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By Root 549 0

the third act to visit their friends in their boxes, to see and be seen, and to watch the ballet (some of the dancers were kept by the fashionable male members of the exclusive Jockey Club). This was the Paris of the Bois de Boulogne, the vast park west of Paris where rich women, members of society and of the demimonde, were slowly drawn down the shaded, well-sanded, and well-watered roads in their carriages as they received the nods and salutes of men on horseback or on foot. An evening outing in the Bois was one of the few daily rituals everyone observed. This was the Paris of the Impressionists, of well-manicured gardens and children playing with stick and hoop. But it was also the Paris of the newly erected (and much criticized) Eiffel Tower, of train stations with glass and metal roofs, of great financiers speculating on the next building boom that would be set off by the leveling of yet another poor, crowded neighborhood to make way for the growing system of boulevards. This was the Paris of ragamuffins calling out their wares and selling herbs from door to door, of milk or ice wagons lumbering through the streets at dawn, of professional photographers, of oyster-eating dandies lounging about in brasseries open to the street, of expensive florists such as Lachaume and Lemaître, of exquisite pastry-makers such as Rebattet and Bourbonneux, of chic cafés such as le café Anglais, le café de la Paix, Weber, and Larue (where Proust as a young adult would often dine, usually alone). This is the Paris in which even the most modest middle-class household kept at least one servant and where ladies were so extravagantly appareled by the first couturiers (Worth, Redfern) that they appeared to be creatures of another species, set apart from ordinary women. This was the Paris that had been enriched by its colonies in the Far East and in Africa; and if it was the condensation of luxury, it was so because it had drained the world dry to pay for its excesses.

This was also the France of heavy, tasteless furniture, of engraved portraits of Prince Eugène, of clocks kept under a glass bell on the mantelpiece, of overstuffed chairs covered with antimacassars and of brass beds warmed by hot-water bottles. Proust lovingly describes (in Jean Santeuil and also in the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies) his aunt Léonie’s house in Illiers (her real name was Aunt Elizabeth Amiot). He hovers over the magic lantern in the child’s bedroom that cast revolving images from fairy tales on the walls. He lingers over the dining room with its round mahogany table, its walls decorated with old plates, its grandfather clock. In Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust renders his aunt’s bedroom in detail: “On one side of her bed were a big yellow chest of drawers in lemon wood and a table that was both dispensary and altar where, below a statuette of the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy water, one discovered prayerbooks and prescriptions for medicine, everything necessary for following from her bed the mass and her cure, to keep the proper times for her pepsin and for vespers.”

All his life Proust would remain faithful to the ugly furnishings his parents and relatives had accumulated. The tourist visiting the Musée Carnavalet in Paris today can see his bedroom, preserved down to its last shabby detail: the scarred side table heavily burdened with some of the schoolboy notebooks in which he wrote, the battered Japanese screen behind his bed, a well-worn armchair, and the brass bed itself. The tourist might well agree with Proust’s English biographer George Painter, who wrote that “to the end of his life, he filled his room with hideous but sacred objects which spoke to him of his dead parents, his childhood, time lost. He had come into the world not to collect beauty ready-made, but to create it.” Proust himself said that since he was too lazy and indifferent to care about his surroundings, “I had the right not to provide nuances to my rooms.”

Few incidents about Marcel’s childhood are known beyond his terror