Abstract: This article identifies two characters who appear very briefly in À la recherche du temps perdu: a “great Parisian publisher” present at the Verdurins in Balbec and a “mulatto banker” seen in the Bois de Boulogne when the narrator was a teenager. By comparing the clues sown in the text by Proust, probably for the benefit of some of his readers, including the publisher, and relying on the genesis of the texts, we come to recognize Gaston Gallimard and Severiano de Heredia.
