Jacques Guérin was a prominent businessman at the head of his family's successful perfume company, but his real passion was for rare books and literary manuscripts. From the time he was a young man, he frequented the antiquarian bookshops of Paris in search of lost, forgotten treasures. The ultimate prize? Anything from the hands of Marcel Proust.
Guérin identified with Proust more deeply than with any other writer, and when illness brought him by chance under the care of Marcel's brother, Dr. ...