His dizziness increased he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea.

At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness.

But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s `View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.The circumstances of his death were as follows. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day.

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu ( Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.īorn in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family.

La Prisonnière by Marcel Proust