Translations:CP 05411/16/en
- ↑ Adrien Proust and Samuel Pozzi were professional colleagues, their two families often socialising together: "The memory of him, his handsome features, are associated with my whole childhood, with the whole of my youth [...], sometimes dining with my parents, sometimes entertaining us in the Place Vendôme [...]" (see Proust's letter to Jean Pozzi of [Saturday 15 June 1918]: CP 03556; Kolb, XVII, no. 116). A member of the high society, friend of artists and writers (among them Leconte de Lisle, but also Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, etc.), in the mind of the young Proust Pozzi enjoyed the prestige that the writer would later attribute to Swann. Like Swann in the novel, it was Pozzi who afforded the adolescent Marcel Proust the means of introduction to the writers he admired. (See Lawrence Joseph, "Marcel Proust et 'Docteur Dieu': lettres inédites à Samuel Pozzi," BMP, no. 51, 2001, p. 13-15 and p. 19.) [LJ, FL]