A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you shew him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labelled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that apart from Ruskin Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon Montaigne Stendhal Flaubert George Eliot Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Paris: Bernard Grasset:

1919 Pastiches et mélanges ("Pastiches and mixtures").

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: ​[maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist critic and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past).