A Reading of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way at Yale by William Carter

“For a long time, I used to go to bed early” - so begins “Swann’s Way,” the first volume in Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time,” also known as “Remembrance of Things Past”). To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the book’s publication, the Yale Department of French organized the Proust Marathon on Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 16-17, 2013.
The event, sponsored by the French Department’s Guicharnaud fund, brought together 100 students, scholars, and guests, who took turns reading their favorite passages from Proust’s masterwork in the language of their choice - French, German, English, Polish, and more. The readings, each about 10 minutes long, began at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday and ran until 3:30 a.m. on Sunday.
The literary marathon set in the Yale Saybrook Underbrook Theatre took place in a full-scale recreation of the cork-lined bedroom where Proust labored to finish his seven-volume novel.
Madeleines, the pastry that famously prompted an onslaught of involuntary memories in Proust’s narrator, were served.