Description

The story of the overcoat begins with a chance meeting – between an obsessive bibliophile, Jacques Guerin, the head of a French perfume house, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, brother of the late writer. Glimpsing the possibility of adding to his collection, Guerin stumbles into a tense and tangled relationship with the novelist s family who, embarrassed by Proust s writings and his homosexuality, are in the process of destroying the mountain of notebooks, letters and manuscripts they had inherited. Little by little, over decades, Guerin acquires Marcel s remaining personal effects, including – eventually – the relic he had come to covet more than any other: the moth-eaten otter-lined overcoat Proust had worn every day and used as a blanket every night while writing in bed. Like the novelist s second skin, this coat was as close as Guerin could ever come to touching Proust himself: it was the jewel of his collection.