Someone like Maman

Elisabeth Ladenson

  • BuyMadame Proust: A Biography by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, translated by Alice Kaplan
    Chicago, 310 pp, £16.00, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 226 05642 5

The heroic image of Proust in his cork-lined room, valiantly racing against death to finish his masterpiece, is now so ingrained that it eclipses that of the spoiled 30-year-old who left messages for his mother complaining about noise made by the servants; bullied her into throwing dinner parties for people who sneered at the family; and, later, challenged the father of a young man he had flirted with to a duel because the son had failed to respond with sufficient indignation to rumours about Proust’s sexual tendencies.

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