Viking’s In Search of Lost Timeis the first completely new translation of Proust’s masterwork since the 1920s. Under Christopher Prendergast’s general editorship, these superb editions bring us a more rich, comic, and lucid Proust than American readers have previously been able to enjoy.After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Wayopens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Waydefines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a young man into the ways of the world.

Marcel Proust (1871-û1922) is considered the greatest French writer of the twentieth century.
< Mark Treharne taught French at the University of Warwick and has since worked as a translator. His translations include the work of Philippe Jaccottet and Jacques Reda-'s The Ruins of Paris.

Introduction	p. vii
A Note on the Translation	p. xv
Suggestions for Further Reading	p. xvii
	p. 1
	p. 307
	p. 309
	p. 342
Notes	p. 597
Synopsis	p. 611
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The early-morning twitter of the birds sounded tame to Francoise. Every word from the maids? quarters made her jump; their every footstep bothered her, and she was constantly wondering what they were doing. All this was because we had moved. It is true that the servants in our former home had made quite as much stir in their quarters on the top floor, but they were servants she knew, and their comings and goings had become friendly presences to her. Now she even made silence the object of her painful scrutiny. And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing in the street as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Francoise. And if I had made fun of her when she had been distressed at leaving an apartment building where we had been ?so well thought of by everybody,? weeping as she packed her trunks in accordance with the rituals of Combray and declaring that our former home was superior to any other imaginable, I, who found it as difficult to assimilate new surroundings as I found it easy to abandon old ones, nonetheless felt a close sympathy with our old servant when I realized that the move to a building where the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits had driven her to a state close to total decline. She alone could understand my feelings; this was certainly not the case with her young footman; for him, a person as remote from the Combray world as it was possible to be, moving into a new district was like taking a holiday in which the novelty of the surroundings provided the same sense of relaxation as an actual journey; he felt he was in the country, and a headcold gave him the delightful sensation, as if he had been a victim of a draft from the ill-fitting window of a railway carriage, of having seen something of the world; every time he sneezed, he rejoiced that he had found such a select position, having always wanted to work for people who traveled a great deal. And so it was not to him I went, but straight to Francoise; and because I had laughed at her tears over a departure that had not affected me in the least, she now showed a frosty indifference to my misery, because she shared it. The so- called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear it when other people flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves. Francoise, who would not allow the least of her own troubles to pass unobserved, would turn her head away if I was suffering, so that I should not have the satisfaction of seeing my suffering pitied, let alone noticed. This is what happened when I tried to talk to her about our move. What is more, she was obliged, two days later, to return to our former home to collect some clothes that had been forgotten in the move, while I, as a result of the same move, was still running a temperature and, like a boa constrictor that has just swallowed an ox, was feeling painfully swollen by the sight of a long sideboard that my eyes needed to ?digest?; and Francoise, with a woman?s inconstancy, returned home saying that she thought she was going to choke to death on our old boulevard, that she had gone ?all around the houses? to get there, that never had she seen such awkward stairs, that she would not go back there to live for all the world, not if you were to offer her a fortune? unlikely hypotheses?and that everything (meaning everything to do with the kitchen and the hallways) was far better appointed in our new home. And this new home, it is time to explain?and to add that we had moved into it because my grandmother was far from well (though we kept this reason from her) and needed cleaner air?was an apartment that formed part of the Hotel de Guermantes.At