PROUST, Marcel (1871-1922)

PROUST, Marcel (1871-1922)

Autograph letter signed « Marcel » to Fernand Gregh
[Paris, July / August 1892], 2 p. in-8° in bold pencil
On letterhead of Le Banquet
Fold marks, ink smudge on first page

Proust reassures his father by studying law

« Mon cher petit Gregh, je suis désolé. Voici pourquoi.
J’ai un examen imminent qui me fait travailler toute la journée, et comme la nuit je ne me couche pas à cause d’horribles crises d’asthme, le soir je n’ai le courage de rien faire.
Aussi je ne t’ai pas vu depuis longtemps et voilà ce qui m’attriste ; je suis seul à Paris, ma famille étant à Auteuil, moi ne pouvant y aller à cause de cet asthme. Tâche donc de venir un moment. Préviens-moi pour un soir de préférence.
Je t’envoie en attendant mes tendresses et mon admiration.
Marcel »

Uncertain about his career choice, Proust enrolled in the Faculty of Law in 1890, at the age of just 19. After passing the written part of his exams in June 1892, he was due to take the oral on August 4, which he failed. This failure did not prevent him from going to enjoy himself in Trouville, where he met up with his correspondent Louis de La Salle as well as Jacques Bizet. He was finally admitted the following November.

It was in January 1892, among the students of the Lycée Condorcet who animated the literary review Le Banquet, that Fernand Gregh (1873–1960) met Marcel Proust. He quickly became the editor-in-chief of this periodical, while Proust published some of his first important literary and theoretical texts there. Along with two other students from the Lycée and members of Le Banquet, Louis de La Salle and Daniel Halévy, Proust and Gregh undertook in 1893 the writing of a collaborative novel. This collective work, conceived in the manner of La Croix de Berny (composed by Gautier and three other writers), was never completed, but Proust was its principal contributor and already introduced themes that would later reappear in À la recherche du temps perdu. Fernand Gregh then devoted himself almost exclusively to poetry, winning a prize from the Académie française in 1896. He played a certain role in literary life through his position as secretary of the editorial board of the Revue de Paris (1894–1897) and as editor of Lettres (until 1909). His friendship with Proust, however, was intermittent, notably due to aesthetic divergences. Moreover, like many ‘established’ writers, Gregh at first regarded Proust with a touch of condescension, while Proust, for his part, mocked the ridiculousness of his friend’s supposedly ‘charming’ character. Fernand Gregh entered the Académie française in 1953 and left significant literary memoirs there, including a volume entitled Mon Amitié avec Marcel Proust (1958), in which he published the letters he had received from the author of La Recherche.