PROUST Marcel (1871-1922).

Lot 119
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PROUST Marcel (1871-1922).
L.A.S. "Marcel Proust", [end of May 1921], to BINET-VALMER; 5 and a half pages in-8, in a half-maroquin blue night folder in-4. Superb letter on his work and the inverts, which seems to be unpublished. [Proust reacts here to an article by Binet-Valmer in Comœdia of May 22, 1921, dedicated to Sodom and Gomorrah. While recalling his "admiration for the meticulous genius" of Proust, he deplores: "if this monument is to be crowned by four volumes that will study sexual inversion, I think the time is ill-chosen. In truth, the depravities that Louis Dumur denounces when he approaches the court of Wilhelm Kronprinz, are little compared to those in which M. Marcel Proust, historian of M. de Charlus, indulges"...] "Dear and great friend You are too good to speak of me with such excess. Don't talk about me anymore. To defend myself from just reproaches mixed with your too indulgent praise, I will invoke the composition of the work. It can no longer be denied, now that at the end of the third volume of Sodom II, we see the evocation of a scene (Mlle Vinteuil and her friend) from Swann's Way, suddenly diverting the narrative, taking it in a new direction. We must therefore give credit, for the same reason, to the author, you will see him show that all his inverts are Germans (already in Le Côté de Guermantes we see that the Guermantes are German princes). I don't want to say that Germany has the sad privilege of inversion, and Sodom I (in the same volume as Guermantes II) ends precisely with the enumeration of capitals that you say. [...] There is only one point on which we disagree. I do not believe that the war destroyed but on the contrary developed the inversion. I add that those who were previously invested were often heroic soldiers. [...] Besides, does it ever prevent one from being brave in war (from the Gd Condé to the Maréchal xxx)? It only makes one obnoxious "in society" because of the tense preciousness, the gossip etc. I recognize that all this is quite long. But I have always exhausted my subjects whatever they were. I don't like this one any more than Flaubert liked the characters in La Bovary. And alas, it is a thousand and one thousand feet below the Bovary. But it is the fault of my talent, not of my subject"... [Binet-Valmer will reply on June 4 to Proust, who will reply by return (Correspondance, volume XX, p. 314).
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