"[…] Pages from the working notebooks, the 'Cahiers,' are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that [Marcel] Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down.
On one notebook page, he’s drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits (Proust looks to have been a capable, imaginative draftsman) that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction. Next to the collage, he has drawn a female face, which, the gallery note tells us, represents the genesis of Albertine. One wonders if it’s true. If so, it’s all the more enchanting to behold. On another page, he has written the heading 'Swann et le Monde,' followed by the words 'Swann cependant n’avait pas complètement abandonné le monde' ('Nevertheless, Swann hadn’t completely abandoned the world'), which offer a different kind of palpable thrill."
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