[2][3] Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at the home of his great-uncle in the Paris Borough of Auteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic 16th arrondissement), two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War.

Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the fin de siècle.

[5] Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of the English language was sufficient to help with her son's translations of John Ruskin.

This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place.

Thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time.

[10] In spite of his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel.

At this time, he attended the salons of Mme Straus, widow of Georges Bizet and mother of Proust's childhood friend Jacques Bizet, of Madeleine Lemaire and of Mme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models for Madame Verdurin, and mother of his friend Gaston Arman de Caillavet, with whose fiancée (Jeanne Pouquet) he was in love.

Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom of his apartment 44 rue Hamelin[12][13] (in Chaillot), sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel.

[21] Despite Proust's public denials, his romantic relationship with composer Reynaldo Hahn[22] and his infatuation with his chauffeur and secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, are well documented.

[23] On the night of 11 January 1918, Proust was one of the men identified by police in a raid on a male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat.

[28] He was equally critical of the right, lambasting "the insanity of the conservatives," whom he deemed "as dumb and ungrateful as under Charles X," and referring to Pope Pius X's obstinacy as foolish.

[30] Proust was among the earliest Dreyfusards, even attending Émile Zola's trial and proudly claiming to have been the one who asked Anatole France to sign the petition in support of Alfred Dreyfus's innocence.

[32] In 1919, when representatives of the right-wing Action Française published a manifesto upholding French colonialism and the Catholic Church as the embodiment of civilised values, Proust rejected their nationalistic and chauvinistic views in favor of a liberal pluralist vision which acknowledged Christianity's cultural legacy in France.

[28] Julien Benda commended Proust in La Trahison des clercs as a writer who distinguished himself from his generation by avoiding the twin traps of nationalism and class sectarianism.

[6] In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche.

She invited him and Reynaldo Hahn to her château de Réveillon (the model for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895.

[citation needed] That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors.

The rough outline of the work centred on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning.

Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements.

Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters.

[41] Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother Robert.

When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.