"Charming, impudent, privileged, emotionally precocious, Vincent de I'Etoile is the same age as the young century when he meets the elegant, asthmatic forty-five-year-old Marcel Proust, and in one week - at literary salons, at the Ritz, in private rooms, in cafes - the striking youth with black hair and green eyes fashions an intimate platonic friendship with Parisian society's most eminent outsider." "It is 1916. For two years war has ravaged Europe,...