On 10 July 1901, Marcel Proust called on his friend Léon Yeatman in his law office and announced: ‘Today I’m thirty years old, and I’ve achieved nothing!’ (Corr, ii, 32). Yeatman must have protested, but Marcel had good reason to be discouraged. Nearly all his friends had established themselves as writers or launched other successful careers. Although he held university degrees in literature, philosophy and law, he had never entered a profession. He had stubbornly rejected the advice of his father, Dr Adrien Proust, one of France’s most distinguished physicians and scientists. After one of their heated discussions about his failure to choose a career, Marcel wrote: ‘My dearest papa . . . I still believe that anything I do other than literature and philosophy will be just so much wasted time’ (Corr, i, 237).

Dr Proust was a self-made man from the little town of Illiers. His fortune had greatly increased when he married Jeanne Weil, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. Proust adored his mother, who, though modest and discreet, quoted with ease from the classics in several languages. Her influence was the strongest in Proust’s life. From the age of ten, he suffered from asthma and other ailments and was regarded by his parents as neurasthenic if not neurotic. In the Recherche, Proust has a physician say: ‘Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art’ (3: 350; ii, 601). But neither he nor his parents had such confidence; his childhood ailments prevented him from enjoying many activities and even caused him to miss an entire school year.