IN THE FALL OF 1882 Marcel, eleven years old, entered class 5 at the Lycée Condorcet.1 The lycée’s courtyard on the rue Caumartin had once been the cloister of a Capuchin monastery designed in 1779 by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, a noted architect who had also created the Palais de la Bourse, which houses the Paris stock exchange, and the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the city’s largest and most famous burial ground. The more modern wings of the lycée, constructed around the time of Proust’s birth, were equally severe and monastic but lacked the architectural nobility of the original structure. Yet the ambiance at Condorcet, compared to that of the austere, rigorous lycées on the Left Bank, seemed hospitable. Robert Dreyfus, who entered Condorcet in 1888 and become a close friend of Marcel’s, recalled his visit to a Left Bank lycée, which had impressed him as a “huge fortress of Latin and Greek. . . . When I left the building of Louis-le-Grand, I breathed more easily the fresh air of liberty and I thanked fate for having made me a frivolous day student of the light and charming Condorcet.” Dreyfus noted gratefully in his memoirs that Condorcet’s administration even took into account students’ preferences for teachers and courses.2
Jeanne must have felt that this atmosphere would be good for her high-strung, nervous son. Another advantage was Condorcet’s proximity; the school was a pleasant ten-minute walk from home, and Marcel, like the other boys, could easily be escorted by a parent or a servant. A contemporary painting, La Sortie du Lycée Condorcet by Jean Béraud, shows fashionably dressed, well-to-do parents standing on the sidewalk outside the columned entrance of the lycée, the men wearing greatcoats and top hats, the women in long fur-lined coats and stylish hats, come to collect their equally smartly dressed sons, who hold their leather satchels stuffed with schoolbooks for homework assignments.
In spite of its reputation as a less rigorous lycée, Condorcet had a solid curriculum and a strong humanist tradition, with an emphasis on literature and philosophy. Among Condorcet’s most distinguished graduates, before Proust’s time, were the writers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; the novelist and critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve; the poets Théodore de Banville and Paul Verlaine; the philosophers Hippolyte Taine and Henri Bergson; the scientist André-Marie Ampère; and three presidents of the Republic: Sadi Carnot, Jean Casimir-Perier, and Paul Deschanel. If Marcel, as his parents intended, decided to become a lawyer, a diplomat, or a politician, the school seemed an excellent choice.
The great lycées of the Left Bank, such as Louis-le-Grand, Saint-Louis, and Henri IV, were steeped in tradition and known for their iron discipline and fierce competition among the students. Unlike Condorcet, their mission was to prepare the intellectual crème de la crème of France’s young (as well as a large number of provincials bent on conquering Paris) for admission to one of the prestigious Grandes Écoles. These schools are France’s most renowned institutions of higher learning and include the École polytechnique, or school of engineering, and the École normale supérieure, which trains teachers for secondary and higher education. Although some of Marcel’s classmates were preparing to compete for slots at the École normale supérieure, the boys at Condorcet were spared the exhausting intellectual training for the entrance exams. The students in the Left Bank lycées did not hide their disdain for the more relaxed atmosphere enjoyed by the Condorcet pupils, whom they refused to take seriously as academic competitors, calling them “melodious flute players.”3
Among Condorcet’s students were many sons of the smart society set of Paris, including many Jews or half-Jews like Marcel who considered education not a means to social advancement or the key to a brilliant career in a distinguished profession but the confirmation of their cultural heritage. The school had the reputation of being solidly intellectual, yet with a worldly bent. Some of the students, sons of wealthy industrialists and rich bourgeoisie, liked to show off their “impeccably elegant wardrobes.”4 Many of Marcel’s classmates, as befitted the upper class of Third Republic France, were to pursue careers as philosophers, scientists, industrialists, doctors, engineers, statesmen, and diplomats.5 A number of his closest friends from school distinguished themselves as journalists and writers.
If parents had any misgivings about Condorcet, it was that the administration was too lax. The mothers also worried about the proximity of the notorious passage du Havre, where prostitutes were known to practice their trade and where schoolboys considered it a rite of passage to lose their virginity as quickly as possible. Dreyfus thought these fears unfounded and recalled that what drew him and his friends to the passage was the presence of a well-stocked stationer’s shop, where the boys purchased their school supplies, and a confectioner’s boutique that sold “incomparable caramel creams.”
The boys loved their school. Dreyfus wrote that the atmosphere at Condorcet resembled that of a “Lilliputian cénacle,” whose subtle appeal made Marcel and his friends so impatient to arrive at school that they often came early to meet and talk under the meager shade of the trees in the courtyard before the first drumroll called them to class. Even the drumroll was music to their ears, reverberating across the quadrangle more like a pleasant tympanic invitation than a harsh military command.6
When school ended at three o’clock, Marcel and his friends often headed for the gardens along the Champs-Élysées or the Parc Monceau to have fun. Among his playmates were Lucie and Antoinette Faure, daughters of François-Félix Faure, a family friend and future president of France. On winter days the other children were amazed when Marcel arrived to play, frail and sensitive to the cold, his pockets stuffed with hot potatoes his mother had put there to keep his hands warm. He especially liked Antoinette, who was his age and had taught him to make caramels.7 He was fascinated by her beautiful long eyelashes and once asked his mother’s friend Comtesse Mirabeau, who had watched him and Antoinette playing, “Tell me, Madame, have you ever seen Antoinette’s eyelashes?”8
Other friends included children from upper-middle-class Jewish families, some of whom he had known in elementary school at the Cours Pape-Carpentier, like Jacques Bizet, Robert Dreyfus, Henri de Rothschild, and Daniel Halévy. Jacques, a year younger than Marcel, was the son of the composer Georges Bizet and Geneviève Halévy, who was the daughter of one of France’s most distinguished composers, Jacques Fromenthal Halévy. Jacques was not yet three when his father died, less than three months after the disastrous première of his opera Carmen. Jacques’s cousin Daniel Halévy was the son of Ludovic Halévy, a distinguished librettist and playwright. Ludovic, along with Henri Meilhac, had written the libretto for Carmen, as well as for many of Jacques Offenbach’s most popular operettas. Writing, for the Halévys, resembled a family profession, passed from generation to generation, a tradition Marcel would envy. At Pape-Carpentier, Marcel eagerly awaited the arrival of Jacques’s mother, who called him “my dear little Marcel.” Even as a child Marcel was struck by Mme Bizet’s elegance and beauty.
At Condorcet Marcel completed his secondary education, met many of his lifelong friends, and discovered his sexual nature. Because of ill health and constant respiratory difficulties, school life for Marcel was difficult and required special arrangements: tutors, private lessons, and work sessions with his parents to supplement missed classes, especially during the early years. In his first year at the lycée, he supplemented his homework by reading as quickly as he could books that his mother and grandmother Weil purchased for him or selected at the lending libraries to which they subscribed in Paris and Auteuil. For the next two years Marcel studied natural sciences with Georges Colomb, a distinguished alumnus of the École normale supérieure. Colomb’s pupils admired him for his dedication to his discipline, his sense of humor, and the clownish side of his personality, later shared with the general public in three books of humorous stories.9
Colomb’s buffoonery was a trait much appreciated by Marcel, who enjoyed being a clown himself. Young Proust liked to show off in class and constantly passed notes and letters to his friends, often reading and writing them right under the noses of his professors. But Colomb was not merely a light entertainer; he proved to be a well-prepared and enthusiastic lecturer with an appreciation for details. His classes strongly influenced Marcel, who had already developed a liking for natural sciences, especially botany. The only surviving honors list for class 5, division D, shows that on August 3, 1883, not long after his twelfth birthday, Marcel received the fifth and lowest certificate of merit in French, the fourth certificate of merit in Latin composition, and the second-place prize for natural sciences.
In the fall of 1883 Marcel made his first communion. Although the Catholic religion remained an important part of his cultural heritage, especially when he undertook his studies of history and medieval art, there are no indications that he remained a practicing Catholic beyond this time.
Marcel enrolled in class 4, division A, in early October 1883. His teacher for French, Latin, and Greek was Professor Legouëz, a kind man nearing retirement, who failed to recognize Marcel’s potential. The subject that Proust hated and in which he performed poorly, despite his parents’ urgings and threats, was math. According to Robert Proust, Adrien was a born mathematician who, in order to please his father, had abandoned math to study medicine. As a child, Adrien had amazed his professors by deriving mathematical laws with his own calculations. When his sons were young, Adrien’s idea of a relaxing, entertaining evening was to invite math professors from the École normale supérieure to come over and play at inventing imaginary numbers. He was disappointed that neither of his sons showed any particular aptitude for math. When Marcel had math assignments, Adrien worked them for him, while trying diligently to make certain the boy understood. Marcel would plead with him: “Stop, stop, I’m completely at sea.”10
Marcel managed to complete the school year despite frequent absences because of ill health. He performed fairly well in languages and literature and kept up in his other classes. In the first two terms he obtained the highest marks out of the class of twenty-five. Then his poor health and many absences began to take their toll, and at year’s end he won only a single prize in Colomb’s class: a third certificate of merit in natural sciences. But he had worked especially hard at what he liked: writing. The results of his compositions, often written at the dining room table, can be seen in the surviving rough drafts with their scant revisions.
The first such homework paper begins with a floral sensation, “The air is scented.” Hastily written over seven pages, this dramatic piece tells the story of a young mason who sacrifices his life to save a coworker with a wife and children. Presenting a variety of narrative elements, it opens with a Proustian springtime: the air is fragrant with lilacs and hawthorns in bloom. Marcel’s classical literary heroes—La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, and Bossuet—are evoked in quotations and allusions. Young Proust enjoyed displaying his considerable erudition, although at times the placement of a quotation or brief commentary detracts from the story. Although the handwriting remains that of a child who has barely reached adolescence, the narration shows a precocious ability to dramatize a story in an engaging voice.11 The action is quick. There is even a street scene in which two wealthy aristocrats briefly exchange gossip, in language typical of their class. Proust seems to have been born with a keen ear for spoken dialogue. Except for one or two lapses in tone and taste, “The air is scented,” was an impressive composition for a thirteen-year-old schoolboy.
Marcel also wrote an essay on a proposed theme from Tacitus relating a dramatic event that took place in the Roman senate: Agrippina had accused Gaius Calpurnius Piso of murdering her husband. Such training was the goal of classical education, in which students learned to “reproduce before producing, re-create before creating.”12 The text that Marcel wrote based on Tacitus showed, yet again, a confidence in expression and an ability to create drama and suspense, as well as an increased sureness of taste and tone. The young scholar must have been proud of his efforts, because he wrote at the top of the first page Lege, quaeso—Latin for “please read”—and placed his essay on the table where he knew his mother would find it.
Impressive as his essays were, Marcel had struggled through a difficult school year because of his health. Jeanne hoped the summer months of rest and recreation, combined with the proper amount of tutoring, would strengthen him for the future. On August 8, 1884, Marcel received his certificate of grammar, having passed all the subjects taught in class 4. In addition to French, Latin, Greek, and German, Marcel had studied Roman history, French geography, arithmetic (basic theory), plane geometry (elementary), geology, and botany. The curriculum was demanding, even for students with excellent health.
Meanwhile, Dr. Proust continued to distinguish himself in the field of medicine. On December 1, 1883, Adrien published another study on Le Choléra: Étiologie et prophylaxie. On March 30, 1884, the French government appointed him inspector general of health. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Toulon that June, Dr. Proust left immediately to direct efforts to prevent the disease from spreading beyond the city. He carried out this assignment, as the citizens of Toulon later acknowledged, with his customary energy and dedication.
In August, when the Proust family vacationed in the Normandy seaside town of Houlgate, Marcel’s parents arranged for him to take Greek lessons. But he continued to be more interested in literature expressed in his own idiom. Though still too young to attend plays, he now dreamed of becoming a famous playwright.
At Proust’s funeral nearly four decades later, an elderly man approached the art dealer René Gimpel and introduced himself, eager to have a witness for what he remembered. Gimpel failed to catch the man’s name, but not what he said: “I was his Greek professor . . . in the summer at Houlgate where he had come to vacation with his family.” The old man went on to say that although “little Marcel liked Greek a lot,” he preferred to talk with him and his wife about writing, especially for the theater. Unlike the other children, Marcel did not like to play, but “always tried to lead my wife far from the bustle of the beach to more tranquil spots, in order to talk, he said, about literature.” Marcel would ask the couple, “‘Do you think one day my plays will be performed at the Comédie-Française?’”13
When Marcel returned to school in class 3, he began studying physical sciences, continued to struggle in math and German, and read history with Régis Jalliffier. Proust admired Jalliffier, who, at thirty-eight, was the youngest teacher at Condorcet. Dreyfus believed that Marcel’s passion for history had been kindled in his long conversations with Jalliffier.14 In the Search, the Narrator listens to the “Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History.”15 In the course of his vast novel, which roughly spans French history from 1870 to 1920, Proust shows the dramatic social changes caused by the invention of machines of mass transit and communication, and by two pivotal events in his lifetime, the Dreyfus Affair and World War I.
Some of Marcel’s schoolwork survives in rough draft, with many sentences crossed out, including a composition written for a private tutor and titled “Le Gladiateur mourant” (The dying gladiator). Upon completion, Jeanne wrote the date, October 1, 1884, at the top of the essay and Marcel signed it, noting “Class 3A.” This work tended to Christianize ancient Rome, as had the composition on Piso. In the gladiator story, Marcel alludes to the French classical playwright Pierre Corneille, whose plays celebrated duty and heroism in the face of overwhelming forces.16 The nobility of the brave warrior in an alien land who “must die for the pleasure of the wicked” represents Proust’s first experiment with one of his future major themes: the prisoner. The first soundings of other major Proustian themes are also found in this sketch: perversion and guilt.17
Another assignment that Proust wrote for a private tutor recounts an episode from the Roman sacking of Corinth. The hero is a proud Greek youth who defies the Roman general intent upon killing all the free citizens of Corinth once he succeeds in separating them from the slave boys, whom he intends to confiscate and exploit. The only way the cruel tyrant can distinguish between the two groups is to trick the free boys into revealing their education. He asks all the youths to write on a tablet for him, knowing that the illiterate slaves will be unable to perform this task. The youthful hero, though aware of the general’s stratagem, writes a heroic passage from Homer, “Three times and four times happy those Danaans were who died then in wide Troy land,” illustrating his own courage and scorn for the barbaric Romans.18 Marcel ended this remarkably mature story with a paean to the moral value of literature and the “harmonious and divine music” of Homer’s epic poem: “Literary studies allow us to disdain death, they lift us above earthly things by speaking to us about spiritual matters; they purify our feelings; and this reasoned courage, that is nearly philosophical, is far more beautiful than physical courage, than the intrepidity of the senses, because, in reality, it is spiritual courage.”19 Marcel’s literary credo was already fixed by age thirteen and did not vary: literature is superior to life and its petty miseries.
Saturated with the glories of French prose and poetry from his constant reading and memorization, Proust became intimately attuned to the precision and musicality of language. Robert Dreyfus recounts how one day when Marcel was thirteen or fourteen, he observed the texture of the Arc de Triomphe seen in the light of the setting sun and scribbled on a sheet of paper two words that rang true and whose sonorous beauty made him dream: granit rose (pink granite). Marcel’s sensitivity to the sounds of French was also evident in his homework assignments that some of his professors, like those fictionalized in Jean Santeuil, criticized for being “too poetical.”20
In spite of many absences during the second term, Marcel’s name appears on the February 14 honor roll. But on March 31 he withdrew from Condorcet for reasons of health. His schooling now depended entirely on his mother and private tutors. Over the summer he would have to make up the work he had missed after dropping out if he wanted to stay with his class.
The year proved to be a good one for Marcel’s father. On Bastille Day, July 14, 1885, the city of Toulon gave Dr. Proust its Medal of Honor for the extraordinary services rendered during the cholera epidemic of 1884. In October he was awarded the Chair of Hygiene at the Faculté de médecine. At fifty-one, Adrien had reached the peak of his career. He had worked hard, and he happily accepted his rewards. Adrien must have thought that he had everything a man could want: fame, fortune, a beautiful, accomplished wife who adored him, two fine, intelligent sons. Marcel’s poor health remained his only worry.
