Prust Marsel

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French writer. One of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.

Marcel Proust was born in Paris on July 10, 1871, into a wealthy family: his father, Adrien Proust, was a professor at the medical faculty, and his mother, Jeanne Weil, was the daughter of a Jewish stockbroker. At the age of nine, Marcel was diagnosed with asthma, from which he suffered throughout his life.

In 1882, Proust entered the Lycée Condorcet. He was often absent. He passed his baccalaureate exams in July 1889 and was especially noted for his French composition. At the lycée, Proust met Jacques Bizet, the son of the composer, Lucien Daudet, the son of a novelist, the future modernist painter Maurice Denis, and the future poet Fernand Greg.

Yielding to his parents’ wishes, Marcel Proust began studying law at the Sorbonne, but he did not complete his studies. During this time, Proust frequented fashionable literary and artistic salons and began writing himself. In 1894, he published his first book of prose poems, which, however, went almost unnoticed. Proust also tried his hand at criticism, wrote journalistic essays and stories, and did translations. However, the idea of writing a novel never left him. He headed the society column in the newspaper Figaro. Among the Paris salons, three played a special role in Proust’s life: the salon of Madame Strauss (Geneviève Halévy, Bizet’s widow); the salon of Madame de Caillavet, Anatole France’s beloved; and the salon of Madeleine Lemaire.

From November 1889, Proust spent a year in military service in Orléans. In June 1895, he took a job at the Mazarin Library, but immediately took leave “at his own expense,” which he continuously extended until 1900. At the beginning of 1892, Proust and his friends founded the magazine Le Banquet.

In 1895, Proust began writing a large novel, many of whose plotlines were later repeated