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On May 18, 1922, Paris rocked. On that evening Violet and Sydney Schiff, a wealthy, culture-loving English couple gave a party at the Hotel Majestic to celebrate the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Le Renard.” The guest list included actors, princesses, ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and gay writer Marcel Proust.

“I have never read your works,” Joyce reportedly told Proust. Only a few aficionados have read all of Proust’s 3,000-plus page autobiographical novel “In Search of Lost Time” (also known as “Remembrance of Things Past”). Yet even if you’ve never dunked a Madeleine into your tea, you’ve likely had a Proustian experience of sudden, unexpected memory.

Two new books — “Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris” by Richard Davenport-Hines and “Proust in Love” by William C. Carter — present detailed portraits of the writer’s life.

Proust lived from 1871 to 1922 and was often bedridden with asthma and other ailments. This didn’t keep him from leading quite the life. He dined at the Ritz, dished with socialites, frequented male brothels, invested in stocks (when he liked the sound of their names) in addition to writing his massive masterpiece.

Proust’s father was a renowned physician and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish stockbroker. From his adolescence, Davenport-Hines and Carter say, Proust was attracted to other boys and men, who often rejected his overtures.

“PROUST AT THE Majestic,” is the more interesting of the biographies because the author places Proust’s life in a cultural and intellectual context. Homosexuality in France was legal, but still a matter of shame in many circles.

“Beneath any carnal pleasure of any profundity, there is the permanent possibility of danger,” Proust wrote, knowing what being open about his sexuality could do to his reputation. Davenport-Hines argues that Proust’s work is groundbreaking in its treatment of homosexuality.

“Sodom and Gomorrah,” a section of “In Search of Lost Time,” is “the first novel to present human sexuality as a continuum including bisexuality and the homosexual behavior of married men,” Davenport-Hines says. The descriptions of the Schiffs’ party and Proust’s funeral are riveting. The title is a bit misleading, though, as the focus shifts from the scene at the Majestic to the life of Proust after the book’s first chapter.

“Proust in Love” is an intimate portrait of Proust’s emotional life. Carter provides insight into Proust’s sexuality and into how Proust used his real-life loves in his work. “Proust and his Narrator [the protagonist of “In Search of Lost Time” suffer from an ‘incapacity for happiness,’” Carter writes.

Proust broke taboos in his writing about homosexuality, Carter says. “The many pages Proust devoted to various types of homosexuals and their determined efforts to find partners made it difficult for those who wished to avoid the taboo subject,” Carter writes.

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