In August 1886 Mme Proust decided to bring Marcel and Robert with her to a health spa “to take the waters.” Jeanne had read in her Baedeker that Salies-de-Béarn, not far inland from Biarritz, was a small town with saline waters, superior even to its German counterparts. The guidebook further stated that it was a spa of the first order, specializing in the treatment of “illnesses of women, children, lymphatism, and scrofula.”21 Perhaps this cure would benefit them all and improve Marcel’s health by giving his resistance a boost before the fall term.
The decision to go to Salies-de-Béarn must have been made suddenly, for when Jeanne and her sons boarded the train in Paris around midnight, she had no hotel reservations for their stay. After a train ride that lasted until noon the next day, Jeanne and her boys finally arrived in Salies. They stopped first at the Hôtel de Paris, where they lunched on veal, potatoes, steak, eggs, and grapes. Then Jeanne instructed the boys to wait in the lobby and write letters or read while she went to look for rooms. Robert dutifully wrote to his grandmother, giving her all the details of the journey and remarking on the decidedly bovine atmosphere of their new surroundings: “Since our feet first touched ground in Salies, we have seen only oxen, oxen here, oxen there, oxen everywhere.” By the time Robert reached the postscript, his mother had returned: “P.S. We haven’t found out yet if Marcel will be able to fish here. Mother just informed me that we will be staying at the Hôtel de la Paix.”
Over the next few days, despite the intense late-summer heat that Marcel found “sufficiently southern,” the family settled in and began to enjoy the routine of taking the waters, reading, and, for the boys, playing croquet on the hotel lawn. Jeanne was especially pleased that her elder son’s appetite had grown hearty. Marcel, in a holiday mood, wrote to his grandmother and expressed some embarrassment about the quantities he found himself consuming. Each meal consisted of five courses, and the morning and evening desserts were preceded by entremets. He described the cooking as divine and the portions gargantuan. At breakfast, he had “gulped down more than usual: a hard-boiled egg, two slices of steak, five whole potatoes, a drumstick and a thigh, and three servings of baked apples.” And at 8:30 he enjoyed café au lait and bread! He entreated her not to show the letter to anyone lest his family and friends think the “delicate bibliophile is becoming an insatiable eater, the peaceful reader of Horace and Virgil... is transforming himself into an enormous Pantagruel.”
In the course of this letter to his grandmother, Marcel, who had acquired his mother’s and grandmother’s ability to quote at ease from classical works, cited Corneille and Racine, parodied Molière, and played with words, transcribing them phonetically: Fé tro cho pour sla (Fait trop chaud pour cela), which means “’S too hot for that.”22 It was too hot and he was too ebullient to worry about his mother’s strictures: decorum, grammar, coherent ideas, style, and handwriting, all items she checked when he handed his letters to her for approval before mailing.
His mother may have let this letter pass, but not without repercussions. The vivacious, familiar style could not have pleased her refined taste. One day when Marcel was eager to join his new friends already playing croquet on the hotel lawn, Jeanne made him sit down and write another letter in a loftier style to his grandmother. Marcel had struck a bargain with his mother’s close friend, Mme Anatole Catusse, who had recently joined them at Salies. Known for her beautiful voice, Mme Catusse promised to sing a “little” aria if he started a pen portrait of her and a “big” aria if he finished it. Marcel, who loved to hear her sing the “divine melodies of Jules Massenet and Charles Gounod,” agreed. He described Mme Catusse’s “charming” face of “perfect beauty” in a letter that contained enough classical epithets, literary quotations and allusions, and other sophisticated rhetorical devices to satisfy the high cultural standards of the matriarchs. At the end Marcel could not resist saying how stupid he found the exercise, slipping in, after the final literary fanfare, a dangerously informal note: “‘Hello, Grandma, how are you?’ Marcel.” He informed his grandmother that he found Salies boring and that only Mme Catusse’s conversation consoled him for his many sorrows and for the unpoetic atmosphere on the “terrace filled with chit-chat and tobacco smoke, where we spend our days.”23
In September, Marcel wrote from Salies to his grandfather Weil, admitting somewhat ruefully that because no one in the family appreciated the “sublime” style of his earlier letters, he would try the bourgeois style. Marcel proceeded with a comic description of encounters with one of the hotel guests, a pretentious dentist “who had become a local celebrity by walking around holding, tucked under his arm, copies of the Proceedings of the Anthropology Society, of which he was a co-founder, causing the staff and clientele to believe he is a famous scientist.”24 Concluding his letter, Marcel summarized the beneficial results of the spa: “Mama is flourishing and Robert is prospering. I am rosy and dying of hunger at every meal.”
Robert is prospering. In French—Robert prospère—the words rhyme syllable for syllable. It is an appropriate motto for the younger boy, healthy, robust, never known to give his parents any problems, and seemingly successful at everything, as he would continue to be by following in his father’s footsteps. The phrase may have become a tag for him, one that Marcel and his parents were often heard to murmur with a knowing smile, when informed of his latest achievement: Robert prospère. As for Marcel, it remained unclear whether he could regain his health and overcome his emotional dependency on his mother. At Salies, Jeanne must have been encouraged by his outdoor activities, his serious dedication to his studies, his healthy glow, and, above all, his amazing appetite for good food.
Marcel ended his letter to his grandfather by asking for something that “interests me infinitely,” the fulfillment of a long-standing promise. Nathé had promised Marcel his own subscription to La Revue bleue, whose theater reviews by Jules Lemaître the boy was eager to read on a regular basis. Redemption of the pledge had awaited Jeanne’s approval, which she had given at last, as a reward for Marcel’s hard work and hearty appetite. Before closing the letter to Nathé, Marcel asked about the servants. He had apparently undertaken to educate the chambermaid Augustine about literature and inquired about her progress in reading the list he had left with her.25
Sometime during 1885 Adrien Proust, freshly endowed with laurels for his most recent accomplishments, had his portrait painted in oil by Jules Lecomte de Nouy. Adrien’s portrait, greatly admired by his family, shows the doctor in full academic robes, plume and parchment in hand, the image of a wise, learned, and benevolent man, face glowing with knowledge, wisdom, and compassion. In the lower right-hand corner, one’s eyes are drawn to an arresting detail: an hourglass with the sand nearly two-thirds run out. One has only to look at Adrien’s portrait to see time in the process of being lost. Even if the hourglass is only a stock image to remind the mighty of the earth of the vanity of all human enterprises, it is a remarkable coincidence for the father of a man whose primary theme will be the loss and recapturing of time.
In spite of his many accomplishments in the field of medicine, Adrien remained as helpless as any parent when faced with a child’s chronic physical and psychological disorders. The stay at Salies-de-Béarn brought only temporary improvements. Marcel successfully completed his summer assignments, enabling him to enroll with his schoolmates in class 2, but health problems plagued him constantly during the fall. On December 31, 1885, because of Marcel’s constant absences from school, his parents officially withdrew him from Condorcet. While absent from school he worked closely with his mother, especially on composition, and the family arranged once more for private lessons. They would do everything possible to strengthen and prepare him to repeat class 2 the next fall.
A few pieces of Marcel’s work survive in the exercises he prepared with his mother and private tutors. In March 1886 he wrote “L’Éclipse” (The eclipse), an account of an episode from Christopher Columbus’s fourth and final voyage to the Americas.26 This text contains the earliest known example of a technique that would become an important feature in Proust’s narrative style in the Search. Proust’s ability to attribute, in a convincing way, multiple motives for a single action increases the richness of character and situation. In “L’Éclipse,” shortly after a storm drives Columbus’s fleet into Jamaica, the explorer sends some of his crew to Santo Domingo to find fresh ships. While they are absent, the natives revolt “either because they had wanted to seize the opportunity to free themselves from a control of which they had grown weary, or because they had been mistreated by the sailors of the great voyager, or, finally, because they had been persuaded to rebel by Columbus’s enemies.” Here Marcel repeats historical conjecture, but later in his fiction, he often attributes multiple motives to his characters. Such enrichment reminds us of our own complexity and how little we really know about others and, sometimes, ourselves.
While working at home, Marcel also completed a school assignment known as an exercise in style, in which the student expresses himself freely on a simple theme. Normally such assignments filled about twenty lines, but Marcel, never short on ideas and inspiration, produced four pages on “Les Nuages” (Clouds).27 These pages reveal the pleasure the apprentice novelist took in learning his craft, seeking the right word and an appropriate image. Of all the adolescent writings that survive, this text is the most distinctly Proustian in the subject matter and expression. The subject of clouds suited his contemplative nature and announced the future child Narrator’s lyrical dialogues with hawthorn trees in bloom in the Search: “Man, moved spiritually by the mysterious and solemn calm of this poetical hour, likes to contemplate the sky; he may then discover in the clouds giants and towers and all the brilliant fantasies of his exalted imagination.” The dreamer becomes lost in the clouds, then the “brilliant fantasies” disappear and he abruptly returns to earth with “the same disagreeable sensation one has in the morning on awakening from a beautiful dream.” After stating that clouds make us dream because “their rapid passage plunges our soul into the most profound philosophical meditations,” he expresses a major tenet of his philosophy that will guide his aesthetics and vision: “Man has in his heart a secret and slender thread that binds him so closely to all parts of nature.”28
“Clouds” contains a number of allusions and quotations from works he had studied at Condorcet: The Odyssey, Victor Hugo’s poem “L’Enfant,” and works by the French classical poet Joachim Du Bellay. In addition to literary allusions, Marcel expressed a number of ideas then current: The external world is a product of the mind of which it is a mere projection; sorrow is the great inspirer of art that is then transfigured and magnified by art.29 The meditation also shares a common theme with “The Dying Gladiator,” one that is a major motif of the Search, the plight of the captive or the exiled. God is invoked in this piece, as he often is in Jean Santeuil, though not in the Search. The dreamer confides his sorrows to the clouds in the belief that they will rush to God and seek consolation for him. He pities the captives and exiles to whose misfortunes the clouds are the only witness and expresses his thanks to clouds who make of a person, who was only a wretch, a poet and a philosopher.
It was probably during the fall visit of 1886 to Illiers that Marcel knew for certain that he wanted to be a writer. Mme Jules Amiot had died in June following an operation for a cancerous intestinal tumor, and that autumn the Proust family came to Illiers, perhaps in connection with her estate. It had been four years since his last trip, and Marcel, now in his mid-teens, feared that Illiers might bore him, especially because the season was rainy and the hawthorns were not in bloom. He had brought along for his reading Augustin Thierry’s La Conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (Norman conquest of England), considered a masterpiece of historical narration. Robert Proust remembered that their grandmother Weil “was enamored of Augustin Thierry and never stopped talking to us about him.”30 Marcel intended to discover the reasons for his grandmother’s adulation.
Thierry (1795–1856) had abandoned a promising career as a scientist to devote himself to history. His aim had been to revolutionize historical narrative, which he felt had paid too much attention to abstractions and political institutions. To meet his goal, he decided to adapt the novelistic techniques of Sir Walter Scott’s popular historical novels to his own needs in telling the story of the French people, especially the rich and largely neglected chronicles of medieval times. True to the romantic spirit of his age, Thierry made ample and effective use of anecdote and local color.
In La Conquête de l’Angleterre published in 1825, Thierry recounted the story of the Saxons’ resistance to the Norman invaders and celebrated the heroism of those who rebelled against foreign oppressors.31 As Marcel sat at the dining room table in Illiers and read page after page of vivid, picturesque narration, he was captivated. After each reading session, Marcel felt himself bursting with energy, with a desire to comprehend and convey his own sensations and impressions. He would become so pent up that he had to leave the warmth and comfort of the house and rush out for long walks, often in drenching rain. Rather than deterring him, the showers seemed to augment his feeling of exhilaration: “And I walked back soaked, tired and joyful in the harmony of all things.”32
In one of the first drafts for Swann’s Way, written sometime in 1908–9, Proust evoked the reading of Thierry at Illiers that rainy autumn in the context of the Narrator and his family’s visit to Combray to settle the estate of the fictitious Aunt Léonie: “Autumn had come; it was cold; while my parents conferred with the notary, M. Goupil, I read, in the ‘living room’ by the fireside, Augustin Thierry’s The Norman Conquest of England; then, when I tired of reading, I went out, no matter what the weather: my body, which in the long spell of immobility while reading for hours, during which the movement of my ideas kept it moving in place, so to speak, was like a wound up top which, when suddenly released, felt the need to let go, to expend the accumulated energy in every direction.”33
The ebullience Marcel felt during these readings in 1886 created in him a great urge to uncover and express the hidden secrets, the laws, the profound meaning behind impressions that he stored up from his walks: “the play of sunlight on a stone, a roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves.” Yes, he wanted to be a writer. But how? And what would he write about?
In the final fictionalized version of these reading sessions at Illiers, the situation is the same, but the book or books read are not specified. The Narrator realizes, as he walks through the forest, that in spite of his great desire to express himself as forcefully as the authors he loves, he is incapable of doing so. He expels his pent-up energy and frustrations by shouting and beating the trees with his umbrella. The passage illustrates one of Proust’s most successful narrative tricks, used with variations throughout the Search: he tells us in dazzling prose about his inability to write!
The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall and at the hen’s downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.34
Marcel had found reading Thierry’s history and the walks afterward so happily stimulating that once his parents were ready to return home he had no desire to leave Illiers; he could not have guessed that he would never return. But during the Illiers trip he had made an invaluable discovery: the conviction that he must devote his life to literature.
Sometime during this year, perhaps on the occasion of her birthday, Antoinette Faure, whose long eyelashes continued to captivate Marcel, asked him to answer questions about himself in an English keepsake book, then a fixture of the social scene. Although Marcel left five answers blank, he took his task seriously as he wrote in the book whose red cover bore in large letters the title Confessions: An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, Etc.35 His answers, thoughtful and sincere, bear witness to the idealism of a young dreamer:
Your favourite virtue. All those that are not specific to any one sect, the universal ones.
Your favourite qualities in a man. Intelligence, moral sense.
Your favourite qualities in a woman. Tenderness, naturalness, intelligence.
Your favourite occupation. Reading, daydreaming, poetry, history, theater.
Your idea of happiness. To live near those I love, surrounded by the beauties of nature, lots of books and musical scores, and not far from a French theater.
Your idea of misery. To be separated from maman.
Your favourite color and flower. I like all colors, and as for flowers, I don’t know.
If not yourself, who would you be? Not having to ask this question, I prefer not to answer it. However, I would have quite liked to be Pliny the Younger.
Where would you like to live? In the realm of the ideal, or rather of my ideal.
Your favourite prose authors. George Sand, Aug[ustin] Thierry.
Your favourite poets. Musset.
Your favourite painters and composers. Meissonier, Mozart, Gounod.
Your favourite heroes in real life. A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mohammed, Musset, Pliny the Younger, Aug[ustin] Thierry.
Your favourite heroines in real life. A woman of genius leading the life of an ordinary woman.
Your favourite heroes in fiction. The romantic, poetic heroes, those who represent an ideal rather than a model.
Your favourite heroines in fiction. Those who are more than women without betraying their sex, everything tender, poetic, pure, beautiful in every genre.
Your pet aversion. People who do not sense what is good, who are ignorant of the tenderness of affection.
For what fault have you most toleration? For the private lives of geniuses.
Your favourite motto. One that cannot be summed up because its simplest expression is in all that is beautiful, good, and grand in nature.36
Certainly Marcel’s answers about what makes him happy or miserable are straight from the heart: happiness for him always meant being near his mother. Proust’s intense love for her was, with his passion for writing, the primary constant in his life. His answer that his heroine in real life is “a woman of genius leading the life of an ordinary woman” may have been inspired by the thought of his mother, who had taught him so much, and with such modesty, about music and literature.
The questionnaire reveals his deep interest in history and literature, and especially poetry and the theater. His heroes are authors of many cultures and include those of ancient Greek and Roman history and literature. Three writers he particularly admired during his adolescence are each mentioned twice: Alfred de Musset, Pliny the Younger, Augustin Thierry. Although the reasons for his admiration of George Sand and Augustin Thierry are clear and reflect his grandmother’s influence, we do not know what interested him especially about Pliny the Younger (A.D. 62–113), a wealthy patrician and state official, who counted among his friends Quintilian, Martial, Suetonius, Tacitus, and the emperor Trajan. Perhaps Marcel had read in Latin class or with a private tutor selections from the famous letters that Pliny wrote during his hours of cultivated leisure, while out on hunts, or relaxing at one of his country villas. Pliny’s letters contain vivid accounts of the social, literary, and political life of his times, one of the happiest of the empire. Proust, who would chronicle the lives of wealthy aristocrats and bourgeois under the Third Republic, may have recognized in Pliny a kindred spirit.
