A man tastes a madeleine soaked in tea and the whole of his childhood returns unbidden - the most famous few pages in modern fiction open a novel that is, in fact, about how little we control what we remember. Proust wrote through the night in a cork-lined room and could not find a publisher for the first volume; he paid for it himself. Ninety-nine plates by Monet, Morisot and their contemporaries, from garden benches to children in Argenteuil, gather the leisure and light of Proust's world around his text.