Note on the Text

Where the text comes from

The text is taken from the Wikisource transcriptions, under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 licence. Each work is taken from a specific revision, whose number and date are recorded in our files and can be consulted from the Sources and credits panel at the foot of each section of the reader.

These transcriptions were prepared page by page by Wikisource contributors from photographs of period editions digitised on Wikimedia Commons, which come mostly from Gallica and the Internet Archive. The facsimile chosen is not always the first edition: for several volumes, it is a later printing. The details are given below, work by work.

Wikisource distinguishes two proofreading statuses: a proofread text (corrigé) has been checked once; a validated text (validé) has been checked a second time by another contributor. Of the fifteen volumes of the Recherche, six are validated; the others are proofread but not yet validated. We indicate this for each work.

Our own interventions are technical and have never touched the text: removal of the Wikisource navigation markers, clean-up of the markup, standardisation of characters and division into sections.

What we cannot reproduce

Proust’s work is in the public domain. The work of the modern editors who established its text is not: the Pléiade edition edited by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, the one edited by Jean-Yves Tadié, and those of Jean Milly or of the Livre de Poche remain in copyright for several decades yet.

We can therefore only reuse editions that are themselves out of copyright, that is to say period printings. Where a modern critical edition gives a different text, more complete or differently ordered, we point this out without being able to reproduce it. This is notably the case with the Venetian episode of Albertine disparue.

À la recherche du temps perdu

The seven parts are taken from the edition of the Nouvelle Revue Française, in which the novel is physically divided into fifteen volumes. The first four parts appeared in Proust’s lifetime; the last three are posthumous, and it is for them that the history of the publication has the greatest consequences for the text.

Du côté de chez Swann

Published in 1913 by Grasset, then taken over by the NRF. The online reader follows two facsimiles of different editions: the 1946 Gallimard printing for volume 1, the 1919 printing for volume 2. Both transcriptions are validated.

À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

Published in 1919; awarded the Prix Goncourt the same year. Facsimiles: Gallimard, volumes 3, 4 and 5 of the 1919 printing. Transcriptions validated.

Le Côté de Guermantes

Published in two parts, 1920 and 1921. Facsimiles: Gallimard, volumes 6, 7 and 8 of the 1921 printing. Volume 8 is validated; volumes 6 and 7 are proofread, not yet validated.

Sodome et Gomorrhe

Published in 1921 and 1922, the last volume to appear in Proust’s lifetime. Facsimiles: Gallimard, volumes 9 and 10 of the 1924 printing. Transcriptions proofread, not yet validated.

La Prisonnière

Facsimiles: Gallimard, volumes 11 and 12 of the 1946 printing. First published in 1923. Transcriptions proofread, not yet validated.

The first posthumous volume. Proust worked on it until the end: three typescripts followed one another, and the last bears, in his own hand, the title La Prisonnière (première partie de Sodome et Gomorrhe III). He revised its text until 6 November 1922, twelve days before his death. The volume was published in 1923 by his brother Robert Proust and by Jacques Rivière, on the basis of this typescript.

This title makes La Prisonnière the first part of a larger whole, Sodome et Gomorrhe III, which La NRF had announced in 1922 as bringing together La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue. In 1993 Nathalie Mauriac Dyer published in Le Livre de Poche classique Sodome et Gomorrhe III. La Prisonnière suivi d’Albertine disparue, which reconstitutes this volume as Proust had announced it. The history of the second part is traced in the next entry.

Albertine disparue

Facsimile: Gallimard, volume 13 of the 1927 printing. First published in 1925. Transcription proofread, not yet validated.

This is the volume whose textual establishment is the most debated, and the only one in which the text we provide presents an identifiable gap. It reproduces the first edition of 1925, established by Robert Proust and the NRF team from a typescript that the author had not himself corrected. The division into four chapters and their headings were the initiative of these first editors.

