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was born on 10 July 1871 in Auteuil, a village to the west of Paris where his mother’s uncle had a house to which his parents had moved when the disruption and violence of the Paris Commune grew intolerable. He was a weak baby and the family harboured serious doubts about his chances of survival. When he was well enough they moved back to Paris. Their vacations were spent largely in Illiers, the paternal family seat to the south-west of Paris, near Chartres. Proust would later draw heavily on the landscapes and way of life at Illiers in constructing the ‘Combray’ section of In Search of Lost Time. In 1971, to mark the centenary of the author’s birth, the village’s name was formally changed to Illiers-Combray; it continues to attract a great many Proustian pilgrims. Proust’s mother, born Jeanne Weil, came from a wealthy Jewish family (her grandfather made his fortune in porcelain manufacture and her father was a stockbroker) and his father, Adrien Proust, was Catholic, although neither practised their respective religion. Proust was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church and he and his brother Robert, born in May 1873, were raised as Catholics.

Proust’s initial weakness and poor health are one explanation for the strong bond he developed with his mother. His relationship with her was closer than that with his father, in large part because of the latter’s career. Adrien Proust was a successful doctor, held in high public regard, who published extensively on a wide range of subjects of medical science. His implementation of the use of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ or quarantine line in the fight against cholera contributed to his election to the prestigious Académie de médecine in 1879; by 1885 he was elected Professor of Hygiene in the Faculty of Medicine. He travelled a lot, worked long hours and believed in the benefits of regular exercise and the strict scientific treatment of illness. As his career went from strength to strength his first son’s health gradually deteriorated.

In the spring of 1881, returning with his parents from a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Marcel had a sudden choking fit: this asthmatic seizure that almost killed him marked the beginning of his lifelong struggle for breath and inaugurated what would thereafter be a constant nervous fear of the open air and an extreme sensitivity to dust, pollen and smoke. After the onset of his asthma, longer spells were spent on the Normandy coast, where Adrien believed the sea air would have a beneficial effect on his son’s respiratory problems.

Proust attended the Lycée Condorcet in Paris from 1882 until 1889 but missed a great deal of schooling for health reasons. At this time it was popular for children to have keepsake books, albums which included questionnaires friends filled out so as to learn more about each other. Proust completed one such questionnaire in 1886: judging by his responses, the adolescent Proust was romantic, idealistic and had pastimes befitting his age, health and upper-middle-class background (favourite occupations: ‘Reading, daydreaming, poetry, history, theatre’). About six years later Proust took a similar questionnaire and his answers are revealing of his development. He was extremely fond at this time of Marie de Benardaky, a girl with whom he played in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, and Jeanne Pouquet, the companion of Gaston, son of Mme Arman de Caillavet, a society hostess whose salon Proust had recently begun to frequent. It is at Pouquet’s feet that Proust can be seen strumming a tennis racket-guitar, mock serenading her in a well-known photograph from 1891 or 1892. Despite his attraction to Pouquet and other young women in the late 1880s, tellingly, in the second questionnaire, Proust described his favourite quality in a man as ‘feminine charm’, his favourite qualities in a woman as ‘Manly virtue and openness in friendship’. These answers anticipate his later challenging of commonplace conceptions of gender identities in his novel.1

Letters from the late 1880s offer evidence of Proust’s sexual experimentation with his (all