Yves Saint Laurent died in France today. Twenty years ago, I interviewed him just before his company went public and asked how he felt about sharing ownership of his name. In response, he pulled a framed quotation from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, off the wall of his Paris office. Slowly, a tremulous finger tracing the words, he read it aloud in French. ”The magnificent and lamentable family of the nervous is the salt of the earth,” it read in part. ”They are the ones – and not others – who founded religions and created masterpieces. The world will never know all that it owes them, nor especially how much they suffered.” (photo by Michael Gross)