He uses this same formulation in another letter, one written February 12, 1915, in which he says: ‘My brother, since the first day, has been in great danger, but actually so far has escaped everything and is doing well. I have a conseil de contre-réforme to pass, but have not yet been summoned’ (letter to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Correspondance générale, vol. 4, p. 67). ]

12. Alfred Agostinelli died May 30, 1914.

13. John 3:8.

14. Joachim Joseph Charles Henri (1875–1918), third count of Clary, son of Napoleon II’s aide-de-camp, a friend of Proust, Lucien Daudet, and Montesquiou, presumably an inspiration to Proust for the japonisant part of In Search, but also a model for Baron de Charlus going blind, in Time Found Again. Clary was the author of L’île du soleil couchant [The island of the setting sun], published by Arthème Fayard in 1912, a novel about Japan cited by Marcel Proust in one of his letters of November 1912.

[Since Joachim Clary is mentioned in no fewer than eight letters of the present volume, we may say a little more about him. The following description is taken from a memoir by his friend, the English composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, in her Impressions That Remained – Memoirs of Ethel Smyth (Knopf, 1919). She had first known Clary as one of the ‘enfants de la maison’ in the English residence of the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III:

I had first known Clary as a clever, good-looking, active, rather spoilt youth; now, though still a young man, he was a cripple, scarcely able to move hand or foot, his limbs twisted and gnarled with arthritis, in constant pain day and night, and totally blind. Yet his originality, his culture, his unconquerable sense of humour and, above all, his superb courage, made our friendship one of the assets of my life.

Ethel Smyth remarks that Clary’s death was ‘wholly unexpected’. (At the time she describes seeing Clary, she would have been in her late fifties, Clary about 41. He was to die the following year.)]

15. The letter is torn in places, and passages are missing.

16. Doctor Léon Faisans (1851–1922), often mentioned in Proust’s correspondence. He was a specialist in respiratory illnesses and a physician at the Hôpital Beaujon.

17. June and July 1914, pages 48 and 52 of La Nouvelle Revue Française, excerpted from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way I.

18. The poet Maurice Rostand and the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche were close friends, as was Proust, of Lucien Daudet. Each of them devoted a laudatory article to Swann’s Way.

19. ‘The cruel fates.’ A verse from Virgil’s Aeneid, 6:882, addressed to Marcellus, nephew of Augustus. [It is perhaps a reference to the war.]

20. Proust was envisaging at this point a work in three volumes; the second was to have included the present In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and The Guermantes Way, in shorter versions. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds the proofs of this volume printed by Grasset.

21. This important revelation was omitted from the final version of In Search of Lost Time.

22. Title of a book of poems by Anna, Countess de Noailles.

23. What is Proust referring to here? Is he alluding to the play by Maeterlinck, to a poem by Mallarmé, or to a poem by his neighbour herself?

24. Respectively, Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les tragiques, 4; Paul Verlaine, Sagesse; Gérard de Nerval, ‘Artémis’ and ‘El Desdichado’, Les Chimères.

25.