Marcel PROUST motto on the art of the novel, style and Beauty.

Marcel Proust (1871.1922)

Autograph letter signed to Baroness Aimery Harty of Pierrebourg.

Seven pages in-8°. Slnd [Shortly after June 6, 1913]

Kolb, Volume XII, pages 195 to 198.

“I have always been amazed every time I saw a writer wrest a literary “genre”. »

Magnificent literary letter. Proust entrusts the teachings of Chardin and Veronese on Beauty.

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“Madam, I am writing to you very badly, in a much worse state of health than I have ever experienced and with a thousand pages of proofs to correct. But in these days of sadness and fatigue, your La Vallière and yourself nobly and graciously “visited” me in the most beautiful sense of the word which here is akin to Visitation, – the great title of nobility – and not to “visits”, the ugly side of the family. 

I have always been amazed each time I have seen a writer wrest a literary “genre” from the immemorial and deceptive technique in which it was mummified, and made it come to life, passing through it, as freely as in a novel or an essay, the whole life of his thought. Life of Bees rise far above it, well outside it .

Perhaps this exchange between the novel and History is even more touching because it affirms an indifference towards the fact which goes so far as to proclaim that provided a book is psychologically true, it can even be he wants to be materially true. A true novelist demands so much truth from the novel that it is to make it prove its truth to history by admitting it to the dignity of the novel.

I remember that after Chardin had taught me that the humblest things, a tablecloth, a knife, a dead fish, can have beauty, Veronese taught me that beautiful things are not excepted from this possibility of beauty and that gold, silks, precious stones, can be as beautiful as a knife and a tablecloth. Likewise, you teach us through your La Vallière that the fact that a novel has “arrived” is not a reason why it cannot be true, if the historian-novelist infuses it with all his truth, all his heart. . You just have to take the trouble, and have the talent, to write the novel that will authenticate the story.

From the beginning your landscapes of Touraine, and the birthplace, and the prophetic motto, and Nothing is more to me, and the Court of Gaston, and the king's army, all this you have prepared, arranged, crimped, as if something had come out of your heart and it did indeed come out. And goes to ours, to torture it sometimes like when you show this odious Montespan needing the tears of La Vallière to be happy in her finery and in her loves. How painful it is to read this, and the coldness of Louis XIV.

Alas Madam, my strength betrays me and my fatigue arrived before my letter was started. Because finally the real subject of the book, what you care about and have the right and right to care about most, I haven't talked to you it yet. I will try to go see you and only count these lines as proof of the respectful interest I have in everything that comes from your fruitful, rich and simple thought, which gives beautiful proportions in the novel or the story , to beautiful subjects and deign to accept my admiring tributes. Marcel Proust. »