Personal items of French writer Marcel Proust, including intimate letters and family photographs, are being sold at auction in Paris.

Among the items is an original signed edition of Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past.

The collection passed to his brother Robert when Proust died in 1922. A great-great-niece, Patricia Mante-Proust, is selling now the items at Sotheby’s auction house, as BBC reports.

The collection, valued at between €520,000 and €740,000, include boyhood photos of Proust and Man Ray’s image of him on his deathbed.

One of the photos, dated 1896, shows Proust with his secret lover Lucien Daudet.

There is also a letter from Proust to another lover, the pianist Reynaldo Hahn, whom he describes as “really the person who, besides mummy, I love most of all in the world”.