A thick beard masking his sunken cheeks, the dying 51-year old Marcel Proust sat in his bed, propped up by pillows, covered with blankets. Sleeping during the day, and working at night, in a room with cork-lined walls to stifle noises, Proust was working on the page proofs of the fourth volume of his one-and-a-half-million word novel À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time.
The autobiographical novel depicts an unnamed ‘narrator’ who, like Proust, lived a comfortable life, hobnobbed with aristocrats, was a writer, and suffered from asthma. This illness affected Proust deeply, and, in many ways, helped forge his way of looking at the world, and his way of writing about it.
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