A wonderful surprise arrived in the post this week. A gift, beautifully timed for the long bank holiday weekend: Marcel Proust in Pictures and Documents, edited by Patricia Mante-Proust, Proust’s great-grand-niece and the keeper of the family archive, with text by Mireille Naturel of the Sorbonne.

It is a large-format book, and the size matters. The photographs of Proust are reproduced at almost life scale, so when you open the page his face meets yours at something close to actual size. There is a strange intimacy in that.

What makes it special is that Mante-Proust opened the family archive for this book, much of it never previously published. Letters. Manuscript pages with revisions still visible. The notebooks Madame Straus gave him, which he filled between 1908 and 1918 with notes for the Recherche. The questionnaire he answered at thirteen (“Where would you like to live? In the land of the ideal, or rather my ideal”). His mother’s fan. His paperknife. Sketches of him in a Trouville rocking chair from August 1892. Naturel’s text is restrained and lets the documents do the work.

I have been turning the pages slowly all weekend, dipping in for ten minutes between other things. A companion to my year of slow reading In Search of Lost Time. thereflectiveeye.substa…

(Edition Olms, Zurich. Originally published in French in 2012 as Marcel Proust: l’arche et la colombe, for the 2013 centenary of Swann’s Way.)