They bring with them the world of their existence-“the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another.” Proust is famously meticulous in delineating the depth of these resurrected memories.

They are not lifeless “snapshots” of an intellectual act of remembering. At this late stage, however, he is determined to solve the “riddle of happiness” brought on by these experiences.

In the past, as with the madeleine’s bringing back images of his childhood in Combray, the narrator had simply luxuriated in the dazzle of the emotion. These memories are an intervention at a fundamental level in his life as a writer. Inside the mansion, two similar experiences follow almost immediately: the noise of a spoon clanging against a plate recalls, years before, a train stopped in a forest moments later, the starched texture of a napkin evokes the first day of his arrival at Balbec. It is a happiness that he has felt before at select times in his life-at “the sight of trees” near the seaside resort of Balbec, at “the twin steeples of Martinville,” sensing “the flavor of a madeleine dipped in tea.” The intense happiness that he feels in the presence of this memory displaces his depression. In the mansion’s courtyard, avoiding a departing car, he steps back onto two uneven stones, and is suddenly overtaken by the memory of standing on two uneven stones in the baptistery of St. Everything in the first six volumes is behind him-Swann, Gilberte, Vinteuil, Albertine-although unwritten as yet. At this point in the novel, the narrator is nearly middle-aged, bored, over-sophisticated, and aware that, for lack of talent, he is not the writer he had dreamed of becoming. Ancient and ruined by a stroke, Charlus is like a ghost of a possible future for the narrator himself. de Charlus, a member of the Guermantes family. On his way to the Guermantes’s, he encounters by chance M. It takes place at the mansion of the Princess Guermantes, where the narrator has been invited to a musical reception. Since I first read “ In Search of Lost Time,” his immense and unique autobiographical novel, a long passage about what writing is-from “ Time Regained,” the seventh and last volume-has stayed with me. Proust died at fifty-one, in Paris, of pneumonia, on November 18th, and last year was the centenary of his death.

Marcel proust books in order