To those of us who have read or who are now reading Proust’s enormous novel, it is a curious experience to turn back to his earliest publication, to the book written by the precocious boy whose social successes are described at such length in _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_. This book, _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, appeared in 1896, seventeen years before the publication of _Du Côté de chez Swann_. _Les Plaisirs_ is a large, shiny volume, a pretentious “tome” for the drawing-room, printed in the most expensive manner, and made hideously elegant by Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations of the _higlif_ of the ’nineties—an amazing _élite_ of melancholy great ladies, exquisitely fashionable in costumes which time, with its ironic touch, has made inconceivably out of fashion and dowdy. A few copies of this large book appeared recently in the London bookshops, when its rarity and value seem not to have been known; and one of these copies has come, in the happiest manner, into my possession. It contains the literary exercises and first attempts of the “little Proust” of the great novel, some verses of no especial merit, a few stories and set pieces of description, and a number of short poems in prose. These pieces were all written, the author tells us, between his twentieth and his twenty-third year; the style is somewhat sententious, immature and precious: it is the writing of a boy—but, one sees at once, of a boy of genius. For here, not only in their bud, but in their first exquisite flowering, we find all the great qualities of Proust’s later work: the beautiful sensibility, the observation, as of an insect with an insect’s thousand eyes, the subtle and elaborate study of passion, with its dawn, its torments of jealousy, and—what is so original in the great novel—the analysis, not only of falling in love, but of falling out of it—the slow, inevitable fading away of the most fiery passion into the coldest indifference. Indeed, most of the themes, and often the very situations, of the later work are not only adumbrated but happily rendered in this boyish volume—the romantic lure of the world and its heartless vulgarity, the beauty of landscapes, of blossoming trees and hedges and the sea, the evocative power of names, the intermittences of memory, the longing of the child for its mother’s good-night kiss, the great dinner-party, with all the ambitions and pretences of hosts and guests cynically analysed and laid bare. And here, too, we find something which, to my mind, is of even greater interest, and about which, as Proust’s other critics have hardly mentioned it, a few words may not be out of place.