Some indication of the immense editorial difficulties that arose, many of which I may say were not solved until the, the Pléiade edition in three volumes of nineteen fifty-four, some of the difficulty I think is hinted at, at any rate, in a recent description of the state of Proust's papers at the moment of his death, and I quote: ‘Huge packets of type- and manuscript, the pages festooned with half-illegible addenda, and blackened with savage deletions which had swallowed up entire paragraphs, heaped the ugly little bamboo table that stood near his death-bed, and overflowed from the shelves of the table along the top of the nearby chimneypiece.