Dated from March 31 to June 7, 1913, the Bodmer sheets for Du côté de chez Swann total 95 in all. Proust received them day after day, and set about correcting them intensively. At this stage, the text remains highly unstable and mobile. We will examine in turn the three elements of incompleteness already mentioned: the title, the first sentence and the ending. The first and third are abundantly evoked in the correspondence; the second never.
In 1962, Jacques de Lacretelle confessed to having been shocked when Du côté de chez Swann was published in 1913, first by "the title, not very harmonious, these two genitives", then by the first sentences, annoying for "someone who loved logic and limpidity of expression". Long before the novel's content, the first readers' grievance may have been linked to the title.
Proust consulted Vaudoyer shortly after March 18: "Would you like the title Les Intermittences du Passé/ Premier volume Le Temps Perdu/ Deuxième volume Le Temps Retrouvé [?]"(Corr., XII, 114). By the time he sent Grasset the first 45 plates on May 23rd, he had decisively altered both the general title and the individual titles: "The book will be called : Du côté de chez Swann for the first volume. For the second, probably : Le Côté de Guermantes. The general title of the two volumes will be À la Recherche du Temps perdu "(Corr., XII, 176-177). Proust doesn't seem to have any doubts about this new general title, which had never been mentioned until then, and which only came to the fore in the course of correcting the plates between April and May.
As for the specific title Du côté de chez Swann, chosen "on the advice of [Maurice] Rostand"(Corr., XII, 222), whom Proust had seen at least once between February and May, it was condemned by many of his friends, especially Louis de Robert, who had received the second proofs of "Combray" at the end of June(Corr., XII, 220-221). The writer considered replacing him with Charles Swann, who would be "a kind of metaphor"(Corr., XII, 224) for the character's life. But he hesitated again during the summer(Corr., XII, 231-232, 238-239). In a letter to Jacques Copeau in early August, he asks whether Du côté de chez Swann is a "French" title(Corr., XII, 246). In any case, this was the last consultation on this subject: he corrected neither the second nor the third proofs.
