When his father died, he pretended to feel remorse and guilt. In fact, he felt more secure now that he had his mother all to himself.

Despite the discontinuities of any correspondence, and the particularly shifting tone of these letters which often mimic the style of the addressee, certain basic character traits emerge. Chief among them is an almost morbid need for affection. Young Marcel is worried about the impression he makes to the point of writing self-portraits that are close to caricatures. This mirror disease in turn is a symptom of a deep narcissism, as well as of his sexual preferences. If Proust the writer was later to camouflage these preferences, there can be no doubt that the adolescent made open advances to several fellow students at the lycée. There is an explicit missive, written in class, to Jacques Bizet, the son of the composer of Carmen, which speaks of “plucking” the delicious flower “that we shall soon be unable to pluck.” There is another one, to Daniel Halevy, in which he declares his admiration for his friend’s agile body, and speaks of sitting on his lap and kissing his eyes. Granted that the style of these letters remains playfully elegant and literary, the preciosity of the language only stresses young Marcel’s discomfort at the boldness of his requests, as well as his fear of being rebuffed (which he apparently was).

Not all is endearing in this correspondence. The literary memory and readiness to quote are often bookish and affected. The self-indulgent, hypochondriac concern for his health became an excuse for procrastination and an anomalous existence. Not only did Proust keep irregular hours, sleeping during the day, reading and eating during the night, but one has the impression at times that he went directly from bed to dinner parties. In the hay fever season he made a point of never going out during the day. Even worse than this self-pampering is the sentimental blackmail he inflicted on his parents, who were doubtless frightened by his psychosomatic crises. When he met with opposition, or merely with criticism, he could easily become moody and temperamental—leaving the dinner table, slamming doors, sulking, writing urgent and annoyed messages. Tantrums were not unheard of. He himself tells, in one of his letters, how on a given occasion he trampled on a friend’s hat, tore it into shreds, and then ripped out the lining! When his father died, he pretended to feel remorse and guilt. In fact, he felt more secure now that he had his mother all to himself.

The intellectual and aesthetic aspects of his character are more appealing. His interest in his studies was genuine, and he liked to establish personal relations with teachers he admired. A letter to his philosophy teacher Darlu is a true consultation in which he himself acutely diagnoses his self-consciousness, the cleavage he feels within himself as a result of excessive intellectualization, the habit of self-contemplation—all of which, he says, kills his spontaneity. Later on, scholarly, hedonistic, and social interests tend to mingle. To his composer friend Reynaldo Hahn he explains in a brief missive that he is still in bed, “drunk with reading Emerson,” but that shortly he intends to go to the Bois, and suggests that they then both attend a defense of a Sorbonne thesis on “The Metaphysics of Sociology.”

Behind this ethos of leisure, there is the stubborn commitment to literature. In its early stages, it took the form of a superficial infatuation. To Anatole France, the seventeen-year-old Proust, signing himself “A Student of Philosophy,” writes the kind of letter his hero Marcel might have written to Bergotte. But literature soon became an obsession, then a vocation. Pressed by his career-minded father, a famous professor of medicine, to make a choice, Proust answered that he could not consider becoming either a lawyer or a stockbroker (there was also some talk of diplomacy, and a more serious attempt to become a librarian)—that whatever was not philosophy or literature was for him wasted time: “temps perdu.” This is precisely the expression, with its double denotation of waste and loss (but a loss to be restored by a proper quest, or “recherche”), which many years later informs the suggestive title of Proust’s great novel.