Proust's Letter and Poem to Raoul Versini — December 2020

In October 2020, the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray acquired, at a public sale at the Ader auction house with Thierry Bodin as expert, an autograph letter and poem by Marcel Proust addressed to his schoolmate Raoul Versini. These two documents of capital importance — missing for many years before reappearing, some thirty years ago, at a sale where Jean-Yves Tadié had been able to study them — decisively enrich our knowledge of the young writer's inner life and the genesis of his early works.

The letter, written on an envelope dated 26 and 28 October 1888, constitutes one of the most intimate testimonies we possess concerning the young Marcel Proust, then a philosophy student at the Lycée Condorcet. It sheds light on a formative episode in his private life and allows direct connections to be drawn with several early texts — "Avant la nuit" in the Revue blanche (1892), the "Confession d'une jeune fille" collected in Les Plaisirs et les Jours — as well as with certain recurring motifs of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Overview

Raoul Versini (1870–1939) was Marcel Proust's classmate in the philosophy class at the Lycée Condorcet — the famous class of Professor Darlu, the model for Monsieur Beulier in Jean Santeuil — who exerted a profound influence on the writer. A little-known figure in Proust's circle, Versini nonetheless pursued a fine literary and academic career: admitted to the École normale supérieure and successful in the agrégation in literature, he went on to become director of the "petit lycée" Condorcet and published several essays and editions of classical texts.

The letter of 26–28 October 1888 is Marcel's reply to Raoul, continuing a confession already exchanged between the two schoolmates. In it, the writer returns to an episode presented as a rape, confided at once to his friend Abel Desjardins and, that same evening, to his own father. This account sheds light on the genesis of an early version of the "Confession d'une jeune fille" from Les Plaisirs et les Jours, as well as of the text "Avant la nuit" published in the Revue blanche in 1892. The motif of the sofa that appears in it will resurface, moreover, in several episodes of À la recherche du temps perdu.

The autograph poem, written in a style close to Verlaine, was given by its author to a second recipient during his military service in Orléans, in the spring of 1890, under the title "Chanson de printemps." To these two documents is added a "Credo littéraire" — a list of the great nineteenth-century writers admired by Proust — which foreshadows the pastiches and critical studies he would go on to publish over the course of his career.

Authors and Contributors

Jean-Yves Tadié, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and author of the reference biography Marcel Proust (Gallimard, 1996), signs the central study of the brochure. He places the two documents in their biographical and literary context, revealing their significance for our knowledge of the writer's youth.

Laurent Versini, member of the Académie française, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and specialist in eighteenth-century literature, was the grandson of Raoul Versini. His testimony provided Jean-Yves Tadié with decisive information on the relationship between Marcel Proust and his schoolmate.

Éric Unger was responsible for the typesetting of the brochure.

Contents

• Letters to Raoul Versini, by Jean-Yves Tadié
• The Poem
• The Literary Credo
• Reproductions and Transcriptions

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback
• ISBN: 978-2-492318-06-1
• Price: 4 €
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray
• Legal deposit: December 2020