Writing to Simone, Proust requested her photograph, as he had her mother’s not so long ago without success. He explained to Simone the importance photographs had for him: “I shall think of you even without a photograph but my memory, exhausted by drugs, is so feeble that photographs are invaluable to me. I keep them as reminders and don’t look at them too often so as not to exhaust their potency. When I was in love with your mama I went to fantastic lengths in order to get her photographs from some people in Perigord with whom I made friends in order to try to get hold of that photograph.”
–William C. Carter, Marcel Proust
