Marcel PROUST (1871-1922). L.A.S. "Marcel", [Salies-de-Béarn September 1886], to his maternal grandfather Nathé Weil; 3 1/2 pages in-8 in purple ink. Long and amusing youthful letter to his grandfather, with a portrait of Mme Catusse. "My dear little grandfather Thank you a thousand times over for your letter. It seems that my style has the misfortune to displease everyone. Since the sublime genre doesn't suit me, I'll try bourgeois". And Marcel talks about one of the hotel's guests, the dentist Magitot, and his wife's "maneuvers and the respect of the hotel's inhabitants", where he was considered "an illustrious scholar, a famous doctor. While we passed poor and ignored in the hotel lounge, people were bustling around the deity, with an affable and easy welcome. [...] And the doctor deigned to smile, even to play wisth. Hide your face, O faculty! So I insinuated insidiously to a chatty admirer of the "doctor" that the scientist was a dentist, a simple "scientist by the way, and doctor I believe" tooth puller. But the venom circulated badly, and Mr. Magitot left yesterday, having enjoyed a month of the lying sweets of popularity. I must say, to pay homage to the truth, as the châtelain d'Auteuil says, that the doctor is a very good man, very frank, very natural, extremely well-educated and very intelligent. He amused himself the other day in front of an audience of very devout wives and husbands by reading atheistic and blasphemous verses by a certain Madame Ackermann and proving a+b, that religions were human institutions that stopped the progress of society, that God was a chimera, the intelligence and the heart were vital functions like digestion and respiration, shouting out loud that conscience was the only rule of man and that with these dogmas the virtues - charity, for example - regained all their strength, whereas with religion they were practiced for the narrow and selfish purpose of a reward". Mme Catusse loathed Magitot, calling him an odontologist... "The treatment is doing us very well. Maman is blooming and Robert is thriving. I'm a tender rose and starve at every meal"... Marcel then paints a portrait of Madame Catusse [who was to become one of his great friends]: she is "a charming woman. Very pretty face, black hair, smooth velvety skin, very clear eyes, very lively and very soft, very slim waist, plump rather than tall, very great intelligence, very remarkable, deep education, a lot of wit and grace, a not so banal amiability which does not exclude a frankness full of flavor, all in all, a great deal of originality and charm, and to complete my information, this delightful woman, who softens for us the rigors of exile, sings admirably with a very pure and sympathetic voice, and also paints (I don't know how, having never seen anything painted or drawn by her)"... He ends by recalling the promise to subscribe her to the Revue bleue; and he adds "that the odontologist had called himself a colleague of Papa's noise, which I found hard to destroy"... Madame Proust added 8 lines at the bottom of her son's letter: "Mon petit père I don't want to deprive you of your grandson's letter, but for special reasons that I will tell you in person, I want no one but Maman, you and Georges to read it, and I want you to tear it up immediately. J.P" Correspondance, t.XXI, n°393. Provenance: Bibliothèque Jacques Guérin (VII, May 20, 1992, no. 57).