Marcel Proust, A Biography, Jean-Yves Tadié: "Marcel Prévost [...]
also turned down an article about Barrès' La Colline Inspirée,
which had just been published, for La Revue de Paris."
"... in his letter to Barrès Proust gives an idea of the content of the
article that is now lost. Le Temps also rejected it."
Letter to Maurice Barrès, shortly after 24 October 1913:
[...] When La Colline Inspirée [The Sacred Hill], your
masterpiece, first appeared in La Revue Hebdomadaire, I wanted
to write to you. And then I thought that what I might have written to you
would have been better written for others, and so I wrote an article which
wasn't particularly good but if touched up and put in order would, I
think, have seemed appropriate to you. My friend Hahn, who has some
contacts at Le Temps, took them my rough draft. They promised
they would put it in. But in the end it never appeared. I recall that I
quoted Maeterlinck's book La Mort as proof of the truth of what
you were proposing: Maeterlinck rejects religion, but so as to believe in
table turnings. I also said that it is amusing that a great writer who has
a predilection for certain works that are far inferior to his own, amuses
himself by doing similar things, but ingeniously for his own pleasure. And
I said that in La Colline Inspirée you had given
yourself the pleasure of creating, but infinitely surpassing them, your
own Angélique and your Récits d'une Soeur. [...]