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Employees of the National Library in France spent hundreds of hours working on the restoration of 75 pages of the famous novel “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust, written in 1908.
Such delicate work requires patience and precision to heal the scars left behind by wear and tear. The rare manuscript, “unknown and unpublished”, will be exhibited in autumn, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death.
Guillaume Fau, National Library of France: This manuscript fell into the hands of the publisher Bernard de Fallois in the 1950s, and he kept it to himself for decades without publishing it. But he had alluded to it in some of his texts, though only in a few lines. That was enough, however, to make known the existence of this manuscript, which remained far from the eyes and attention of researchers, who await such moments with great impatience.
The manuscript was not in good condition at all. It wasn’t completely compromised, but almost every page of it presented elements of deterioration that needed to be blocked in order to prevent further damage.
Guillaume Fau: The text we have in hand is almost a twin of the book of essays, “Against Sainte Beuve”, as far as the format and the type of paper it is written are concerned. It was fragile, it had to be worked with care.
Books, said Proust, are the product of a different self from the one we display in our habits and habits, in our social life, in our vices and vices. If we were to go to the trouble of understanding this particular “I”, we would only be able to understand it by going inside our own chests, rummaging and trying to reconstruct that “I” within them.
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