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male) classmates at Condorcet. But his inquisitiveness was more than libidinal. From a young age he read widely; at the Lycée he read set texts such as Pascal’s Pensées and Leibniz’s Monadology as well as recent and contemporary writers such as Barrès, Renan, Leconte de Lisle and Loti. He began contributing to journals run by his classmates, amongst whom were Daniel Halévy, who became a noted historian and biographer; Fernand Gregh, later a major critic and member of the Académie française; and Robert de Flers, another future Académicien. As well as drawing on his reading and the intellectual and amorous stimulation he received from this remarkable peer group, Proust’s perspective on the world also developed through his precocious participation in the salon life of belle époque Paris. He was an enthusiastic reader of Anatole France and it was in the salon of Mme de Caillavet, France’s mistress, that Proust eventually met the eminent writer who, in due course, provided the preface for his first book, published in 1896, the year France was elected to the Académie française.

Proust’s health was still precarious and he harboured desires to become a writer, so his decision in 1889 to sign up voluntarily for military service upon graduating from the Lycée may seem surprising. It was in fact calculated: those volunteering undertook just one year’s service rather than being enlisted for the normal three. The young intellectual was stationed to Orléans, but his asthma disrupted his fellow cadets so he was lodged privately in the town (which now has its rue Marcel Proust). Early on in his service, in January 1890, Proust’s maternal grandmother, Adèle Weil, died from an attack of uraemia. Proust’s mother, devastated, went into mourning, travelling later in the year to Cabourg where previously they had holidayed, the three generations together; there she sought consolation in reading the letters of Mme de Sévigné, her mother’s favourite author. Proust returned to Paris after his military service with thoughts of becoming a writer, but with little sense of how he might do so. His parents wished him to study with a view to a stable future (of the sort that writing could not guarantee), so, somewhat reluctantly, in November 1890, Proust enrolled in the Faculties of Law and Political Science, the conventional pathway for those seeking a diplomatic career.

His studies were a minor part of his existence, however, as writing of a number of non-academic sorts began to occupy him: he wrote for Le Mensuel, commenting on societal and political affairs, and founded, with a group of ex-Condorcet students, Le Banquet (the title borrowed from the French rendering of Plato’s Symposium), a journal in which he published reviews and sketches based on his ever-growing experiences in the salons. It was at this time that Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942), an established society painter, began his sketches and eventually completed the portrait by which Proust’s youthful face would be forever remembered, his pallid complexion, pursed lips and narrow moustache looming enigmatically out of a dark background, atop evening dress, adorned with the sensual splash of a white orchid in his buttonhole. This painting, now in the Musée d’Orsay, captures Proust eternally as a twenty-one-year-old socialite, ironically perhaps for one whose novel shows him to be so exceptionally alert to the mutability of the human body and the effects of the passing of time.

In 1891, as Blanche worked on his portrait, Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray and visited Paris. One might anticipate that a meeting between the notorious Wilde and the impressionable young Proust would have been a momentous occasion. It is not certain, however, that they actually met.2 Two years later Proust’s first sustained creative piece, ‘Violante ou la mondanité’ [Violante, or Worldly Vanities], was published in Le Banquet. Thereafter short stories, criticism, satirical sketches and essays were published in La Revue blanche (a prestigious journal which provided a platform for writers such as