There were another two floors above the Williamses’ apartment, but it is not clear who lived in them, though on the top floor, under the roof, there would usually have been small independent rooms connected by a narrow corridor, the bedrooms of the servants who worked in the apartments below. There was a back stairway which Proust referred to as the service stairs or ‘small’ stairs. This was used by the building’s servants, and by the concierge when he brought up a message for Proust, discreetly tapping at the kitchen door to avoid the disturbance of ringing the doorbell, and for other deliveries, including the milk, brought daily by the neighbourhood crémerie for Proust’s coffee. Somewhere in Proust’s apartment, probably near or next to the kitchen – though it is not clear from the simplified floor plan of the apartment included in this volume exactly where – was a bedroom for the use of a servant, and this was where Céleste slept after she moved in sometime in 1914.

There have of course been changes in the layout of the rooms since the time Proust lived here. There is now a door at the head of Proust’s bed. The corridor outside his bedroom, across which he used to step on the way to his dressing room and bath, now extends into the building next door. The other door out of his bedroom, the door he assigned to be used by visitors and by his housekeeper, opens into a generous room with a massive conference table in the centre and a fireplace at either end. Here too, very little is original: the fireplaces, the wood floor, and the windows. But a change in the wood of the parquet floor marks the line where a wall stood, separating Proust’s large drawing room from a small anteroom where his guests used to wait to see him.

These three rooms line the street side of the apartment. To the rear of them, towards the courtyard, there are other vestiges: the marble surface of the stairs and landing by which visitors approached the apartment; the shaft for the small elevator (though it is a different elevator) that rises up in the centre of the stairwell; the oeil-de-boeuf window through which Céleste used to look out into the stairwell to see who was coming up. Proust’s visitors stopped and waited on the landing in front of the front door to the apartment, but there is no longer a wall or a door there, only open space and two white pillars. Nowadays, from a spot that was once inside the apartment, you can watch the stairwell as men in shirtsleeves and ties, carrying folders, walk up from the landing that would have opened into the apartment of Dr Gagey, and on up to the next floor – the floor where Dr Williams had his practice and his laboratory of assistants – or come trotting back down, talking finance. Visitors now coming up to the first floor to do business with the bank will see, when they walk into what used to be Proust’s apartment (across what used to be the entryway, where his gloves and handkerchiefs sat in a silver salver), an open area with a sofa and armchairs, and they may sit there to talk. This was in fact Proust’s dining room, though the walls are gone and he used it not as a dining room but as a storeroom. He had inherited a great deal of the contents of the family apartment, and did not want to part with much of it, but could not find places for it all in the other rooms, so he filled the dining room until it was ‘like a forest’, according to Céleste. An imaginative financier with a little information might be haunted, sitting next to the lone potted plant, by the lingering presence of a crowded accumulation of heavy fin de siècle furniture and bric-a-brac.

There is no balcony on the front of the building now, though Proust describes stepping out onto the balcony from his bedroom and actually enjoying a rare contact with sunlight. The apartment is no longer a set of rooms whose closed shutters and curtains create an eternal night, but is now glowingly well lit, with its high ceilings and tall windows, prosperous and busy.

A fourth reference to Proust in his former bedroom is not immediately obvious: the walls are lined with cork. But this is a marbleized, decorative cork that has been put on the walls since Proust’s time, and it is not even obviously cork unless you look closely. It is a sort of compromise cork, a stand-in for Proust’s cork. In Proust’s time, the bank officer explains, the walls were crudely lined with thick slabs of raw bark off the cork trees that grow in the south of France, painted over in black so as to protect Proust’s lungs from the material’s crumbling or disintegration – though Proust’s servant has described the cork as being the colour of honey. The famous cork was suggested to Proust’s close friend Anna de Noailles, a poet and another noise-phobic, who used it in her own home.

The extant contents of Proust’s bedroom are in the Musée Carnavalet, the city museum of Paris. They are down a corridor and within hailing distance of the recreated bedroom of Anna de Noailles. Here, too, square tiles of cork line the walls of Proust’s room, a plain tan cork which the literature of the museum describes as an exact replica of Proust’s cork. In Illiers-Combray, there are a few more objects from Proust’s apartment: the dishes he ate from; the coffee maker used by Céleste to make his special coffee; several shelves of books.

Because they are the real thing and not approximations, Proust’s bedroom furniture – the brass bedstead, the bedside table and lamp, the desk, the sideboard, the chaise longue, two armchairs, and the Oriental screen – are haunted by his presence, especially those with signs of wear: most of all, because so intimately associated with the human body, the places on the upholstery where the nap of the fabric has been worn down to the thread, not only by Proust but by others, too, presumably his mother, his father, his brother, and his visiting friends.

Because of his illness, Proust spent most of his time in bed, heavily dressed in – according to one account – two sweaters, socks, and long underwear, with a hot-water bottle at his feet that was renewed three times a day. A blanket folded in four hung over the large door to the room to protect him from draughts and noise. Both shutters and curtains were closed over the double-paned windows, so that no sound could be heard from the street. The chandelier that hung from the ceiling was never illuminated.