Marcel Proust Auction Will See Previously Censored Photographs And Letters Of The Celebrated French Author Go Under The Hammer

Marcel Proust auction will execute a “remembrance of things past” of all things belonging to the French author in Paris. Letters bearing the novelist’s slanted handwriting, manuscripts with the author’s corrections, signed first editions, and photographs that make no bones of Proust’s homosexual past will be up for sale almost a century after the author’s passing.

The auction will be hosted by Sotheby’s. Marcel Proust’s great-grand niece, Patricia Mante-Proust, is the person behind the orchestration of the author’s personal effects coming under the hammer today.

Known worldwide for his epoch-making seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past, Proust lived half his life as a Parisian in clear public view and withdrawing entirely in his room in the other half to write his magnum opus. The Marcel Proust auction will remove the curtains from a “scandalous” photograph which shows Proust’s lover and friend, the French writer Lucien Daudet, looking at Marcel with a rather enamored and resolved stare, while their friend, Robert de Flers, looks fixedly at the camera.

What made the apparently innocuous professionally-clicked image a ready recipe for trouble, even leading Proust’s parents to order him to destroy all prints of it, is the fact that Daudet’s arm is seen lovingly resting on Proust’s shoulder — something that was, in 1896, equal to an announcement from the rooftops that Proust was homosexual. But Proust was not one to burn a photograph bearing testament to a friendship that he cherished. The Marcel Proust auction valued this particular photograph at between €5,000 and €8,000 ($5,568 and $8,909).

“These photos are the originals that Proust kept at home and that he asked his friends to send him,” Benôit Puttemans from Sotheby’s said to the Telegraph. “They are very touching as it was his way of keeping close to his loved ones.”

The auction will not just give a glimpse into the personal archives of Marcel Proust but will also show the remarkable transformation of a precocious child posing with his brother into a serious novelist comfortably posing on his own lounge chair with all the affect of a plagued authorial persona.

Also in the collection, valued at between €520,000 ($580,000) and €740,000 ($830,000), are photographs of his family members, including a single one of his mother, Jeanne, smiling kindly from underneath an elaborately done hairpiece.

But the most exciting aspect of the Marcel Proust auction are the letters that have been brought out of their home of a hundred years in the estate of the author. Proust not only shared long notes of passion with his lovers, he also wrote with the plaintive tone of a true writer in love. To Reynaldo Hahn, a Venezuelan musician who later made France his home, Proust wrote simple declarations of his adoration, announcing that he was “truly the person I love most in the world, together with my mother.”

The auction will also feature more from Proust’s epistolary archives, including heart-wrenching letters sent by a petulant Marcel to his father, Achille Adrian Proust, who never accepted his son’s literary profession as one which could be taken seriously. At times in these letters, Proust complains, and at others he promises to sit for foreign examinations instead of continuing with his writing hobby.

Among the 120 selected items in the Marcel Proust auction is a spontaneous sketch of the Amiens Cathedral in Notre Dame, which the author also sent to Hahn, along with fervent autographs on first editions. Proust’s handwritten inscription on an original edition of Swann’s Way (the first in the Remembrance series) to his friend Walter Van Rensselaer Berry is a philosophical meditation on authorship that is almost three pages long.

Also in the Marcel Proust auction list, somewhat as a requiem, is the famous photograph by Man Ray of the author on his deathbed.

[Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images]