One of the most famous lines in French literature might have never existed if Marcel Proust had not changed his mind about baked goods.
Instead of a tea-soaked madeleine to trigger sudden, involuntary memories of childhood, it could have been a piece of stale bread.
For generations, Proust’s passage about dipping the shell-shaped sponge cake into a cup of tea has been etched into the collective memory of literature lovers worldwide.
People who have never even read one page of the seven-volume opus “In Search of Lost Time” by the French writer, recognize the transformative power of his madeleine.
But in an early, one-page draft of that passage from 1907, Proust chose a less appetizing snack.
“How could I have known that all those summers, the garden where I spent them, the sorrows I experienced there, the sky above, and the entire lives of my family — all of that was contained in a small cup of boiling tea, in which stale bread was soaking?” he wrote with a fountain pen in barely legible script.
The earlier variation of the passage is contained in a cache of 900 Proust manuscripts that the Bibliothèque Nationale of France, France’s National Library, is determined to buy with money raised from the private sector. Proust’s heirs, the cache’s current owners, have entrusted the manuscripts to Sotheby’s, which is acting as the intermediary. The cost: 7.7 million euros (about $9 million).
“The diversity, the quality! We never dreamed of such a discovery of Proust treasures,” Gilles Pécout, the president of the National Library, said in an interview. “Proust has a universal appeal. Even if we haven’t read him, we quote him.”
Asked whether the price was too high, Pécout replied, “It’s cheaper than paintings the Louvre and the Orsay have bought.”
The National Library loves to collect. In 2010 it paid about 7 million euros to buy the memoirs of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the 18th-century serial seducer, gambler, swindler, diplomat, soldier and pleasure seeker. In 2021, it bought “The 120 Days of Sodom,” by the Marquis de Sade, one of the most perverse works of 18th-century literature, for 4.55 million euros.
The library already owns the largest Proustian collection of manuscripts, documents and books in the world. The new manuscripts will fill gaps and round out that collection so that the library can claim it will hold 95 percent of known Proust manuscripts. After the purchase, the National Library will digitize them and make them public.
Proust, for some French scholars, is the country’s Shakespeare, and you never seem to get enough of him here. At dinner parties in some intellectual and social circles in Paris, it is normal for his name to come up at least once.
So excitement was anticipated last month when, at an 1,500-euro-a-head fund-raising gala at the National Library’s Richelieu site, several of the manuscripts were publicly displayed. Before dinner, hundreds of guests crowded around two glass cases to admire them.
“This is amazing — it is as if you have a slice of his life before you,” Pedro Corrêa do Lago, a Brazilian art historian, curator and world-class collector of letters and manuscripts, said. “Sorry — perhaps that is not something to say — but this turns me on.”
Fabienne Verdier, a contemporary French painter, said “I saw and I cried.”
“Capitalissime!” said Adrien Goetz, one of France’s leading art historians and the editor of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie magazine, using the invented superlative Proust himself used to mark a certain page as ultra-important.
Another guest, Corinne Dromer, began reciting Proust’s famous madeleine passages from memory.
The manuscripts are a hodgepodge — some of them important, some banal, all crucial material for Proust addicts. But the most important are about 300 pages of rough drafts of “In Search of Lost Time” on loose sheets of paper turned yellow and brown from age.
One evokes “pain rassis” or stale bread, the first iteration of what would become the madeleine passage in “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of the novel “In Search of Lost Time,” which stretches to more than 1.3 million words.
The National Library had previously documented the evolution of the madeleine from “pain rassis” to “pain grillé,” or toasted bread, to “biscotte,” a hard, dried biscuit.
But the documents on display and for sale — one on the stale bread, another from 1909 on the biscuit — underscore his tortured process in writing the novel and piece all the documents together for the first time.
In the final draft version, written later in 1909, the dipped bread product morphed into madeleines, “those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell” to evoke the crumbs dipped in lime-blossom tea that his Aunt Léonie served him when he was a child.
Proust would agonize over a single word, cross out passages, scrawl in the margins and make additions until he felt the text of his novel was perfect. He kept most of his manuscripts and was still revising the last three volumes of his opus when he died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922.
