Proust's Overcoat

The story of the overcoat begins with a chance meeting – between an obsessive bibliophile, Jacques Guérin, the head of a French perfume house, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, brother of the late writer. Glimpsing the possibility of adding to his collection, Guérin stumbles into a tense and tangled relationship with the novelist’s family who, embarrassed by Proust’s writings and his homosexuality, are in the process of destroying the mountain of notebooks, letters and manuscripts they had inherited. Little by little, over decades, Guérin acquires Marcel’s remaining personal effects, including – eventually – the relic he had come to covet more than any other: the moth-eaten otter-lined overcoat Proust had worn every day and used as a blanket every night while writing in bed. Like the novelist’s second skin, this coat was as close as Guérin could ever come to touching Proust himself: it was the jewel of his collection.