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book, Pleasures and Days, was finally published, although it had been ready for the printer for more than two years by that time. The holdup had been due to Madame Lemaire, who had taken her time sketching the floral designs that decorated the pages, and also to the difficulty of finding a publisher (at last Calmann-Lévy agreed, although he had many reservations about Proust’s style). Even Anatole France, who wrote the preface, harbored his private misgivings; according to his secretary, France complained that Proust wrote “sentences interminable enough to make you consumptive.” In print, fortunately, France took another tone, although one still ambiguous. He said the stories breathed “an atmosphere of the hothouse among clever orchids” but also (continuing the vegetal metaphor) that they represented a renovation of classical learning: “This is the springtime of leaves on ancient branches.”

When the book came out it appeared in such a luxurious edition that it cost four times the price of a normal volume its size. Sales were slow, especially since the reviews were few and tepid. Léon Blum, who in the future would preside over France, reviewed the book with considerable reservations (referring to “this book that is too coquettish and too pretty”). And even Proust’s old school chum Fernand Gregh wrote an equivocal article: “The author of this book is commended to the public by the best known names; with a sort of timidity he has called on his most precious friends to introduce him into literary life. One could say that he has assembled around this newborn book all the good fairies. Usually one fairy is forgotten; but here all of them, it seems to us, have been convened. Each one has given to the child a grace: the first, melancholy; the second, irony; the third, a special music. And all have promised success.” What Gregh was obviously satirizing in his silken way was Proust’s penchant for publicity overkill, something that would reach its apogee years later when he invoked all the deities necessary to win the Goncourt Prize.

Between 1897 and 1899 Proust seems to have done little writing. Pleasures and Days (written between 1892 and 1895) had been published, and most of the work had been done on the never-completed Jean Santeuil, although Proust was still dramatizing and disguising in the novel his breakup with Hahn in the fictional affair between the characters Jean and Françoise, and he was adding details about the Dreyfus Affair even as they were occurring. In fact the nearly journalistic accounts of the Dreyfus trials contained in Jean Santeuil seriously compromised its proportions.

Of course in these years he was also reading constantly, primarily Balzac, the French writer who impressed him the most with his vast series of interlocking novels in which the characters keep reappearing. Proust was influenced by the story of how young, ambitious men from the provinces (epitomized by Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions) could social-climb their way through Paris with the help of mistresses—and even a powerful male lover: Lucien, for instance, is aided by Vautrin, a master criminal who is clearly in love with him. Just as Balzac had learned the lore of the aristocracy from his titled friends and filled his books with detailed accounts of the Faubourg-Saint-Germain, in the same way Proust, helped by the aristocrats he was meeting through Robert de Montesquiou, was observing everything about this fabled bastion of the old aristocracy—and storing everything away in his memory for later use. To be sure, Proust himself made a distinction between normal memory—fallible, lifeless, virtually useless to the artist—and involuntary memory—perfect, vital, and timeless.

From Balzac Proust acquired a taste for the theatrical, evident in Proust’s scenes in a male brothel, or in the moment when a lesbian spits on the photo of her friend’s revered father, than dissolves into a frenzy of sexual excitement with her partner, or even in the great scene when the baron de Charlus (a literary cousin to both Balzac’s Baron Hulot and Vautrin)