Alfred de Musset (1810–57) was a poet of the early romantic movement who, after George Sand broke his heart, sang the ecstasies and despairs of love in verses tinged with bitter irony. Marcel’s great admiration for Musset’s poetry diminished as he matured, to be replaced by an enduring love for the poems of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), whose masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal, inspired the symbolist movement and is considered by many to contain the greatest French poems of the modern era. Proust was to share many of Baudelaire’s predilections, especially in his poems about nostalgia and the resuscitation of memory through the sensations of scent and taste.
The questionnaire shows that Marcel had an uncommon degree of self-awareness for an adolescent. During this period he acquired the habit—at first agreeable but soon to become obsessive—of intensive self-analysis. And he was just as curious about the experiences of others. Eager to know everything about anyone who interested him, he would stop and talk for hours with the young or old, asking many questions. Proust particularly enjoyed conversing with members of the servant class, including concierges and waiters. He often received scoldings from his mother when he arrived home late from school because he had dawdled in the street, treating himself to cakes and chatting at length with the concierge. Servants, he learned, possess special knowledge about food, clothing, and social customs, not to mention delicious gossip about the secret lives and foibles of many families and men about town.
Marcel had likely discovered a secret about himself: he found boys as beautiful and as attractive as girls. Maybe even more so. His answer in the questionnaire that the fault for which he had the most tolerance was the private life of a genius may indicate that he had become fully aware of his sexual nature and of society’s abhorrence of its expression. Homosexual experimentation among schoolboys might, to some degree, be tolerated, but its open expression by mature men was not accepted by society at large. Men whose masculinity was impugned fought duels to restore their honor. Prominent homosexuals, such as Proust’s future acquaintances Oscar Wilde and Prince Constantin Radziwill, paid blackmailers to keep their activities secret. People might be willing to look the other way, but the façade of respectability had to be maintained.
Marcel’s proclaimed tolerance for the private lives of geniuses is an early indication of another distinction that would inform his aesthetic theories and influence his innovative method of characterization: the crucial difference between what Proust called one’s social self and the creative self. One cannot, he would demonstrate, contrary to what most French critics believed, determine the value of a writer’s work by appearances or breeding or social distinction.
For children like Marcel, who lived in or near the prosperous eighth arrondissement, the Champs-Élysées gardens offered a splendid playground. There were puppet shows, donkey and goat carts to ride, vendors selling candies, lemonade, and other refreshments, and green swards of grass lined with chairs and benches from which parents and nannies could enjoy beautiful vistas of statues and architecture as they read or knitted or chatted while watching the children play. In the late spring and early summer months the rows of tall chestnut trees that lined the streets would display their blooms of pink or white.
Marcel was sent to the gardens for his health, to allow his body to absorb the healing, invigorating rays of the sun, and here he encountered other adolescent friends: Robert Dreyfus, two years younger than he; a sweet girl named Blanche; Jeanne Pouquet, with whom Marcel later engaged in an innocent flirtation; and sisters Lucie and Antoinette Faure, whom he liked intensely. Proust’s health concerned his friends; he seemed fragile and was subject to bouts of hay fever. When particularly unwell, Marcel would arrive and depart in a carriage, his body wrapped in woolens “like a fragile, precious trinket.”37
Dreyfus left a vivid account of Marcel playing in the Champs-Élysées gardens.38 Young Proust usually met his companions on the wide green lawn near two adjacent popular music halls, the Alcazar d’Été and the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs. On the grass stood a fountain in whose spray rose a bronze nymph, bathing and plaiting her hair. Beyond the fountain two carousels offered rides on hand-carved, brightly painted steeds of different dispositions, ranging from docile mares to fiery stallions. Most often, the children entertained themselves by playing hoops, shuttlecock, or prisoner’s base, a tag game in which the players on one team seek to catch and imprison members of the other.39 As the children played, they would often hear, wafting toward them over the grass, bits of song and the blare of bands from rehearsals at one of the music halls.
Although Marcel joined the others in playing tag, he preferred conversing with the boys and reciting lines from his favorite poems. Dreyfus, privileged to have known the “outdoor Proust,” never forgot their talks as they walked along the path that ran beside the Alcazar while Marcel chatted about his beloved authors: Racine, Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, and Baudelaire. From his friend, Dreyfus heard for the first time the name Leconte de Lisle, the leading figure in the Parnassian movement. During this time Marcel also read with obvious delight Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the novels of George Eliot. Marcel had read his way through many of the Greek and Roman classics, as well as those of French literature, and was now discovering modern Russian and English authors.
Dreyfus later realized that this little group of playmates had formed Marcel’s first salon, where he brilliantly displayed “the luminous gifts of his magnificent artistic intelligence and his delicious sensitivity.”40 His amazed and often perplexed playmates at times grew impatient to return to their invigorating games of pursuit and capture, yet on the whole they provided a sympathetic audience. Although the little nucleus contained future industrialists, engineers, statesmen, diplomats, and generals, their predominant interests and talents were literary. They were joined occasionally by other playmates, such as future writers Louis de La Salle and Jean de Tinan.41
If Marcel’s intellect and manners surprised his friends, his remarkably refined, sensitive behavior, his sweetness, and his extraordinary knowledge of literature astounded their mothers even more. From an early age, encouraged by his mother, Marcel delighted in pleasing others. Handsome, smothered in woolens even in warm weather, Marcel would rush to greet the women, young and old, bowing to them as they approached, and always able to find just the right words to touch them, whether he introduced topics that ordinarily concerned only adults or simply inquired about their health. Geneviève Bizet, who was intrigued by Marcel’s graciousness and intelligence, was always pleased to see him and listen to his remarks and observations. His incessant chatter irritated others. Marcel enjoyed recounting the occasion when Mme Catusse surprised him by asking, “Are you never going to stop talking?”42
One day while playing in the garden, Marcel saw Marie de Benardaky, an “elegant, tall, and beautiful” blonde with whom he fell in love.43 Of Greek and Russian descent, Marie was born in Russia to a wealthy family. Her father, a Polish nobleman, had made a fortune in the tea trade before becoming master of ceremonies at the court of the Russian czar. Once Marcel met Marie, nothing was more important than the afternoon trek to the Champs-Élysées to find his new girlfriend and her sister Nelly. Marcel’s daily rendezvous with Marie became the source of conflicts with his parents, who sometimes had other activities planned, such as private lessons. Jeanne and Adrien were ambitious for their son, who needed to remain in top form and extremely competitive if he was to succeed in a distinguished profession. In spite of his parents’ concerns, Marcel remained stubbornly intent on the daily outing to the Champs-Élysées to meet his exotic new sweetheart.
His insistence on going to meet Marie on every occasion and in all kinds of weather alarmed his mother, bent as usual on keeping him wrapped safely in the cocoon of her love and concern. During this period of his life, Marcel was attracted to girls. Had his parents known that his sexual orientation would change, they might have been more careful about discouraging his relationship with Marie and other young women. To obtain permission to leave for the Champs-Élysées on days when the weather was less than perfect, he had to convince his mother that he would not become ill; but he would do anything to be with the “pretty, exuberant” Marie, the girl with the open, winsome smile whom he was to remember as “the intoxication and despair of his childhood” and one of “the great loves of his life.”44 Here is an early account of this infatuation from Jean Santeuil:
But a day arrived when a sudden change came over him. He made the acquaintance of a little Russian girl, with a mass of black hair, bright, mocking eyes and rosy cheeks, who was possessed of all the glowing vitality and joy of living which were so sadly lacking in Jean. As soon, now, as he awoke in the morning he began to think of nothing but the moment when he would see her laughing at her play. All the time she was present, he stayed close beside her, taking part in games of prisoner’s base, hide-and-seek and sliding. When she arrived about three o’clock in the Champs-Élysées with her governess and her sister, his heart beat so fast that he almost fell down, and [he] remained for a few moments with his face as white as a sheet before he could pull himself together.45
Marcel’s affection for Marie was obvious to everyone. His friends, including her sister Nelly, were amused by his ardor and indulged him to a large degree, always letting him be on Marie’s side in games.
Marcel’s preoccupation with Marie did not prevent him from being well prepared for the 1886–87 school year. He earned good grades in all subjects except math. He studied history and geography with Alexandre Gazeau, a brilliant, lively teacher who would later serve as headmaster. Although Gazeau had little enthusiasm for geography, his history lessons held the class spellbound. Marcel’s love of history and his hard work earned him top marks all three terms.
Another piece of work, written for M. Claude Courbaud’s literature class, showed that Marcel was making up for lost time. He produced a fluent translation of a Latin text known to all French schoolboys of the period: Cicero’s account of his discovery of Archimedes’ tomb. The enlightened, cultivated Cicero was appalled at the neglect suffered by the tomb of the greatest mathematician of antiquity. Cicero’s conclusion contained a statement to which Proust heartily subscribed, one that became a dominant motivation for his own writing: “It is by discovering the laws that govern human nature that one finds consolation for life’s bitterness and its frailties.”46 Did Marcel keep this particular assignment because he realized that he would set out to discover such laws himself?
In March Mme Proust took Marcel, a few months shy of sixteen, to Paul Nadar’s famous studio to have his picture taken. At least two poses were printed, one in which he looks directly at the camera and the other from a three-quarter angle. The photographs, typical of Nadar’s superb work of the era, look like official portraits. The pose is formal, almost too stiff, as if the young man had been warned not to move. He is fashionably dressed in a jacket and a wide white collar, with a floppy cravat tied in a bow and a gold fob looped through a buttonhole. His crewcut hair crowns an oval face of nearly perfect symmetry. Just beneath the left nostril there is a mole. His small, delicately shaped lips are dry, cracked, perhaps from too much exposure to the March wind. Above his lips one can detect the faint outline of a mustache about to appear. The thin, short eyebrows, like the dim mustache, are those of early puberty. Looking directly into his face one is transfixed by the striking large brown almond-shaped eyes that look sad. More than one observer would qualify them as “gazelle-like eyes” because of their soft, lustrous appearance. Perhaps they are only contemplative, observing far more than one would expect from even the most perceptive adolescent. The strong impression his stare made on his friends was the reason they all mention those eyes, those eyes that might have belonged to a melancholy Persian prince, those deep, sad, penetrating globes.
In 1887, at the end of the school year, Alexandre Gazeau chose Marcel to compete in the state examinations, an honor for which he had qualified by taking second-place prizes in history and geography. His performance was no doubt due to his keen interest in history, greatly intensified by the previous summer’s reading of Thierry. Although he had always earned good grades in the subject, this was the only time he won a prize.
Marcel and approximately one hundred other top-ranked students from each lycée division reported to the Sorbonne on July 13, 1887, the eve of Bastille Day, and right in the middle of the Boulangist crisis.47 Gen. Georges Boulanger was a popular military leader who had played a major role in suppressing the Commune and had become a hero of the right wing. He had been elected war minister the year before and seemed poised for even greater political heights. Many of his ultraconservative admirers hoped that he would engineer a coup and create a government with strong executive power. Demonstrations for the general were being organized throughout Paris. As Marcel entered the Sorbonne to take the history exam, he was conscious of the portentous events swirling around him.
The general history exam consisted of two questions, one on Philip II and the decline of Spain, the other on Asian Russia, for which a map was provided; Marcel wrote for five straight hours on the questions. He also participated in the inter-school Greek contest, but he failed to place in either history or Greek. He and his parents were disappointed, but on his lycée’s awards day in August he took home, in addition to the history prize, the top merit award in Latin and the fourth merit award in French.
After the history exam, Marcel went to Auteuil to spend the night. On Bastille Day he witnessed, in addition to the traditional national holiday celebrations, a pro-Boulanger demonstration that made the streets even livelier than usual. Crowds of the general’s partisans filled the streets on their way to Longchamp in the Bois to attend the colorful military review, the final and most popular event of the Bastille Day celebration.48 As groups of celebrators rushed by, Marcel heard them singing the general’s campaign songs, “Happy, triumphantly, we marched” and “‘It’s Boulange, lange, lange’ shouted out by everyone, women, workmen, even children from five to eight years old, who sing it perfectly in tune and with passion.”49
The next day he wrote to Antoinette Faure, reporting on his recent activities and the street scenes he had witnessed: “My dear Antoinette, Would you believe that Mama has torn up a letter I wrote to you. The handwriting was too bad. Actually, I am inclined to think that my great praise of our good general, that ‘simple and sublime’ soldier, as the Petit Boulanger calls him, aroused Madame Jeanne Proust’s old Orleanist-republican sentiments.” Marcel had been only temporarily swayed by the highly visible and vocal endorsements of the general’s campaign. He told Antoinette that he saw in the general a “very common and vulgar self-promoter,” although he admitted that the mighty, spontaneous enthusiasm that greeted Boulanger had stirred in his heart feelings that were “primitive, indomitable, bellicose.” Fortune did not smile on the general, who, shortly after being elected a deputy in 1889, was accused of conspiring with the monarchists against the Republic and was forced to flee France.
In spite of health problems and Jeanne’s constant fretting over his outings, his handwriting, his hygiene, and his progress, Marcel enjoyed active games and even roughhousing, some of which took place between boys and girls. Such tussles were the occasions of his first awareness of sexual desire. Marie was the primary model for Gilberte in the Search, the first girl with whom the Narrator falls in love. Here is how Proust describes a wrestling match between the two over the possession of a letter in the Champs-Élysées garden:
She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders . . . and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said good-naturedly: “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling a bit longer.”50
This is the first episode in the novel in which the Narrator obviously experiences orgasm with another person—an orgasm that is, to say the least, adolescent, protected, and remote. In real life such an incident might just as easily have occurred with a boy. Wrestling, fighting, playing rough-and-tumble games—such sport often furnishes the first occasion when many youths feel desire, fleeting, denied, or embraced, for members of their sex. Would this feeling disappear as a bit of youthful ephemera or would such yearnings become permanently fixed? How could Marcel know? He did know that he was irresistibly drawn to the masculine beauty of his classmates, and he yearned to taste the pleasures of intimate sexual contact. If masturbation brought such bliss, if wrestling held such promise, he could only imagine what it must be like to spend his passion willfully on a beautiful, naked body. Perhaps he had been wrong to decline an older classmate’s invitation to visit a brothel.
If he was to have no compunction about offering himself to his male friends, Marcel felt a healthy repugnance toward having sex with whores, then a common rite of passage for French schoolboys. Daniel Halévy recounts an incident that occurred when Marcel wandered into a beer hall frequented by prostitutes who worked in the Latin Quarter. Later, when he and Daniel were sitting on a bench alongside an unknown, respectable-looking woman, Marcel related his adventure among the prostitutes, concluding: “I went into a beer hall. I will never go there again. I felt as if I had left there a part of my moral being!” The woman, stupefied, stared at him while Marcel assumed a cocky air.51 This remark, which Daniel immediately spread among their classmates, appeared to them the height of ridiculousness, another instance of Marcel’s making a colossal fool of himself.
Although he disdained prostitutes, Marcel was eager for sexual experience and largely indifferent as to whether it was with a man or a woman. Daniel had told Marcel about a woman whom he had discovered in a shop on the slopes of Montmartre and whose beauty intrigued him.52 One day after school, Daniel led him to the dairy shop, where the two boys stopped on the sidewalk and stared, watching Mme Chirade as she came and went, busy serving her customers delicious cheeses and creams. Marcel, struck by the splendor of her black hair, fair skin, and fine features, whispered in Daniel’s ear: “How beautiful she is!” Then he compared her to Flaubert’s exotic heroine: “Beautiful like Salammbô.” After a short silence in which he remained absorbed in admiration, trying to imagine what it might be like to possess such a creature, he startled Daniel by asking, “Do you think we can sleep with her?”
Daniel had to admit that the thought had never occurred to him. Marcel’s audacity inspired in Daniel a sudden respect for the friend he had considered a sissy. Fearing that their immobility and curiosity would attract attention, the schoolboys moved on down the sidewalk, distracted and lost in thought. Marcel, obviously inflamed by desire and eager for action, suggested, “Let’s bring her some flowers.”