Long before computers made cut and paste easy, he tore large passages of handwritten or typed text and reassembled them, glueing them into long strips of paper known as “paperoles” that had to be folded over.
One manuscript that the National Library is looking to buy completes a long partial paperole that the library already owns about Albertine, the narrator’s mistress in the novel, as she is sleeping.
Among the manuscripts are two drawings: one that Proust made to guide his mother through an exhibition of Whistler in 1905, another one of a map he drew of the coast of Balbec, the novel’s fictional seaside resort in Normandy.
Then there are lesser items, like drafts of letters Proust, an obsessive letter-writer, wrote and never sent and articles he wrote for the newspaper Le Figaro.
One early manuscript is the first draft of a play, “The Unhappy Genius,” written when Proust was thirteen. There are high school and Sorbonne University assignments, too.
One amusing document is an essay Proust wrote about dreams as a high school student at the celebrated Lycée Condorcet, accompanied by scathing commentary of Alphonse Darlu, his philosophy teacher. “Neither the development, which is uncertain, nor the style, which is vague and never clarifies abstract ideas, nor the tone, which is heavy and rambling, make this essay resemble a proper academic paper,” Darlu wrote in the margin. Proust received the dismal grade of “3 or 4/20” — an F. (10/20 is a passing grade.)
Among the other manuscripts are more than a dozen unpublished fragments relating to “Jean Santeuil,” Proust’s early unfinished novel, manuscripts of poems and writings on the English art historian and writer John Ruskin.
Worthy of an entire Proustian chapter itself is the story of how 900 Proust manuscripts suddenly surfaced for public sale.
Suzy Mante-Proust, his niece, had already sold a huge cache of manuscripts the family owned to the National Library in 1962.
According to Anne Heilbronn, the vice president and director of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s France, when Bernard de Fallois, an important book publisher, died in 2018, the publisher’s heirs found the new manuscripts.
De Fallois studied Proust as a young man and was lent manuscripts by the family for research purposes. But there is no public explanation for why he still had them in his possession and why they hadn’t been returned. After de Fallois’s death, Sotheby’s said, his family quietly sent them back to Proust’s heirs.
Mante-Proust’s heirs — their identities remain confidential — reached out to Sotheby’s in 2019 to sell the new collection of manuscripts.
“When I saw them, it was an incredible moment,” said Heilbronn. “I was speechless. In the life of an expert of manuscripts and books, you only see something like this only once.”
After so many years, the manuscripts were in disarray. Benoît Puttemans, Sotheby’s specialist for books and manuscripts, spent two years sorting, organizing, appraising and cataloging them, putting them into plastic sleeves in black binders that are wheeled around in a large, orange plastic crate. The manuscripts are kept in a safe at Sotheby’s headquarters in Paris.
During a private viewing at Sotheby’s, Puttemans lifted some of the pages with clean but ungloved hands and explained that he categorized them in importance using clothing sizes — from S, for small and not very important, to XL for extra-large, or what he called “an absolute treasure.”
The auction house stuck a deal with the National Library to buy them at an agreed-upon price, which guaranteed that the manuscripts would not be sold piecemeal at auction to private collectors, officials at both the library and Sotheby’s said.
Asked why the Proust family is selling and not donating the manuscripts to the National Library, Heilbronn said, “The family decided to contribute to French heritage by not holding a public sale. But like you and me, they need money.”
Now, the challenge is to find the money to buy this literary treasure. The National Library, a government-owned institution, will continue its fund-raising campaign until the end of the year.
The French government has declared the manuscripts a national treasure of major cultural importance, which allows for generous tax deductions. The National Library hopes that will attract wealthy French and foreign donors.
“Thanks to that classification, people will give,” said Pécout, the library’s president.
Not everyone is so sure. “What happens now?” asked Jacques Berchtold, the director of the Martin Bodmer Foundation, the Swiss-based library and museum specializing in manuscripts and rare books, in an interview at the gala. “The Library doesn’t have money. We all have to come up with the money.”
Some manuscript experts among the diners whispered that the price was too high. Ominously, perhaps, the madeleines served with the glazed chocolate meringue cake, blackberry sorbet and vanilla ice cream were tasteless and a bit dry. Maybe they needed a cup of lime-blossom tea for dipping.
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