“But what you must understand,” he would impress upon her, “is that all this excitement in Paris isn’t just about painting, music and ballet, interesting as they all are. It’s deeper and broader than that. We’ve just had a war. The German Empire, the ancient Hapsburg Empire in Vienna and the creaking old Ottoman Empire of the Turks are all broken. The Russian Empire has undergone a Bolshevik revolution. The old world order has gone. We’ve seen warfare on an industrial scale that’s not only killed millions but may even call into question our society and the nature of man himself.

“Naturally, most people assume that the comfortable old life with its solidity, its stratified classes, its masters and servants will gather itself together again. The world that is good to people like us.

“But the avant-garde are looking to the future with fresh eyes. These artistic movements you read about—the Constructivists in Russia, the Vorticists in England, or Futurists in Italy—they’re artistic movements certainly, each with their manifestos—but they’re reacting to this new reality, where the old certainties of humanity are all called into question, and the destructive industrial machines we’ve created seem almost to have taken on a fearsome life of their own. And if you want the best expression of that uncertainty, then read this.”

He gave her a slim book of verse: The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot.

“It’s just published. Eliot’s an American in London—I suspect he may turn into an Englishman, the way Henry James did. His friend Pound, an American who’s been living in Paris, gave it to me.”

On other occasions, he spoke of some of the French authors—Apollinaire, the modernist and anarchist. He told her delightedly how Apollinaire and his friend Picasso were briefly arrested, for reasons known only to the bureaucratic mind, when the Mona Lisa had been stolen. “Turned out it was a crazy Italian who wanted to return the Mona Lisa to Italy. They found it in his lodgings.”

Most important of all, however, he introduced her to the novels of Proust.

“The Prousts were our neighbors on boulevard Malesherbes,” he told her. “We just thought Marcel was a show-off and a dilettante. So did everybody. Who would have guessed he was hatching this work of genius in his head?”

“Does he still live there?”

“He moved just a block up the street and around the corner on boulevard Haussmann—only five minutes’ walk from Joséphine. He lived there until just after the war. But they say he’s dying now, and his brother may have to finish his work.”

The following year, Proust had died. But by then Claire had finished Swann’s Way; now she was halfway through Sodom and Gomorrah.