12 Interesting Facts About Marcel Proust

Do you want to know some fascinating facts about Marcel Proust?

If there was one influential author in the 20th century that had touched the lives of so many people in France, that would be none other than Marcel Proust.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist as well as a critic who also specialized in essays.

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His masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, was first published in French in 7 volumes from 1913 through 1927. Critics and other writers consider Proust as one of the 20th century’s most influential writers.

Proust wrote several classic works. His writing was characterized by lengthy sentences, some of which were several pages long. His writing has significantly impacted both readers and other authors over the years.

Read on to learn more facts about Marcel Proust, one of France’s most beloved authors of all time.

12 Interesting Facts About Marcel Proust

1. Marcel Proust was born during one of France’s most turbulent times

Proust was born before the Franco-Prussian War ended, in the Auteuil neighborhood of Paris’ 16th arrondissement. Numerous affluent families resided in this area, which was known to be among the costliest districts to live in the the French capital.

He was a baby during the 1871 Paris Commune insurrection.

Proust wrote a lot about the profound changes taking place in his country at the time, notably the fall of the upper class which was then overtaken by the middle class.

2. He was born with asthma

Attacks of persistent asthma that remained throughout Proust’s life started throughout his boyhood.

Although Proust attended the Lycée Condorcet, his asthma prevented him from enrolling as a typical student. He was still a well-known student, however, especially in literature, and he won an honor in his senior year.

Proust enlisted in the military from 1882 to 1889 despite having poor health. From 1891 to 1893, he studied law at the École des Sciences Politiques.

3. His own father was the first to publish a book about Marcel Proust

Proust’s mother was well-recognized for her love of reading and writing. She even helped Proust transcribe the writings of British author John Ruskin.

His father, Adrian Proust, on the other hand, was a renowned pathologist. This means he researched the causes of illnesses.

Dr. Proust specialized in illnesses without a physical cause. He was the first to publish a book about his ill son (Marcel Proust) as he was baffled as to why his asthmatic son remained sick all the time despite all the measures taken to prevent attacks.

4. Marcel Proust never followed a story outline

Proust never wrote in a straight line or with an outline in mind. He always worked like a mosaicist, carefully building a particular scene, tale, feeling, or image.

Thus, the novel became more extensive and longer when he worked on the lengthy portion known as Swann in Love that year and the following year.

5. He self-published his book Swann in Love

Believing his work was nearing completion in 1911, hence Proust started hunting for a publisher.

In order to accomplish this, he made arrangements with Le Figaro, a prestigious daily, to publish four excerpts.

Unfortunately, the book was turned down even as it grew, so Proust made the decision to self-publish it in two volumes.

6. Proust’s most influential novel was rejected by several publishers

Before Marcel Proust self-funded his book because he had a lifelong ambition for his writing, several publishers initially rejected and mocked Swann’s Way.

With In Search of Lost Time, which was earlier titled Remembrance of Things Past from the French, Proust achieved global renown and indelible success.

Proust had always aspired to be a novelist and let nothing stand in his way.

7. The war had a thing to do with the length of the second installment of Swann’s Way

The previous publisher of Swann’s Sway, Gaston Gallimard, was Proust’s new partner in 1916. In November of that year, Proust informed Gallimard that the second book of what he now anticipated would be a four-part narrative. 

When he wrote “Fin”  at the end of the fourth volume, Proust told his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, that his life’s work was finished and that he might now die.

However, the war infringed on his story, which had grown from the roughly 500,000 words he’d written up to that point to more than twice that amount.

Proust once compared this experience to an army commander: “A commander is like a writer who sets out to write a certain book, and then the book itself, with the unexpected potentialities it reveals here, the impassable obstacles it presents there, makes him deviate to an enormous degree from his preconceived plan.”

8. In Search of Lost Time has over 1.2 million words

The massive In Search of Lost Time has 3,200 pages and over 1.2 million words.

From 1909 through 1922, Proust worked on the book. Over the years, he was renowned for revising and adding new content to completed volumes.

Although it is assumed that he was aware of the novel’s structure from the start, he nonetheless went back and edited his work.

The last three volumes of the book are typically regarded as incomplete because Proust passed away before he could go back and revise them. After Proust’s passing, his younger brother Robert coordinated the release of these books.

9. The “Proust Effect” is inspired by him

“La madeleine de Proust“ (English: “Proust Effect”) is a term used to describe tastes, scents, noises, or any other sensations that bring back memories from a long time ago or just remind you of your childhood.

The phrase is from Marcel Proust’s well-known book Swann’s Way, known in French as Du côté de chez Swann. It was first published in 1913. It is a piece in his body of work called la recherche du temps perdu, sometimes known as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past.

In this book, Proust describes his mother giving him tea and a madeleine to warm him up. Unintentionally, the flavor of the shell-shaped cake soaked in tea made him feel overwhelmed with emotion and made him go back to a period when he used to have the same snack.

As a result of the phrase’s increasing use over time, philosophers have compared Proust to other influential writers on time and memory, while neuroscientists have been attempting to explain the concept of unintentional memory in terms of science.

10. Marcel Proust wrote the longest published sentence

In addition to producing the book that holds the record for being the longest book ever published, Proust is also responsible for penning the sentence with the history for being the longest ever written. The statement contains a whopping 847 words in total.

11. Proust was obsessed with his secretary

Marcel Proust, who was gay, tended to become romantically involved with straight men.

Proust based his obsession with Albertine, the woman in his book In Search of Lost Time, on Alfred Agostinelli, the secretary he lavished with presents.

Proust purchased a plane for Mr. Agostinelli after learning of his desire to learn to fly. Flying it, the plane crashed and Agostinelli – who had never learned to swim – perished with it into the ocean.

12. Proust left numerous unfinished novels upon his death

Three more volumes of the book were left unfinished when Marcel Proust died from pneumonia in November of 1922.

Robert Proust, his younger brother, published the books La Prisonnière (1923), Albertine disparue (1925), and Le Temps retrouvé (1927).