PROUST Marcel (1871-1924)

CORRECTED PROOFS with autograph corrections and additions for Du côté de chez Swann (1913); 16-page in-8 booklet (273-288). Proof book for the first edition of Du côté de chez Swann (Grasset, 1913). It contains autograph corrections and 7 autograph marginal additions, the last of which is continued on a glued paper. The notebook (numbered 13) bears at the head the stamp of Ch. Colin, printer in Mayenne, dated August 9, 1913, with the mention "Épreuves en 3e". It belongs to the second part, Un amour de Swann, and corresponds to pages 218-232 of the Tadié edition of the Bibl. de la Pléiade. Swann takes tea at Odette's house; Odette looks like Botticelli's Zephora; exchange of letters. One evening, not finding Odette at Verdurin's, Swann searches for her in the night, finds her holding a bouquet of catleyas, and others adorning her bodice; she becomes his mistress; the metaphor "faire catleya"; Swann comes to her house every night... The first important addition (p. 273) concerns the first letter that Swann receives from Odette, where he "recognized at once that large handwriting in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on shapeless characters which might have meant to less discerning eyes the disorder of thought, the inadequacy of education, the lack of frankness and will. Swann had forgotten his cigarette case at Odette's house"... Another (p. 277), with two redactions crossed out, concerns another letter "which she had sent him at noon from the 'Maison Dorée' (it was the day [of the first farewell performance of Delaunay where the Verdurins had taken him in the evening with Odetteelle began crossed out] of the Paris-Murcia Feast given for the flooded people of Murcia) began"... On the last page (288), Swann, returning from an evening out, dismisses his friends: "They were astonished; and, in fact, Swann was no longer the same. They were astonished; and, in fact, Swann was no longer the same. No letter was ever received from him in which he asked to know a woman. He no longer paid any attention to any woman, and refrained from going to places where people met. In a restaurant, in the country, he had the opposite attitude to the one by which, only yesterday, he would have been recognized and which had always seemed to be his. A passion is so much like a momentary and different character in us, which replaces the other and abolishes the hitherto invariable signs by which it was expressed! On the other hand, what was invariable now was that wherever Swann was, he would not fail to go and join Odette. The path that separated him from her was the one he inevitably travelled, and like the very slope, irresistible and rapid, of his life. In fact, often... PROVENANCE Horace Finaly Library