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In a cork-lined room with closed windows, away from sound and sight, wrapped up in flannels and taking the day for the night, Marcel Proust at the age of 35 begins to write the work which will make his name immortal. Only at rare intervals will he seek contact with the friends whose company once seemed indispensable to him and he now lives as much in self-imposed retreat from the world, as formerly the “grand monde” was the only surroundings where he seemed to feel at his ease.
We ask ourselves what was the past which changed the elegant, much sought-after frequenter of Paris “salons” into the invalid sequestered from human intercourse.
Marcel Proust was born in 1871 as the son of a Roman-Catholic physician and a Jewish mother. His father had a great reputation among his colleagues and did good work in the field of public health. His mother belonged to that numerically very small and very refined Jewish group, which in the time of Marcel's youth was fully assimilated to the cultural French milieu in which it lived.
From his early youth Marcel was a sickly child, given to fits of hay-fever and asthma, and hypersensitive in his nervous reactions.1 His mother gave him all loving care to that excess which delicate children seem to claim and which in their later lives may become of such far-reaching influence. Marcel adored his sweet looking, tender mother with an adoration that wanted her all to himself. And in the self-confession he gave to the world in “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” he speaks of the anxiety of sleepless nights when his mother's absence became unbearable, and of her night kiss which brought the peace that passes all understanding. His ambivalent attitude towards his father whose conscious goodwill he appreciated at times, but whom he chiefly experienced as