The reference is to Pelléas and Mélisande, the lyric drama by Maurice Maeterlinck and Claude Debussy.

26. Perhaps an allusion to the train trip to Balbec described in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, which appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1914 and in which the narrator, borne away by the train, watches a young milkmaid recede into the distance.

27. Reynaldo Hahn was in the Argonne at Vauquois in April 1915. Bertrand de Fénelon (1878–1914) died December 17, 1914, at Mametz. [Since this fact was obscured by contradictory rumours until it was declared official in March of the following year, Proust did not fully accept it until then.]

28. Mme Williams’s brother, Lieutenant Alphonse Emile Georges Marcel Pallu (1882–1915) of the Third Regiment of Dragoons, died for France (thus designated) as a result of an illness contracted in the field, February 13, 1915, at Nantes.

29. The dentist’s office was on the third floor, above Proust’s apartment. His private apartment was on the fourth (that is, on the third floor above the mezzanine).

30. He is referring to the military doctor (see letter 19).

31. According to the Baedeker of 1914, ‘First-class hotel in the Champs-Elysées, 55 Avenue de l’Alma and 101 Avenue des Champs-Elysées.’ The Avenue de l’Alma is now the Avenue George V.

32. The Countess Wladimir Rehbinder, née Jacqueline Contéré de Monbrison (1871–1925), wrote fashion articles. She was earlier divorced from Count Jacques de Pourtalès (1858–1919).

33. Madame de La Béraudière was the mistress of [Henri,] Count Greffulhe. Proust found her ‘charming, in every respect, and with great vivacity and frankness of spirit’ (Correspondance, vol. 14, p. 165, 1915). According to Céleste Albaret, Mme de La Béraudière ‘was at the feet of M. Proust and didn’t know what to do to make him interested’ (Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, p. 194).

34. Proust must finally have seen Clary again before October 15, 1915, according to his Correspondance.

35. Proust writes, in a letter of August 7, 1915: ‘I cannot move these days, awaiting a visit from the Major of which I do not know the day or the hour.’ The visit took place on August 8 or 9.

36. The reference is to pages on roses, written by Mme Williams (but which have not come down to us). See letter 14.

37. Mme Terre [Earth] was evidently the person in charge of the construction or renovation work that was making him suffer so (see letters 21 and 23). [Napoleon’s mother was known as ‘Madame Mère’.]

38. Verlaine’s ‘a shiver of water on moss’ comes from ‘Listen to the Very Gentle Song’, 1881, the sixteenth poem of collection 1 of Sagesse: ‘Listen to the very gentle song / That weeps only to please you, / It is discreet, it is light: / A shiver of water over moss!’

39. Jean de Reszke (1850–1925), opera singer (tenor), Polish by birth, as was his brother Édouard (bass).

40. See note 25. Pelléas says, at the end of act 2, scene 1, ‘The truth, the truth.’ [The Wolff Agency (misspelled by Proust) was a German press agency, one of the major news agencies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.]

41.