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had found printed in an album of the period. He listed his favorite composers as Mozart and Gounod (the composer of Faust). His idea of happiness: “To live near all those whom I love with the charms of nature, a quantity of books and musical scores, and not far from a French theater.” “To be separated from Mama” was his idea of unhappiness and “the private life of geniuses” was the fault he was most ready to forgive. That same year he paid his last visit to Illiers in the autumn; his asthma no longer permitted him to go to the countryside, but the town, his aunt’s garden, the church, her neighbors and her cook, the smell of orrisroot in the toilet where years before he had felt his first sexual stirrings—all would be preserved perfectly in the clear amber of his extraordinary memory.

By 1888, when he was seventeen, Proust was struggling to overcome his homosexual urges. He wrote to Daniel Halévy, “Don’t treat me as a pederast, that wounds me. Morally I’m trying, if only out of a sense of elegance, to remain pure.”

Simultaneously he began to pay court to Laure Hayman, his uncle’s (and, as it turned out, his father’s) mistress, who would become the model of his most convincing female character, Odette, the “grande cocotte” whom Charles Swann loves and eventually marries. Only after Dr. Proust’s death did Marcel discover that his father had been more than just a friend to Laure Hayman; the discovery wasn’t a shock, since Dr. Proust had always held Laure up as the very standard of elegance, tact, and beauty. Marcel, too, paid her elaborate (if entirely sexless) court and once absurdly declared that “we live in the century of Laure Hayman.” In real life Laure had had an exotic background (she was born on a ranch in the Andes) and was a descendant of the English painter Francis Hayman—a founder of the Royal Academy and Gainsborough’s teacher. She’d been the lover, successively, of the duc d’Orléans; the king of Greece; Karageorgević, pretender to the Serbian throne; Prince Karl Egon von Fürstenberg; the banker Bischoffsheim—and a handsome young secretary at the British embassy. She had a house on the same street where Proust placed Odette, the rue La Pérouse, a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe.

Like Léa in Colette’s Chéri, Laure was approaching forty when she first met Proust, who was seventeen. Like Léa, she had secured her fortune through love, owned extraordinary pearls, was both practical and romantic. But whereas Chéri becomes the pampered lover of Léa, a woman his mother’s age, Proust was just another bauble that Laure added to her china collection (she called him “my little porcelain psychologist”). Like Odette in Remembrance of Things Past, she strolled often in the Bois de Boulogne or rode horseback there. Like Odette, she loved chrysanthemums (which Proust offered her in profusion, though he could ill afford them on his allowance, and she even reported to Proust’s father that his son was becoming too extravagant). Unlike Odette, whom the Narrator’s mother is too prudish and respectable to meet, the real Laure Hayman was frequently invited to dinner at Dr. and Mrs. Proust’s.

During his last year at the Lycée de Condorcet Proust published with his school friends two literary magazines, first La Revue Verte, then La Revue Lilas (green and lilac seem the perfect fin-de-siècle colors). In The Lilac Review the seventeen-year-old boy would publish a story about an ancient Greek named Glaukos: “Today his heart is calm. But he has many friends and he is infinitely loved by certain of them. . . . Often he is seated on the nervous knees of one of his friends, cheek to cheek, body to body, and he discusses with him Aristotle’s philosophy and Euripides’ poems, while the two of them kiss and caress each other and say elegant and wise things.”

In making harsh marginal comments on a poem by Daniel Halévy, Proust revealed that he was indifferent to the taste of his friends for the decadent writers of the day and that he preferred the classics—and absolute sincerity above all literary posing. Already at age seventeen he’d made