Selections from the satirical, moving short stories and sketches featured in Proust's first published work. Telling reflections of the lives, loves, manners, and motivations of salon society in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Grouped together after the part-title "Swann's Way" are the portraits of the family members, diplomats, doctors, school friends, salonistes, and servants who made up the Right Bank bourgeois milieu into which Proust was born. Part-title "The Guermantes Way" includes the aristocratic, Faubourg Saint-Germain world to which Proust aspired. With part-title "The Artists' and Writers' Way" come the Bergotte of Anatole France and actresses with whom he became romatically involved. The closing section is the self-portrait of Paul Nadar, son fo Felix Nadar, the legendary avant-gardist in whose studio the Impressionists had held their first exhibition.