The novel begins with the middle-aged narrator's memories of his happy childhood. The narrator tells the story of his life, introducing along the way a series of memorable characters, among them Charles Swann, who forms a stormy alliance with the prostitute Odette; their daughter, Gilberte Swann, with whom young Marcel falls in love; the aristocratic Guermantes family, including the dissolute Baron de Charlus and his nephew Robert de Saint-Loup; and Albertine, to whom Marcel forms a passionate attachment. Marcel's world expands to encompass both the cultivated and the corrupt, and he sees the full range of human folly and misery. At his lowest ebb, he feels that time is lost; beauty and meaning have faded from all he ever pursued and won; and he renounces the book he has always hoped to write. At a reception after the war, the narrator realizes, through a series of incidents of unconscious memory, that all the beauty he has experienced in the past is eternally alive. Time is regained, and he sets to work, racing against death, to write the very novel the reader has just experienced. In his quest for time lost, he invented nothing but altered everything, selecting, fusing, and transmuting the facts so that their underlying unity and universal significance would be revealed.
Ended
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