Writing the story of "Remembrance of Things Past" means following
the progress of a vocation.
In modern times, no great artist has enjoyed unbroken happiness,
but few have experienced such long periods of discouragement,
years of silence and hesitations in the form of the work to be written,
not related to equal skill in all styles, but a feeling of failure in each.

From abandonment to non-completion, at the age of thirty-eight,
Marcel Proust might have seen himself as a failed writer.
When he developed a marvellous inner stream of language
which would never cease to flow, one by one, publishers rejected his work.
Then, once it was published, the critics ignored or failed to understand it.
A vocation is quite unlike a career:
the author - who had completed "Pleasures and Days" with insolent preciousness at the age of twenty-three - could have published a book a year
like France, Barrès, Bourget and later Mauriac, made a success of his life
and experienced the glory which institutions provide.
But after a promising start and a successful society life, Proust fell victim
to failing health and died young.
After twenty years of silence, barely interrupted by two translations and a few articles, a third of them published posthumously, his great novel failed to provide
the career his parents dreamed of and that Professor Adrien Proust offered as
an example.


Studying Marcel Proust, his life and work, means lending irony to the revelation between these two words, since we follow the destruction of a man and the construction of a book, the metamorphosis of a man into a novel,
and the transformations of a single novel, ever more "other" and ever more itself.

The last great dream of the 19th century and the first modern novel of the 20th
was written in secrecy, in public silence and covert additions.
Proust served pitiless masters - not some fleeting glory, some writer successful
in the 1900s whose works now moulder in second-hand bookshops and no longer have any message for us because they said it all to their readers who died with them - but Balzac, Saint-Simon and Baudelaire.
Like him, they sacrificed their lives and wrote at night, finding glory which grew after their deaths as time went on, and for a single title:
"La Comédie Humaine", the "Mémoires" and "Les Fleurs du Mal".
Proust's dialogue is with them -
and with "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe" and Madame de Sévigné -
he who would have been the equal of Alain-Fournier had he died after
JeanSanteuil.
The reasons for this long wait lie in Proust's working method:
on the one hand, refusal, deletion and non-completion;
on the other , fresh starts, continuation on a higher level and addition;
then, when all seemed finished, the assembly, disassembly and reassembly of pages, episodes and characters.

This idea that it is always possible to "take things further" did not make
the author of "Remembrance of Things Past" an inspired writer,
but the most conscientious and unremitting of craftsmen.
His readers in turn have the feeling that they have been taken as far as possible
in mingled pleasure and knowledge, while the work of others all falls short
sooner or later.


So the important thing is to show how this unique book was created. "Remembrance of Things Past" is the sum of its successive states -
initial versions, rough drafts, scattered notes, books behind the book -
while the work also sums up prior tradition, from the Bible to Flaubert and Tolstoy, and all literary genres.
Finally, it offers a romantic and symbolist dream, shared by Mallarmé and Wagner, of a synthesis of all the arts: painting, music and architecture.
This resulted in works which escaped the confines of their time, country and author, and whose glory continues to grow:
for a long time, it was said that while England had Shakespeare, Germany Goethe and Italy Dante, France had no-one to equal them.
Today, the number of works devoted to him suggest that France now has and will continue to have Marcel Proust.


Jean-Yves Tadié - Extract from the General Introduction to Volume 1 of "Remembrance of Things Past", published by Editions Gallimard in 1995.