A few days later, at an agreed-upon hour, the boys returned to Montmartre. Marcel carried an armload of roses purchased in a floral shop along the way. They felt like untried soldiers about to execute a difficult and dangerous maneuver. Arriving in front of the shop, they saw Mme Chirade in her usual place, tending to customers. Daniel, unaccountably shy, remained glued to the sidewalk, his eyes wide and darting, wondering whether his friend would dare. Marcel, holding the roses before him, advanced into the shop straight toward Mme Chirade. Daniel watched Marcel’s back as he spoke to the captivating dark-haired woman, saw her smile, gently but firmly saying Non while shaking her head. Marcel apparently insisted, at which point, the beautiful lady, still smiling and determined, advanced in slow, invincible steps, forcing Marcel to retreat until, before he knew it, he found himself back out on the sidewalk standing next to his amazed and flustered friend. Mme Chirade had never for a second lost her composure or her graciousness. The boys, suddenly panicked at the audacity of their attempted seduction, raced home, Marcel still clutching the now useless roses.
Marcel’s illnesses, his extreme sensitivity, the insomnia that would plague him all his life, and the dreaded onset of asthma attacks all increased his nervous condition and his dependency on his mother. His frailty forced him to listen intently and constantly to his body as he sought clues to the causes of his misery. His body had become for his parents the center of constant, fretful attention as they monitored diet, sleep, exercise, and other activities, looking for any modifications that might make him healthier. Whenever Jeanne and her son were apart, he reported his condition to her in detail, pleased no doubt, with a child’s natural narcissism, to preoccupy so fully her mother love. At age sixteen, he wrote to her from Auteuil one day in early fall:
My enchanting little Mama,
Let me first tell you that my stomach is divine. . . . I was sure I was going to digest well at night. But then came transparent nights with the feeling one has when asleep, about to wake up soon, etc., dreams, foul taste in my mouth on waking. One night (the night of the Louvre) I go to bed, I’m really worried about my digestion, but I’ve taken tea very late and eaten a heavy dinner (3 desserts). On waking I let out a spontaneous cry of surprise, exquisite taste in my mouth, calm, perfect sleep. Consequently I feel much better that day. The next afternoon I go to the Bois as usual on foot, then Uncle’s carriage, etc. Troubled sleep, disgusting taste in my mouth.
So this is what I said to myself.
The only day followed by a good night was like this:
No Bois except in a coupé, because I called for Uncle outside the Louvre, not at the Acacia Gardens.
The next day I try not going to the Bois.
I take tea, I dine (by pure chance) very substantially, even provoking some comments on Grandmother’s part.
No bad taste in my mouth.53
This practice of monitoring himself—eventually leading to self-diagnosis and self-medication—became a lifelong preoccupation.
In October, Marcel enrolled in class 1 and began his next to last year at Condorcet. He studied in Maxime Gaucher’s and Victor Cucheval’s sections in rhetoric B, where the two men shared the teaching. Gaucher taught French and Greek literature, Cucheval the literature of ancient Rome, together conducting “this year’s circular journey from Homer to Chénier by way of Petronius.”54 The students all agreed that M. Gaucher, known as “an infinitely charming and liberal spirit,” was one of Condorcet’s outstanding professors. Robert Dreyfus remembered him as being “the liveliest and most indulgent professor at Condorcet, a man much admired for his wit, his mischievous and jovial nature, and the literary column he wrote as a critic for La Revue bleue.”55 Thus for nearly a year, cut short at the end by Gaucher’s illness and death, Marcel had the good fortune of studying with an excellent teacher who was also a respected critic at a favorite review. Gaucher, who had a profound influence on Marcel, seems to have been the first teacher to appreciate his pupil’s extraordinary literary gifts.
A nonconformist, an admired and respected writer endowed with literary taste, Gaucher did not refrain from using colloquialisms in class, a practice noted and frowned upon by inspectors. A wise teacher, Gaucher provoked questions more often than he provided conclusions. He wanted his students to be curious, open-minded, and industrious, to know that one does not begin a journey or a quest with the answers in hand. Marcel had already become indifferent to literary theories, worth nothing to a young writer who understood that each artist must find his own path to success. Gaucher’s refreshing approach held his attention.
To develop his students’ writing skills, Gaucher concentrated on training them to write original essays on literary topics that he proposed. One topic required the discussion of a statement by Denis Diderot: “Sensitivity is scarcely the quality of a great genius; it is not a genius’s heart but his head that matters.” In his notes for the essay, apparently left unfinished, Marcel disagreed with Diderot, giving the heart the major role. But intelligence also had a vital part to play in creating a work of art: “Sensitivity alone, unless it has been implemented by intelligence, will perhaps excite our emotions, never our admiration, nor the elevated pleasures of intelligence that a true work of art gives us because art provides us with the order, meaning, and harmonious logic that is usually hidden in life.”56 In his mature work, Proust would define the artist as someone who “makes things visible,” who shows us how to see things that are usually concealed.
Another composition challenged the opinion of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), France’s most distinguished literary critic of the nineteenth century. Gaucher had given his pupils Sainte-Beuve’s statement that those who passionately admire Corneille must have a certain liking for boastfulness, whereas those who are passionate admirers of Racine run the risk of having too much of what the French call taste. Marcel addressed the question in a remarkably authoritative voice formed by his years of serious, dedicated reading. His comments showed an apprentice writer’s complicity with the masters he admires, a realization that each must possess a unique quality, a vision that made his work original. It would be absurd, he argued, to seize upon a writer’s defining characteristic, whether Corneille’s pride or Racine’s refinement, and use that as the basis for accusing him of being excessive.
Poetry and literature are not the result of pure thought, he wrote, but bear the stamp of an individual temperament. A true writer will produce masterpieces, like Corneille’s Le Cid or Racine’s Andromaque, that are the highest expression of an artist’s humanity, seeming to derive from the aggregate soul belonging to the tribe of man. We should love great artists not by taking their defects as the essence of their originality but rather by seeing their strengths as the foundation of their genius and the reasons for its development. Thus, to admire passionately Racine is simply to esteem the most profound and sincerest intuitions of so many charming, martyred lives. To admire fervently Corneille would be to love in its integral beauty, in its unalterable pride, the highest achievement of a heroic ideal.57 Marcel’s argument is lucid, his reasons informed yet commonsensical. One can detect here Proust’s earliest predilection for Racine’s plays, which, as he noted, “affirm the power of love.”58
Gaucher appreciated Marcel’s superior essays and asked him to read them aloud in order to encourage his classmates to improve their writing. One student, Pierre Lavallée, recalled Marcel’s essays as being “so rich in impressions and images, already quite ‘Proustian’ with their sentences larded with asides and parentheses. . . . I can still see and hear Marcel reading his papers aloud, and the excellent, the charming M. Gaucher commenting, praising, criticizing, then suddenly overcome with laughter at the stylistic boldness, which actually delighted him. It was the joy of his last days to have discovered among his students a born writer.”59
The Latin teacher Victor Cucheval, soon to be awarded the Légion d’honneur for his scholarly achievements, was a strict Cartesian who had no patience with students he considered sluggards—a category to which he at first assigned Marcel. The boy’s nonconformity and the idiosyncratic style he had already begun to develop did not appeal to the rigorous Cucheval, who judged Marcel’s progress as mediocre and uneven, labeling him a daydreamer and mischief maker.60 Marcel, often at odds with his teachers concerning their opinions about writers and art, had begun to experiment with a writing style unlike that expected of a schoolboy. Writing to Robert Dreyfus, a year behind him at Condorcet, Marcel, aware that he had already become the school eccentric, advised his friend not to emulate his experiments with style, his disputes with teachers, and his attempts to convince them that some contemporary writers merited reading:
I wrote papers that weren’t at all like school exercises. The result was that two months later a dozen imbeciles were writing in decadent style, that Cucheval thought me a troublemaker, that I had disrupted the class, and that some of my classmates came to regard me as a poseur. Luckily it only lasted for two months, but a month ago Cucheval said: “He’ll pass, because he was only clowning, but fifteen will fail because of him.” They will want to cure you. Your comrades will think you’re crazy or feeble-minded. For several months I read all my French papers aloud in class, I was hooted and applauded. If it hadn’t been for Gaucher, I’d have been torn to pieces.61
Years later Proust took his revenge on Cucheval, whose unfortunate name, a schoolboy’s delight, made him the butt of many jokes. Pronounced the same as culcheval, the professor’s name sounded just like the words for horse’s ass. In 1903 Proust, using the pseudonym Horatio, made fun of the poor man in a society column describing an elegant party for Le Figaro. Upon the arrival of each guest in the ballroom, the usher announces the name:
“Your name, sir?”
“M. Cucheval.”
“Oh, no, sir, I asked your name?”
“Don’t be insolent! M. Cucheval.”
And the usher felt obliged to consult the host:
“Monsieur le baron, this gentleman says his name is M. Horse’s Ass, must I announce him like that?”
The issue is left unresolved and the disconcerted baron runs off to consult the baroness.62
Marcel’s name did not appear on the honors list at the end of the year, but at the awards ceremony on July 31, owing to Gaucher’s enthusiastic endorsement, he won the most prestigious honor, first prize in French composition. He also received certificates of merit for Latin and Greek. In coming years, Marcel did not always find editors and reviewers who immediately recognized, as had Gaucher, the exceptional beauty of his prose.
At Condorcet, the boys whom Marcel considered the most intelligent were Robert Dreyfus, Daniel Halévy, and Jacques Bizet.63 Halévy and Bizet were also, according to classmate Fernand Gregh, by far the most undisciplined: “The two cousins competed in making an uproar. The naïve study-hall teacher, M. Martin, who wore blue spectacles, said to them one day, ‘You know perfectly well that with your names, you’d never be expelled....’ They took advantage of the situation, the dastards!”64
Daniel Halévy had come to Condorcet in the autumn of 1887, when he was fifteen years old. Like Marcel, he was from a liberal, bourgeois Parisian family and had a Jewish ancestor in Germany.65 An intelligent, gifted boy, tall, handsome, with hazel eyes, he had a difficult but solid friendship with Proust.66 They shared many qualities and tastes, a love of literature, and a drive to succeed, but they were separated by other traits. Daniel, who liked to be seen as domineering and tough, tormented Marcel with his angry gestures and his ability to keep silent for days on end.
Among Proust’s classmates, there was an extraordinary amount of budding literary talent, accompanied by frequent outbursts of schoolboy high jinks. Daniel Halévy, Robert de Flers, Robert Dreyfus, Fernand Gregh, and Louis de La Salle were among those who formed what Dreyfus described as “our intimate circle of school-boys,” all of whom became successful writers.67 Halévy was to write biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Michelet, and Sébastien Vauban. La Salle published a volume of poetry and a novel before his career was cut short. Dreyfus was a journalist on the staff of Le Figaro for years and an important historian of the Third Republic. He wrote the first major study of Comte Joseph Arthur Gobineau, author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (The inequality of human races), who has been called the “intellectual parent of Nietzsche” and the creator of the idea of the super-man.68 Robert de Flers, novelist, playwright, and librettist, and Fernand Gregh, future author of ten volumes of poetry, were both later elected to the Académie française, a distinction not bestowed upon Proust.
On May 13, 1888, Marcel succumbed to the call of the muse and wrote a poem “To Daniel Halévy, while watching him during the first quarter hour of detention.” This untitled and unfinished verse, written primarily in rhymed alexandrine couplets, is the first known poem by Proust. Unlike other writings that he soon sent to friends or submitted to the little literary magazines his circle created at Condorcet, this one contained no homoerotic longings. The young poet expressed his horror at the tyranny of the sun over those who have been disappointed in the pursuit of their heroic dream and who now “curse you, o cruel King, fierce and white / And dream of the fresh blueness of nights / Near mystical cats.”69 This poem shows the influence of Marcel’s favorite poets; if Leconte de Lisle made him want to write Parnassian verses, his first poems also echo the rhythms and images of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Charles Cros.70
Although Marcel’s friends were amazed by his talent, they were often repulsed by his personality, his clinging possessiveness, his tireless preoccupation with gentillesse (kindness), and his direct homosexual overtures. The boys recognized that while Marcel was “close” to them, he was different, and that sufficed to awaken their distrust and provoke their harsh treatment of him. They found it hard to believe anyone could be so refined and so tactful, and they thought his behavior was an affectation. Only later did they realize that the “words that he wasted on us, ‘niceness, tenderness,’ conveyed quite sincerely and, in a timid, attenuated language, as we later understood, his deep need to be liked.”71
Precocious in composition, Marcel was gifted at observing and analyzing others. He was also lucid regarding his own amorous inclinations and eager to engage in sexual experimentation. Like other adolescents overflowing with sexual energy in late-nineteenth-century France, he had three obvious choices: masturbation, visits to prostitutes, and sex with his classmates. Marcel may have been puzzled and even disturbed on becoming aware that his longings for sexual gratification were not of the kind considered normal, but he had no hesitation in avowing his feelings to his classmates. Perhaps he hoped that these desires were just an adolescent phase. Weren’t there others who felt as he did or who, at least, were curious about intimate contact?
Jacques Bizet, one year behind Marcel, had entered Condorcet in 1887. Robert Dreyfus described young Bizet as being “well liked, a faithful friend, and full of joyful life.”72 Handsome and popular, Jacques appeared gifted, sensitive, a normal adolescent boy who loved the outdoors and hiking. But Jacques had a troubled, darker side he kept hidden from his friends. Geneviève Bizet was the child of two parents whose families had histories of depression and other psychological disorders. Jacques’s troubles would not become evident until he reached adulthood.
Sometime during the winter of 1887–88, Marcel wrote Jacques saying that he greatly needed his friendship because he had so many problems and hinted that his family treated him badly. Exaggerating his difficulties to win sympathy, he said that his parents had threatened to send him away to boarding school in the provinces. He then asked Jacques to be his “reservoir,” the recipient of his overflowing sorrows and love: “My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and be loved.” He ended his short, desperate appeal with a declaration, “I embrace you and love you with all my heart.”73
Like all adolescents, Marcel felt isolated and misunderstood. In drafts of Jean Santeuil and later the Search, he remembered the feeling of being alone, plotted against, a prisoner of his family, a feeling that roused in him “that old desire to rebel against an imaginary plot woven against me by my parents, who imagined that I would be forced to obey them, that defiant spirit which drove me in the past to impose my will brutally upon the people I loved best in the world, though finally conforming to theirs after I had succeeded in making them yield.” Marcel, whom his classmates considered spoiled, would write in Jean Santeuil that his protagonist’s childhood resembled a prison, that his “parental home had seemed to him a place of slavery.”74 No doubt he felt shackled by his parents’ relentless bourgeois aspirations for him and society’s hypocrisy regarding homosexual love.
Undeterred by the knowledge that the couplings he desired were generally considered perverse, Marcel expressed in his letters to his classmates, often humorously, his strong homosexual urges. These letters reveal an astonishingly mature and analytic voice, highly sensual and yet capable of self-parody without abandoning candor. Marcel put his own sensuality under a microscope, refused to be hypocritical by pretending to denounce sensual pleasures, and proposed a hedonistic moral code that embraced the needs of his mind and his body.
In the spring of 1888, Marcel, still enamored of Jacques, handed him a letter at school, inviting him to have sex. Jacques, indifferent to the proposal, passed his unwanted suitor a note declining the offer while Marcel was on his way to M. Choublier’s history class. Once in his seat Marcel skimmed the letter and then, on the sheet of notebook paper intended for history notes, he wrote his reply. Pretending to accept the refusal, Marcel praised Jacques’s intellectual gifts and gently pressed his case. He again offered an erotic, troubling flower—his own eager body—tinged with all the dangers of forbidden love. By asking Jacques if he might pluck his flower-penis and savor the tender yet dangerous bloom, was Marcel naïve or indifferent to exposure and ridicule? The letter pleads along these lines: It is all right to engage in such behavior now, because we are young, innocent, and inexperienced.
