What are some important works of Marcel Proust (novelist)?

C'est parce que je croyais aux choses, aux êtres, tandis que je les parcourais, que les choses, les êtres qu'ils m'ont fait connaître sont les seuls que je prenne encore au sérieux, et qui me donnent encore de la joie. Soit que la foi qui crée soit tarie en moi, soit que la réalité ne se forme que dans la mémoire, les fleurs qu'on me montre aujourd'hui pour la première fois ne me semblent pas de vraies fleurs.

Proust's earlier works include a collection of short stories and poems, “Les Plaisirs et les jours”, and a novel “Jean Santeuil” but he is remembered for his masterpiece “À la recherche du temps perdu", written between 1913 and 1927, in which he seeks to trace the workings of the human mind with particular emphasis on the process of memory. He holds that reality can be redeemed only through art and suggests that only involuntary memory, such as the one induced by the petite madeleine, can recreate a past experience in its totality.

I take exception to the English title “Remembrance of Things Past" which lacks the sense of a quest inherent in “À la recherche du temps perdu".

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(It's because I believed in things, in entities, while I experienced them, that only those things and entities thus known are viewed seriously and afford me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates has dried up in me or that reality is formed only in memory, the flowers that I am shown today for the first time don't seem real flowers to me.)

Coming home one evening tired and depressed, he dips a cake — a petite madeleine — iinto a cup of tea. As he tastes it, a feeling of joy comes over him and a sense of liberation from anxiety, doubts and misgivings. As if by magic, the Combray of his childhood arises from the depths of his memory, restored by the taste of the little cake which is linked to his childhood. He meditates on that childhood world: