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The Thrill of Proust’s Handwriting | The New Yorker

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The first time I saw Proust’s bedroom, in the Musée Carnavalet, in Paris—a tiny tableau cordoned off by a chain, lined in cork, and crammed with undistinguished, illogically placed furniture—I was struck more than anything by the modesty of the bed. Proust famously preferred to write in bed, and, between chronic illness and predisposition, ended up spending much of his life there. “It is pleasant, when one is distraught, to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to howling, like branches in the autumn wind,” he wrote in “Pleasures and Regrets,” his first book, a collection of prose poems, philosophical reflections, and sketches, published in 1896, when he was twenty-five. A current exhibition at the Morgan Library, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the publication, in November of 1913, of “Du Côté de Chez Swann” (“Swann’s Way”), the first volume of Proust’s masterwor

Save this story Save this story The first time I saw Proust’s bedroom, in the Musée Carnavalet, in Paris—a tiny tableau cordoned off by a chain, lined in cork, and crammed with undistinguished, illogically placed furniture—I was struck more than anything by the modesty of the bed. Proust famously preferred to write in bed, and, between chronic illness and predisposition, ended up spending much of his life there. “It is pleasant, when one is distraught, to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrende

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