Long overlooked in Proust’s posthumously published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work. The afterword by renowned Proust scholar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, originally published in the French by Le Bruit du Temps, is an impassioned argument in favor of returning to the lost paths of Proust’s early thinking. It sees, in the passage from Chardin’s world of objects to Rembrandt’s contemplative paintings, a movement toward the radical interiority for which Proust would later become widely celebrated as a novelist.