The French author Marcel Proust was born and educated in Paris. He lived there all his life, leaving only for short holidays or artistic pilgrimages, most of which were to the great cathedral cities of France. His father, a professor of medicine, was Catholic; his mother, whom he adored, was Jewish. Both traditions, as well as his consuming interest in French history and culture, played important roles in his life and art, although he was neither religiously orthodox nor politically chauvinistic. He undertook a considerable and seemingly futile search for a vocation and did some writing, most of which was discarded drafts of his future novel. Suffering terribly from asthma and from certain guilts about his homosexuality, but with economic as well as spiritual means sufficient to indulge and transmute these ills, Proust ensconced himself in his famous cork-lined room to write his masterpiece...