Courses

Two anniversaries give rise to this confrontation. We commemorated the centennial of the
death of Proust (1871-1922) in 2022, and celebrate the 150 th birthday of Colette (1873-
1954) in 2023. They belong to an exceptional generation born around 1870, the “Modern
French Classics,” with Valéry, Gide, Claudel and Péguy. They met in fashionable salons in the
1890’s, when Colette, just married to Willy, arrived in Paris, and they did not much like each
other: he was a snob, she was outrageous. But Colette read Du côté de chez Swann as soon
it came out in 1913, and was strongly impressed by the evocation of the village of Combray.
Proust congratulated Colette warmly after reading Mitsou in 1919, a brief romance between
a dancer and a lieutenant during WWI. During the last years of Proust’s life, Proust and
Colette were the two most visible and popular authors on the postwar literary scene.
Among the “Six of 1870,” common to Proust and Colette is the focus on sensations, memory
and time, as well as a curiosity for sexual transgressions. “Combray” and La Maison de
Claudine explore the lost paradise of childhood; Le Pur et l’Impur is a response to Sodome et
Gomorrhe; Le Temps retrouvé and La Naissance du jour the autofiction as a genre. We will
read the two authors as serendipitous counterparts.