The building is now owned by a bank, but one can still view Proust’s high-ceilinged bedroom with its two tall windows and marble fireplace. In this room, of modest dimensions, Proust spent most of the rest of his life—slept, rested, ate, received visitors, read, and wrote. It was here that most of À la recherche du temps perdu came into being.

In a sense, the book had already been in preparation for several years before it began to take the form of a novel. It was never destined to be composed in a neatly chronological manner in any case, and elements of it had been emerging piecemeal in various guises: paragraphs, passages, scenes were written and even published in earlier versions, then later reworked and incorporated into the novel. The famous description in Swann’s Way of the steeples of Martinville, for example, had an earlier incarnation as an article on road travel; and versions of many scenes had appeared in Proust’s first, unfinished, and unpublished novel, Jean Santeuil, which juxtaposed the two childhood homes that Proust would later combine to form the setting of the drama of the goodnight kiss.

Proust had been projecting a number of shorter works, most of them essays. At a certain point he realized they could all be brought together in a single form, a novel. What became its start had, immediately before, begun as an essay contesting the ideas of the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a work which he conceived as having a fictional opening: the mother of the main character would come to his bedside in the morning and the two of them would begin a conversation about Sainte-Beuve. The first drafts of this essay evolved into the novel, and at last, by midsummer of 1909, Proust was actually referring to his work-in-progress as a novel. Thereafter the work continued to develop somewhat chaotically, as Proust wrote many different parts of the book at the same time, cutting, expanding, and revising endlessly. Even as he wrote the opening, however, he foresaw the conclusion, and in fact the end of the book was completed before the middle began to grow.

A version of the present first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, was in existence by January 1912, and extracts including “A Ray of Sun on the Balcony” and “Village Church” were published that year in the newspaper Le Figaro.

Although the publisher Eugène Fasquelle had announced that in his opinion “nothing must interfere with the action” in a work of fiction, Proust nevertheless submitted to him a manuscript of the book in October 1912. At this point, admitting that his novel was very long but pointing out that it was “very concise,” he proposed a book in two volumes, one called Le Temps perdu (Time Lost) and the other Le Temps retrouvé (Time Found Again), under the general title Les Intermittences du coeur (The Intermittences of the Heart). (He had not yet found the title Du côté de chez Swann.)

He received no answer from Fasquelle and, in November 1912, wrote to the Nouvelle Revue Française, a more literary publisher which had developed from a literary journal of the same name founded by André Gide and was later to take the name of its director, Gaston Gallimard. Now he was considering three volumes.

In December 1912, Gallimard and Fasquelle both returned their copies of the manuscript. Fasquelle did not want to risk publishing something “so different from what the public is used to reading.” Gide later admitted to Proust: “The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF—and (since to my shame I was largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my life.”

At the end of December 1912, Proust approached another publisher, Ollendorff. He offered not only to pay the costs of publication but also to share with the publisher any profits that might derive from it. Ollendorff’s rejection came in February and included the comment: “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.” At last Proust submitted the manuscript to the energetic young publisher Bernard Grasset, offering to pay the expenses of publishing the book and publicizing it, and Grasset accepted.

By April 1913, Proust was beginning to work on proofs. He said in a letter to a friend: “My corrections so far (I hope this won’t continue) are not corrections. There remains not a single line out of 20 of the original text. . . . It is crossed out, corrected in every blank part I can find, and I am pasting papers at the top, at the bottom, to the right, to the left, etc. . . .” He said that although the resulting text was actually a bit shorter, it was a “hopelessly tangled mess.”

During this time, he made final decisions about titles. Ideally, he would have preferred simply the general title, À la recherche du temps perdu, followed by “Volume I” and “Volume II” with no individual titles for the two volumes. However, his publisher wanted individual titles for commercial reasons. Proust decided the first volume would be called Du côté de chez Swann and the second probably Le Côté de Guermantes . He explained several times what these titles meant, that in the country around Combray there were two directions in which to take a walk, that one asked, for example: “Shall we go in the direction of M. Rostand’s house?” (His friend Maurice Rostand had in fact suggested the title of the first volume.) Du côté de chez Swann would, most literally translated, be the answer: “in the direction of Swann’s place” or “toward Swann’s.”

But the title also had a metaphorical signification.