À la recherche de la madeleine perdue

So I saw a documentary about Marcel Proust yesterday (I watch a lot of TV these days. A LOT. Like if there was a fairly interesting series, film or documentary on German TV these days, I probably saw it). Marcel Proust wrote "À la recherche du temps perdu", which really is a cycle of novels containing: over 3000 pages, 200 characters, and over 1 million words (I wonder who counted the words. Maybe they just did an approximate estimation based on the number of pages.).
What is also interesting about Marcel Proust and his major oeuvre is that he basically sat down (or rather: lied down) and wrote it in the last 15 odd years or so of his life. He would have the weirdest life rhythm; getting up only at sunset and writing the whole night through. Suffering from asthma since he was a child, he would drink 17 cups of coffee every day (or night?) to "fortify" his health. (Interestingly enough, Balzac is known to be a great coffee drinker as well. So there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of consumed coffee and the amount of written pages. Of course, they just simply gained time to write more by being awake much longer. But maybe it is also heightening your creativity? When do the brain researchers finally solve this mystery, I ask? [Come to think of it: I hardly sleep these days, but doesn't do my creativity any good. I just walk around like a zombie all day and toss around in bed at night.])
What Proust did (at least I like to look at it that way), was to live intensively for 35 years, and then completely withdraw from the world and just write, write, write (which is a very extreme case of what a lot of authors say, that you can't live and write at the same time). And boy, he had the means to live (and also: he had the means to write!). He was a regular guest at the most fancy salons of Paris, and apparently he liked gossip so much, and was so well known for it, that there was the expression "proustier" for gossiping. Although he did already write essays, colums and stories at the time (among them an essay about St. Beuve with 800 pages!), nobody really took his writing serious. And even the first novel of the "Recherche" was hard to publish: He got a rejection from most of the famous publishers. A certain Monsieur Humblot, working for the publisher Ollendorff at the time, said in his evaluation of the manuscript: "Maybe I don't get it, but I can't understand why someone would need 30 pages to describe how he is tossing around in bed at night before he falls asleep." (Geez, can you imagine going down in literary history for that kind of misjudgment? André Gide, who also worked for a publisher at the time and rejected Proust, thought it was the biggest mistake of his life.) The editor who did finally consent to publish it had, ironically enough, simply not read the book before. Which is just to say: Sometimes ignorance can be very beneficiary.