Question: Which Marcel Proust novel features a character who is working on an essay?
About the article "Johannes Vermeer", section "References in other media".

Candidate passages:
Luigi Ferdinando Dagnese is an Italian novelist based in Turin.
He is the author of a novel in English, "The Book of Breathing", that appeared first in Italian as "Il libro del respiro", as well as of another novel in Italian, "L’imbarazzo della scelta", and an essay on Marcel Proust, "Alla ricerca del tempo sprecato". 
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age.
In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published, while at school, "La Revue verte" and "La Revue lilas", from 1890 to 1891 Proust published a regular society column in the journal "Le Mensuel".
In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review called "Le Banquet" (also the French title of Plato's "Symposium"), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious "La Revue Blanche".
In 1896 "Les Plaisirs et les Jours", a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published.
The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme Lemaire in the "salon" of whom Proust would be a frequent guest, and who was a model of Mme Verdurin.
She invited him and Reynaldo Hahn in her château de Réveillon (model of Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894 and three weeks in 1895.
This book was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size.
That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled "Jean Santeuil" by his posthumous editors.
Many of the themes later developed in "In Search of Lost Time" find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of "In Search of Lost Time" can be read in the first draft in "Jean Santeuil".
The portrait of the parents in "Jean Santeuil" is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece.
Following the poor reception of "Les Plaisirs et les Jours", and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned "Jean Santeuil" in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899.
Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson, and John Ruskin.
Through this reading Proust began to refine his own theories of art and the role of the artist in society.
Also, in "Time Regained" Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies".
The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art.
Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", "The Bible of Amiens", and "Praeterita".
Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English.
To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime loverReynaldo Hahn, then again finally polished by Proust.
Confronted about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin".
"The Bible of Amiens", with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904.
Both the translation and the introduction were very well reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin" and had similar praise for the translation.
At the time of this publication, Proust was already at work on translating Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies", which he completed in June 1905, just before his mother's death, and published in 1906.
Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer.
During the first part of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers.
These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style.
In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of "Contre Sainte-Beuve".
Proust described what he was working on in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel".
From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period.
The rough outline of the work centered on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning.
The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work.
Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the "Recherche", in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7.
Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements.
By 1910 he was at work on "À la recherche du temps perdu". 
The questions raised by homosexuality are pervasive throughout the novel, particularly in the later volumes.
The first arrival of this theme comes already in the "Combray" section of "Swann's Way", where the daughter of the piano teacher and composer Vinteuil is seduced and perverted, and Marcel observes her having lesbian relations in front of the portrait of her recently deceased father.
Marcel invariably suspects his lovers of liaisons with other women, a repetition of the suspicions held by Charles Swann about his mistress and eventual wife, Odette, in "Swann's Way."
The first chapter of "Cities of the Plain" includes a detailed account of a sexual encounter between M. de Charlus, the novel's most prominent male homosexual, and his tailor.
Critics have often observed that while the character of Marcel is ostensibly heterosexual, Proust intimates that the narrator is a closeted homosexual.
Marcel's manner towards male homosexuality is consistently aloof, yet the narrator (or Proust) is unaccountably knowledgeable.
This strategy enables Proust to pursue themes related to male homosexuality—in particular the nature of closetedness—from both within and without a homosexual perspective.
Proust does not designate Charlus' homosexuality until the middle of the novel, in "Cities"; afterwards the Baron's ostentatiousness and flamboyance, of which he is blithely unaware, completely absorb the narrator's perception.
Lesbianism, on the other hand, tortures Swann and Marcel because it presents an inaccessible world.
Whereas male homosexual desire is recognizable, insofar as it encompasses male sexuality, Odette's and Albertine's lesbian trysts represent Swann and Marcel's painful exclusion from characters they desire.
There is much debate as to how great a bearing Proust's sexuality has on understanding these aspects of the novel.
Although many of Proust's close family and friends suspected that he was homosexual, Proust never admitted this.
It was only after his death that André Gide, in his publication of correspondence with Proust, made public Proust's homosexuality.
In response to Gide's criticism that he hid his actual sexuality within his novel, Proust told Gide that "one can say anything so long as one does not say 'I'."
The nature of Proust's intimate relations with such individuals as Alfred Agostinelli and Reynaldo Hahn are well documented, though Proust was not "out and proud," except perhaps in close knit social circles.
In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men.
Strip off the feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée—and one has their masculine counterpart.
This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged in "Epistemology of the Closet" (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson.
Feminized forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French. 
Proust commonly refers to the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
Proust may also refer to: People  Joseph Proust (1754–1826), French chemist, responsible for the Law of definite proportions  Antonin Proust (1832–1905), French journalist and politician  Jean-Paul Proust (born 1940), the current Minister of State of Monaco Other uses  "Proust" (Beckett essay) (1931), an essay by Samuel Beckett  Proust Questionnaire, a personality test   4474 Proust, a main-belt asteroid  
The Merovingians feature in the novel "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust: "The Merovingians are important to Proust because, as the oldest French dynasty, they are the most romantic and their descendants the most aristocratic."
The word "Merovingian" is used as an adjective at least five times in "Swann's Way".
The Merovingians are extensively featured in the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail".
The authors claim they were descended from Jesus and survived their deposition in 751.
The book was later revealed to be based on a hoax originating with Pierre Plantard in the mid-20th century.
The Merovingians are also linked with the Jesus bloodline in the popular novel (chapter 60) and motion picture "The Da Vinci Code", which used "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" as one of its pseudo-historical sources.
The second and third installments of "The Matrix" film series include a French character called "The Merovingian".