Unrevised, a letter may show the thread of the thought as it develops: ‘When it has subsided,’ Proust writes, of one of his attacks, in letter 24, and then realizes it may not subside, and so goes on to add what has just occurred to him: ‘if it subsides.’

The letters, written over a span of years and in different moods and physical conditions, show different aspects of his personality and character. He may be gracious and flattering, as in letter 11: ‘At least I would have the joy of knowing that those lovely lucid eyes had rested on these pages’; or flowery and eloquent, as in letter 15: ‘My solitude has become even more profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me. It has thus been a blessed messenger, and contrary to the proverb, this single swallow has made for me an entire spring.’ Or, in contrast to his poetic descriptions, he may suddenly deploy, with cool adeptness, in letter 26, a metaphor taken from the world of chemistry: ‘Already I carry around with me in my mind so many dissolved deaths, that each new one causes supersaturation and crystallizes all my griefs into an infrangible block.’

He is meticulous and particular not only in his requests as to when and where his upstairs neighbours might nail shut their crates, in letter 17: ‘Or else if it is indispensable to nail them in the morning, to nail them in the part of your apartment that is above my kitchen, and not that which is above my bedroom. I call above my bedroom that which is also above the adjoining rooms, and even on the 4th’; but also in describing the nature itself of disturbance from noise (as he continues the sentence): ‘… since a noise so discontinuous, so “noticeable” as blows being struck, is heard even in the areas where it is slightly diminished.’

And in letter 19, too, he goes into detail about the effect of noise: ‘What bothers me is never continuous noise, even loud noise, if it is not struck, on the floorboards, (it is less often no doubt in the bedroom itself, than at the bend of the hallway). And everything that is dragged over the floor, that falls on it, runs across it.’ I think we readers, peering over Mme Williams’s shoulder, may find his precision amusing, but he himself, though so likely at other times to see the humour in a situation, here seems in deadly earnest. And the same earnestness must be present in another letter, letter 22, as he describes one of his weekly torments (again, with a somewhat eccentric placement or omission of commas): ‘Yet tomorrow is Sunday, a day which usually offers me the opposite of the weekly repose because in the little courtyard adjoining my room they beat the carpets from your apartment, with an extreme violence.’

Proust’s style, in these letters, then, is a mix of elegance and haste, refinement and convolution, gravity and self-mockery, marked by abbreviations and mistakes, very little punctuation, and no paragraphing to speak of, or almost none, as he shifts from topic to topic.

My approach to translating this style has been to hew very close to it, not supplying missing punctuation or correcting mistakes, but at the same time trying to retain as much of its grace, beauty, sudden shifts of tone and subject, and distinctive character as I could. It was a pleasurable challenge to attempt to reproduce his non sequiturs, his flowery constructions, his literary references, and his meticulous instructions for lessening the intrusions of noise. One is bound to feel compassion – as his neighbours did – for the beleaguered Proust, pushing ahead, against all odds and in the worst of health, with his vast project; it is certainly impossible, in any case, for anyone with neighbours to blame him for being so fussy about their noise.

One particular challenge in the translation was to create a passable version of Proust’s pastiche in letter 21, of the sonnet by Félix Arvers. This poem became so famous in its day that Arvers has been dubbed a ‘one-poem poet’, so famous that it inspired a contemporary American poet to translate it. One would not immediately associate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Proust, and yet, for a time – not at the same time – they were both concentrating their attention, and their literary abilities, on ‘My Secret’. We may gain yet another idea of the original from reading Longfellow’s version, from which I had hoped to steal some phrases but managed only to take the last line:

My Secret

My soul its secret hath, my life too hath its mystery,

A love eternal in a moment’s space conceived;

Hopeless the evil is, I have not told its history,

And she who was the cause nor knew it nor believed.

Alas! I shall have passed close by her unperceived,

Forever at her side, and yet forever lonely,

I shall unto the end have made life’s journey, only

Daring to ask for naught, and having naught received.

For her, though God hath made her gentle and endearing,

She will go on her way distraught and without hearing

These murmurings of love that round her steps ascend,

Piously faithful still unto her austere duty,

Will say, when she shall read these lines full of her beauty,

‘Who can this woman be?’ and will not comprehend.

As for the other apparatus in the book, I have made only a few slight changes to the very helpful notes by Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié, and to M. Tadié’s foreword, when it was necessary to supply a first name, for instance, or an identification, or otherwise enlarge upon a reference that might not be obvious to an Anglophone reader.

By way of coda: After these letters were brought into public view from where they had been residing in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris, and after some excerpts from them, in the original French, were published in Le Nouvel Observateur online, on October 10, 2013, an interesting response added a few more details to our understanding of Proust’s life and activities.

A person by the lyrical name of Lerossignol – ‘the nightingale’ – writes an online comment to the article. He is the grandson of a florist with a shop in the seaside town of Houlgate, on the stretch of the Normandy coast aptly known as the Côte Fleurie (the Flowery Coast); Houlgate was a neighbouring town to Cabourg, where Proust liked to stay at the Grand Hôtel. Guests marvelled, according to Philippe Soupault in his memoirs, over ‘how Monsieur Proust rented five expensive rooms, one to live in, the other four to “contain” the silence’. Cabourg became Balbec in Proust’s novel. The flower shop was the one Proust patronized in the years 1908 to 1913 when sending flowers to, among others, Mme Williams. M. Lerossignol writes that the family archives in his possession include records of the shop’s transactions which mention Proust’s sending flowers to the Williamses; he has therefore known the name for a long time and was aware that the couple must have been acquaintances of Proust’s. But only now, with the publication of the present letters, does he know who they were. He would like, incidentally, to correct one statement in the commentary that accompanies the extracts – that in those days etiquette required that a man send flowers not directly to a married woman but to her husband. He can attest from his family records that this was not always the case, and he knows in which cases Proust sent flowers to the husband and in which, in fact, directly to the wife. With regard to the Williamses, however, he adds, Proust was always very correct. (See, for example, letter 3.) M. Lerossignol goes on to remark that Proust, despite his illness, did venture into the family flower shop: Lerossignol’s grandmother counted thirty-two visits before 1912.

From the invoices of Proust’s orders it is possible to know the names of those with whom Proust associated while staying at the vast Grand Hôtel Cabourg, before his health worsened to such an extent that he confined himself permanently to Paris. M. Lerossignol has had the idea of organizing a tour of the still surviving villas of those to whom Proust sent flowers in Houlgate ordered from Au Jardin des Roses, the florist of M.