Maybe it seemed small because it was so relatively empty, containing only a sideboard, a bookcase, a small table in the centre, and four small chairs.

According to the bank employee-cum-guide, certain structural parts of the room were the same as they had been in Proust’s time: the two tall windows; two of the four doors; the mouldings around the tops of the walls; the parquet floor; and the fireplace with its thick white marble mantel. There were few outward signs that this room had anything to do with Proust: in addition to the portrait on the wall, there was a short row of volumes of the Proust Society’s quarterly journal occupying part of one shelf in the otherwise empty glass-fronted bookcase, one that had not belonged to Proust; and, on the top of the sideboard, which also had not belonged to Proust, a small sign announcing ‘Proust’s bedroom’ alongside a stack of brochures about the actual Proust Museum, which was elsewhere – in the house of ‘Tante Léonie’ out in Illiers-Combray, one and a half hours from the city.

When Proust lived in it, when he rested, slept, ate, wrote, read, inhaled his smoking Legras powders, drank his coffee, and entertained visitors there, it was crowded with furniture. We learn from a description by his housekeeper and faithful companion Céleste that there was, for instance, a large wardrobe between the two windows, and, in front of the wardrobe, so close that its doors could not be opened, a grand piano. Between the grand piano and the bed, an armchair as well as the three small tables which Proust used for three different purposes. Other pieces of furniture – a bookcase, a work table that had belonged to Proust’s mother, a different sideboard – stood at various spots against the walls. Céleste had to squeeze her way in and out.

My guide pointed out the corner in which Proust’s bed had been placed, along the wall opposite the windows, and where he wrote a great deal of the novel. Standing between the head of the bed and the wall, an Oriental screen protected him from draughts and helped buffer him from the noise that came from the adjoining building, on the other side of the wall.

Noise from construction within the building or from next door was a continuing menace and plague for Proust during his years here, as we can see from the letters in the present collection. It was the neighbour on the entresol below, one Dr Gagey, who was having work done on his apartment when Proust first moved in, in the last days of 1906, as we know from the complaints, sometimes humorous, in his other, voluminous letters. Just as the work on Dr Gagey’s apartment was ending and relief for Proust was in sight, work began in the building next door, where one Mme Katz was installing a new bathroom just a few feet from his head. (Kafka, at about this time, was recording the same sorts of complaints in his diaries, though he liked to turn them into small stories about what fantastic things these neighbours might be doing.)

After the death of his mother, Proust had made the decision not to continue living in the too-large, memory-haunted family apartment. This apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann was just one possible choice of residence among many which Proust had investigated by proxy, with the help of a host of friends and without moving from his temporary rooms in a hotel at Versailles. It is therefore surprising to realize that he was in fact a quarter-owner of the building at the time, his brother owning another quarter and his aunt the other half.

When he moved in, he considered the apartment to be no more than a transitional residence. It was the first he had ever lived in on his own, but it was a familiar part of his past: his mother had known it well, and his uncle had lived and died here – Proust had in fact visited him on his deathbed, in the same room that became his bedroom. He later, through inattention, and without fully realizing the consequences, allowed his aunt to buy his own share and his brother’s, and thus had no say in the matter when she in turn decided, in 1919, to sell the building to a banker, who intended to convert the premises into a bank, obliging him to move, against his will, and in fact twice more. This was only three years before his death, and in Céleste’s opinion hastened his decline.

In order to talk about the context of the letters in this volume – including the room in which Proust wrote them and the apartment in which the room was situated – it is helpful to have some sense of the geography of Proust’s building. The French system of numbering is the same as the British: what the French call the first floor is the floor above the ground floor, the second floor is two floors above street level, etc. Proust’s apartment was on the first floor, the dentist’s practice on the second, the dentist’s apartment on the third. But, complicating this numbering system, in the case of Proust’s building, was the entresol, that low-ceilinged half-floor which can be between any two floors but is generally between the ground floor and the first, in which case we in English call it the mezzanine.

When there is an entresol, the floor above it may in fact be called the second floor, and this is what Proust calls it at least once in this collection of letters, as do the editors of the French edition. Other sources, including the memoir of his housekeeper Céleste, call it the first. (There is no disagreement about where Proust lived, just some inconsistency about how to number the floor.) We will adhere to the traditional French system in discussing the apartments and inhabitants of 102 Boulevard Haussmann.

However, to clarify matters: there was, at that address, first the ground floor, which in those days was entered through a two-panelled carriage entrance (the same that Proust mentions indignantly in letter 13). This level contained, at least, an apartment occupied by the concierge Antoine and his family. One flight up, there was the entresol, under Proust’s apartment, occupied by Dr Gagey, his wife, and their daughter. Another flight up was Proust’s apartment. Above it was the practice of the American dentist Charles Williams, on the street side directly above Proust’s head, as well as, in the back, his laboratory. Since this latter workplace was located away from the street, looking out on the courtyard, Proust was not bothered by the footsteps of the several assistants who worked there.

Above Dr Williams’s practice was the apartment occupied by the Williamses and their small son, who was about four years old when they moved in.