Frances Stern's bold and well-researched claim is that Proust's main sources of inspiration in A la recherche du temps perdu can be traced in Dante's Divina Commedia, Racine's PhÈdre, Goethe's Faust and Wagner's Parsifal. Here is an extraordinary work of scholarship that offers, as George Painter says, "four neglected threads which will perhaps aid us to find the way, and issue out to rebehold the stars."