...the rule among the human race – a rule that naturally admits of exceptions – is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.

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).