I write this month from my parents’ home in New Jersey, to which I have escaped, with my baby son, from the jackhammers tearing down the parapets of our apartment in New York. The loudest sound here is the clacking of the keyboard; occasionally a school bus hums by. No such auditory respite was available to Marcel Proust when, after his mother’s death, he relocated first to a sanatorium, then to the Hôtel des Réservoirs in Versailles, and at last to his uncle’s old rooms at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris. The occupant of the entresol below, Dr. Gagey, was…