When, in 1896, Marcel Proust published his first book, he was twenty-five.
It was a disparate collection of tales, prose poems, verses, portraits, and
satires, some written at least five years earlier, entitled Les Plaisirs
et les jours. This is the work (with the addition of a few items of
juvenilia) newly translated and now offered to the public as Proust’s
Complete Short Stories. Given the mixed nature of the contents, this title
seems an approximation: the stories are there, but so are other things.

Les Plaisirs et les jours did not make much of an impression when it appeared,
though it was not for want of the author’s attempts to publicize it.
Through the good offices of Mme Arman de Caillavet, the Egeria of Anatole
France, then regarded as one of the leading writers of the age, Proust
solicited a preface from the great man (a preface said to have been
written in part by the lady herself). A well-known salon hostess and
painter, Madeleine Lemaire, supplied watercolor illustrations, to which
were added four musical pieces by his friend, the composer Reynaldo Hahn.
Proust even fought a duel with Jean Lorrain, after that fashionable man of
letters and notorious gossip published some disparaging remarks about the
book that Proust considered personally insulting. Duels, occasionally
fatal, were quite common then among littérateurs.

Moreover, at thirteen francs fifty instead of the usual three, Pleasures
and Dayswas virtually priced out of the market. Some