Marcel Proust

Note

There is already an enormous amount of information published on Proust, on the web and elsewhere. However this itself creates a problem--it can be difficult to find high-quality resources. I've created this page both for my own use and for others. It is aimed at English speakers interested in reading Proust in French.

Proust's work is in the public domain and can be freely downloaded. I have included links below to the best-quality free editions I've found. However publishers have competed to produce higher quality editions that feature recent scholarship, detailed footnotes, background and essays. In my opinion these are worth the price.

It can be challenging to buy French editions outside of Europe. In the US, I can sometimes find French editions on Amazon, sometimes shipped from the UK and sometimes even with free shipping. Otherwise I mostly use Amazon.fr, although shipping charges tend to be high, and often the books are poorly packed. An alternative option is Librarie Gallimard, which packs the books much more carefully.

For digital French editions, many are available from the US Kindle store but you have to be careful since Amazon tends to confuse editions. I prefer when possible to read PDF over epub since I want correct page layout and numbering. The best source I've found for these is Numilog, but most are DRM-protected which means you have to use different and inferior software to read them. However I've still found this to be worthwhile. A big advantage of digital editions is that you can click on words to look them up.

À la recherche du temps perdu

1. (1913) Du côté de chez Swann   (Combray · Un amour de Swann · Noms de pays : le nom)

2. (1918) À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleures   (Autour de Mme Swann · Noms de pays : le pays)

3. (1920) Le Côté de Guermantes   (I · II)

4. (1921) Sodome et Gomorrhe   (I · II)

5. (1923) La Prisonière (Sodome et Gomorrhe III)

6. (1925) Albertine disparue (La Fugitive)

7. (1927) Le Temps retrouvé

La Pléiade

The 1989 Pléiade edition edited under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié is the current definitive edition of Recherche. It is published in four volumes which can be purchased separately or as part of a boxed set. Although the books and typeface are small the quality is otherwise excellent. This version contains extensive footnotes as well as thousands of pages of variants, and is invaluable for anyone interested in how the novel evolved. It is also the edition all scholarly works will refer to. For those who want only the text with no footnotes or essays, la Pléiade released a compact two-volume limited edition (also leather bound) in 2022. The older three-volume 1954 Pléiade edition is still available but is likely of little interest.

Other French Editions

The primary three modern editions of Recherche are published by Gallimard, Flammarion, and Livre de Poche. I currently own the 2024 Flammarion edition of Du côté de chez Swann and the Gallimard Folio editions of the others, including the separate volume Un Amour de Swann. I have them all as DRM-protected PDFs, both for portability and so I can make the font size as big as I like. See also the excellent page at the University at Buffalo.

Gallimard: The text should be identical to the Pléiade edition; however the variants are missing and there are different footnotes, plus a different selection of essays and supplementary material. There are Folio, Quarto and Blanche (NRF) editions. The Folio editions seem to be the best to get. Currently the newest versions have appeared from 2019-2023 (plus a separate volume for Un amour de Swann in 2018); only Du côté de chez Swann hasn't been recently updated (last version 1988) and still has the cover of the older series, despite the new cover being shown on the website. I'd expect it to be updated within the next year or two.

Flammarion: Edited under the direction of Jean Milly. Also very high quality (from the one volume I have), but has the disadvantage of being split in 10 volumes instead of 7, which makes it more expensive. Ombres, Guermantes and Sodome are split into two volumes. On the other hand the volume La Fugitive / Albertine disparue contains both major variants of that work.

Le Livre de Poche: Edited under the direction of Matthieu Vernet. I haven't looked at this edition yet, but it should also be good. New editions of the first four volumes have been released in the period 2022-2024 and I'd guess the others will follow soon. The (not yet revised) edition of Albertine disparue apprently contains both major variants of that work.

Public Domain Editions

Note that public domain editions will pre-date the Pléiade edition.

The best source I've found for a free edition of Recherche is La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec; the work is based on the 1947 Gallimard edition and is particularly carefully done. It's divided into 15 volumes and is available in every major format.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France Gallica site contains, among numerous other invaluable resources, scans and transcriptions of historical editions of the volumes of Recherche. They can be found in the "Editions publiées" section of this page.

Another free online and searchable text for Recherche, possibly based on the Pléiade edition (I have not checked), is proust.page .

Audio Books

Although there are paid audio books available, there are two free sources:

• Youtube series of Recherche read by actors of the Comédie-Française. Superbly narrated.

• Mp3 files at litteratureaudio.com. However both male and female readings of the text are far inferior to those by the Comédie-Française actors.

Notebooks and Proofs

The best place to find digitized notebooks and proofs of Proust's work is the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Gallica site. This page has a well-organized selection of states of the work from the original notebooks to the final published versions. Unfortunately the most valuable corrected proofs, those in the Fondation Martin Bodmer collection below, are not available here; the closest are the "placards corrigés de Du côté de chez Swann", but these seem to be earlier, less extensive, corrections. It is still worthwhile to compare both.

