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most memorable character, the baron de Charlus) said that Proust’s work was “a mixture of litanies and sperm” (a formula that he considered to be a compliment). Gide accused him of having committed “an offense against the truth” (Gide was irritated that Proust never acknowledged his own homosexuality in print nor ever presented homosexual inclinations in an attractive light). Lucien Daudet, a young writer with whom Proust had an affair (Proust liked artistic young men with mustaches and dark eyes: that is, those who resembled himself), at one point told Cocteau that Proust was “an atrocious insect.” Lucien’s father, Alphonse Daudet, one of the most celebrated writers of the generation before Proust’s, though now largely forgotten, announced, “Marcel Proust is the devil!” He might well have taken such a position, since it was Proust’s seven-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past (in recent editions, translated more literally as In Search of Lost Time), that surpassed—indeed, wiped out—the fiction written in the two decades before him. Who today reads Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, or even Alphonse Daudet? Paul Claudel, the arch-Catholic poet and playwright, described Marcel as “a painted old Jewess.” In New York during the 1970s one popular T-shirt, using the Yiddish word for a female gossip, brandished the slogan “Proust Is a Yenta”!

These insults, many of them handed out by people who on alternate days adored Proust, were neutralized by an issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française, France’s best literary magazine at the time, that was entirely dedicated to Proust. It came out in 1923, just a year after Proust’s death, and contained photos of the dead master, previously unpublished snippets from his pen, and evaluations from critics, French but also from nations all over the world. Most touching were the many personal testimonies. The poet Anna de Noailles, herself a monument to egotism, praised Proust for his . . . modesty. (The duc de Gramont, one of Proust’s highest-born friends, once remarked that aristocrats invited Proust for country weekends not because of his art but because he and Anna de Noailles were the two funniest people in Paris.)

Everyone had a sharp memory to share. Jean Cocteau, the poet-playwright-impresario-filmmaker (Beauty and the Beast), recalled Proust’s voice: “Just as the voice of a ventriloquist comes out of his chest, so Proust’s emerged from his soul.” The writer Léon-Paul Fargue remembered seeing Proust towards the end of his life, “completely pale, with his hair down to his eyebrows, his beard, so black it was blue, devouring his face. . . .” Fargue noticed the long sleeves covering frozen hands, the Persian, almond-shaped eyes. “He looked like a man who no longer lives outdoors or by day, a hermit who hasn’t emerged from his oak tree for a long time, with something pained about the face, the expression of suffering that has just begun to be calmed. He seemed possessed by a bitter goodness.” A young aristocratic woman recalled that when she was a girl she was supposed to be presented to him at a ball, but the great writer, “livid and bearded,” wearing the collar of his overcoat turned up, stared at her with such intensity that when they were finally introduced she was so frightened she nearly fainted.

One of Proust’s ex-lovers and his most constant friend, Reynaldo Hahn, the composer, recalled that soon after he met Proust they were walking through a garden when suddenly Proust stopped dead before a rosebush. He asked Hahn to continue walking without him. When at last Hahn circled back, after going around the château, “I found him at the same place, staring at the roses. His head tilting forward, his face very serious, he blinked, his eyebrows slightly furrowed as though from a passionate act of attention, and with his left hand he was obstinately pushing the end of his little black mustache between his lips and nibbling on it. . . . How many times I’ve observed Marcel in these mysterious moments in which he was communicating totally with nature, with art, with life, in these