Over the weekend—as Jean-Paul Proust, the police chief of Paris, struggled to ease tensions between French Arab Muslims and Israelis—Marcel Proust, the modernist French novelist, spoke out in this extraordinarily rare interview.* A Stranger exclusive!

Okay--so, France. What the fuck?

So crude in its symbolism, so lacking in subtlety.

Exactly. Why won't France just join the U.S. and Britain in going to Iraq?

Identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order.

I always thought of France as a place where smart people live. Say something that sounds really smart.

Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process.

Jesus, you're really good.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Okay, enough. Have you been reading the newspaper?

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

But I bet you wouldn't mind being "embedded" with a bunch of sweaty Marines.

I might perhaps elicit from it something that would bring me happiness.

Uh-huh. What did you do when you learned America had begun bombing Baghdad?

I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window.

Have you ever had French fries, and if so, how were they?

They had the transparency and mellowness of life itself.recommended

*Proust's answers are verbatim quotes from Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin). He died in 1922.

frizzelle@thestranger.com