Also valuable is Fonds Proust numérique at ITEM, which indexes Gallica and Bodmer collections.

Published works:

• Du côté de chez Swann : premières épreuves corrigées (1913), fac-similé et transcription, édition de Charles Méla
  Beautiful deluxe limited editions, huge (30x40cm) and heavy. Combray is sold out but Un Amour de Swann is still available as of late 2024. Although expensive at 249 €, it's a bargain given the quality of the volume. Combray can be found in some libraries.
  These proofs come from the private collection of Jacques Guérin, who knew Proust personally, and who acquired them from the collection of Robert Proust's widow Marthe Dubois-Amyot immediately after her death in 1935. He then sold them at auction in 2000 just before his own death at age 98, and they were purchased by the Fondation Martin Bodmer in Geneva, Switzerland.
  The complete proofs have been digitized and are available at Bodmer Lab. In addition some pages from Combray including the title page are available as images and in a video here.

  • (2013) Combray (Gallimard, Placards 1-29, 1200 exemplaires)

  • (2016) Un Amour de Swann (Gallimard, Placards 29-53, 1100 exemplaires)

• (2022) Marcel Proust: La fabrique de l'oeuvre (Gallimard · Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
  Catalog for the exhibition at the BnF of the same name. There is a tour of the exhibition on YouTube.

• (2021) Les soixante-quinze feuillets. Et autres manuscrits inédits (Gallimard), édition de Nathalie Mauriac Dyer
  Early writings by Proust that would evolve into Recherche, discovered in 2018.

• (2021) Le Temps perdu (Bouquins), édition de Jean-Marc Quaranta
  The manuscript Proust originally and unsuccessfuly tried to publish in 1912-1913. 

• (2015) Marcel Proust, L’Agenda 1906 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, et al.
  Extremely high quality and also free!

• (2008-2022) Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (Brepols · Bibliothèque Nationale de France), Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, et al.
  Expensive but extremely high quality two-volume editions for each notebook, one volume a facsimile and the other a transcription with editorial notes. For some notebooks the second volumes are also available separately. As of 2024 only seven of the notebooks have been released.

• (1976) Le Carnet de 1908 (Gallimard), édition de Philip Kolb
  First notebook specifically for Recherche. See also Carnets (Gallmard, 2002),  édition de Florence Callu et Antoine Compagnon, which includes all four carnets.

Translations

Information is on a separate page. I have also translated a few short passages.

Other Works

Proust's other works have been published in many different editions, but the following volumes should cover most of what is available.

• (2022) Essais (Gallimard · Bibliothèque de la Pléiade)
  Most notably includes Pastiches et mélanges and Contre Sainte-Beuve.

• (2022) Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Calmann-Levy)
  Re-issue by the original publisher of this 1896 work including illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire and four hand-written piano scores by Reynaldo Hahn. A scan of the original book is on Gallica.

• (2021) Le Mystérieux Correspondant et autres nouvelles retrouvées (Gallimard)

• (2015) La bible d'Amiens - Sésame et les lys et autres textes (Laffont), édition de Jérôme Bastianelli
  Proust's translation of two books by John Ruskin, with his own prefaces and annotations.

• (2001) Jean Santeuil (Gallimard), édition de Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre avec la collaboration de Jean-Yves Tadié
  More recent than the 1971 Pléiade edition, perhaps to be subsumed into a new Pléiade edition.

• (1978) L'Indifférent (Gallimard), édition de Philip Kolb

• (1971) Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les Jours (Gallimard · Bibliothèque de la Pléiade)

• (1970-1993) Correspondence de Marcel Proust (Plon, 21 volumes), édition de Philip Kolb
  There is an Édition numérique of some of the letters. See also the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research and this University at Buffalo page.
  There is also a 2004 (reissued in 2022) book Lettres published by Plon which features a selection of letters with updated annotations by Françoise Leriche, embedded in biographical information and including very high quality pictures (2004 edition only, but almost all pictures are from Le Monde de Proust vu par Paul Nadar).

• (1971) Textes Retrouvés (Gallimard), recueillis et présentés par Philip Kolb et Larkin B. Price
  (Originally published in 1968 by the University of Illinois Press.)  Other notebooks are also available.

Biographies

There are two long recent biographies of Proust, one in French and one in English. I personally consider Tadié to be far superior to Carter. There is also an earlier biography by Painter (1959) that should be superseded by these, as well as a short 2013 biography by Adam Watt.

• (2022, originally 1996) Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust I, II (Gallimard). Also available as separate tome I and tome II including in ebook form. Also translated into English as Marcel Proust: A Life (Penguin, 2001) but seems to be out of print.

• (2013, originally 2000) William C. Carter, Marcel Proust, A Life (Yale)

Highly recommended complements to any biography are Marcel Proust: Une vie de lettres et d'images by  Pedro Corrêa do Lago (Gallimard, 2022) and Le Monde de Proust vu par Paul Nadar by Anne-Marie Bernard (Patrimoine, 1999).