Paris (France)

A very long, unpublished, signed autograph letter from Marcel Proust to Maurice Levaillant, written in black ink and with its envelope marked “personal” in Proust's hand. A humorous typo by the author on this same envelope, marking it “au Figao” [sic].
A few underlinings in Proust's hand.
On 10 December 1919, which is to say a few months before writing this letter, Proust completed his quest for the Holy Grail: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower won the Goncourt Prize. With six votes to four, the “old” writer pipped his young competitor Roland Dorgelès to the post, whose very promising Wooden Crosses was tipped as favorite. “The prize brought Proust the sudden glory to which he had aspired for thirty years. The next day, there were 27 articles in the papers and the number had passed a hundred by the end of January (George D. Painter, Marcel Proust. 1904-1922: Les années de maturité [The Mature Years], Paris, Mercure de France 1965). But the aforementioned articles were not, however, all positive: some challenged Proust's winning the prize, he not being a veteran, and some went even so far as to suggest that the granting of the prize to the author of Young Girls was the result of some political plot by the extreme right, orchestrated by Léon Daudet, a member of the jury and a friend of Proust's. The writer, careful with his public image, set about trying to get the press to write articles, as in the case of Maurice Levaillant, the literary critic for the Figaro. There are three known letters to this addressee, dated respectively 24 and 25 January and 9 February 1920, which outline the details of Proust's complaints and expectations.
In this letter of 9 February 1920, Proust shares his reactions with Levaillant to an article entitled “Du côté de chez les Goncourt [Goncourt's Way]”, devoted to him, which had appeared the night before.
The writer starts off by explaining to the journalist that having tried to reach him by telephone, he had gone in person to the Figaro offices, “for the first time since the death of Calmette!” to see him. The description of his wanderings demonstrates the importance which Proust, afflicted at the time by the illness that kept him bed-ridden, attached to articles about him.
The scene now set, Proust thanks his colleague warmly: “I read your article ‘Du côté de chez les Goncourt' and I am most grateful for it... I found some lovely things in it.” Nonetheless, the very next sentence is: “But despite that, let me tell you that I was a little disappointed.” The disappointed Proust explains to Levaillant: “If you skim your article, the way the reader will, you will see that it seems not to be favorable towards me.”
The author affirms his desire to explain to Levaillant his reasons for being disappointed at length “in person”: “If we start this discussion in writing, we'll never stop.” Nonetheless Proust then launches into a long explanation, reproaching Levaillant, between the lines, for not having used the laudatory articles about him that he had advised him to quote: “I must say I regret that you did not quote a single one of the articles I sent you, nor my article on Flaubert.” This sentence shows the skill with which Marcel Proust worked to orchestrate things from the shadows, providing his correspondent with the materials necessary to write an article of which he had high hopes.
This letter is also a precious witness of the esteem that Proust had for Jacques Rivière, who had published a laudatory article on his fellow author's winning of the Goncourt Prize in the NRF on 1 January 1920, calling the author of Young Girls the “most rejuvenating” of novelists. The critic changed his mind a month later in a much longer and more substantive article entitled “Marcel Proust and the Classical Tradition.” It was precisely this eulogistic text that Proust quotes in this letter, insisting that Levaillant publishes it. “Given my desire that Le Figaro publish extracts from Rivière's article in the NRF on 1 February one way or another...and of my article on Venice in the Feuillets d'art...do you think you can print these? If you can't, who would you advise me to contact? The administrator?...and what should I ask him to do?”
To convince Levaillant to help him succeed in this mission, Proust tells him that this is, for him, a second chance, arguing that “a second failure would be more grave for [him] than the 1st.” Persuasively, he quotes Virgil's Aeneid: “This would be the ‘alter aureus' that would present itself for me, Levaillant ‘deficiante'” (Primo avolso non deficit alter aureus, et simili frondescit virga metallo [When one is plucked, another doth not lack, Golden, and burgeoning with leaves of gold]). History does not record whether Levaillant gave in to this colorful attempt at persuasion.
In this letter, which has remained unpublished to this day, we see a worried Proust try to shape his image of a young Goncourt Prize winner with the aid of the merciless machine that was the literary press of the 1920s.