My dear Jacques,
Under the stern eye of M. Choublier, I have just raced through your letter, propelled by my fear. I admire your wisdom, while at the same time deploring it. Your reasons are excellent, and I am glad to see how strong and alert, how keen and penetrating your thinking has become. Still, the heart—or the body—has it reasons that are unknown to reason, and so it is with admiration for you (that is, for your thinking, not for your refusal, for I am not fatuous enough to believe that my body is so precious a treasure that to renounce it required great strength of character) but with sadness that I accept the disdainful and cruel yoke you impose on me. Maybe you are right. Still, I always find it sad not to pluck the delicious flower that we shall soon be unable to pluck. For then it would be fruit... and forbidden.75
Marcel, by juxtaposing reasons of the heart and body, made a wordplay on Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim from his Pensées: “Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point” (The heart has its reasons that reason does not know).76 In French the words for heart, cœur, and body, corps, have a similar sound. But in spite of the image of flowers and the wittily altered maxim, Jacques was simply not interested and shrugged off the sly invitation. Dreyfus remembered that Jacques often laughed robustly at Marcel’s attempts at seduction because the younger boy “only liked women, who also found him very attractive, and so did not see himself at all compromised by Marcel’s bizarre behavior; on the contrary, it flattered him.”77 Bizet remained a close friend, as he indicated a year later when he gave Marcel a photograph of himself as a child, on the back of which he wrote: “To my dearest friend (with Halévy), 18 February 1889.”78 Marcel cannot have been happy at sharing first place in Jacques’s heart with Halévy, for he, like his later fictional heroes, exhibited extreme jealousy in his affections. Jacques-Émile Blanche recalls a childhood friend of Marcel’s who told Blanche that in playing with the future writer, he was “gripped with fear when I felt Marcel seize my hand and declare to me his need for total and tyrannical possession.”79
That spring Marcel wrote Jacques another letter, revealing that Marcel’s parents had discovered the nature of his sexual desires and his obsessive masturbation.80 Jacques gave the letter to Halévy, who recorded it in his diary.81 Before copying the letter, Daniel noted, “Poor Proust is absolutely crazy.” Marcel had written in a rage when his mother forbade him to see Jacques or invite him over, “perhaps because she is worried about my affection that is somewhat excessive and that may degenerate (so she believes perhaps) into a . . . sensual affection.”82 Mme Proust apparently had good reason to be alarmed. Marcel goes on to say that she believes Jacques has some of the same faults as he: rebellious spirit, nervousness, unfocused mind; perhaps even onanism. Marcel described for Jacques the scene that erupted when his father caught him masturbating: “This morning, dearest, when my father saw me . . . he begged me to stop masturbating for at least four days.” He continues melodramatically by saying that if his parents refuse him permission to invite Jacques, then he will love him “outside the walls” of the family prison, and the two friends will make their common abode in a nearby café.
This letter amazed Daniel, not only because of the intimate glimpse into the Proust family’s private struggle with Marcel’s emotions and raging sexuality but also as a literary production. He expressed to his diary his astonishment that Proust had written the letter without crossing out a word: “This deranged creature is extremely talented, and I know NOTHING that is sadder and more marvelously written than these two pages.” Halévy noted that we must tolerate excesses when one has genius, but he feared that Marcel’s obsessions would destroy his gifts. “More talented than anyone else. He overexerts himself. Weak, young, he fornicates, he masturbates, he engages, perhaps, in pederasty! He will perhaps show in his life flashes of genius that will be wasted.” Years later, when asked whether any of Proust’s schoolmates had a premonition of his genius, Halévy answered that although they knew Marcel was obviously talented, no one believed he had “the will power ever to achieve a masterpiece.”83
Marcel’s parents, alarmed at his proclivities, searched for solutions. His father concluded that his son needed to visit a brothel and gave him ten francs. Marcel went to a brothel, but in his consternation broke a chamber pot and lost his erection and his money. Jeanne, fearing Adrien’s wrath if he found out Marcel had been so careless with the money while failing to obtain the desired results, advised him to appeal to his grandfather. Marcel sent Nathé an urgent plea for thirteen francs: “Here’s why. I so desperately needed to see a woman in order to put an end to my bad habit of masturbating that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But 1st in my agitation I broke a chamber pot 3 francs and 2d in this same agitated state I was unable to screw. So here I am still awaiting each hour 10 francs to satisfy myself and in addition 3 francs for the chamber pot.” He ended his petition on a humorous, bravura note: “But I dare not ask papa for money again so soon and I hoped you will be able to come to my aid in this instance, which, as you know, is not only exceptional but unique: it can’t happen twice in one lifetime that a person’s too upset to screw.”84 Unfortunately, the outcome of Marcel’s misadventure remains unknown.
Nathé was the model for M. Sandré in Jean Santeuil, where he is described as a “violent and sweet” man who worries only about his daughter’s happiness, his son-in-law’s career, and his grandson’s health. Marcel made this observation about elderly couples: “Old people don’t love each other, they love their children.”85 Nathé did have tender affection for his grandson, but he tried to remain stern as part of the family’s efforts to teach the boy discipline. If the boy looked to his grandmother to guide him in reading and cultural interests, he turned to his grandfather for practical matters, usually involving money, whether a subscription for a literary journal or a visit to a prostitute.86
Toward the end of May, Marcel wrote Halévy a long note from M. Choublier’s class: “Everyone is ‘geographizing’ zealously around me.”87 After denying that he is decadent, he lists for Daniel the writers of the century he admired above all others: “Musset, Hugo, Michelet, Renan, Sully-Prudhomme, Leconte de Lisle, Halévy, Taine, Becque, France.” He also mentions Théodore de Banville and Heredia, certain works by Mallarmé, and the Chansons of Verlaine, which he found exquisite but with reservations.88 After more literary chitchat, he expresses his desire to meet Halévy after school on those days when Halévy does not go home immediately. “Bizet will believe that I am starting with you the series of ‘lists’ that are, as you know, with me the sign of a burgeoning friendship.” The list apparently refers to a ranking of friends in order of affection.89
After thanking Daniel for giving him the opportunity not to listen to the boring Choublier, Marcel added a postscript in which he invites Daniel to cofound a major art magazine. Then, changing subjects rapidly, he discusses someone Daniel suspected of being a pederast, which led Marcel to share some information about homosexuality among youths: “(. . . If this interests you and you promise me absolute secrecy, not to tell even Bizet, I will give you documents of very great interest, belonging to me, addressed to me) from young men and especially ones in age from eight to seventeen who love other guys, eager always to see them (as I do Bizet), who cry and suffer far from them, and who desire only one thing to embrace them and sit in their lap, who love them for their flesh, who devour them with their eyes, who call them darling, my angel, very seriously, who write them passionate letters, and who would not for anything in the world practice pederasty.”
No doubt the conclusion of this single, long sentence was not what Daniel expected. One can be skeptical about Proust’s naïveté or sincerity here. He ends the postscript with another paragraph stating what was to remain his view on ethics concerning sexual love between members of the same sex: “However, generally love wins out and they [the boys] masturbate together. But don’t mock them and the friend of whom you speak, if he is like this. They are simply in love. And I do not understand why their love is any more unclean than normal love.”90 In his early twenties, Marcel elaborated this viewpoint, using an aesthetic argument to justify same-sex love in the short story “Avant la nuit” (Before nightfall).91
By seeking sexual partners among his classmates, was the adolescent Marcel playing with fire, and did he finally get burned? Letters from the family of Raoul Versini, a classmate at Condorcet, indicate that Marcel’s flirtations may have placed him in a difficult situation.92 Versini became a close friend with whom Marcel exchanged letters. Sometimes when Adrien and Jeanne were away, they allowed Marcel to spend the night at Raoul’s. Versini undertook to cure Marcel of his homosexual tendencies by lecturing him about its dangers. In a letter to Versini, Marcel confessed that he had gone too far with an older boy and agreed to perform “a very filthy act.”93 What allegedly took place is that the older boy, while begging Marcel to consent, presumably, to anal intercourse, took him by surprise “in a moment of madness” and being stronger, overpowered him. Marcel claimed that he had agreed only to certain fondlings and caresses: “I agreed at first, that was all.” Immediately after the incident he related what had happened to a friend, Abel Desjardins, and then to his father, who, aware of his tendencies, did not condemn him too severely but considered his “error a surprise.” This information, which cannot be substantiated because the letter was later destroyed, shows that his parents knew about his homosexuality.94
In the autumn of 1888, Marcel sent Daniel a sonnet with its title in capital letters, PEDERASTY, in which he celebrates the serene joys of boy love. He begins by saying that if he had a large sack of gold he would run away to an ideal country where he would like “forever to sleep, love or live with a warm boy, Jacques, Pierre or Firmin” and “breathe his scent until he dies . . . far from the mournful knell of importunate Virtue.”95
Proust’s great need to be liked, combined with his extraordinary sensitivity, often made him behave in an obsequious, unctuous manner that his friends found insincere and phony. So bizarre were his mannerisms, at once both endearing and infuriating, that his friends, realizing the French language contained no word to describe such behavior, invented one: Proustify.96 On occasions when the boys had their fill of Proustifications, they responded by displaying coldness or indifference, or by pretending not to like him any more. To show their displeasure and to indicate to Marcel that he was unwanted, they would speak to him sharply or feign a shove, dismissing him rudely with a wave of the arm, causing his large, dark eyes to fill with sadness. Often miserable, feeling misunderstood and unloved by his family, he found no solace among his friends, who considered him peculiar at best. None was willing to offer him the consolation he sought. On the contrary, filled with adolescent insensitivity, when not overtly hostile, they enjoyed teasing and tormenting him.
As summer drew to a close, he had another source of misery: his mother’s impending departure. She had decided to return to the spa at Salies-de-Béarn and to take Robert along with her, leaving Marcel behind. It is unclear why Marcel did not accompany her to the spa, since his first trip had been so successful, excepting bouts of boredom, a common and rather benign adolescent ailment. Perhaps this was part of the family strategy to wean him from his dependency upon her. One thing is certain; being separated from his mother remained his idea of misery.
From Auteuil on September 5, Marcel wrote to his “dearest Mama” on his last sheet of fancy paper that what issued from his pen would be the “purest truth,” a pledge no doubt made necessary by her fear over how he might fare and behave without her. After a funny story about taking his Uncle George to the train station, an anecdote no doubt intended to prove that he was putting on a brave face and trying his best to amuse himself despite his wretchedness over her departure, Marcel related the “accidents” he experienced at dinner. These were weeping fits caused by her absence that, coming from a seventeen-year-old boy, scandalized the family members, guests, and servants present.97
Jeanne wrote back immediately to her “poor wolf,” quickly assuring him that she was all the less inclined to criticize his weeping fits because “I had at least as much chagrin as you and I haven’t stopped thinking about you. I cannot say that I wish you were here because you would have had no pleasure till now.” She was not exaggerating, for a calamity had occurred during the night: a fire broke out and destroyed part of the building housing the baths, upsetting everyone’s regimen and schedule. The fire, the smoke, the confusion, added to the oppressive heat of late summer, would have been, she wrote, particularly difficult for him. She expressed her pleasure on learning about the success of his morning walks and urged him to take a stroll every day for as long as he enjoyed going out.
Marcel’s parents continued to worry about his weeping fits, sexual orientation, proclivities, obvious nervous disorders, and asthma. In moments of painful objectivity, Adrien forced himself to wonder whether his son would ever become strong and independent. Were not many of his tastes, habits, and mannerisms more feminine than masculine? Was Marcel not the epitome of a clinging mama’s boy? Did the boy have the stamina, the will to make his way in life and excel in a profession? The busy doctor, whose own son provided a case history of many of the ills that he sought to prevent or cure, had little time or energy to spare on Marcel’s problems. Could he count on his wife, naturally tenderhearted and kind, to follow the strict regimen necessary to educate the boy?
While Jeanne and Robert were at Salies, Marcel, who had managed to regain his composure, visited a classmate, Édouard Joyant, at Île-Adam. From there Marcel wrote Dreyfus again, trying to comprehend Halévy’s heartless treatment of him. Marcel spoke about “the different persons of whom I am composed.” Proust had already begun developing his concept of multiple selves. He identified his “romantic” self, who thought Halévy really did want to know him, and his “distrustful” self, whose voice insisted that Halévy found him an unbearable nuisance.98
What is remarkable about many of Marcel’s adolescent letters is that he used them not simply to express his emotions but to analyze them and try to comprehend his motivations and those of his classmates. He played roles himself and assigned different attitudes to his friends. He had already created for himself, years before he began trying to develop plots for stories, a laboratory in which to study the human personality and psychology. This practice, begun at such a young age, combined with his remarkable sensitivity, which allowed him to put himself in another’s place, was to serve him well when, as a mature writer, he began populating the Search with fascinating, multifaceted characters.
Lying and fiction are, after all, synonymous. A child’s imagination and penchant for making up stories are but efforts to reshape the world to make it more interesting or more to our liking—an impulse that often lasts into adulthood. Marcel’s letters reveal his intense self-scrutiny and remarkable ability with words, his passion for literature, his at times nearly ravenous desire to be loved and find happiness, all combining to create a made-up world in which he finds or seeks, at times through duplicity and manipulation but with an unyielding determination, a world in which to be happy. He wanted to love and be loved, especially by his mother but also by his friends—and physically by boys he found attractive.
We must all create a world of fiction in which we alone can live. Our world never matches the one inhabited by those with whom we are most intimate. A writer, especially one of genius, creates a world we can all visit, like paupers touring a palace, wondering, as we explore its splendors, at the remarkable differences with our own more ramshackle abode, while struck by the persistence of human nature and emotion that makes us feel that we, too, could live in such a mansion. Proust always invites us in. After making a particularly revealing remark about an aspect of a character’s personality or behavior that the reader could have thought unique, he deftly switches to a pronoun, one or we, and embraces us all, as in this maxim about how the young are necessarily uncertain of their talents and inclinations: “No one can tell at first that he is an invert, or a poet, or a snob, or a scoundrel.”99 Young Marcel could not tell either, and he continued to experiment with various personae, peering like Narcissus into the water, but seeing many reflections of himself. Ultimately, disguising himself as the egotist at the story’s center, he wrote a book that places the reader at its heart, a book that perhaps more than any other, is about each of us and our many reflections in the mirror.
This practice of relentlessly investigating and grilling—and lying to—his acquaintances would become a hallmark of jealous lovers in Proust’s fiction. His characters subscribe to the belief that in love and war all is fair, including mendacity. In their world, it is accepted, even expected, that lovers, especially, lie to each other. If one may be said to wear a mask in society, Proustian characters wear many masks for many reasons, at times voluntarily, at others because of social pressures or lust, to disguise ruthless social ambition, or to hide from their own scruples. The world at Condorcet was society in miniature, minus women. Soon Marcel was to make his entrance onto the grand stage of dissimulation, the world of high society, of vanity fair.
The adolescent Marcel, who incarnated the wretched, insecure mama’s boy, was also a precocious psychologist, and a gifted comic and mimic of his friends and professors. He understood how ridiculous he must often appear, a spectacle he depicted in outbursts of self-parody. One beautiful September day, in an elated mood before heading off to a riding lesson, Marcel sent Dreyfus a caricature of himself. If he were a great lord, he would like to “order up a play” and behave any way he liked and declare his love to Jacques. As a compensation, he would drive in a carriage to the “Acacia Gardens, the place for elegant, wealthy Parisians to see and be seen. That, to my taste, is the height of Parisian beauty in 1888.”100
Marcel next imagined two beautiful courtesans gossiping as they drive through the park. One asks the other if she knows “M. P.” and then begins to tattle about Marcel’s personality and his crushes on his schoolmates. She accuses Marcel of hypocrisy because, having given her to understand he had “quite a feeling” for her and after “pretending to love a comrade like a father he loves him like a woman.” Even among the boys, Marcel remains fickle: “The nasty part of it, ma chère, is that after making a fuss over B he drops him and cajoles D, whom he soon leaves to fling himself at the feet of E and a moment later into the lap of F. Is he a whore, is he mad, is he a charlatan, is he an imbecile?... Perhaps . . . he’s all these at once.”101
Whether engaged in mischievous play, as in this letter, or suffering from the pangs of terrible rejection and jealousy, Marcel could not help himself: he constantly reinvented himself and his friends, always aware of the rich complexity of personality and behavior. Because of the mature Proust’s absolute commitment to his vocation and his creation of “high” art, his joyful, playful side, along with his great gift for comedy, is sometimes overlooked.