The title, on the other hand, is indeed Proust’s own. In June 1986, Claude Mauriac discovered, in the archives of Suzy Mante-Proust — daughter of Robert Proust and niece of the writer, who had died that year — another typescript: corrected by Proust in 1922, it bears in his own hand the title Albertine disparue, and the one used by the 1925 editors turns out to be a duplicate of it. Claude Mauriac’s daughter, Nathalie Mauriac, now Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, edited it with Étienne Wolff: Albertine disparue, édition originale de la dernière version revue par l’auteur (Grasset, 1987). This document bearing the author’s final revisions brought to light the scale of the reworking Proust was still carrying out in his last months, and the structural incompleteness of the Recherche.

The Venetian episode, in particular, does not come directly from the manuscript notebooks. In December 1919 Proust had given the review Feuillets d’art an article entitled “À Venise” (“In Venice”), which drew only very partially on the manuscript, leaving out what concerned Albertine and, in places, the hero’s mother. It was this abridged text that served as the basis for the episode in the typescript; it is found in the version corrected by Proust in 1922 as well as in the 1925 edition.

As a result, several pages present in the notebooks are missing from the text we provide: the visit to the baptistery of St Mark’s with the hero’s mother, the visit to the Carpaccio paintings at the Accademia, the search in Venice for substitute loves. The absence is noticeable in reading: Le Temps retrouvé, which we also provide, returns to “deux dalles inégales du baptistère de Saint-Marc” (“two uneven flagstones of the baptistery of St Mark’s”) as to a memory already formed, whereas our text does not narrate the scene. Modern critical editions restore these pages from the manuscript; as their establishment of the text is protected, we cannot reproduce them here.

For the history of this volume, the reader is referred to the work of Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, who pursued the study of the 1986 document: besides the combined edition mentioned in connection with La Prisonnière, the text of the manuscript notebooks, La Fugitive. Cahiers d’“Albertine disparue” (Le Livre de Poche classique, 1993); the correspondence that sheds light on the role of the posthumous editors, Robert Proust et la Nouvelle Revue française. Les Années perdues de la Recherche (1922-1931) (Gallimard, 1999); and a synthesis, Proust inachevé. Le dossier “Albertine disparue” (Champion, “Recherches proustiennes”, 2005). See also Jean Milly, “La Fugitive disparue ?”, Bulletin Marcel Proust, no. 39, 1989, pp. 45-51; and, on the origin of the Venetian episode, Jean Milly, “Problèmes génétiques et éditoriaux à propos d’Albertine disparue”, in Marcel Proust. Écrire sans fin, Rainer Warning and Jean Milly (eds), CNRS Éditions, 1996.

Le Temps retrouvé

Facsimiles: Gallimard, volumes 14 and 15 of the 1927 printing, the year of first publication. Transcriptions proofread, not yet validated.

The last posthumous volume, and the least prepared of the three: no typescript of it existed. The editors had nothing to guide them but the manuscript of the notebooks, left as a work in progress. The division between this volume and the previous one, which nothing marks in the notebooks, is likewise an editorial decision.

The other works

Five texts complement the Recherche: two books by Proust and two translations of Ruskin published in his lifetime, followed by a posthumous collection.

Les Plaisirs et les Jours

Proust’s first book, published by Calmann Lévy in 1896, with illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire and a preface by Anatole France. Facsimile: the first edition of 1896. Transcription proofread, not yet validated.

La Bible d’Amiens

Proust’s translation of John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, preceded by his preface, published by the Mercure de France in 1904. Facsimile: the 1904 edition. Transcription validated.

Sésame et les lys

Proust’s second translation of Ruskin, preceded by “Sur la lecture”, published by the Mercure de France in 1906. Facsimile: the 1906 edition. Transcription proofread, not yet validated. The Wikisource record gives 1865 as the date of original publication: this is the date of Ruskin’s English original, not that of the French translation.

Pastiches et Mélanges

Published by the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1919. Facsimile: the 1921 printing, presented as the seventh edition. Transcription proofread, not yet validated.

Chroniques

A collection of articles and short pieces gathered after Proust’s death by his brother Robert, published by the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1927. Facsimile: the 1936 printing. Transcription proofread, not yet validated.

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