In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

PRAISE FOR THE MODERN LIBRARY
EDITION OF IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

“Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never achieve, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—THE medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of modern scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.”

—RICHARD HOWARD

2003 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Biographical note copyright © 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Richard Howard
Revisions to the translation copyright © 1992 by D. J. Enright
Copyright © 1981 by Chatto & Windus and Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This edition was originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus and in the United States by Modern Library in 1992.

This translation is a revised edition of the 1981 translation of Swann’s Way by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, published in the United States by Random House, Inc., and in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. Revisions by D. J. Enright.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922.
[Du côte de chez Swann. English]
Swann’s way/Marcel Proust; translated by C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; revised by D. J. Enright.
p.   cm. — (In search of lost time; v. 1)
Translation of: Du côte de chez Swann.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64178-0
I. Title.  II. Series.
PQ2631.R63D83 1992
843′ .912—dc20           92-25657

Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com

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MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871. His father, Adrien Proust, was a doctor celebrated for his work in epidemiology; his mother, Jeanne Weil, was a stockbroker’s daughter of Jewish descent. He lived as a child in the family home on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, but spent vacations with his aunt and uncle in the town of Illiers near Chartres, where the Prousts had lived for generations and which became the model for the Combray of his great novel. (In recent years it was officially renamed Illiers-Combray.) Sickly from birth, Marcel was subject from the age of nine to violent attacks of asthma, and although he did a year of military service as a young man and studied law and political science, his invalidism disqualified him from an active professional life.

During the 1890s Proust contributed sketches to Le Figaro and to a short-lived magazine, Le Banquet, founded by some of his school friends in 1892. Pleasures and Days, a collection of his stories, essays, and poems, was published in 1896. In his youth Proust led an active social life, penetrating the highest circles of wealth and aristocracy. Artistically and intellectually, his influences included the aesthetic criticism of John Ruskin, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the music of Wagner, and the fiction of Anatole France (on whom he modeled his character Bergotte). An affair begun in 1894 with the composer and pianist Reynaldo Hahn marked the beginning of Proust’s often anguished acknowledgment of his homosexuality. Following the publication of Emile Zola’s letter in defense of Colonel Dreyfus in 1898, Proust became “the first Dreyfusard,” as he later phrased it. By the time Dreyfus was finally vindicated of charges of treason, Proust’s social circles had been torn apart by the anti-Semitism and political hatreds stirred up by the affair.

Proust was very attached to his mother, and after her death in 1905 he spent some time in a sanatorium.