Proust answered the questionnaire in a confession album—a form of parlor game popular among Victorians.[2] The album belonged to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure, titled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc."
The album was found in 1924 by Faure's son, and published in the French literary journal Les Cahiers du Mois. It was auctioned on May 27, 2003, for the sum of €102,000 (US$113,609.46).[3]
The French book talk show host Bernard Pivot used a similar questionnaire at the end of every episode of his show Apostrophes. Inspired by Bernard Pivot, James Lipton, the host of the TV program Inside the Actors Studio, used a similar questionnaire. Lipton had often incorrectly characterized the questionnaire itself as an invention of Pivot.
A similar questionnaire is regularly seen on the back page of Vanity Fair magazine, answered by various celebrities. In October 2009, Vanity Fair launched an interactive version of the questionnaire, that compares individual answers to those of various luminaries.[5]
Another version of the questionnaire, as answered by various Canadian authors, is a regular feature on the radio program The Next Chapter.
The questionnaire
There are two surviving sets of answers to the confession album questions by Proust: the first, from 1885 or 1886, is to an English confessions album, although his answers are in French. The second, from 1891 or 1892, is from a French album, Les confidences de salon ("Drawing room confessions"), which contains translations of the original questions, lacking some that were in the English version and adding others.
Confessions questions
Confidences questions
Proust's answers 1886
Proust's answers 1890
Your favourite virtue
The principal aspect of my personality
All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues.
The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.
To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater.
I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.
Your idea of misery
What would be my greatest misfortune?
To be separated from Mama.
Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.
If not yourself, who would you be?
What I should like to be
Since the question does arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.
Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.
Where would you like to live?
The country where I should like to live
In the country of the ideal, or, rather, my ideal.
A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.
↑ Carter, Graydon, and Robert Risko. 2009. Vanity Fair's Proust questionnaire: 101 luminaries ponder love, death, happiness, and the meaning of life. [Emmaus, Pa.]: Rodale.
↑ In French the gender of the possessive is determined, not by the gender of the possessor, but the gender of the possessed object - in this case flower, 'fleur', is feminine, but the context gives no assurance of how to read 'la sienne' meaning 'his/hers'.
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It was on one of those days that [Odette] happened to play for me the passage in Vinteuil’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated ... For our memory, relatively to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall a minute afterwards what one has just said to him...
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