The story of the overcoat began with a chance meeting - between an obsessive book collector, Jacques Guérin, and his physician, Dr Robert Proust, brother of the late writer. Guérin immediately glimpsed the possibility of acquiring the novelist's personal effects, but it would be decades before he finally came to possess the relic he had most coveted: Proust's moth-eaten otter-lined overcoat...

Translated by: Eric Karpeles