My Confidences
Name and first names:
Marcel Proust
Birthplace:
Auteuil
Place and date of your confidences:
Paris 25 June 1887
1. What is your favourite colour?
The colour of the eyes of the person I love.
2. What is your favourite smell?
The smell of the cheeks of the person I love.
3. Which flower do you think is the most beautiful?
The one which a charming poet speaks to me about or is gathered in a
pretty hand.
4. What animal do you find most appealing?
Man.
5. What colour eyes and hair do you prefer?
One always likes the dish one is eating the best.
6. What, in your opinion, is the most praiseworthy virtue?
Sincerity; if I am forced to become a flatterer I will change my
mind.
7. Which vice do you most hate?
Narrow-mindedness.
8. What is your favourite occupation?
Loving.
9. What is your favourite relaxation?
Reading.
10. What, in your opinion is the ideal of earthly pleasure?
I could certainly tell you but I don't like to use fancy words. I
have a horror of the sentimental, which it very much would be.
11. What seems the worst fate to you?
To be stupid.
12. May we ask how old you are?
Beware in case I exaggerate my age; which proves that I am not yet 20
and that I do not have a flirtatious mother.
13. What first name would you have taken if you had the choice?
One that you would give if you were an intelligent man or a pretty
woman.
14. What was the most beautiful moment of your life?
I would tell you but there are things one prefers categorically not to
write down.
15. What was the most painful?
The day of my worst indigestion.
16. What is your greatest aspiration?
That of loving and understanding as many things and people as I can.
17. Do you believe in friendship?
No; in friends yes, but above all in female friends.
18. Which is the most pleasant moment of the day for you?
The one where I see who I love [sic]; otherwise where I dream of
them, which is all the time.
19. Which character from history are you most drawn to?
The one who is most accommodating to the passions that I feel.
20. Which character from novels or the theatre?
It is too hot to go into that.
21. In which country would you prefer to live?
The question is impertinent. Because nature exists only in the soul the
country makes no difference.
22. Who is your favourite writer?
The one who I read with the most pleasure.
23. Which painter?
The one whose women most resemble the one who I am enraptured by.
24. Which musician?
The one whose music makes me feel the most in winter, the less in summer.
25. What motto would you take if you had to have one?
Love and Doubt.
26. What,in your opinion, is nature's masterpiece?
A pretty complexion and sweet verses.
27. From which place have you retained the most pleasant memory?
You are tormenting me, you are becoming indiscreet.
28. What is your favourite dish?
The one I think of when I am hungry.
29. Do you prefer a hard or a soft bed?
The one in which I have the nicest dreams.
30. To the people of which foreign country are you most drawn?
At this moment the Russian people; and not, I assure you, because they are
France's allies.
Signature. Write down one of your own thoughts or a quotation whose
sentiments you agree with.
... Love! scourge of the world's abominable folly! (Musset).
And there is nothing good in the world but to love (I can't remember who).
Ancient Life is created inexhaustibly
From the endless whirlwind of appearances (Leconte de Lisle).
Marcel Proust.
"Mes Confidences" - a recently discovered questionnaire
completed by the 15 year old Proust.
Created 07.04.18
Updated 30.12.18