November, 18th 1922. It’s a cold gray morning in Paris, temperatures plummeted, and the following week would be colder.

This was the day when Marcel Proust, unforgettable author A la Recherche du temps Perdu, or In Remembrance of Things Past (nowadays retitled In Search of Lost Time, less poetic, if more accurate), would die.

He’d been finishing correcting and editing his last Opus, the last tome of the Recherche, with his devoted Celeste, his governess, until 3.30 am.

Too soon gone, a genius writer, forever connected with a delightful cake, the madeleine. And forever linked to Normandy too, Cabourg, more precisely, which was the model for the fictional town of Balbec.

Good bye Mr Proust.