In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual and holds in abeyance but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since, if one had not obtained what one desired. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity which in other circumstances it would never have. The lovelorn live under the sign of suffering… He finds a refuge by the sea and spends his days immersed in romantic daydreams and amorous fantasies.
He falls in love but his love is unrequited and his heart is broken. Time runs, now the narrator is a hypochondriac, nervous and susceptible youth and he is a product of his milieu. However, wishing to magnify themselves in the eyes of the princely or ducal families which are their immediate superiors, these aristocrats also know that they can do this only if they enhance their name with something extraneous to it, something which, other names being equal, will make theirs prevail: a political influence, a literary or artistic reputation, a large fortune. Peacockery… Exclusive circles exist under the sign of swagger… Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu ( Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.īorn in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family.
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