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switch between unrequited love (‘Mme de Breyves’s Melancholy Summer Vacation’) and the promise and pleasure of art, as explored in the ‘Portraits of Painters and Musicians’, poems inspired by the work of artists Proust had admired at the Louvre (all from the seventeenth century: the Dutchmen Albert Cuyp and Paul Potter, the French painter and engraver Antoine Watteau and the Flemish painter and portraitist Antoine Van Dyck) and by four favourite composers. The latter are from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Chopin, Gluck, Schumann and Mozart. After the poems come ‘The Confession of a Young Woman’, a substantial, psychologically fraught tale of moral trauma and suffering, followed by a lighter prose piece, ‘A Dinner in Town’; then come a series of short prose poems, ‘Nostalgia – Daydreams under Changing Skies’, which consider emotions, landscapes and fleeting scenarios of various sorts. The original, wistful title, ‘Les regrets, rêveries couleur du temps’, incorporates a characteristically Proustian play on ‘le temps’, the word for time and for the weather. Time passing and reflection on the past are concerns of these pieces which have much, stylistically, to identify them with the literary currents of their time. The collection ends with a novella, grave in tone and purpose, entitled ‘The End of Jealousy’.

Besides the vanities and vicissitudes of society life the dominant concerns of the collection are the joys and, more prominently, the sufferings of love; jealousy; habit; the passing of time; memory; contingency; and death, which brings the first and the last stories to their glum conclusions. All of these preoccupations will eventually take their place, to varying degrees of prominence, in the Search.

Various traits of Pleasures and Days distinguish it from the later novel. Most obviously perhaps, at the centre of the collection we find the poetic ‘Portraits of Painters and Musicians’. The Narrator of the Search frequently refers to poets, major and minor, but nowhere does verse of his own appear. The ‘Portraits’ are largely derivative, echoing Baudelaire’s ‘Les Phares’ [The Beacons] in which each of the first eight stanzas is dedicated to a tutelary artist figure (Rubens, Da Vinci and others). For all the apparent divergence between the brevity and intensity of the poetic line and the slower-paced unfolding of the Proustian sentence in the Search, that poems commemorating artists should form the core of Pleasures and Days shows us how early Proust came to revere art and to explore the responses that great art elicits. Many of the pieces on either side of the poems show the vanity and illusion – the ‘temps perdu’ – that society life represents. Proust’s poems may lack originality but they underline his recognition of the crucial importance of solitary contemplation and reflection, so markedly different from the buzz and bustle of social interaction.

An aspect of the collection that dates it rather as a work of the nineteenth century is the decadent style and tone of certain passages, reminiscent of writers such as Huysmans, author of Against Nature (1884), whose protagonist Des Esseintes lives a life of artificial pleasures, withdrawn from society and the natural world. In ‘Fragments from Italian Comedy’ we read of one character ‘unstopping a small bottle and explaining … that he has formed a concentrate of the most potent and most exotic perfumes’ (PD, 53; PJ, 51). Shortly after, we read of another, echoing the extravagances of Montesquiou, ‘describing his new bedroom, skilfully treated with tar to evoke the sensations of a sea voyage, and … detailing … all the quintessences of his dressing table and his furnishings’ (PD, 53, trans. mod.; PJ, 52). Proust’s text shows his sensitivity to the currents of his time and his talent in reproducing their traits with a very few choice phrases. We find the same practice in the later pastiches, of which ‘Bouvard and Pécuchet on Society and Music’ in Pleasures and Days provides a satirical foretaste.

Proust’s first book serves as a seedbed for stylistic practices, themes,