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“... Bernard deFallois​ , a legendary French editor and publisher, died in January 2018. He worked for a long time at Hachette, and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering doing postgraduate work on Proust; he said in one of the lectures now published as Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust that he had been ‘tempted to conduct … a university exercise that one calls a thesis’, and the wording alone tells us a lot ...”

“... Proust’s unpublished work does not exist,’ Bernard deFallois wrote in 1954. Provocative words, since he was introducing a whole volume of such material, and two years earlier had brought out Jean Santeuil, an unfinished novel Proust worked on between 1895 and 1899. De Fallois was trying to suggest, with a little too much bravado, that all Proust’s writing, early and late, published and unpublished, should be considered part of his great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu ...”

“... not said – about the recovery of the Proust pages, parts of which were published in 1954 by Bernard deFallois, in whose archives the full text was discovered when he died. In the Céline case there is a lot to be said and seemingly only one secret remaining: who gave the papers to the person who made public ...”