocation in life. At the end he is preparing to write a novel which is like the one just presented to the reader. Marcel's childhood memories start to flow when he tastes a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child.
"And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine."
Memory takes the central role in the novel and apparently insignificant details prove to be the most important. The first part focuses on Marcel's childhood in Combray. Proust follows the lives of three families, Marcel's own, the aristocratic de Guermantes, and the family of the Jewish Bohemian dilettante Swann. Among the central characters are the faithless cocotte Odette, whom Swann marries, homosexual Baron de Charlus, partly modelled on Count Robert de Montesquiou-Ferensac (1855-1921), an art critic, poet, and essayist, Dutchess, Mme de Villeparisis, Robert Saint-Loup, and Marcel's great love Albertine, who is perhaps lesbian and who dies in a riding accident. The character was partly based on Alfred Agostinelli, Proust's chauffeur, secretary and live-in companion. Proust gradually deepens the portraits of his characters – Vinteuil, a modest piano teacher, turns out to be a great composer. In the climax of the novel the narrator fails to recognize many of his friends because they have changed so much physically during the years. Marcel realizes that his vocation as an artist is to capture the past still alive within us. And being was for Proust the complete past, "that past which already extended so far down and which I was bearing so painfully within me." In the narration past and present merge, reality appears in half-forgotten experiences, and parts of the past are felt differently at different times.
Proust is generally considered a pioneer of the modern novel. He made a clear distinction between man and work. The writer is a man of intuition. "A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices," Proust wrote in his answer to the French critic Sainte-Beuve, who tried to understand writers by investigating their private life and environment.
Proust's work widely influenced authors in different countries, among them Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. His style of long sentences, some of which extend to several pages in length, paved the way for Claude Simon's narrative inventions. Proust later said that he had from the beginning a fixed structure for the whole novel. In the construction he used photographs; the author himself had a penchant for being photographed in uniform. One biographer mentions that Proust liked tight underwear.
Proust's literary criticism did not attract wide attention until 1954, when Contre Sainte-Beuve came out. He admired Vigny, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle, but Baudelaire was for him the greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Proust denied Henri Bergson's influence on his work, although they both were much occupied with time and memory, emphasizing duration – time lived every day rather than clock time. The most famous of Proust's essays is that on Flaubert's style, in which he compares Flaubert's grammatical use of tenses to Kant's revolution in philosophy. A prolific writer, Proust also was an avid letter writer.