Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (with a name like that, perhaps we have our first intimation of the future length of À la recherche!) was born on 10 July 1871 in Auteuil to wealthy parents.
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Achille Adrien Proust |
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Jeanne Weil |
Marcel was born in July of 1871 in the midst of a dangerous and violent insurrection know as "The Commune." His father, insisting on continuing to see his patients at the Hôpital de la Charité, narrowly missed being killed by an insurgent's musket ball one day on his way there. This incident left his wife, 6 months preganant with Marcel, in state of extreme fear and trepidation, resulting in their leaving Paris for the relatively safe haven of Auteuil where her uncle Louis had a spacious home situated amidst a large garden. It was in this bucolic setting that Marcel was born and, shortly after his arrival, not expected to live, but did. His poor state was blamed on his mother's high level of stress and malnutrition due to the lack of food during the Prussian siege of Paris during that year. Despite his poor health, as he grew older, he showed signs of precociousness and charm, attributes which would later enable him to move up in society. However, his parents, especially his mother, lavished him with their attentions to the point of morbidity, creating an almost pathologic co-dependence which would later precipitate his withdrawal from society.
Marcel continued to be a sickly child and at the age of nine, after returning from a spring pollen-filled walk in the Bois de Boulogne with his parents, was stricken with an asthma attack so severe that his breathing ceased. His father feared he was dead, but he revived, only to have the specter of death loom over him for the rest of his life: the return of Spring, a walk outside in the park, the smallest whiff of pollen could mean his death.
Although he attended the Lycée Condorcet from 1882-89, his attendance was irregular. Despite his health problems, he was able to fulfil his year of military service at Orléans, and later studied law at the Sorbonne but left before finishing. After this, his life was apparently taken up with failed attempts at finding an acceptable career: lawyer - given up after spending a couple of weeks with a solicitor ("In my most desparate moments, I have never conceived of anything so horrible as a law office"); Foreign Ministry - too far from his beloved mother; and even librarian - death from dust. Realizing he would probably never have a "proper" job, he then went the route of the idle rich: endless dinner parties, social ladder climbing, and insouciant spending of money, much to the chagrin of his father.
The year 1905 marked the beginning of his withdrawal from society. Marcel's relationship with and attachment to his mother was stifflingly neurotic (interestingly, he and Freud co-existed but had no knowledge of each other...I'm sure Freud would have had something to say about this!) and her death from nephritis in 1905 "severed the only tie that bound him to the life of the world." (Joseph Krutch)
What followed has many interpretations, but essentially, he withdrew to an apartment soundproofed with walls of cork, where his solitary cogitations produced his masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu.
Clearly, a fascinating man who lived in fascinating times. And about whom we shall learn a great deal more...
Sources and further reading:
How Proust Can Change your Life, Alain de Botton, 1997. "Curious, humorous, didactic and dazzling.. It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction."
- The New York Times
Marcel Proust: A Life, William C. Carter, 2000.
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust, trans. Scott Moncrieff, 1934. Introduction by Joseph Wood Krutch is most informative.
Wikipedia: Marcel Proust, Achille Adrien Proust
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