A handwritten manuscript of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Times Past, has been sold for just over half what experts thought the lost proof might fetch.

Christie's had hoped the heavily reworked version of Swann's Way - the first volume of his mammoth meditation on the hidden depths that lurk in the trivial - would fetch up to £1m. It was bought yesterday by the Fondation Martin Bodmer, a Geneva library, for £663,750. The draft, which disappeared in 1935, gave an insight into how Proust endlessly revised, and how his dallying over a title threw up such unlikely contenders as The Frazzled Pigeon, The Stalagmites of the Past, and Gardens in a Cup of Tea.