Marcel Proust's grave at Père Lachaise

The last flat on rue Hamelin

Proust died on 18 November 1922, aged fifty-one, of pneumonia following a bronchitis he had refused to be treated for. He had spent the previous three years in a rented flat at 44 rue Hamelin, in the 16th, working through the night in a bedroom lined with cork to keep the street out, and dictating corrections to his housekeeper Céleste Albaret.

He was still revising À la recherche du temps perdu on the last day. The final words he dictated were additions to the death of Bergotte — the novelist character whose death he had written years earlier and was still, at the very end, adjusting.

Whose tomb it actually is

The vault was built for Adrien Proust, who died in 1903. He was not a minor figure: a professor of hygiene, an inspector-general of public health, and one of the architects of the international sanitary conferences that produced the modern concept of the cordon sanitaire. He spent his career trying to stop cholera reaching Europe overland, and he largely succeeded.

Jeanne Weil Proust, Marcel's mother, was buried here in 1905. Her death effectively ended the sociable half of her son's life; the cork-lined room follows from it. Robert Proust, his younger brother, a surgeon, joined them in 1935.

Robert deserves more attention than he gets from most visitors standing here. Proust died with three volumes unpublished and in varying states of chaos. Robert, working with the editor Jacques Rivière and later with Jean Paulhan, got La Prisonnière out in 1923, Albertine disparue in 1925 and Le Temps retrouvé in 1927. Without the brother in this grave, the book as we have it does not exist.

What to look for

There is almost nothing to look at, and that is the point of coming. The slab is severe, reflective, and completely at odds with the prose of the man under it. Proust himself had no say in it — he was placed in a family tomb designed for a nineteenth-century medical man, which is to say he was filed.

Visitors leave things anyway. Métro tickets are the traditional offering, along with pens, and occasionally a madeleine, which the cemetery staff remove because it attracts vermin. Flowers are welcome; food is not.

Stand at the foot of the slab and look at the reflection. On a bright day the black marble takes the whole avenue of trees above it, which is a better memorial to involuntary memory than anything anyone could have carved.

Finding it

Division 85 sits in the upper eastern part of the cemetery. From the Gambetta gate it is a short, nearly level walk; from the main gate it is a solid twenty-five-minute climb, which is the main argument for entering at the top and walking down.

Guillaume Apollinaire is in the neighbouring division 86, under a menhir-like stone cut to a design by Picasso, and Oscar Wilde is a few minutes further on in 89. If you are planning your own route through the upper divisions, the map page explains the numbering, which follows the cemetery's expansion rather than any geography and therefore helps nobody until someone explains it.