xvi MARCEL PROUST
destroyed at Proust's command by Celeste Albaret, or in the holocaust
of'manuscripts of which no other copy exists' at the time of his removal
to rue Laurent-Pichat in May 1917.1 However this may be, the evidence
on which I based my own reconstructions of these missing materials still
seems to me adequate, and is confirmed by these later amplifications.^2
As I bid farewell to writing on Proust, I look back to a day in 1962
when I reached his death, and seemed not only to be bereaved but to die
myself. A biographer's relationship with his subject is perhaps the
deepest in his own experience outside the family, and he who writes
more lives than one more deaths than one must die. Further still is the
week in '947 when I first encountered a volume of Proust's letters,
found to my astonishment that it revealed a world that belonged to the
raw material of his novel, and resolved to write his life with the intention
or hope of experiencing it myself, and of discovering what A fa Reckercke
meant to himself. Remotest, but still most vivid of all, is the moment
sixty years ago in 1928, when I opened in our midland city public
library a blue-and-gold-spined book mysteriously called Swann's Way,
and found myself walking with the Narrator, an adolescent of my own
age, among the cornfields and appletrees of the Meseglise Way. I have
walked there ever since, as so many others have and many more will.
This new edition is again dedicated as before to my wife Joan Painter,
now forty-seven years after our marriage. In the previous editions
Volume One was inscribed also to Henry Reed (1914-86), Volume Two
to Wynyard Browne (19 II -64) and to Angus (later Sir Angus) Wilson,
and I retain these additional dedications in remembrance of our youth
and friendship in Proust.
Hove, 1988 GEORGE D. PAINTER
1 MP II 288; Lettres retrouvies to; Cattaui (B) 184; A/baret 324-5, 390
2 MP II 2)7-41; see also MP II 44-5, 14)-4, 208-