Shortly before his death, Marcel PROUST was no longer able to read or write. 1922.

Marcel Proust (1871.1922)

Autograph letter signed to Baroness Aimery Harty of Pierrebourg.

Eight pages in-8°. Slnd. [early June 1922]

Kolb, Volume XXI, pages 243 to 245.

“Incapable of reading, writing, speaking […] I was unable to correct the proofs of my book or open it once it was published.  »

A few weeks before his death, Proust, exhausted, was no longer able to write.

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“Madam, Unable to read, write, or speak, I could not help but follow the thrilling novel The Death of Cleopatra from the first page to the last. I was unable to correct the proofs of my book, open it once it was published [ Sodom and Gomorrah II , published April 29, 1922], but I feel enchanted with yours. A few years ago I went (perhaps only one evening to the theater in ten years) to see some scenes from Shakespeare's Cleopatra, translated by Gide. I could not stay until the end, I did not see M ^e Rubinstein die, but alas on returning to rue Laurent Pichat I found who had just died, not in the theater, but in her bed, the admirable actress of La Course du Flambeau , Réjane.

This evening, marked by such a disastrous sign, also remained a dazzling sign for me. I would have liked to learn about the Queen of Egypt. I feared him too; despite Goethe's words, reality would harm poetry. For such a book there would be too much science animated by too much life, too much intelligence raised by feeling, too much art too. Who could write it? It was you. At times when reading the name: “Cleopatra” we think of you, we cannot entirely escape the supposition that you yourself must have thought of it. Astronomical studies, the contemplation of Cassiopeia, don't these make us think of a dear union that death could not break? And facial features too. I am so enchanted by this surprising book which proves and hides so much science so well, hiding it so well under an incomparable art of storytelling.

What an extraordinary development takes you from one genre to another. Didn't Hervieu follow this difficult path full of rich unforeseen events? He whom we have seen move from short stories, to the novel by letters like Peints par sois, then to the short novel like L'Armature, then to the theater, to marvelous theater of which the Words remain the first stage and of which we hesitate to name among so many others the summit, if indeed it is not the Race of the Torch. So your life is still an Imitation (in the sacred sense of the word) of his life. Please accept, Madam, my tributes of admiring and respectful attachment. Marcel Proust. »