The most remarkable letter Proust received [after publication of Swann’s Way] came from Gide: “My dear Proust, For several days I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it. Alas! why must it be so painful for me to like it so much? . . . The rejection of this book will remain the greatest mistake ever made by the NRF [ the Nouvelle Revue Française publishing house] — and (for I bear the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the bitterest remorseful regrets of my life.”   Gide admitted having formed a false image of Proust, based on a few encounters in society . . . .  He would never forgive himself, Gide said, but he had written to “alleviate my pain a little” while “begging you to be more indulgent towards me than I am myself.”

     Proust replied immediately: “My dear Gide, I have often found that certain great pleasures are conditional on our first having been deprived of a lesser one, which we deserved, but without the denial of which we would never have known the other, greater pleasure.” The “joy” of receiving Gide’s letter “infinitely surpasses any I might have felt from being published by the NRF.”  He told Gide he should feel no remorse, “for you have given me a thousand times more pleasure than pain.”

          — William C. Carter, from Marcel Proust, a Life (Yale University Press 2000), p. 563

          — Also see  George D. Painter, Proust: The Later Years (Little, Brown 1965), p. 204