That there is something irremediably wrong in the present moment; that the true reality is the creation of desire and memory, and is most present in hope, in recollection and absence, but never in immediate experience; that we kill our souls by living, and that it is in solitude, in illness, or at the approach of death that we most truly possess them—it is on these themes, which are repeated with deeper harmonies and richer modulations throughout his later work, that the young Proust harps in this divinely fresh overture to the masterpiece which was to follow. Surely, one thinks, a book of such exquisite promise and youthful achievement, heralded as it was to the world by Anatole France’s preface, and talked of, no doubt, in all the Paris salons, must have produced a remarkable impression on people so cultivated as the Parisians, so alert to discover and appreciate literary merit. However, as we know, it produced no such impression; in spite of Anatole France’s praise, no one seems to have had any real notion of its importance, or to have guessed that a new genius had appeared, a new star had arisen. And when, after publishing this large, shiny, unappreciated volume, its author disappeared from the world into a solitary sick-room, he seems to have been thought of (as far as he was thought of at all) as a pretentious, affected boy who had been made a pet of for a while in worldly salons—a little dilettante with his head turned, who had gone up like a rocket in the skies of fashion, but would be heard of no more in the world of letters, where anyhow this pretty coruscation had attracted almost no attention. This seems to have been the impression of even those among Proust’s personal friends who were themselves writers, and who, on re-reading _Les Plaisirs et les Jours_, are now amazed, as M. Gide confesses, that they should have been so blind to its beauty when they first read it—that in the first eagle-flights of this young genius they had seen little more than the insignificant flutterings of a gay butterfly of fashion.