Paris in the 1930s provides the poetic beginning for this autobiography by one of America’s most renowned literary scholars. Victor Brombert recaptures the story of his youth in a Proustian reverie - his protective mother, his first ill-fated romantic liaisons, his passionate love of trains - that vividly recalls his privileged upbringing in Paris’s 16th arrondissment . Brombert recalls the onset of the Vichy regime, the family’s flight from Nazi-controlled Europe, his wartime participation in American military intelligence and the Battle of the Bulge, and his eventual discovery of his scholarly vocation.