PROUST Marcel (1871-1922)

Lot 154
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Estimation :
2000 - 3000 EUR
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Result : 27 300EUR
PROUST Marcel (1871-1922)
Ticket of PROUST ill: his last lines, written a few hours before his death. S.d. November 18, 1922], 1 page in-8 oblong in ink on paper. (Coffee bowl stain). "Celeste Odilon can leave in ten minutes, and return about 6:21/2, 7:00 a.m. Bring the chair to me." On the back, a text in ink in her hand: "I heard iron instead of glass." About this note reproduced in her work Monsieur Proust (appendix, p. 144), Céleste writes: "On the last one at the bottom [this one], there is the trace of the bowl of coffee he tried to take by telling me: "To please you and my brother". It was about seven o'clock in the morning. He died at half past four in the afternoon". On November 16, Proust's weak lungs gave him a terrible attack; on the 17th he felt better. On the night of the 17th to the 18th, he had Celeste come to him "[...] you are going to sit there in the chair, and we are both going to work well [...] if I spend the night, I will prove to the doctors that I am stronger than they are". At half past three he has to stop, the abscess in the lung dies. At seven in the morning he asks for a bowl of coffee. Then he starts to delirium. Celeste then calls Doctor Bize and Robert Proust, who run to the hospital. They will both succeed one another at his bedside, one giving him a shot of camphor, the other putting suction cups or oxygen balloons on him. Proust died at about half past four in the afternoon, he was only fifty-one years old. Reynaldo Hahn, one of the first to arrive on rue Hamelin where Proust had just died, took the responsibility to warn Marcel Proust's relatives of his death by tires or telephone. He watched over the body with Céleste. Proust will be buried on November 22nd at Père Lachaise after a grandiose funeral in the chapel of Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot, where all the worldly and literary Paris came to pay him a last tribute. Barrès, the umbrella hanging from his forearm, told François Mauriac whom he met that day: "Well, yeah ... he was ou
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