It seems fair to say, in fact, that the first thirty years of Proust's life laid much of the intellectual basis for his later literary erm achievements, and it was incidentally also during the eighteen nineties, that, among other things, he obtained a, a Licence des lettres, that he attended Bergson's lectures, that he discovered Ruskin, and that he wrote the bulk of nearly a thousand manuscript sheets discovered in an old hatbox after the last World War, and published as Jean Santeuil in nineteen fifty-two.