In this category:

    FICTION & NON-FICTION - books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets
    FICTION & NONFICTION ARCHIVE
    Archive A-B
    LITERARY NEWS & EVENTS - art & literature news, in memoriam, festivals, city-poets, writers in Residence
    Art & Literature News
    FICTION & NON-FICTION - books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets
    BIOGRAPHY
    EXHIBITION - art, art history, photos, paintings, drawings, sculpture, ready-mades, video, performing arts, collages, gallery, etc.
    FDM in Paris
    FICTION & NON-FICTION - books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets
    BOOKS
    Marcel Proust
    FLEURSDUMAL POETRY LIBRARY - classic, modern, experimental & visual & sound poetry, poetry in translation, city poets, poetry archive, pre-raphaelites, editor's choice, etc.
    CLASSIC POETRY
    Proust, Marcel

New on FdM

  1. My window pane is broken by Lesbia Harford
  2. Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers in The National Gallery London
  3. Eugene Field: The Advertiser
  4. CROSSING BORDER – International Literature & Music Festival The Hague
  5. Expositie Adya en Otto van Rees in het Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
  6. Machinist’s Song by Lesbia Harford
  7. “Art says things that history cannot”: Beatriz González in De Pont Museum
  8. Georg Trakl: Nähe des Todes
  9. W.B. Yeats: Song of the Old Mother
  10. Bert Bevers: Großstadtstraße

Or see the index

All categories

  1. AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE (12)
  2. AUDIO, CINEMA, RADIO & TV (217)
  3. DANCE & PERFORMANCE (60)
  4. DICTIONARY OF IDEAS (180)
  5. EXHIBITION – art, art history, photos, paintings, drawings, sculpture, ready-mades, video, performing arts, collages, gallery, etc. (1,514)
  6. FICTION & NON-FICTION – books, booklovers, lit. history, biography, essays, translations, short stories, columns, literature: celtic, beat, travesty, war, dada & de stijl, drugs, dead poets (3,864)
  7. FLEURSDUMAL POETRY LIBRARY – classic, modern, experimental & visual & sound poetry, poetry in translation, city poets, poetry archive, pre-raphaelites, editor's choice, etc. (4,771)
  8. LITERARY NEWS & EVENTS – art & literature news, in memoriam, festivals, city-poets, writers in Residence (1,615)
  9. MONTAIGNE (110)
  10. MUSEUM OF LOST CONCEPTS – invisible poetry, conceptual writing, spurensicherung (54)
  11. MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY – department of ravens & crows, birds of prey, riding a zebra, spring, summer, autumn, winter (184)
  12. MUSEUM OF PUBLIC PROTEST (143)
  13. MUSIC (222)
  14. PRESS & PUBLISHING (91)
  15. REPRESSION OF WRITERS, JOURNALISTS & ARTISTS (112)
  16. STORY ARCHIVE – olv van de veestraat, reading room, tales for fellow citizens (17)
  17. STREET POETRY (46)
  18. THEATRE (186)
  19. TOMBEAU DE LA JEUNESSE – early death: writers, poets & artists who died young (356)
  20. ULTIMATE LIBRARY – danse macabre, ex libris, grimm & co, fairy tales, art of reading, tales of mystery & imagination, sherlock holmes theatre, erotic poetry, ideal women (229)
  21. WAR & PEACE (127)
  22. · (2)

Or see the index



  1. Subscribe to new material: RSS

Evelyne Bloch-Dano: Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust

Who hasn’t heard of Proust’s famous questionnaire? The writer’s answers have travelled across time and all around the world, but people have forgotten that they came from an album called Confessions that belonged to Antoinette Faure, daughter of the future French President.

Marcel Proust didn’t realize that, by taking part in what was a fashionable parlour game, he would be revealing clues about his teenage self. His answers have elicited commentaries but have never been contextualised or compared, never dated accurately.

Where and when did he answer this questionnaire? What sort of boy was he at the time? And most significantly, how much of that period and those friendships fed into his future work? What traces are left of Gilberte on the Champs-Élysées, Albertine’s little group and the “young girls in flower”?

Évelyne Bloch-Dano conducted this enquiry over many years. Using sometimes tiny clues, she managed to identify Antoinette’s other friends, some of whom may have known Proust.

A whole world came to life, revolving around the daughters of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, many of them with connections to Le Havre like the Faure family. Some boys appear too. Through their ideas, their books, their customs, what they study and what they dream of, the portrait of a whole generation emerges.

Marcel Proust’s generation. Young people born to the defeat at Sedan in 1870, in a vengeful republican France. The generation of General Boulanger, of political scandal and the Dreyfus Affair, but also of schools for girls, electricity, Great Exhibitions and the Belle époque. And later the First World War.

The biographer and essayist Évelyne Bloch-Dano is the author of several prize-winning and widely translated books, including most notably biographies of Madame Zola (1997, Grand Prix of Elle readers), Madame Proust (2004, Prix Renaudot for an essay), Le Dernier Amour de George Sand (2010), but also Jardins de papier (2015), and the more personal La Biographe (2007) and Porte de Champerret (2013).

Evelyne Bloch-Dano: Une jeunesse de Marcel Proust
(Marcel Proust as a young man by Évelyne Bloch-Dano)
Collection: La Bleue
Éditions Stock Paris
Parution: 20/09/2017
304 pages
Format: 135 x 215 mm
EAN: 9782234075696
Prix: €19.50

fleursdumal.nl magazine

More in: Archive A-B, Art & Literature News, BIOGRAPHY, FDM in Paris, Marcel Proust, Proust, Marcel

Previous and Next Entry

« | »

Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature