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Proust, and literary French
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927, is often named as the great French novel of the twentieth century. It is also famous for its length, several thousand pages depending on the edition, and for its sentences, some of which run for a page or more. Its first line, "Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure," is among the most quoted in French, and the episode of the madeleine dipped in tea, which brings back the narrator's childhood, has made "une madeleine de Proust" an everyday expression for any sensation that revives a memory. The book also preserves forms of written French that have since retreated. The imperfect and pluperfect subjunctive, qu'il vînt, qu'il fût venu, and the literary past conditional, il eût fallu, were still normal in careful writing in Proust's time; today they survive mainly in literature, in some formal journalism and speeches, and in jokes. A modern reader is expected to recognize them; almost nobody is expected to use them, and using them in conversation sounds affected. Camille's last remark is a cliché with some truth in it: Proust is far more often cited than finished, in France as elsewhere. Reading the first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, is a common and respectable goal, and many readers come back to the rest years later.