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have a powerful effect on our perception of time and space, serving to link – like the telephone – what had previously been thought to be irrevocably separate. Proust was an inquisitive passenger in Agostinelli’s taxi in 1907 and these early trips provided materials for an article, ‘Impressions de route en automobile’ [Impressions of Riding in an Automobile], published in Le Figaro that year. The conjunction of past and present, as so often in Proust, is beautifully encapsulated in this article in the image of Agostinelli using the lamps from his car to illuminate the façade of Lisieux cathedral at night, ‘casting up to the sculptures the greeting of the present whose light now did no more than serve better to read the lessons of the past’.5 In the Search the Narrator reflects on the different intensities of sensation afforded the traveller by rail and road transit (the latter allowing us to follow ‘more closely, in a more intimate congruity, the various gradations by which the surface of the earth is diversified’; BG, 255; JF, 512). Lying in his bed in Paris, in The Captive, the heady smell of petrol fumes from a car in the street below provokes for the Narrator an involuntary recollection of excursions near Balbec during happier days (C, 469–70; P, 1912).

Proust perhaps unexpectedly, then, finds a place in his grand aesthetic project for the technological innovations of his time – the motorcar, bicycle and telephone (as well as telegrams, the player piano and the elevator). The events of the novel, however, play themselves out during a period not just of technological advancement but also of major developments in science and medicine. In philosophy and psychology (and the developing field of psychoanalysis) debates developed about our conceptions of ‘private’ or subjectively experienced time, whilst in the domains of physics and mathematics the very nature of time and space was being challenged and rethought.6

With his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 and the General Theory of 1916, Albert Einstein revolutionized the way time, space, movement and gravity are understood.7 In Within a Budding Grove the Narrator considers at length how it was for him to observe the constant motion of the young girls’ accelerated bodies along the strand at Balbec, in contradistinction to the other visitors on the beach and the promenade. Repeatedly in the novel he alludes to the different gearings of time, the apparent accelerations and diminutions of the pace at which we experience time’s passing; and at the close of the first chapter of The Fugitive the Narrator makes the following remarks, in which we can recognize how scientific developments are recruited analogically by Proust, in this case to illustrate the rigours of dealing with loss: ‘as there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of Time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting’ (F, 637; AD, 2023). In losing Albertine the Narrator gains a new sensitivity to time and forgetting, forces which bring an additional dimension to our emotional universe. A number of critics in the 1920s drew parallels between the impact of Proust’s and Einstein’s work in their respective fields and although Proust was flattered by the suggestion he was reluctant to endorse it for fear that readers might interpret the link as one of comparable abstraction and incomprehensibility, rather than something more positive. He did concede in a letter, however, that ‘We [Proust and Einstein] have, it seems, an analogous way of deforming Time’.8

In composing the metaphors that add layer upon layer of referential richness to his novel, Proust drew widely on biology and botany, entomology, chemistry, physics and physiology. His father’s profession had exposed him from an early age to the language and literature of medicine and these play a prominent role in the novel on at least two levels. First, the Narrator suffers from fragile health and is personally concerned by