With about 230 paintings, engravings, drawings, works, documents - including major pieces by Monet (one of his favorite painters), Rodin, Bonnard or Vuillard, as well as proofs corrected by the author of "Swann's Way" and "Sodom and Gomorrah", the exhibition tackles a fundamental aspect of Marcel Proust's personality and work who, when his mom left in 1905, seriously set to work, carried out by the thought it will be "so soft before dying to do something his mother would have liked". The writing of his masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time" monopolized him until the day he died.

After shining a light on Proust' ties with his mother family, the Weils - Jews perfectly well included in the modern bourgeoisie played a major part in the history of Jews in France - the exhibition revolves around several themes including the writer's sociabilities, commitment during the Dreyfus case, his vision on homosexuality considered as an alter ego of the Jews, the rising of modernity carried out by Jewish intellectuals and artists in the early 20th century, as well as the issue of memory as the main element of the Jewish identity and the writing of "In Search Of Lost Time".

The exhibition also focuses on the places that marked his life, his participation to the "Revue blanche", the influence he got from British writer John Ruskin - Proust and his mother translated his "Sesame and Lilies" - the framework of the Proust manuscripts reminding of those by Talmud, his interest in the story of Esther or Zohar, Jewish characters from "In Search of Lost Time", anti-Semitism in France from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, or the reception theory of his works in Zionist magazines in the 1920's.

Through the writer's Jewishness, the exhibition also unveils this "Jewish part" - ignored too often - of France in the 19th century, when the Israelits accessed all fields of the political, economic, social and cultural life, in a movement of unparalleled integration in history, without equal in Europe.

The "Marcel Proust, du côté de la mère" exhibition enjoys loans from about thirty institutions aboard and in France including the BnF, the Louvre, the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers Combray and exceptional loans from the Musée d'Orsay. It is accompanied by a rich program (encounters, conferences, concerts, entertainments for children, guided tours and off-the-wall strolls).