La Prisonnière (Nouvelle édition) (A la recherche du temps perdu t. 5)

by Marcel Proust

« L’amour c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au cœur. » Paru à titre posthume le 14 novembre 1923, presque un an jour pour jour après la mort de Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière est le volet central d’un roman de la jalousie, dont les fils enferment les deux protagonistes, comme jadis Odette et Swann. Croyant pouvoir apaiser ses tourments et soustraire Albertine à ses fréquentations lesbiennes, le narrateur installe la jeune femme chez lui, à Paris. Mais cette vie commune arrachée aux convenances morales ne fait qu’attiser sa soif de possession, en même temps qu’elle nourrit sa lassitude vis-à-vis de celle qu’il en vient désormais à considérer comme un obstacle à ses désirs de voyage et à ses possibilités de rencontres amoureuses. D’enquêtes en interrogatoires, le narrateur, geôlier prisonnier de sa propre jalousie, exacerbe les penchants d’Albertine pour le mensonge et, finalement, précipite sa fuite. Drame à huis clos marqué du sceau de la mort imminente, La Prisonnière donne pourtant un souffle nouveau à la Recherche du temps perdu, tissant tous les fils romanesques autour du personnage d’Albertine, insaisissable « être de fuite » et héroïne d’une fulgurante modernité. Édition de Maya Lavault.

815 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 21, 2025

About the author

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, he lapsed more completely into his lifelong tendency to sleep during the day and work at night. He was also plagued with severe asthma, which had troubled him intermittently since childhood, and a terror of his own death, especially in case it should come before his novel had been completed. The first volume, after some difficulty finding a publisher, came out in 1913, and Proust continued to work with an almost inhuman dedication on his masterpiece right up until his death in 1922, at the age of 51.

Today he is widely recognized as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, and À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the most dazzling and significant works of literature to be written in modern times.