Under the powder against asthma, a literary treasure by Proust

(Paris) Large sheets covered with the powder he inhaled to fight his asthma, Proust could not imagine that they would one day be the object of the care of the restorers of the National Library of France.

They are called “the seventy-five sheets”. They are the first known draft of the great novelistic cycle of the writer, In Search of Lost Timewhose publication began in 1913 and ended in 1927, five years after his death.

This long unknown treasure is entrusted to Frédérique Pelletier, in a workshop under the roofs of the BnF, in the center of Paris. “We will carry out minimalist restorations, to block the problems of tears and gaps”, she says, by gluing pieces of ultra-light Japanese paper (2 g/m²).

The goal is not to find the hypothetical original state of the manuscript. The folding is preserved. An artisanal restoration of a torn sheet, at an unknown time and by an unknown hand, is maintained.

“The choice was made not to erase to restore a uniform shade. After analysis, we understood that some sheets were smeared with Legras powder with which Proust fumigated himself. It’s interesting to see,” adds the restorer.

mountain of papers

It took a long time for these famous “seventy-five sheets” (in truth, 76 pages) to emerge.

In the 1950s, the author of On the Swann side no longer interested many people. His niece Suzy Mante-Proust had trusted a young researcher, Bernard de Fallois, to put in order the mountain of papers left by her uncle.

The latter revealed its existence in 1954, in the preface to Against Sainte Beuvea posthumous essay by Proust, recomposed from an unfinished project and various notes on literature.

In 1962, when the drafts of the novels entered the National Library, the Proustian experts were at their expense: the famous “sheets” were not there. Bernard de Fallois kept them.

They will only join public collections after the death in 2018 of the man who has since become a publisher.

When this manuscript reached the BnF in 2020, “it was not in very good condition […] It presented on almost every sheet elements of deterioration, which had to be treated, ”recalls the head of the modern manuscripts department, Guillaume Fau.

“The researchers were waiting”

But everything is readable. The disintegration that awaits many 19th century manuscripts^e or early XX^ebecause of the ferrogallic inks which end up attacking the paper, is not yet perceptible here.

The bet was to show these sheets to the public during the exhibition Marcel Proust, the factory of the workfrom October at the François-Mitterrand library.

“Working in about a year and a half, if you do the math, it’s a bit tight. But it’s a schedule that we were able to keep. We went very, very quickly also because the researchers were waiting for this manuscript”, underlines Mr. Fau.

Its transcription is available in bookstores, published by Gallimard editions in March (The seventy-five sheets and other unpublished manuscripts). Digitization will later make it possible to read it on the Internet.

The beginning is not the famous: “For a long time, I went to bed early”, but a sentence of 40 words, characteristic of the style of the novelist, on the arrival of the rain.

Fragments will arrive in Combraythe first part of On the Swann side. At the end of the last sentence, which has 73 words, Proust did not put a full stop: for him, everything remains to be written.