The letter to Dreyfus seems to mark a turning point, as though by ridiculing himself Marcel could then turn to serious matters and a new set of fascinations with courtesans and society hostesses. Marcel had mentioned to his friend the idea of creating a newspaper in which he and his schoolmates could publish their writings. He had been reading the theater columns and books in which he caught glimpses of life in high society. In Marcel’s depiction of courtesans gossiping maliciously as their carriage descended the Avenue des Acacias, Dreyfus thought he detected the influence of two writers currently enjoying success: Jules Lemaître and Paul Bourget. It was his eagerness to read Lemaître’s articles on literature that had made Marcel beg his grandfather for the subscription to La Revue bleue.
Jules Lemaître, who also wrote drama reviews for the Journal des débats and La Revue des Deux Mondes, captivated his readers, including Marcel, with the wit and charm of his impressionistic, irony-tinged essays. Lemaître’s own works for the stage were less well received than his reviews. Paul Bourget had earned his reputation as an important writer with two novels, Cruelle énigme (1885) and André Cornélls (1887). The next year he would publish Le Disciple, the work that established him as a master of the psychological novel. A regular guest in the salons of Princesse Mathilde, Comtesse Potocka, and the former Geneviève Bizet, now Mme Straus, Bourget had ample opportunity to observe the lives of the rich and famous and of the hangers-on admitted to their intimate circles. His novels detailed the life of the privileged classes, providing analyses of the moods and inner conflicts of the idle rich. This was the world young Marcel yearned to enter.
Although Bourget’s most recent publication, Gladys Harvey, was not one of his most ambitious works, it soon attracted Marcel’s attention. The novel portrayed the life of a demimondaine, as kept women were called, and was based on Bourget’s current lover, Laure Hayman, who had been Uncle Louis Weil’s mistress. Adrien Proust was Laure’s doctor and, almost certainly, her lover.102 In late fall Marcel met Laure at Auteuil, where she had come to call on his Uncle Louis. Louis, who maintained close ties with his former mistress, had been a great ladies’ man in his day and kept a collection of photographs, which Marcel would inherit, of the celebrated actresses and cocottes he had known.103 One of the most interesting was a photograph Adrien had received from Marie Van Zandt, an American singer at the Opéra-Comique who in 1883 created the role of Lakmé in Léo Delibes’s opera. Two years earlier, Marie had inscribed to Adrien a photograph of herself dressed as a man. On the day Laure met Marcel, the thirty-seven-year-old courtesan and the schoolboy were quite taken with each other. Without knowing it, Marcel had just met the first model for one of the Search’s major characters: Odette de Crécy, the courtesan who becomes Mme Swann.
Marcel, on his outings to the Bois de Boulogne, often spotted such women, who represented his current idea of the epitome of Parisian elegance, like the two courtesans he had sketched in the self-parody. At the Pigeon Shooting Range, a private club in the Bois, he had seen Léonie Clomesnil pass by, a vision he would never forget. Each day many of the epoch’s famous courtesans, such as Clomesnil, Liane de Pougy, la belle Otero, paraded past in their carriages. The most elegant and cultivated of these lovely, expensive women was Laure Hayman.
Odette was to share many of Laure’s traits, and to have a mother who, out of hardship, decides to make her a courtesan. Odette, like Laure, has a collection of fine porcelain and a small town house in the rue de la Pérouse near the Arc de Triomphe. She is also infected with anglophilia, then fashionable, and sprinkles her sentences with English words. Through Laure, Marcel had his first glimpse at the world of the demimonde, of the milieu, mores, and customs of beautiful, clever, elegant, and expensive prostitutes. What distinguished Laure from Odette, and most other courtesans, was her education, her intelligence, and her talent, proven later, as a sculptor. Among Laure’s conquests were some of the most distinguished noble names of Europe, the duke of Orléans, the king of Greece, and Karageorgevitch, pretender to the throne of Serbia, whom, it was thought, she really loved. If she earned more respect than most of her kind, it was in large part because she never ruined any of her lovers financially and had earned the title “‘the educator of dukes’ for her attention to the arts of literature, manners, and love.”104
On September 25, 1888, just before the beginning of the school year, Marcel wrote Dreyfus about his new friend without naming her: “A platonic passion for a famous courtesan, ending in an exchange of letters and photographs.” He also alluded to the pretty Viennese girl he had met in dance class, hinting that he was involved in an “absorbing liaison” with her and that his attachment “threatens to go on at least a year for the greater good of the café-concerts and other places of the same kind, where one takes this sort of person.” Nothing more is known about this Austrian beauty and her effect on Marcel. She may have caught his fancy briefly in dance class, but the relationship must have been much less absorbing than he led his friend to believe, for, unlike Marie de Benardaky, the Viennese girl was quickly forgotten.
Marcel ended the letter by wishing Dreyfus, for the new school year, “brilliant success in your studies, sincere friends, and beautiful mistresses.”105 The idea of acquiring beautiful mistresses must have amused the fifteen-year-old Dreyfus as a bit of sheer fantasy on Marcel’s part, but such talk was certainly in keeping with Marcel’s new man-about-town air. Marcel had spent a good summer; his health had improved, he had met and become friends with one of Paris’s legendary beauties, and he was looking forward to his senior year at Condorcet, especially the philosophy class.
By the summer of 1888, Marcel had met Paul Desjardins, a teacher and moralist who wrote poetry, reviews, and essays, many of which were published in La Revue bleue. Rather stern and uncompromising as a moralist, Desjardins attacked what he viewed as the current scourges of intellectual life: religious skepticism and literary dilettantism. From a distinguished upper-bourgeois family, Desjardins had become friends with Adrien and Jeanne and occasionally accompanied Marcel and Robert on their outings. Sometimes he came to boulevard Malesherbes to read philosophy, usually the philosopher-poets Heracleitus and Lucretius, with Marcel.106 For a period Desjardins would influence Marcel’s ideas on morality and self-reliance, but teacher and pupil would soon drift apart because Desjardins hated society and considered Marcel a lost cause once he began frequenting the salons. The teacher remembered that Marcel, at the beginning of his senior year, looked like a “young Persian prince with large gazelle-like eyes under languishing eyelids; respectful, graceful, affectionate, anxious; a seeker of delights, for whom nothing was insipid; exasperated with the obstacles nature places before man’s endeavors, especially before a man such as he, so frail;—striving to transform into action the passive existence that seemed to be his lot, drawn to the effusive, the excessive even in his own charming goodness.”107
In addition to studying classical authors with Desjardins, Marcel had spent the summer reading a variety of books—those required by his professors and others for pleasure. By now, he knew by heart many of Musset’s and Hugo’s poems. In the fragmentary Jean Santeuil, Proust described his frame of mind during this period when he rebelled against reading only the classical works required by school: “Jean held the view that Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle were the greatest among all the poets ... and felt deadly bored when he read the classical authors. . . . On rainy days [as he] sat pondering in his room, the great spreading poems of Leconte de Lisle which juggled with Time, and put into words of shattering power the conception of Life as a dream and the nothingness of things, were more alive for him, more profound, more stimulating than those classical works from which such mental unease is absent.”108 Having absorbed the lessons and style of the great French classical writers, Marcel was eager to hear new voices. Marcel’s favorite novelists from early adolescence, Théophile Gautier, Pierre Loti, Alphonse Daudet, and George Sand, were being replaced by Maurice Barrès and Anatole France.
Maurice Barrès, whose distinctive voice was to influence the prewar generation, had recently published his first novel, Sous l’œil des barbares, volume one of a trilogy whose general title was Le Culte du moi. Barrès, who had the tastes and sensitivity of a fin-de-siècle aesthete, was drawn to the political arena as an active rightist politician who preached individualism and nationalism. In 1889 he was elected to the Chambre des Députés (France’s lower legislative house) as a Boulangist candidate.
Anatole France had caught Marcel’s attention with his Saturday literary chronicles in the leading daily newspaper Le Temps. Marcel enjoyed France’s graceful, impressionistic, and urbane reviews so much that he began reading his other works. France, the son of a Parisian bookseller, had intended to be a poet, but soon abandoned verse for fiction. This was proved a wise decision when his first novel, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, published in 1881, brought him fame. In 1885 he had published Le Livre de mon ami, a thinly disguised and widely acclaimed autobiographical novel about his childhood, a topic of great interest to Proust.109
During his formative years, Marcel also read in translation such English novelists of the nineteenth century as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Eliot. Eliot’s novels Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss remained lifelong favorites. Soon he added novels by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, as well as The Arabian Nights. He later remembered these enchanting Oriental tales, which filled his “adolescence with wonder,” when he began his own nocturnal narrative.110
Lately Marcel’s readings had been troubled by a habit, begun when he was fourteen or fifteen, that was becoming obsessive: intense self-analysis. He attributed this self-scrutiny in part to his isolation because of poor health and the family preoccupation, in which he fully participated, of monitoring all his habits, symptoms, and bodily functions. In Jean Santeuil, Proust described himself as the anxious, hopeful schoolboy he was in 1888. All his “dreams of tenderness and melancholy,” and the discoveries made therein, “had developed in him a habit of self-examination for which the study of philosophy had not provided the necessary food.” So far he had found his “bearings and a natural nourishment in the exaltation produced in him by the reading of books which, no matter how superficially, gave him the sense of a philosophic background.”111
The intelligent older boys whose opinion he respected considered Alphonse Darlu to be a “great philosopher” who possessed “the profoundest mind” of any teacher at Condorcet.112 Marcel, weary from endless self-probings, hoped that philosophy held the key. On Monday, October 1, Marcel began his last year at Condorcet when he walked into the philosophy class at 8:15. He saw that he had as classmates Élie Halévy and Xavier Léon, both brilliant candidates for the École normale supérieure and future philosophers. Their presence alone guaranteed that he would face serious competition for top ranking in this class. By 8:30, the teacher had still not arrived and the boys grew restless. Marcel was nervous but confident. Some days earlier he had turned in the assigned summer essays, convinced they contained the best writing he had produced. His prospects for the school year seemed brighter because his health had improved.
Suddenly, Alphonse Darlu burst into the classroom.113 Clutching a briefcase, he was out of breath and had obviously experienced some difficulty in getting to school. A redheaded man, the professor wore glasses and a scarf around his neck. Marcel noticed the red hair, a markedly oval-shaped face, accentuated by a dark beard neatly trimmed to a sharp point, a receding hairline, and a slightly bulbous nose on which rested a pair of glasses. The professor’s stare was piercing, his demeanor serious—perhaps the result of all the years spent examining philosophical problems and their social ramifications. Marcel soon learned that although Darlu never compromised his principles, his severity was only skin deep. At thirty-nine, Darlu was in his fourth year at Condorcet, where he had acquired the reputation of being an outstanding teacher who awakened many adolescent minds to the intellectual joys of philosophy. Marcel became one of Darlu’s preferred disciples, always referring to him as “our dear master.”
Proust, like his later fictional hero Jean Santeuil, may have been disconcerted by his first philosophy class. The transition from literature to philosophy, from the more subjective commentaries that characterize the study of literature to the rigorous system of logic required of philosophy students, could be daunting. As he struggled to follow the introductory lecture, he heard Darlu refer to difficult philosophical concepts delivered in a concatenation by a voice strangely accented. Darlu spoke with the heavy accent of his native city of Libourne, on the Dordogne River in southwestern France. He was articulate, eloquent even, but his odd pronunciation at first distracted the students. Marcel, fresh from his readings of Ernest Renan, Barrès, and France, might have expected to find the same gracefulness, the same worldly charm and skepticism in the masters of philosophy. He felt himself growing desperate and weary as he attempted to follow all the ideas and connections that poured from Darlu’s lips
with a fluency which made Jean, who had never heard anything like it, feel so exhausted at the end of five minutes that he ceased to follow what was being said. Not once did the words “vanity of life” or “nirvana” come like a familiar and delightful refrain to recall his wandering attention. Never through the whole course of the lessons did there occur any of those sublime and sweet-scented images before which, throughout this headlong intellectual race, he might have paused for rest as at a flower-strewn wayside shrine. Nor was that all. He, who knew that there was no such thing as the “good” or the “true,” was staggered to hear this man, about whose genius he had heard so much, speaking of goodness, truth and certainty.114
After the first day, as Marcel reviewed his notes and impressions, he realized that despite the complexity of the opening lecture for the novice in philosophy, the teacher’s words had seemed addressed directly to him. The evening after his second day in class, he wrote to Darlu seeking a remedy to his intensive self-analysis that caused him to imagine his consciousness as containing multiple selves. He feared becoming too intellectual and losing his ability to “take complete pleasure in what used to be my highest joy, the works of literature.” Now when he read a poem by Leconte de Lisle, even while he was “savouring the infinite delights of former days,” his other self amused itself by looking for the causes of his pleasure; finding them “in a certain relationship between me and the work, specifically, it imagines conditions diametrically opposed to beauty, and ends by killing all my pleasure. For more than a year I have been unable to judge anything in a literary light, I am devoured by the need for set rules by which to judge works of art with certainty.” He feared that the cure would require him to cease the constant contemplation of his inner life, a thought that struck him “as frightful.” Marcel told his professor that he assumed his predicament was common in “persons of my age, whom ill health obliged in the past to live a good deal to themselves.”115 He urged Darlu to keep this letter confidential for fear of being ridiculed by his classmates, who already found him sufficiently odd.
Darlu’s precise remedy to Marcel’s problem is not known. Proust was to remember the danger of excessive intellectualization when creating his fictional writer Bergotte in the Search, whose last works are overly intellectual, indicating a dryness of the soul, a fatal condition for an artist. The question that tormented Marcel in his senior year, unanswered completely until the concluding volume of the Search, was whether art has intrinsic value. Does art point to any universal, eternal value? Can it transcend mere materialism and human vanity? Proust lived his entire life, however, as if the answer were a resounding “Yes!”
Darlu may not have had an easy solution to Marcel’s problem of intensive self-analysis, but almost immediately Marcel began to enjoy the lectures. Darlu was a gifted orator and took great pleasure in the verbal exchanges and debates with his students. His method normally consisted of oral presentations by students, followed by questions, and finally a lecture. Darlu was so well prepared and adept at leading discussions that his lessons resembled brilliant conversations between a group of enlightened young men and their mentor. His classes were ideal for the bright, ambitious, literarily inclined young men at Condorcet. Marcel and Xavier Léon found the discussions with Darlu so engaging that they often would leave the classroom with their teacher, follow him home, and mount the stairs with him to his sixth-floor apartment on rue de la Terrasse without having exhausted the subject begun in the classroom.
The students, however, were often discouraged when Darlu returned assignments, because he was unrelenting in the high standards he set for them. He informed them in blunt, picturesque language when they had failed to meet his expectations, even when their compositions received the highest marks. Fernand Gregh remembered some of the comments Darlu wrote on compositions, sarcastic remarks that came after the praise for being in the top tier: “product of a sick mind” (to which for good measure he added Horace’s original phrase, œgri somnia vana), or “Sganarelle philosophy,” after Molière’s comic, cowardly lackey. Darlu returned one essay to Marcel after having written three times diagonally across the page Verbiage. In Jean Santeuil, Professor Beulier, like Darlu, seeks to purge the influence of decadent writers from his students’ essays.
Once Marcel handed in a composition in which he attempted to demonstrate how a scientist draws conclusions enabling him to derive a law from factual knowledge. Darlu, disappointed in the essay, wrote across the top of the first page that the composition was “extremely vague and superficial.” He did allow that the topic was “very complex” but nonetheless awarded Marcel only four points out of a possible twenty.116 The demanding professor added a remark in which the devastated pupil found a grain of encouragement: there was “some progress in composition.”117 This harsh appraisal was quite different from the praise Proust had received in Gaucher’s classes.
The teachers we admire most are those who help us to know ourselves, who awaken within us a desire to learn and to succeed. Xavier Léon, speaking for his generation of Condorcet students in the introduction to his Philosophie de Fichte, credited Darlu with teaching him to know and love philosophy: “I owe him my destiny and my conscience: I owe him the best of myself.”118 Robert Proust, in the class after Marcel’s, recalled the professor’s vivid, imagistic way of speaking even when explaining the most complex philosophical ideas. Darlu’s “teaching manner was personal and intuitive and he had a nearly poetic way of explaining things that Marcel loved.”119 As his main prop, Darlu used a splendid top hat that he “would place on the lectern . . . and produce philosophy from it as though he were a magician.”120 His methods were innovative and his purpose clear: he wanted to create unfettered minds, capable of thinking for themselves.
