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Autographed letter signed "Marcel Proust" to Marie Scheikévitch [Paris, November 21, 1918], 4 pages. Octavo with autographed, stamped, and postmarked envelope. Small paperclip marks, former mounting trace on tab. Just informed that Marie Scheikévitch survived the Spanish flu, Proust hastens to write to her, who once helped him with the publication of Du Côté de chez Swann. "The human condition is so treacherously wicked." What sadness to learn that you have been so ill, what additional sadness to learn it only now, to have been unable to feel sad while you suffered, since I knew nothing. How could I not have known? Probably because I saw Princess Soutzo so rarely and amidst so many people, and it is she who just informed me.

It is in a retrospective manner, now that you are healed, that I must, through imagination, reverse back through your ordeal, sleep or rather not sleep your feverish nights. The human condition is so treacherously wicked that, as if it were not painful enough for me to have to mourn for you with my friendship of today, the past of your suffering makes my friendship for a moment more vivid than it was a year ago. It is with that friendship that I empathize with all the discomforts you have endured, which forces me to give a maximum strength of compassion, whereas the one dictated by the current page of the calendar of my friendship would already be quite sad! At last, you are healed, thank God. And what lovely things you must have thought during the delightful and new hours of convalescence.

Your respectful friend Marcel Proust." An intimate of Proust who used her connections for the publication of the first volume of La Recherche. Painter describes her as "one of the most intelligent and prominent hostesses of the new generation.

" A patron of artists and writers, she frequents salons and then founds her own. She is a friend of Jean Cocteau, Anna de Noailles, Reynaldo Hahn, the Arman de Caillavet family, and many others. A uniquely special sentiment united Marcel Proust with Marie Scheikévitch. Although they briefly crossed paths in 1905 at Madame Lemaire's salon, it was in 1912 that they truly got to know each other.

This was followed by a correspondence that lasted until the writer's death in 1922. Seeing each other "almost every day," as she would later say (friends write less the more they see each other), only 28 letters from Proust to her are known. She opened the doors of her salon to him, frequented by all that Paris had of illustrious personalities in letters and arts, so much so that he would pay tribute to her in Sodome et Gomorrhe under the guise of Madame Timoléon d'Amoncourt, "a charming little woman, whose spirit, like her beauty, is so delightful that either one alone would have succeeded in pleasing.

" A fervent admirer of the writer, she devoted much energy at the time of the publication of the first volume of La Recherche, ingeniously putting Proust in contact with the Parisian personalities she deemed most capable of helping him. She was the one who recommended him to her lover Adrien Hébrard, the influential director of the newspaper Le Temps, to obtain the famous interview of November 12, 1913, by Élie-Joseph Bois, on the eve of the publication of Swann. It was the first significant article published in the major press devoted to La Recherche.

To thank her, Proust would send her a crucial dedication (recently acquired by the BnF) upon the publication of Swann. A business card from Hélène Soutzo Chrissoveloni, Madame Paul Morand. With handwritten annotation: "Tea Monday, June 8 from 5 to 8" (see scan) The Morand couple lived at 3, Avenue Charles Floquet in the VII arrondissement of Paris, from 1927 to 1976. Andrieux Catalogue, March 12, 1928; n°190 then private collection.

XVII, n°203 Marcel Proust II - Biography, Jean-Yves Tadié, Folio, pp.