_The world of fashion in which Marcel Proust spent his youth and early manhood saw nothing of him during the last thirteen years of his life. A victim of chronic illness, he barricaded himself in his apartment, swathed himself like an Egyptian mummy, drew his shutters and curtains to exclude the light, and there recorded his chronicle of things past. Son of a distinguished physician and an heiress of a rich Jewish family, Proust had his first training under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. An association in the 1890’s with some of the aesthetes of that period resulted in the publication of a review, to which Proust contributed some juvenile prose and verse. Thereafter the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain became his sphere, and it was there, among the illustrious and well-born, that he assimilated those fragments of gossip and family history which were later transmuted into a world in itself—the world of_ _À La Recherche du Temps Perdu._ BIBLIOGRAPHY LES PLAISIRS ET LES JOURS (with a preface by Anatole France (1896)) DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN (1918) (SWANN’S WAY (1923)) À L’OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEURS (1918) (WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE (1924)) LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES I (1920) LE CÔTÉ DE GUERMANTES II (1921) (THE GUERMANTES WAY (1925)) SODOME ET GOMORRHE I (1921) SODOME ET GOMORRHE II (1922) (CITIES OF THE PLAIN (1928)) LA PRISONNIÈRE (1923) (THE CAPTIVE (1929)) ALBERTINE DISPARUE (1926) (THE SWEET CHEAT GONE (1930)) LE TEMPS RETROUVÉ (1928) (THE PAST RECAPTURED (1932)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AUTHOR’S DEDICATION _A_ LEON DAUDET _A l’auteur_ _du_ VOYAGE DE SHAKESPEARE, _du_ PARTAGE DE L’ENFANT, _de_ L’ASTRE NOIR, _de_ FANTOMES ET VIVANTS, _du_ MONDE DES IMAGES, _de tant de chefs-d’oeuvre_, _A l’incomparable ami_ _en temoignage de reconnaissance et d’admiration_ M. P. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSLATOR’S DEDICATION _To_ MRS. H———, _on her Birthday_ OBERON, _in the_ ATHENIAN _glade_, R_educed by deft_ TITANIA’S _power_, I_nvented arts for_ NATURE’S _aid_ A_nd from a snowflake shaped a flower_: NATURE, _to outdo him, wrought of human clay_ A _fairy blossom, which we acclaim to-day_.