Proust in 1913 (1)

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In November 1913, Bernard Grasset published Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume ofÀ la recherche du temps perdu. The imprint is dated November 8. The book went on sale on November 14. This was a turning point. After the drafts of Jean Santeuil and Le Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust began in 1908, with the memorable question: "Should it be a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?" (Carnet 1). The second volume was not completed until November 1918, and went on sale in June 1919 with Gallimard. In the meantime, the work had been profoundly transformed. Two more titles were published before the writer's death in 1922, followed by three posthumous titles. The year 1913 is therefore a key moment in the history of the work and in the life of the writer.

We mark the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann by returning to the text. Despite the many studies devoted to Proust, we'd like to read and reread this canonized novel as if for the first time. In truth, this monument to French literature remained mobile right up to the last moment in November 1913 on the fifth proofs, as shown by the fact that the novel's first sentence, struck as a sentence, was rather a pis-aller, found in a typing correction that the writer was still going to seek to modify on the proofs.

This is therefore neither a cultural history of the year 1913, marked by a modern explosion, nor its reconstruction through the novelist's correspondence and other documents. However, a brief chronology is in order. Proust had been in the process of publishing his novel since the end of October 1912. In the correspondence, the novel is described as consisting of two parts. The first, which covers Du côté de chez Swann and À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, has been typed up bit by bit since autumn 1909 and runs to over seven hundred typewritten pages. This typing of the first volume was completed around the summer of 1912. The second part, which was still buried in the handwritten notebooks, is a worldly account of the Guermantes and the pederastic Charlus, including the trip to Italy, Saint-Loup's wedding and the discovery of the aesthetics of "temps retrouvé" during the morning at the Princess de Guermantes'.

In autumn 1912, Proust was still planning a diptych: two seven-hundred-page volumes with a general title, Les Intermittences du cœur, and two specific titles, Le Temps perdu and Le Temps retrouvé. By the end of October, things were ready, as evidenced by a profusion of letters. He writes to Fasquelle at the end of October to send him his manuscript, warning him that there will be an indecent passage in the second part of the book, not yet ready, where Charlus will reveal himself to be a pederast. At the same time, he contacted Gaston Gallimard in December 1912. By this stage, he had already realized that two volumes of seven hundred pages would be insufficient, and that it would be necessary to move on to three volumes of five hundred and fifty pages, Le Temps perdu, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le Temps retrouvé, still retaining Les Intermittences du cœur as the general title.

What happened next is well known: on the basis of Jacques Madeleine's very severe report on Proust's manuscript, Fasquelle returned it to him on December 24; the second typescript that had been sent to Gallimard received the same fate. After a third setback with Ollendorff in mid-February 1913, Proust finally approached Bernard Grasset, through René Blum, about self-publishing. The manuscript was sent at the end of February; the contract was signed in mid-March. The book is published at the end of the year, with advertisements. Considerable reworking remains on the proofs. From March 31, Proust begins to receive the first placards. These are the large sheets containing eight as-yet unpaginated pages, now kept at the Fondation Bodmer in Geneva. It was at this stage that Les Intermittences du cœur became À la recherche du temps perdu and Le Temps perdu was changed to Charles Swann before becoming Du côté de chez Swann. Three major hesitations are worth noting: the title, the first sentence and the end of the volume, since Proust had to give up the seven hundred pages he wanted to include.