Marcel PROUST (1871-1922). L.A. (minute), [ca. 1911?, to Countess Adhéaume de Chevigné]; 1 1/2 pages in-8 with Imperial Century watermark. Unfinished and unpublished letter to the model of the Duchesse de Guermantes. "Madame La dureté - et la médiocrité partielle - d'une personne qu'on a tant aimée, devrait tout de même, vingt ans après laisser indifférent. Perhaps not having slept for six nights, a quarter of an hour, and getting up only for this dinner, had made me more sensitive. For in extreme fatigue - as in certain hours of convalescence - it takes very little to give a kind of intoxication or to make one cry. Tonight it wasn't intoxication. Yet you looked prettier than ever, and when after so many absurd words to which it wasn't even worth trying to answer" A pencil note at the head identifies the lady. [Proust made the Countess Adhéaume de Chevigné, née Laure de Sade (1860-1963), one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes. He had fallen deeply in love with her in his youth. "Mme de Chevigné was so convinced of the lack of artistic value in Proust's letters that she tore them up as soon as she read them" (Pierre Raphaël). Proust confided to Cocteau: "When I was twenty she refused to love me; must it be, when I'm forty and have made the best of the Duchesse de Guermantes, that she refuses to read me"].