Proust’s First Selfie.

When the French author (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène) Marcel Proust was fourteen, his friend Antoinette Faure asked him to fill out the questionnaire in her Confession Album.

These albums—Victorian keepsakes passed among friends—were the social media of their day: small bound books filled with questions like What is your idea of happiness? or What virtue do you most admire? While they aimed to reveal a person’s essence, what they really captured was their curated self, the version meant to be admired.

That is: the self that answers a questionnaire is not the self that creates, dreams, or loves. It’s a performed version of identity.

Not unlike Instagram.

Still, even at fourteen, Proust refused to perform his identity. Where others flirted, exaggerated or bragged inside these albums, he confessed. His answers were unusually introspective, tender, and poignant.

You can already see the writer he would become, especially in his admission he most fears being separated from his mother (🥲).

in 1924, two years after Proust’s death, Antoinette Faure’s son, André Berge, discovered her Confession Album in a pile of her things. When he shared Proust’s teenage answers in the magazine Les Cahiers du Mois (a short-lived but culturally significant French literary magazine published in the 1920s), they spread like an early form of virality—making the Proust Questionnaire a cultural artifact that would outlive them both.

Vanity Fair magazine adopted it, imitators followed, and soon everyone wanted to be privately profound in public.

Here are the questions Proust originally answered:

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

2. What is your greatest fear?

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

5. Which living person do you most admire?

6. What is your greatest extravagance?

7. What is your current state of mind?

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

9. On what occasion do you lie?

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

11. Which living person do you most despise?

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

16. When and where were you happiest?

17. Which talent would you most like to have?

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

21. Where would you most like to live?

22. What is your most treasured possession?

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

24. What is your favorite occupation?

25. What is your most marked characteristic?

26. What do you most value in your friends?

27. Who are your favorite writers?

28. Who is your hero of fiction?

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

30. Who are your heroes in real life?

31. What are your favorite names?

32. What is it that you most dislike?

33. What is your greatest regret?

34. How would you like to die?

35. What is your motto?

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