Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust (1871–1922), born into an affluent Parisian bourgeois family and afflicted from childhood with severe chronic asthma, spent his youth frequenting the aristocratic salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Following the deaths of his beloved parents, Proust retreated into a cork-lined bedroom on Boulevard Haussmann, working through the night to conquer time and death through memory and art.

Between 1909 and 1922, Proust produced À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), a monumental 3,200-page cathedral of prose comprising seven volumes and over 2,000 characters. Beginning with the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea resurrecting the entire lost world of Combray, Proust formulated the theory of involuntary memory (*mémoire involontaire*). Awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919 for À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Proust wrote and revised until his final dying breath.