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and resilience, Proust immediately asked a friend whether Bernard Grasset would publish his book if all the expenses were paid: what today we would call “vanity publishing,” except that in those days in France well-heeled authors, even those who were well-known and talented, often resorted to subsidizing their own publication—not so hard to understand in a period when even the most famous writers seldom sold more than two thousand copies of their books. Grasset, whom Proust compared to an ebony paper-cutter, so hard and sharp and efficient was he, virtually invented modern publishing in France; he was the first to resort to massive press offensives, advertising, bribing well-known personalities to launch a good word-of-mouth campaign, and so on. His “stable” would one day include Jean Giraudoux, the playwright (The Madwoman of Chaillot), and François Mauriac, the novelist.

Grasset agreed to publish Proust, who benefited from Grasset’s knowhow, although the two men never became friendly. Perhaps they were too similar, since Proust was not only a great artist but also a genius at self-promotion, someone who showered critics with gifts, who wined and dined opinion makers, and never failed to respond to a good review with exaggerated gratitude and a bad one with pages and pages of self-justification—and more often than not an invitation to the Ritz.

IX

IF PROUST’S LAW is that you always get what you want when you no longer want it, then publication exemplified this tragic principle, since by the time Proust’s book came out on November 14, 1913, the event had been completely upstaged by the great love of his life and its brutal conclusion.

Proust had met Alfred Agostinelli in 1907, when the teenage chauffeur from Monaco drove Proust through the Norman countryside, using Cabourg as their starting point. Ironically, Agostinelli worked for a Monaco-based taxi company run by Proust’s first love, Jacques Bizet. Within a few months Proust had already written an essay about the almost religious exhilaration of “flying” across the countryside in an automobile—the same sort of pleasure Henry James was enjoying at the same time in Edith Wharton’s luxurious car. In the essay, “Impressions of the Road in an Automobile,” Proust compared his moon-faced, mustachioed young chauffeur wearing goggles and a close-fitting aviator’s hat to a male pilgrim—and to a wimpled nun. The next year Agostinelli drove Proust from Cabourg to Versailles, where Proust liked to spend every autumn in a melancholy grand hotel, the Hôtel des Réservoirs. Overcome with asthma, Proust stayed shut up in his room or played dominoes with Agostinelli and his valet, Odilon Albaret. Since he had no more need of Agostinelli, Proust dismissed him and apparently forgot him, until he resurfaced in 1913.

Agostinelli was now twenty-five, leaner, out of work, and living with a woman named Anna who he claimed was his wife (in fact they weren’t married). As Proust already had his faithful servant Albaret, he didn’t need another driver, but he offered Agostinelli a job as a secretary. Soon Proust and Agostinelli were spending long hours together in Proust’s bedroom working on the manuscript—and Proust became deeply enamored of him. Agostinelli even moved in to Proust’s apartment with Anna. Proust wrote a friend that the couple had become “an integral part of my existence.” With all the exaggeration of love, Proust declared Agostinelli to be “an extraordinary being possessing perhaps the greatest intellectual gifts I’ve ever known!” He later told Gide that “I have letters from him which are those of a great writer.” Proust’s maid Céleste Albaret, married to the valet-chauffeur, said merely that he was “an unstable boy” who had “ambitions to rise above his station.” Proust himself wrote in The Fugitive, “Certainly I’d known people with a higher intelligence. But love, boundless in its egotism, means that the beings whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral features are for us the least objectively defined.” Everyone agreed that Anna was ugly, and Odilon Albaret called