Marcel PROUST (1871-1922). L.A.S., Sunday evening [September 29, 1901], to Jean Vignaud; 7pages in-8, envelope. Beautiful letter of literary and poetic criticism [Jean Vignaud (1875-1962) had published his first collection of verse, L'Accueil, in March]. He has just "spent a dreadful year in terms of health. October is coming and I have not yet been able to leave Paris for a single day. Since May 1900 I haven't been able to leave for a day. Forgive me for telling you so much about myself. It's so that you won't be angry with me for not yet having thanked you for your book. Since it's not "topical", since its beauty will last, since in ten years I'll love it just as much as I do today (and I hope and predict it will have an infinitely more lasting posterity) it doesn't seem at all odd to talk to you about it after so long. And perhaps if now everyone has spoken to you and there is a silence of individual thanks around him, you won't be angry that this belated letter proves to you that people continue to reread and love him. Your verses are not only admirable and charming. They have, what must fill you with confidence and joy, an extremely strong originality, and the most profound of all, a moral originality. I can't think of a volume of verse more widely differentiated from all contemporary and earlier poetry, not by sought-after dissimilarities that only betray the common origin, but by the strength of your sincerity and talent that lets your original soul shine through. It almost seems as if you have brought a new feeling into literature. I don't know what to call it. It's not yet tenderness for a friend, although it's already more. It's no longer just charity for a guest. The word "hospitality" would take us too far back to Greek antiquity, and besides, it did not know the delicious refinements of this soulful hospitality. And it's not just the broadest of human-to-human relationships. Welcome" is an apt title, and one in which there is a graceful delicacy that marks a first difference with hospitality. I'm sure that from now on we'll be using this noble and charming word "welcome" more willingly, even if we won't be able to draw from it all the richness of feeling you've found there. Found, because this is your domain and it will remain yours. If the feelings are so profound, so simple (there are exquisite landscapes and the grave poetry of the Pater noster in such a piece on bread, which is really the daily bread) the two figures, those I can call neither friends, nor hosts, nor brothers, the Welcomer and the Welcomed remain mysterious, profiled in a shadow where they remain invisible, the light giving only on the wall and on the garden. This mystery is the aesthetic originality of this book, whose invention in the realm of feeling is its moral originality. I congratulate you, I envy you, I thank you"... Correspondence, t.II, n°283.