A Glimpse into Marcel Proust’s Childhood 

The exceptional biographies by Jean-Yves Tadié³, William C. Carter⁴, and Roger Duchêne⁵ provide a combined 3,500 pages of information that help us view the life and person of Marcel Proust through the lens of facts. 

Little Marcel was a mama’s boy with a loving relationship with his younger brother and a somewhat distant father. Their family life was entirely in line with the norms of the upper middle class at the time. They played, frolicked, read, and met friends in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, until Marcel broke his nose at the age of nine when he took a tumble. 

When the children were still young, the Proust family regularly went to Illiers in the summer. There, Father Adrien would make time to take his sons for walks and show them the places where he played as a child. And there was time for walking, fishing, reading, and even mischief. There is the story of the brothers hiding in the garden of Uncle Amiot, the now famous Pré Catelan, waiting for someone to come and get them for dinner. After hearing their names being called for a while, they sprang out of the bushes, stark naked and roaring loudly. 

While Robert was a livewire, always up for some roughhousing, Marcel preferred to quietly immerse himself in a book. 

Despite his fragility and hypersensitivity, Marcel was a typical child, prone to tears, beautiful and intelligent, but otherwise unremarkable. In addition to a vivid imagination and childish playfulness, Marcel possessed, from a young age, the ability to concentrate in silence, as if in a trance, whenever he encountered something beautiful that caught his attention, such as a beautiful woman, a church, flowers, trees in bloom. 

In the spring of 1881, after a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Marcel developed severe shortness of breath and fainted. He was having his first asthma attack, and it was so severe that his father, Adrien, feared for his son’s life. This traumatic experience would have a lasting impact on Marcel’s health and way of life. The sensitive boy became an anxious child and patient, suffering, patient but also demanding. The bond with his mother grew even stronger. 

While Marcel’s asthma attacks eventually subsided, his carefree nature was replaced by a cautious approach to life. Uninhibited walks in nature, enjoying the beauty of flowers and blossoms, and roughhousing outdoors with his friends became a thing of the past. The threat of another life-threatening asthma attack loomed over him like a haunting shadow. 

Marcel continued to suffer from hay fever, colds, and shortness of breath. Dr. Adrien Proust consulted with his many colleagues, but there was no significant relief. 

Marcel’s Parisian grandmother, and especially his mother, took great care in his education, even when attending school was impossible. Literature, languages, and music became integral parts of his upbringing, reflecting the intellectual environment in which his mother had been raised. His intelligence and curiosity were nurtured, laying the foundation for the erudition and profundity that would become the cornerstone of his later work. 

Desperate Measures for a Normal Life 

Determined to provide their son with a normal life and good health, Marcel’s parents and the young patient went to great lengths. Their desperation drove them to extreme measures. As Marcel himself recounted: 

“I remember that as a child, suffering from hay fever, I was told that nasal cauterizations, destroying the erectile tissue of the nose, would completely prevent the action of pollen. I had such faith that I underwent 110 of these rather unpleasant procedures. ‘Now go to the countryside, you can no longer have hay fever,’ Dr. Martin told me. I left with my parents. At the sight of the first lilac in bloom, which I would have sworn was harmless, I was seized with such asthma attacks that my feet and hands were as purple as a drowned man’s until I could be brought back to Paris⁶.” 

It’s possible that the number of cauterizations, one hundred and ten, is an exaggeration, a tendency Proust occasionally indulged in. For instance, he wrote elsewhere that he had not slept for a second in a month (which is physically impossible), that he was once so angry at his insomnia that he took a whole box of Veronal (which is guaranteed to be a lethal overdose), that he was occasionally penniless (even though he kept losing money in investments that were more like gambling, he remained very wealthy), that he hadn’t left his bed in three months, and so on. 

The Enduring Impact of Painful Procedures 

Despite the ineffectiveness of the nasal cauterizations, there is no doubt that these painful procedures demanded immense patience and resilience from the young Marcel. Despite the promise of his doctor, Dr. Martin, the hope for improvement was quickly dashed, as evidenced by his letter. 

It is possible that his broken nose, followed by these painful but futile procedures, combined with the promise of a complete solution, may have been the first seeds of Proust’s lifelong skepticism towards the medical arts (as opposed to medicine) of the doctors. Moreover, it is almost certain that anesthesia was used during these procedures, but since there are no sources on this, it is pure speculation to suggest that this may have laid the foundation for Proust’s later substance abuse. 

What is not speculation is the fact that Marcel Proust, when he truly sets his mind to something, throughout his life, no matter how uphill the road may have been at times, demonstrated remarkable resilience, perseverance, stubborn persistence, and accompanying willpower. These were the wellsprings that guided him through his physical and mental trials and ultimately led to the gift of Recherche to the world. 

Apropos, it is worth noting the stark contrast this presents with the classical portrayal of Marcel Proust as a weak character, a milksop, and a spoiled brat.