On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Here he is writing to a friend from childhood, Abel Desjardins, about a photograph Abel gave him in childhood, inscribed on the back “To my best friend except X.” Two years later, Abel asked for the photograph back and returned it with the words “except X” crossed out.

Proust moved from his apartment at 102 boulevard Haussmann on October 1, 1919, after his aunt sold the building.

Since that time the mementos have seemed so dead to me that latterly, forced to leave the boulevard Haussmann, I burned precious autographs, manuscripts, no copies of which exist — even photographs which have become rare. But all of a sudden I stopped in front of a little boy with a thin nose, a bantering look, and a three-cornered hat, and I exclaimed to the person who was burning up all the things I was taking out of big valises: “No! not that!” It was the photograph in which I was Abel’s best friend except for X — then just best friend, nothing more. And that I couldn’t have burned, for it was still living.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Abel Desjardins, “well known as a surgeon and lover of the arts,” 1919. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Found by opening the book Augustine-style, as I’ve found other passages from letters to post on Proust’s birthday.]