Unseen work by Proust announced as ‘thunderclap’ by French publisher | Marcel Proust

For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.

De Fallois first revealed the existence of the texts in The Seventy-Five Pages in a foreword for a 1954 collection of previously unpublished Proust essays, Against Sainte-Beuve, which he edited. De Fallois described The Seventy-Five Pages as a “precious guide” to understanding In Search of Lost Time and “a logbook of his creation” that includes six episodes that Proust would develop and eventually include in his masterwork. However, De Fallois wrote that Proust’s leading man Charles Swann does not feature in them, with his character split over several different roles.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were thought to be lost, and were searched for by French academics for decades, with some even believing the texts did not exist.

But this week, publisher Gallimard revealed that the papers were rediscovered in De Fallois’ archives, which he bequeathed to the National Library of France on his death. Among the documents were two unpublished works that Proust’s niece, Suzy Mante-Proust, gave to De Fallois in 1949. The first of these, translated as The Mysterious Correspondent, was published in 2019.

In a statement on its website, Gallimard called The Seventy-Five Pages the “Proustian Grail”, describing the rediscovery of the texts as a “thunderclap”.

Without revealing many details, the publisher said the book would be an “essential piece of the puzzle” and would shed new light on Proust’s seven-volume magnum opus as it features similar characters and scenes.

“Through the reading keys that the writer seems to have left there, [it] gives access to the primitive Proustian crypt,” Gallimard said.

An English translation has yet to be announced.