Literary and Personal Map of Marcel Proust’s Paris

Marta Guard

Paris, Dec. 15 (EFE). – Marcel Proust was born and died in Paris, the city marked his personal life and literary career, and had an influence on both the analysis of the Carnavalet Museum in the French capital for the first time.

“Marcel Proust, United Nations Paris” opens its doors on Thursday until the 10th of next April brings the public to Paris for the writer (1871-1922), where he rose to the category of legend thanks to his masterpiece “In Search of Time”. Lost”.

“Paris was a component of the character and of the aesthetic and cultural training he would have,” explains Anne-Laurie Sol, the exhibition’s scientific curator, to Evie.

Proust was the son of a wealthy bourgeois family who facilitated his transition to “extremely rich and varied” cultural environments, with friendships with artists and intellectuals of the time and frequent trips to the Louvre or the theater “which he nurtured thinking and participated in the crystallization of his message as a writer”.

The nearly 300 exhibits on display, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, models, clothing, accessories or manuscripts, as well as cinematic adaptations of his work, represent an immersion in his world and in city life from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Centuries.

Because far from Illier, where his family came from, a stay in Cabourg and Brittany to relieve his asthma attacks and a trip to Venice and Holland, Paris was his almost exclusive place for Proust.

He was above all a “man of Drouet,” as Saul recalls of his preference for the right bank of the Seine.

He was born at 96 rue de la Fontaine, in the old town of the Hôtel and now the 16th district of Paris. Two years later the family settled at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes and when their parents died they moved, in 1906, to 102 Haussmann Street, a place they said was the “ugliest” neighborhood they had ever seen.

His childhood and adolescence, the period when he discovered his homosexuality, passed through the gardens of the Champs-Élysées and the École Normale Supérieure, the institute of the liberal and intellectual elites of the French Third Republic.

Biographical and literary script

“Their titles are practically the same as the titles of the characters in his novels,” says the curator who reinforces the symbolic places of one and the other with different maps.

Paris, according to the account given by Sol in the catalog, was cited 578 times in “In Search of Lost Time”, but in his opinion, the fictional version of the city is above all a “state of mind” and the lack of topography in detail in it makes it acquire a “magnificent dimension” .

Explores the Paris Carnavale Museum which appears in the seven volumes of this great work, three of them posthumously, because he died without being able to finish his copy, and with the parallels between Proust and the protagonist, Charles Swann, he blends documentary, fiction, and realism with fiction.

The exhibition takes its name from a letter he sent to his friend Luis de Albufera in 1908, at a time when he was still studying the direction in which he should present that novel, and takes place in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth and one of the centenary of his death.

They provide an excuse to remember a writer who should not feel “feared”: “In addition to contextual, historical, and cultural elements, it describes the itinerary of a human life going through experiences such as love, desire, death, or self-fulfillment, things that many of us have in common,” concludes the curator. EFE

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