Discoveries in the diaries of Jean-Jacques Henner The interconnected lives of the Duplays’ dinner guests and the Prousts

In 2019, the diaries and two letters of Jean-Jacques Henner revealed that the artist rubbed shoulders with Marcel Proust’s parents. Henner attended a dinner hosted by the doctor Simon Duplay in March 1894 where nearly all the other guests were doctors, including Adrien Proust, accompanied by their wives. In light of this new source of information, it is worth examining how the paths of these dinner guests crossed and intertwined. This medically oriented social group left its imprint on Proust’s novels.