Art Calendar - 29 December 2021

Marcel Proust - A Parisian Novel

The great poet's Paris at the Musée Carnavalet

from 16 December 2021 to 10 April 2022

The year 2021 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust (1871-1922). The Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris, which has reconstructed the writer's bedroom in its collections, is taking this event as an opportunity to explore the links between Marcel Proust and Paris and the city's role in his major work "In Search of Lost Time". It is a beautiful exhibition for lovers of Marcel Proust's work to Paris tourists who can discover Paris from a historical and poetic side.

The museum

Founded in 1880 and therefore the oldest museum in Paris, the Carnavalet Museum reopened in March 2021 after four years of renovation. It comprises 2 city palaces, the 16th century hôtel Carnavalet and the 17th century hôtel du Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, which are connected to each other. It houses many Paris treasures such as a silk slipper of Marie Antoinette, Voltaire's so-called 'Death Chair', and the reconstructed bedroom of Marcel Proust: 

" I always had a map of Paris at hand ". 

Marcel Proust, 

In Search of Lost Time, Swann's Way

The first part of the Marcel Proust exhibition deals with the world Marcel Proust inhabited in Paris. As he was born and died in Paris, Proust's life took place in the very limited area enclosed by Parc Monceau, Place de la Concorde, Auteuil, Bois de Boulogne and l'Étoile. Paris was of immense importance in the development of Marcel Proust's literary vocation, from the first writings he produced with his classmates at the Lycée Condorcet in the late 1890s to his entry into the city's high society and his encounters with people who were to be decisive in his life. Around 280 works bring Marcel Proust's Parisian universe to life.

Proust's discovery of Parisian artistic and social circles, the friendships and loves he experienced there, strengthened his personality and led him to an awareness of his vocation. City maps illustrate Marcel Proust's life in Paris, his networks and his favourite places. The focus of the exhibition is the writer's bedroom. The furniture and objects in the room, which are closely linked to the personal life of Marcel Proust and his family, make it possible to recreate the writer's space of invention and trace the genesis of his novel.

The second part of the exhibition begins with the fictional Paris that Marcel Proust created. Following the architecture of the novel "In Search of Lost Time" and referring to emblematic places in the city, it offers a journey through the novel and the history of the capital, focusing on the main characters of the book. The city of Paris, poetically depicted in the novel, is the setting for the quest of the narrator, the author's alter ego, until he discovers his vocation as a writer.

Mobilier ayant appartenu à Marcel ProustCollection du musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris

© Pierre Antoine / Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris

" One of the city's ugliest districts " 

Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at 96 rue La Fontaine, in the 16th arrondissement. He was born in the 16th arrondissement.

His parents Adrien and Jeanne Proust came from an atheist family with republican traditions. After their marriage in 1870, the couple moved to Rue Roy 8, in the 8th arrondissement. Arrondissement. This is where Marcel Proust lived until 1919.

The writer grew up against the backdrop of a Paris that had been transformed since the reign of Emperor Napoleon III by the Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, and his successors. The cityscape changed dramatically with the creation of large green spaces and the construction of opulent buildings that contrasted with the still visible ruins of the fires of 1871. After the birth of their youngest son Robert, the Proust family moved in 1873 to the house at 9 boulevard Malesherbes near the Madeleine church, a neighbourhood that Marcel particularly disliked.

He spent his childhood and youth in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées and the Lycée Condorcet, from which he graduated in 1889. His sense of beauty was fostered by visits to the Louvre and the theatre. It was also during this time that the young Proust experienced the first inklings of love and discovered his homosexuality.

At his father's urging, Marcel enrolled at the Institut de Sciences Politiques and the Sorbonne to study philosophy. Although he obtained a job as an unpaid administrative assistant at the Bibliothèque Mazarine (library), he turned it down in order to devote himself to an intense social life and his first attempts at writing. Thanks to friends from his school days, Marcel Proust gained access to the bourgeois salons and later through introductions to Parisian literary and artistic circles. Meeting Robert de Montesquiou gave him access to the aristocratic circles in the wealthy neighbourhoods of the Right Bank: Saint-Honoré and the Plaine Monceau.



