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boy Marcel could not go to sleep without his mother’s kiss; this necessity would become a major theme of “Combray,” the first section of Remembrance of Things Past. Quite understandably she was worried by these signs of her son’s total dependence on her and would attempt to cure him by refusing to indulge him in his “whims,” but he would become so hysterical if denied a kiss or his mother’s tenth “good night” visit to his bedroom that usually she gave in—or her less rigorous husband would urge her to do so. Not only did Proust not outgrow his dependence; it became the template for his adult loves, since for Proust passion was a nagging need that became only more demanding the more it was denied. Indeed, Proust would drive away all his lovers (in his fiction as in his life) through his unreasonable demands.

II

PROUST GREW UP in the then recently constructed Paris built by the baron Haussmann, Napoleon III’s master town planner—a spacious, bourgeois world of broad boulevards radiating out from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées, a web of tree-lined streets of nearly identical façades of seven-story apartment buildings constructed out of pale stone and wrought-iron balconies. Inside, the apartments were huge, with massive reception rooms, creaking parquet floors, machine-cast plaster ornaments on the ceilings, white marble fireplaces, a rabbit warren of servants’ quarters, and all the modern conveniences. By the time Marcel was three his family was living at 9 boulevard Malesherbes, where they enjoyed running water, gas lighting, central heating from a coal furnace, toilets, a large bathroom, a wide, well-lit staircase with marble steps and a wrought-iron banister, even an elevator. Dr. Proust was delighted with the airy apartment, in which the parents’ room was separated from the children’s quarters by a corridor some forty-five feet long. He judged it to be hygienic, modern, and comfortable—his highest praise. Marcel himself considered their family salon to be of “an ugliness completely medical.” And Marcel’s school friend Fernand Gregh later wrote of the Proust apartment: “The impression I’ve kept, and that I see again when I close my eyes, is of a rather dark interior, bursting with heavy furniture, weatherstripped with curtains, stuffed with carpets, everything black and red, the Platonic apartment, not really that far removed from the somber bric-à-brac of Balzac’s time.” It was a seven-room apartment, with Dr. Proust’s consulting room on one side of the living room, and on the other, Proust’s bedroom, redolent of his eucalyptus fumigations, considered useful in treating the symptoms of asthma.

This was the Paris of new, giant department stores; of the recently built Palais Garnier opera house, which resembles a cross between a Victorian inkwell and a Liechtenstein medal for bravery; of newspaper kiosks and Morris columns (those turreted, freestanding, upended tubes on which theater posters are glued); of omnibuses (horse-drawn public vehicles) and vespassiennes (ornate public urinals, and occasional gay cruising grounds). As a boy Proust would run out every morning to see which plays were being advertised by the posters on the Morris column across the street (it’s still there in front of 8 boulevard Malesherbes). This was the Paris in which aristocratic women sporting diamonds and ostrich plumes and men in top hats and tails rode through the streets at night in their elegant carriages to balls or private dinners. At receptions there was inevitably one footman for every three guests—and the footmen had to be at least five feet ten inches tall. (The upper-middle-class Prousts kept a live-in butler, chambermaid, and cook.) In the houses of the rich and aristocratic, the comfortable family side of the living quarters was rigidly separated from the formal reception rooms. Men of this class smoked cigars banded with personalized gilt paper rings and had their shirts sent to be washed and pressed in London. The rich attended the opera, where often they arrived late and left early, staying only long enough during