There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that apart from Ruskin Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon Montaigne Stendhal Flaubert George Eliot Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Paris: Bernard Grasset:

1919 Pastiches et mélanges ("Pastiches and mixtures").

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: ​[maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist critic and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past).