Before he was thirty, Proust experienced the emotions and situations that inspired his first book, Pleasures and Days, and later Jean Santeuil, a novel abandoned in 1899, about which he wrote: "This book was not made, it was harvested".

Around 1900, Marcel Proust occasionally wrote chronicles for Le Figaro about the elegant evenings he attended. In his parents' luxurious flat at 45 rue de Courcelles, near the Parc Monceau, he organised dinners where artists and aristocrats met. It was at this time that Proust discovered the work of the art critic John Ruskin. Under Ruskin's influence, he made several trips to Venice and, with the help of his mother, translated two works by the English theorist: The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies.

The years were marked by the brutal deaths of his father in 1903 and his mother in 1905. Desperate and in poor health, Proust sought refuge at Doctor Sollier's clinic in Boulogne and at the Hôtel des Reservoirs in Versailles. Forced to leave the parental home, he moved into the former flat of his uncle Louis at 102 Boulevard Haussmann.

When he moved to Boulevard Haussmann in the 8th arrondissement, Proust was nevertheless unhappy to return to the neighbourhood of his childhood. The writer suffered from constant asthma attacks and only left the city in the summer to travel to Cabourg and Normandy.

Gradually, he left his cork-lined bedroom only at night. As in his younger years, when he met friends at Weber's, he now dined late at the Larue in the Rue Royale or at the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, where he learned valuable information about Parisian high society from the head butler.

In 1908, Proust embarked on several literary projects. After starting with an essay on the Romantic poet and critic Sainte-Beuve, he gradually turned to writing novels. After receiving several rejections, in 1913 he published, together with Grasset, In Search of Lost Time, the first volume of Intermittences du coeur, which later became Swann's Way and In the Shadow of the Young Flower Maidens.



On 3 August 1914, the declaration of war suspends the publication of the second volume, which finally appears in 1919, published by Gallimard, who becomes the publisher of The Quest in 1916. Due to his poor health, Proust is discharged from military service. However, as his servant Nicolas Cottin was mobilised, he hired Céleste Albaret as housekeeper and secretary. The latter was the young wife of his chauffeur Odilon. While giving his novel its present form, Proust read seven newspapers a day and followed the events of the war on a survey map. Sadly, he learns of the death of many of his friends at the front.

"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."

Anonyme, Marcel Proust et ses amis au tennis du boulevard Bineau (au centre Jeanne Pouquet), 1892

© Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

The end

After the sale of 102 Boulevard Haussmann to the Varin-Bernier bank, Proust sought refuge in the 16th arrondissement: first at 8 bis Rue Laurent-Pichat, a flat belonging to his girlfriend, the actress Réjane, near the Bois de Boulogne, and a few months later at 44 Rue Hamelin. Despite the upheavals caused by these moves, Proust was pleased to see four volumes of his novel published by Gallimard: "Swann's Way", with one of the manuscripts on display here, "In the Shadow of Young Flower Maidens", "The Way of the Guermantes" and "Sodom and Gomorrah". The second volume of his novel cycle was awarded the Goncourt Prize in September 1919.

Although his health deteriorated, Proust, whose social and artistic life fed his writing, continued to visit the Ritz, the theatre and the Opéra "to see how people had aged".

In May 1921, accompanied by the art historian Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, he visited an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the Jeu de Paume. The view of Delft painted by Vermeer that he rediscovered there influenced the episode of Bergotte's death in "The Captive", the fifth volume of his novel.

In the autumn of 1922, Proust told Céleste: "I have great news. Last night I put the inscription 'The End'. [...] Now I can die." He dies on 18 November without having finished correcting the last three volumes.

Marcel Proust, 

a Parisian novel

December 16, 2021 - April 10, 2022

Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris | Crypte archéologique

23 rue de Sévigné - 75003 Paris

www.carnavalet.paris.fr | www.crypte.paris.fr

Find everything in the exhibition catalogue

Catalogue published in french only

Marcel Proust, un roman parisien

Hardback, 256 pages, 250 illustrations

Published by Paris Mus.es

39,90 €

By C. Mauer 29 December 2021