Thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time. Despite this, he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet however, his education was disrupted by his illness. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971 on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.) This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. īy the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. He later became an atheist and was something of a mystic. He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practised that faith. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of the English language was sufficient to help with her son's translations of John Ruskin.

Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence (maiden name: Weil), was the daughter of a wealthy German–Jewish family from Alsace. He wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent French pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the fin de siècle.

His birth took place at the very beginning of the French Third Republic, during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the Republic.

Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at the home of his great-uncle in the Paris Borough of Auteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic 16th arrondissement), two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( / p r uː s t/ French: 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time ( À la recherche du temps perdu with the previous English title translation of Remembrance of Things Past), originally written in French and published in seven volumes between 19.

Proust in search of lost time