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Verlaine, Mallarmé and Gide) as well as other journals and papers. In the salons of Mme Straus, Mme de Caillavet and Madeleine Lemaire he met major artistic figures of all stripes: the actress Sarah Bernhardt, poets such as José-Maria de Heredia and Leconte de Lisle, painters including Degas and Puvis de Chavannes (Lemaire herself was a painter); as well as aristocrats and royals including Charles Haas and the Princesse Mathilde. Proust, whose background was solidly haut bourgeois, gained access to these social arenas where titled nobility rubbed shoulders with the artistic elite by dint of his ability to charm and entertain with his conversation, wit and considerable intellect. His interactions with the prominent worldly figures of his day exposed him to intrigues, to quirks of language, conventions of behaviour, patterns of prejudice and pretension – in short, gave him a sort of sociological training. The salons were the preserve of the wealthy, but they displayed to Proust’s sensibilities deeper laws and configurations of human interaction that could be found throughout the social spectrum, as his lengthy conversations with domestics and hotel and delivery staff would later confirm.

In Madeleine Lemaire’s salon Proust became acquainted with the dandy and poet count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921), one of the period’s most remarkable figures. A decadent aesthete with wealth, pomposity and idiosyncrasy in vast measure, aspects of his behaviour and eccentricities fed into Proust’s fictional baron de Charlus. The decadent novelist J. K. Huysmans had already drawn heavily on Montesquiou as a model for Jean Des Esseintes, the protagonist in his 1884 novel A rebours [Against Nature], which is thought to have influenced Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Besides Montesquiou, chez Lemaire Proust also met a brilliant young composer named Reynaldo Hahn. His infatuation with Hahn lasted approximately two years but their friendship endured Proust’s lifetime. His early letters to Hahn, frequently signed ‘Your pony’, reveal how rapidly his amorous devotions developed. In the Parisian salons as well as in country residences (such as Lemaire’s château de Réveillon at which Proust and Hahn spent a month in 1894), musical recitals were heard, plays and paintings discussed and the polemics – and gossip – of the day were debated. A subject that began in 1894 to pique the interest of chattering socialites, bourgeoisie and working class alike was the case of Alfred Dreyfus.

A Jewish captain on the General Staff, Dreyfus was accused of having passed information to the Germans, convicted of treason and sent, for life, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. In 1896, suspecting that Dreyfus was being framed to protect a non-Jewish officer, Colonel Picquart proved that the evidence against Dreyfus – a memorandum stolen from the German embassy in Paris – had been written by another man, Major Esterhazy. The latter, however, was acquitted and Picquart jailed. This turn of events led to a public outcry and demands for a retrial of Dreyfus. Emile Zola (1840–1902), in a series of articles in the Figaro newspaper, called for truth and justice, protesting vociferously against the military cover-up and the systemic anti-Semitism of the time. Proust and other Dreyfusards campaigned amongst writers and public figures for signatures on a petition backing Zola’s critique of the military’s juridical violations. Proust famously won Anatole France’s influential signature for the cause. The drama reached its peak with the publication in January 1898 of Zola’s open letter ‘J’accuse’ and, the following day, the petition against the authorities, the ‘Manifesto of the Intellectuals’. Tried for defamation, Zola was sentenced to a year in prison but fled to England, avoiding this fate. Dreyfus was retried but found guilty again in 1899; it was not until 1906 that he was rehabilitated.

Proust is often represented as an ivory-tower aesthete but his commitment and action during the Dreyfus Affair cast him in a different light; indeed, the ways in which