From Darlu, Marcel learned, as an antidote to Hippolyte Taine’s positivism, the lessons of Platonic and Kantian idealism and rationalism. These philosophers, with the later addition of Ruskin’s aesthetics, served Proust well until he advanced beyond their systems to formulate his own aesthetics and ethics.121 Marcel admired in Darlu’s discourses the strength of his convictions, which were free from any trace of religious mysticism, his Olympian self-assuredness, the enthusiastic love of philosophy that he conveyed to his students, and his belief in progress in civilization due to the succession of great minds in all domains of creativity. Darlu believed in science and philosophy, and in the role of religion in its proper domain; his idea of God was that of a spirit embodying truth.122
Sometime that autumn Marcel wrote to Daniel Halévy a letter showing that his thoughts in Darlu’s class were, at times, on subjects less idealistic and transcendental than Plato and Kant. Daniel had apparently given Marcel a verbal lashing and called him a pederast. Proust replied, stating in the opening paragraph that his “ethical beliefs allow me to regard the pleasures of the senses as a splendid thing.” He attempted to explain why affectionate caresses between boys need not be corrupt:
You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken. If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes which reflect the grace and refinement of your mind with such purity that I feel I cannot fully love your mind without kissing your eyes, if your body and mind, like your thoughts, are so lithe and slender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap, if, finally, I feel that the charm of your person, in which I cannot separate your keen mind from your agile body, would refine and enhance “the sweet joy of love” for me, there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words, which would have been more fittingly addressed to someone surfeited with women and seeking new pleasures in pederasty. I am glad to say that I have some highly intelligent friends, distinguished by great moral delicacy, who have amused themselves at one time with a boy. . . . That was the beginning of their youth. Later on they went back to women.
Presenting homosexual love between innocent youths as a rite of passage, Proust gave the examples of Socrates and Montaigne—Proust later realized he was mistaken about Montaigne—who “permit men in their earliest youth to ‘amuse themselves’ so as to know something of all pleasures, and so as to release their excess tenderness.” Such “sensual and intellectual friendships are better for a young man with a keen sense of beauty... than affairs with stupid, corrupt women.” Although Marcel felt the “old Masters” were wrong, he did accept the “general tenor of their advice. Don’t call me a pederast, it hurts my feelings.”
Darlu then announced that he was going to question Marcel, who had to interrupt his letter and concentrate on philosophy. He ended with a quick request to Daniel: “But tell me what you mean by saying that your hands are not pure.”123 The indirect question, placed as though it were a casual afterthought, shows Marcel typically eager to learn all he could about his friends’ secrets. The reference to “impure hands” was, Marcel surmised, a confession on Daniel’s part that he engaged in masturbation. Marcel remained trapped in the struggle between a young man’s desires to remain pure and to taste the forbidden fruit. Overflowing with tenderness, he sought an ethics that would sanction the possession of his masculine ideal: intelligent beauty.
Darlu may not have known that Marcel spent part of his class time writing letters justifying homosexual love between youths, but the professor was aware of his frequent infatuations with classmates. One day, after seeing Marcel at Condorcet with yet another new friend, Darlu asked him: “What number did you give him when he passed through the door of your heart?”124 In his final year at Condorcet, Marcel was blithely hedonistic, appreciative of Anatole France’s brand of epicureanism, which perfectly suited his tastes and humor.
At the beginning of the fall term, Robert and other friends had noticed a change in Marcel, who no longer cared for the games in the parks along the Champs-Élysées. Now that “his beautiful languorous eyes had attracted the attention” of celebrated courtesans, his desires had gone farther afield.125 Marcel wanted to distance himself from the younger, bothersome boys who teased him about preferring the company of the older women who opened their salons to him. Laure Hayman had recently given Marcel a copy of Gladys Harvey, autographed by Paul Bourget and bound in the flowered silk from one of her petticoats. She, too, had signed her name, dated October 1888, and penned some advice: “To Marcel Proust, Do not love a Gladys Harvey.”
Laure, with her years of experience observing, teaching, and flattering men—a professional necessity—recognized Marcel’s precocious, genuine gifts. He constantly amazed her by the acuity of his psychological observations, especially from one so young, expressed in words that were often as eloquent as the classical French of La Rochefoucauld or Blaise Pascal. Considering Marcel’s pale skin and fine features, reminded of the figurines in her porcelain collection, she chose a new name for her young admirer: “my little psychologist in porcelain.”126
Word of Marcel’s nickname spread quickly among his classmates, delighted to have a new reason to tease him. Dreyfus remembered: “We laughed at school on learning that she was mad about Marcel Proust, taking him along wherever she went, that he attended her parties, where he was thrilled to meet dukes, writers, and future members of the Académie française.”127 Marcel’s classmates, many of whom had literary ambitions, had reason to be jealous, but no one took him too seriously as a competitor. He was tremendously gifted, of course, but too delicate, too exquisite, and too frivolous.
Some of the boys who had received love letters from Marcel must have been confused. Could he possibly be having an affair with a woman who, from their point of view, was an ancient but celebrated courtesan, currently the subject of a novella by one of their favorite writers? Jacques-Émile Blanche, Proust’s future portraitist, who knew both Marcel and Laure, believed there was more than mutual fascination between them. His friends had noticed him every morning walking with Laure, who obviously doted on her young protégé.128
Daniel Halévy wrote in his diary on December 5, 1888:
Proust, Jacques, and I went for a walk. We pass in front of Laure Hayman’s town house, and, naturally, Proust cannot resist the desire to drop in. He remains a quarter of an hour and comes back out with this witty rejoinder from Barbey d’Aurevilly, related by her—Bourget had invited him [Barbey] for a meal—
Bourget: Is it true that you are a pederast?
Barbey: My tastes, my age, my whole life inclines me in that direction, but the ugliness of the sex in question has always prevented me from entirely becoming one.129
In Laure’s salon, Marcel met bohemians and the well-to-do. Artists, bourgeois, and aristocrats rubbed elbows as they enjoyed fine food, entertainment, and choice Parisian gossip. Men like Adrien Proust and Louis Weil pursued the courtesans and actresses whom Laure invited. The actress Louise Théo, yet another close attachment of the energetic Uncle Louis, signed, perhaps at Marcel’s request, one of her photographs: “To Marcel Proust, the nephew of my dear friend M. Louis Weil, with my sincere friendship.”130 While Mme Straus and others of Marcel’s more distinguished female acquaintances would provide inspiration for the duchesse de Guermantes, Laure and Louise belonged to the group of actresses and courtesans who would pose for Odette de Crécy.
Seventeen years old. Eleven o’clock in the evening. October. I am living in a sanctuary, in the midst of a spectacle.
In their final years at Condorcet, Daniel, Jacques, Marcel, and a few other classmates began producing short-lived little magazines of which they would circulate a few copies from hand to hand. In November 1887 the boys created Le Lundi, subtitled “Artistic and Literary Review,” whose white cover bore an ink drawing of two cupids lifting a great, open book across whose pages was spread a quote from Paul Verlaine: “The triumphant eclecticism of the Beautiful.”131 The editors made multiple copies of each issue in purple ink and then sewed the pages together by hand. In the first issue, the contributors addressed their readers and pledged to publish the best that each literary school had to offer or any work they considered beautiful. Among the schools then in vogue, the notice listed naturalist, idealist, decadent, incoherent, and progressive. Proclaiming its independence, the review assured each reader that he would find something to his liking.
Although Marcel was the oldest and most gifted of these young writers, he did not take the initiative in the creation of these reviews; he left the editor-in-chief role to Daniel, who proved to be a good choice. Le Lundi had a long run: thirteen issues. Marcel published in its pages several pastiches of Jules Lemaître, who was a disciple of Sainte-Beuve.132 Lemaître’s widely read column of theater reviews, Chronique d’art dramatique, appeared each Monday in Le Journal des débats and was considered the last word on the theater by the young generation. In December 1887 Lemaître published Contes de Noël (Christmas Stories), his own pastiches of the writings of popular authors, printed under their names. This literary exercise of imitating the manner of a well-known author intrigued Marcel, who became an accomplished pasticheur.133
For Le Lundi, Marcel produced several causeries that show his ability to identify a writer’s particular tics. Marcel’s essay in the manner of Sainte-Beuve and Jules Lemaître, Causerie d’art dramatique, which appeared in the review’s second issue on December 5, discussed the use of local color, said to be absent from classical tragedy, in Corneille’s play Horace. This essay, like many the young men wrote for their reviews, is basically academic, reflecting literary debates taking place in the classroom.
Marcel’s next article, Causerie littéraire, was more personal, for it discussed his admiration for Gautier’s adventure novel Le Capitaine Fracasse. Defending a favorite writer against the distinguished but stuffy critic Ferdinand Brunetière, who deplored Gautier’s lack of ideas, Marcel saw in Gautier a precursor of modern decadence in the good sense, similar to Anatole France, in whom he found not ideas and romantic angst but gracefulness. He confessed that the apparent charms of decadence as practiced by Gautier and France tempted him: “If I were ever to found a Republic in the manner of Plato,... all ideas would be banished from it, its citizens would look at the sky and dream.”134
Marcel, who still dreamed of becoming a playwright, announced a play, La Première Matinée de mai (The first May morn), inspired, he told the review’s readers, by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play involved pagan May Day ceremonies, which appealed to him because of their non-Christian, Celtic origins. This is all we know about the play, which he apparently never wrote. Plays were not to be Proust’s genre. Although he had a superb ear for dialogue and produced page after page of captivating and often humorous conversations for his characters, their words were only part of the rich Proustian music, solo voices that emerge on cue from the orchestral sounds of the symphony.
After a number of issues of Le Lundi had appeared, Daniel stepped forward during an editorial meeting and proclaimed himself the inventor and promoter of a new school: subtle-ism. Marcel, perhaps due to the new emphasis on subtleties and his own search for the exquisite, began to write mainly poems, only one of which survives because he used it later for his first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and days). He wrote the poem about the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp “before a class at Condorcet, after visiting the Louvre, where I had just seen the horsemen who have a pink feather in their hats.”135 Over the years Proust wrote many poems, often doggerel bits written in jest or in letters to amuse friends. The same penchants that kept him from writing successful plays also discouraged poems.
The demise of Le Lundi came in March 1888, when the contributors, putting aside subtleties, contested Halévy’s policies and tastes, prompting Daniel to resign. But the boys’ victory was hollow; without Daniel’s supervision they were unable to produce the review. Although Halévy was clearly the leader when it came to directing the reviews, the boys looked to Marcel as their mentor in writing. In his memoir, Daniel describes Marcel as “our master, our guide in matters of taste in a school full of civil servants.” These apprentice writers, Daniel noted, were preoccupied with style: “The French language, at that time, was in poor condition. Edmond de Goncourt, with his ‘rare epithets’ and his ‘artistic writing,’ had done a lot of damage.”136 Halévy said that only Proust understood the importance of Anatole France’s influence on style through his use of “exquisite language.”137
That fall Daniel wrote “Amour,” a poem of fourteen quatrains in alexandrines.138 Reeking of decadence and the grotesque, complete with a vampire, rotting bodies, and a nun, the fifteen-year old poet’s work tells the story of a youth on his deathbed whose principal regret is that he must die a virgin. The nun, who is nursing him, comprehends his plight and enters his bed, where both die in ecstasy. Daniel spent hours on the poem before submitting it to Proust, who took “great care and kindness” in reading his rhymed adolescent sex fantasy: “And what a correction! . . . How many useful, harsh remarks penciled in the margins of my poor poem! Odious. Formless. Idiotic. Naturalist, ergo stupid.”139 Marcel did single out as très bien the fifth verse, describing the “pale, dying blond boy” with “vaporous ringed eyes.” And certainly Marcel sympathized with the nun’s willingness to grant the dying boy’s wish.
If Marcel’s comments seemed brutal even to thick-skinned Daniel, the critic softened the blows by claiming to know nothing about such matters. Proust did offer Halévy some heartfelt advice. He must free himself from the grip of the decadents, who had spoiled his ability to express his “thoughts sincerely, completely.” As a cure, Daniel should “practice Latin discourses” and, above all, read the classics. Marcel listed Homer, Plato, Virgil, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Shelley, Emerson, Goethe, La Fontaine, Racine, Rousseau, Flaubert, Baudelaire—and, among contemporaries, Renan, France, and “super omnes Ludovic Halévy.” If Marcel highly recommended Daniel’s own father, this was no doubt because of the sure, light touch of Ludovic’s libretti for Offenbach’s operettas and the superb, moving realism of his lyrics for Bizet’s Carmen. For excellent examples of fine writing, Daniel need look no further than home. Marcel then made a statement proving that though still a schoolboy, he understood the basis of creativity: “You will learn (by reading the classics) that if your mind is original and strong, your works will be so only if you are absolutely sincere. . . . Simplicity is infinitely elegant, naturalness has ineffable charm.”140 Like all advisers, Marcel at times had trouble consistently following his own advice, but at least he had identified the qualities to which he should aspire.
That fall, shortly after entering Alphonse Darlu’s philosophy class, Marcel, Daniel, and Jacques created another review, this time with Marcel as secretary. Because some of their collaborators had to write their homework assignments on green paper for the eccentric Professor Eugène Linthilhac, who believed that such paper protected his eyes, the boys decided this hue would give their little magazine an original look and its name, La Revue verte.141 A disagreement soon erupted among the members of the editorial staff because Marcel wanted the single copy of each issue to be destroyed once it had been read by the small select group for which it was intended, while Daniel, who had the instincts of an archivist, wanted to preserve a copy for himself. Marcel notified Halévy that his proposal was unacceptable.142 Marcel’s ultimatum, duly submitted on green paper, may have aborted the efforts of the little publishing group. Proust feared that if copies remained in circulation, professors and parents would read and censor them. He wanted to express himself frankly regarding his own feelings, including sexual longings. Marcel’s ultimatum and a story by Jacques Bizet are the only surviving copy from this review.143
In November 1888 Marcel wrote a few sketches for a little magazine that he and his friends, switching colors, named La Revue lilas because its issues were produced in thin, pale mauve-colored notebooks purchased for a few cents at the stationer’s shop in the passage du Havre.144 No issue has survived, but Robert Dreyfus kept the battered manuscripts of two of Marcel’s brief articles.145 These are the first writings in which Marcel consciously fictionalizes his own voice in the first person.146 Previously, as in “Clouds,” there was a persona representing man in his contemplative, philosophical mode, or characters cast within stories or sketches provided by teachers or tutors.
The first text, consisting of two short paragraphs and dedicated to “my dear friend Jacques Bizet,” begins “The sky is dark purple marked with shiny patches. Oh! my little friend why am I not in your lap, my face against your neck, why don’t you love me?”147 The narrator broods under a Baudelairian dark sky, heavy with ennui and suffocation, stifling all hope. These impressions evoke feelings of loneliness, boredom, claustrophobia, and, ultimately, insomnia. He hears noises drifting through the walls from an apartment where someone is playing a waltz and from a nearby room where dishes are being put away.
The second text, a schoolboy prose poem for Bizet about night and falling asleep, starts, “The lamp feebly lights the dark corners of my room.” Although Proust is many years away from conceiving the Search, he will begin his great work with the Narrator slumbering in a dark room. Although he had yet to become the nocturnal storyteller, this early piece shows him meditating at late hours when “Everyone is asleep in the great silent apartment.” He opens the window “to see one last time the sweet, tawny face, completely round, of the friendly moon. I hear, it seems, the breath, very fresh, cold, of all the sleeping things—the tree from which seeps blue light—beautiful blue light transfiguring in the distance, at an intersection of streets, the pale, blue paving stones, like a polar landscape electrically illuminated. Overhead stretch out infinite blue fields where frail stars flourish.”
