2-Proustaverses:
Le Petit Marcel is an imaginary sick man, a neurasthenic psychosomatic who has exaggerated his ailments his whole life to flirt with them and thus demand the attention of those around him.
2-Proustophiles:
From his fashionable articles in the Figaro, his first book “Les Plaisirs et Jours” (1896) as well as from his extensive correspondence, some of his friends and acquaintances distill the image of a somewhat world-weary weakling who gives himself an air by flirting with his many complaints. They simply did not take him and his lamentable physical condition seriously. Moreover, in Proust’s time, asthma was seen as neurasthenia, a ‘nerve weakness’. Under the lemma ‘nervous’ one can read in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionaire des Idées Reçus2: “Said every time you don’t understand an illness; this explanation satisfies the listener”. After all, the medical community had no idea of the underlying allergic mechanisms, let alone the effective therapeutic interventions for this sometimes life-threatening but – certainly then – invalidating disease. The treatment of his illness was initiated by his father, Dr. Adrien Proust, with the best of intentions but in no way hindered by our current knowledge. Marcel Proust’s lifelong round of all the major Parisian top doctors does him more harm than good, not least because he willfully ignores all good advice and stubbornly sticks to his own will. His ‘je suis plus docteur que les docteurs’3 attitude fueled his experiments with medication and drug use. In addition, his living conditions have a disastrous effect on his asthma: spending weeks in a dusty bed full of house mites in a poorly ventilated room with cork-lined walls, spending many hours a day in a thick mist of burning anti-asthma powders, a peculiar diet that degenerates into anorexia at the end of his life. In short: Marcel Proust was much sicker than he and his surroundings thought.
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