In another remarkable anticipation of the sedentary life he will one day lead, Marcel described his bedside table cluttered with glasses, flacons, cool drinks, small expensively bound books, and letters of love and friendship. The adolescent writer has already placed himself at the center of his web to observe and record the universe around him: “Divine hour. Ordinary things, like nature, I have consecrated, being unable to vanquish them. I have clothed them with my soul and with intimate, splendid images. I am living in a sanctuary, in the midst of a spectacle. I am the center of things and each brings me magnificent or melancholy sensations that I enjoy. I have before my eyes splendid visions.” Sensations and images from this luminously blue night—nocturnal solitude, moonlight streaming through open windows, the busy world in slumber, the tree seeping moonlight—all reappeared years later, cast in the mature prose of Swann’s Way.148
Dreyfus also saved, from the fall of 1888, a prose poem about homosexuality, censored by the editors of La Revue lilas. The poet yearns to escape into an idealized, decadent world where such love is not merely tolerated but celebrated. A beautiful Greek boy named Glaukos, in love with philosophy, poetry, and other young men, surrounds himself with piles of letters expressing friendship as he sits nearly naked either in the sun or in a swank, decadent decor filled with rare blooms. (Marcel hesitated between an austere classical Greek setting and a contemporary lush scene.) Glaukos has many male friends, all of them beautiful, who delight in subtle thoughts. Some of them love him infinitely: “Often seated on the sturdy knees of one of them, cheek to cheek, bodies entwined, [Glaukos] discusses with him Aristotle’s philosophy and Euripides’ poems, while they embrace and caress each other, making elegant and wise remarks in the sumptuous room, near magnificent flowers.”149
When not indulging in erotic literary and floral fantasies, Proust found inspiration in the theater and Jules Lemaître’s reviews. In fall 1888 Marcel attended a number of operettas, operas, musical reviews, and vaudeville shows.150 But what captured his attention were the classical plays of Racine and Corneille. On October 13, 1888, at the Odéon, Marcel saw a production of Athalie by Racine, whose tragedies were to be a major inspiration for the themes of jealousy and atavism in the Search. In his notes on Athalie, he indicated his admiration for the acclaimed classical actor Jean Sully Mounet, known as Mounet-Sully, who, like Sarah Bernhardt, had been accorded the epithet “divine.”151 Proust would spend years observing and noting the skills of such performers, both on the stage and in private salon readings, probing the secrets of their craft.
In the fall of his last year at Condorcet, Marcel began frequenting the salons whose hostesses he had met through classmates. While remaining friends with the sons, Marcel now preferred the witty, worldly conversations of their mothers. Bewitched by the glamour of society, whose refined milieu suited his delicate nature, he wanted to know the details of its history, ceremonies, family connections, and secrets. Eager to please and genuinely thrilled at having been invited by a society grande dame, he lavished flattery and huge, expensive bouquets of flowers on the women who invited him to the most elegant drawing rooms of Paris. The hostesses who received him were happy to add a promising young recruit to the regular guest lists at their weekly gatherings. All the ladies admired his exquisite manners, his eagerness to please, his genius at turning a compliment, and, above all, his dazzling conversation.
Although Jacques Bizet spurned Marcel’s amorous advances, he offered some-thing that eventually would be more important than the withheld “delicious flower”: entrance to his mother’s drawing room. Geneviève Straus’s salon had rapidly become one of the most brilliant in Paris. Early in her marriage to Georges Bizet, Geneviève, in need of distraction from her frequent bouts of melancholy, began inviting artists and musicians she knew from her father’s and Bizet’s circles. This group formed the nucleus of a small bohemian salon that met on Saturdays in her fourth-floor apartment at number 22, rue de Douai.152
Years after Bizet’s death Émile Straus, a wealthy young lawyer for the Rothschild banking family, began to court Geneviève. Although something of a snob, Émile was an intelligent, highly capable, industrious man, who indulged himself only in his passion for collecting paintings and his fascination with Geneviève. He pressed her to marry him, but she refused. Her friends, convinced that Straus had nothing in common with Geneviève or with them, expressed relief.
Edmond de Goncourt, who met Straus at Princesse Mathilde’s in 1883, several years before Émile married Geneviève, wrote a brief portrait of the lawyer in his diary that shows the anti-Semitism then prevalent in French society. Goncourt noted that Princesse Mathilde’s salon was becoming “a real salon for Jewry, today increased by the entry of Straus who, it is whispered, is the illegitimate son of old Rothschild. In a novel, he would be the perfect type for a satanic eyeglasses merchant with his bestial eyelids that appear paralyzed and with a wrinkle as big as a horseshoe on his forehead.”153 Despite Goncourt’s prejudices against Jews, he had an overall favorable opinion of the man, but not without reservations: “I find him intelligent, a keen observer, amiable with Jewish humility and a lawyer’s somewhat excessive, glib chatter, but he has a damned Mephistophelean air about him that makes me distrust my inclination to like him.”154 The diabolical air may have been suggested by Straus’s strange eyes, which disconcerted many who first met him. His eyes always remained half closed because of a slight paralysis, said to have resulted from an injury suffered during the siege of Paris.155
As Émile continued to court Geneviève, he invited her to Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild’s salon, where she met the gratin, the utmost upper crust of Parisian society. Geneviève’s beauty, taste, and extraordinary wit, combined with the name Bizet now in full posthumous glory, made her a star among the select. She found herself exalted, invited to all the best parties, but the popularity was nearly too much for a woman who, often ill and depressed, preferred to be alone. Then, suddenly, almost on a whim, the gratin made attendance at Geneviève’s Saturday salon an obligation for the smart set. Her neighbors stared in bewilderment at the scene in front of the apartment building, where the street echoed with the beat of hooves as elegant broughams lined up to deposit the glamorous guests, the baronne de Rothschild, Comtesse Potocka, the duchesse de Richelieu, and Comtesse Chevigné among them. These elegant ladies, most of whom lived in sumptuous town houses, eagerly climbed the stairs at the back of the courtyard to join Geneviève’s once intimate circle.
Straus had in large part orchestrated the evolution of her salon, making it an unqualified success. One day in 1886 Émile announced that Geneviève Bizet would become Mme Straus. The news alarmed her longtime friends because they still distrusted the lawyer, whom they considered indiscreet, abrupt, and insensitive. They tolerated him only because of his intelligence and obvious devotion to Geneviève. One after the other her friends tried to dissuade her from accepting his proposal: “You’re going to marry Straus! That will be tiresome.” In a reply typical of the wit that delighted Proust, she asked, “What else can I do? It’s the only way to get rid of him.”
The Strauses moved into a grand town house at 134, boulevard Haussmann, not far from Proust’s future address at number 102. Mme Straus was nearly forty when Marcel began attending her salon. Goncourt, that inveterate connoisseur and collector, could not resist describing Geneviève in her new and sumptuous interior: “She wears a dressing-gown of light, soft, puffed silk trimmed from head to toe in large flossy bows, as she sits lazily sunken into a deep armchair.” The diarist noted “the feverish mobility of her soft, velvety eyes” and the “coquettishness” of her posturing as an invalid, while holding in her lap Vivette, the latest in a line of black poodles. “A charming decor surrounds the woman. On a panel, opposite her, is a splendid Nattier painting representing a great lady of the Regency in her flowing Naiad costume. . . . In the middle of the mantel, on whose cold marble the mistress of the house occasionally leans her forehead, stands an elegant statuette of white marble attributed to Coysevox.”
Émile, during his long campaign to marry Geneviève, must have heard her express skepticism about love and marriage, as she did to Goncourt: “She speaks of love with a touch of bitterness, saying that after physical possession, it is indeed rare for two lovers to love each other equally and that inequality in love creates halting couples who don’t walk in step. . . . Her words seem to allude to the state of her soul, giving a glimpse of her regret at having allowed herself to yield to tender entreaties.”
It was rumored that one of the men to whom Geneviève had yielded was that notorious womanizer and distinguished surgeon Samuel Pozzi, a handsome, seductive man—admirably captured in one of Sargent’s remarkable portraits—whose exploits had earned him the nickname l’Amour médecin (Dr. Love). But Geneviève quickly tired of talking about the disappointments of love and turned to lighter topics. She told Goncourt fascinating stories about her poodles, one of which had so hated baths that when his was being prepared, he “simulated the most convincing head cold one could imagine.”156
In Mme Straus’s round salon in the boulevard Haussmann, Marcel met the cream of the faubourg Saint-Germain aristocratic society and that of arts and letters, like Gabriel Fauré, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Degas, Princesse Mathilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Charles Haas.157 Haas was, to Marcel’s envious eyes, the quintessence of chic in manners, gestures, and wardrobe, the incarnation of the society man who belonged not only to the highly selective Cercle de la rue Royale but also to the ultrasnobbish Jockey Club, of which he was the only Jewish member. Haas, fifty-six, apparently paid Marcel little attention, but the young man studied him intently.
Émile’s fortune made possible the acquisition of an impressive collection of paintings, which Marcel admired and studied, especially the works of the contemporary painters Claude Monet and Gustave Moreau. Straus’s passion for collecting was so strong that he rarely resisted the opportunity to add a new work to his trove, leading Geneviève to complain to friends that she was encumbered with Boudins and Corots.
The constant object of Marcel’s attention was Geneviève, so beautiful and so clever. An excellent conversationalist, she kept her remarks concise, never made speeches, remained calm but always ready with a witty remark. She lacked the cattiness and pettiness that typified so many leading hostesses. Her nephew Daniel Halévy said that she was too indifferent to what went on around her to be mean. Émile did take their entertaining seriously, organizing their receptions and repeating Geneviève’s witticisms to everyone he encountered.158 Eventually, her husband’s presence became more tolerable to Geneviève’s friends, who had to admit that though they still did not care much for Émile, the Straus salon was anything but boring.
Geneviève noticed that her guests were amused by Marcel, who seemed to possess encyclopedic knowledge, expressed with amazing eloquence on a number of subjects, literature especially, but also French history and botany. He played so naturally the role of a delicate, sensitive, and fawning page, eagerly attentive, producing magnificent flowers and exquisite compliments in great abundance. If most of the women were captivated by his kindness and manners, some of the men were disconcerted by this brilliant but strange adolescent. A number of Geneviève’s regulars considered him nothing more than an interesting oddity. Years later Gustave Schlumberger recollected, “On a stool at the feet of Madame Geneviève Straus one constantly saw the bizarre Marcel Proust, still a young man, who since then has written books admired by some and quite incomprehensible to others, including myself.”159
Just as Marcel had imagined he was in love with Jacques, he now became enamored of Geneviève Straus in her role as society hostess. Geneviève’s photograph by Nadar, taken in 1887, shows a woman with strong features, whose beauty has not diminished. The many artists and society men who pursued Geneviève were struck by her svelte figure, her flawless olive-complexioned skin, and magnificent black eyes grown even more melancholy than when captured by painter Jules-Élie Delaunay in his portrait of the young widow Bizet. Marcel found such beauty and prestige irresistible. Mme Straus, more amused than annoyed, discouraged his advances, thereby removing the only obstacle to the formation of a lifelong friendship. Over the years they would exchange letters, gossip, and information about their various ailments, which with time would make each more reclusive.
Through their sons, Marcel met Mmes Arthur and Henri Baignères, sisters-in-law who both had salons. Mme Arthur Baignères and her husband were close friends of the celebrated writer Alphonse Daudet, whose burlesque adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon Marcel had admired since the summer at Salies-de-Béarn. Marcel would soon be introduced to the Daudet family, with whom he would have a close lifelong relationship. Mme Arthur Baignères’s son Paul, two years older than Marcel, had already developed a passion for art and owned a reproduction of a Vermeer painting. This reproduction may have provided Proust’s first exposure to an artist whose work The View of Delft was to figure in a key scene in the Search.160 Marcel soon became a weekly guest in both Baignèreses’ drawing rooms, where the regulars were astonished to learn that the knowledgeable, articulate young man was still in high school.
Marcel’s classmates denounced his seduction by high society. Believing that he was motivated by nothing more than egotism, they deplored his lack of seriousness. Society, labeled the “pink peril” by Robert Dreyfus, posed one of the chief dangers for writers in France. Rare was the artist who could resist the allure of a Parisian society hostess and all she could offer to one of the chosen few. Julien Benda, an acerbic essayist and critic, confessed to Dreyfus one day, “I’ve discovered why I don’t go out in society; it’s because no one invites me.”161 Marcel’s friends could not fail to notice that he rarely declined an invitation, especially when he knew that members of the aristocracy would be present. Alarmed and irritated that he would risk wasting his exceptional talent, his classmates began to tease him about his servility toward people with noble titles. His behavior reinforced their conviction that he lacked discipline and would never be anything but a frivolous snob.
On March 19 Adrien’s invalid mother died in Illiers, in her small second-floor apartment overlooking the town square. She was eighty years old. Nothing else is recorded about her passing or her funeral. Although we know that her grandsons visited her in Illiers and posed for at least one photograph with her, she does not seem to have been close to any members of the family. Perhaps this was because the family seldom went to Illiers and her inclinations and poor health forced her to stay at home. She must have always seemed distant and old-fashioned to her grandsons, especially when compared with the affectionate and cultivated grandmother Weil.
That spring Marcel met one of the leading writers and thinkers of his parents’ generation when Ernest Renan came to have dinner with the family. Although Marcel had read and admired Renan’s works earlier in the year, he rushed out to purchase copies for himself and asked the distinguished author to autograph his copy of La Vie de Jésus (The life of Jesus) and Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Memories of childhood and youth).162 Renan’s studies of Christianity questioned the supernatural aspects of Christ’s life. In his later years, Proust, while recognizing Renan’s genius, saw La Vie de Jésus as “a kind of Belle Hélène of Christianity,” a reference to Offenbach’s operetta, indicating that he considered Renan delightful to read, but essentially lightweight as a philosopher.163
Proust’s unqualified admiration went to novelist Anatole France. Darlu was a friend of France’s and often discussed the writer’s works with Marcel. Darlu and France each said the other possessed “a good brain.”164 When a critic attacked Balthasar, France’s new collection of remarkably fine stories, for being “laborious, superficial, artificial, tedious, long-winded,” and so on, Marcel sent France an anonymous letter by pneumatic mail, proclaiming his admiration for France’s books.165 Marcel told France that he always read the author’s weekly Saturday chronicle in Le Temps and thought about him several times a day, although he found it difficult to imagine France’s “physical presence.”166 But this was of no consequence, because what mattered was the spirit that emanated from his books: “With the memory of the hours of exquisite delight you have given me I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.” Marcel signed the letter, “A student of philosophy.”167 Proust soon met France in Mme Arman de Caillavet’s salon, where the author was the star attraction.
Marcel was drawn to France’s hedonism, in which he could find solace and some justification for many of his cherished dreams. France’s delightful prose and fine humor tempered somewhat Darlu’s rather austere conviction that there is a truth and that only truth matters. Marcel was to hesitate for some years between the arduous quest for truth and “the Epicurean gardens in bloom of Anatole France.”168 He later found that these two ways—at first, thought to be absolute and separate entities—were actually joined.
In the early summer months before graduation there was great excitement in Paris, as the city prepared to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution with a world’s fair. On April 1, as part of the fair, the City of Light inaugurated the world’s tallest structure, which soared 984 feet (300 meters) into space. This controversial tower of indefinable symbolic value was something the likes of which no Frenchman had ever seen and for which most Parisians already felt prodigious Gallic contempt. This incredibly expensive curiosity had been erected on the Left Bank of the Seine by a friend of the Prousts’, an engineer named Gustave Eiffel.
At graduation, Marcel claimed his only top prize—but the most prestigious one of all—first place in French composition and third place in his class. For his award he received an edition of Jean de La Bruyère’s Caractères, a classical work that contains shrewd, trenchant portraits and maxims describing the mores of court life under Louis XIV.169 Marcel had made the most of his year studying philosophy with Darlu. In taking the composition prize, Proust beat all comers, even such accomplished veterans as Élie Halévy and Xavier Léon, both of whom were admitted to the École normale supérieure.170
The completion of his secondary education had been a long struggle for Marcel and his family, but now his health seemed genuinely improved. Perhaps he would leave behind the afflictions that had plagued his adolescence. His parents were relieved and proud that he had completed his lycée years near the top of a class with so many brilliant students.
Marcel cared for only two things, society and literature.171 The new graduate, eager to compete with mature writers, dreamed of being published by a serious review. If only his parents would let him pursue a career as a writer! It was clear that he would never want for money, but respectability and duty as defined by his parents demanded that he pursue university studies and select a profession in law or government. He had officially reached manhood, but in his heart he would always be his mother’s little Marcel. And yet he was ready, eager to make new friends—preferably well-born, handsome ones—and to face new challenges.
The first challenge Marcel and his classmates would face was being crafted on the other side of Paris on July 15, the very day the young men received their graduation certificates.172 The French congress passed a law regarding military service that ended one year of voluntary enlistment and established obligatory service of three years. The new law provided a short grace period during which young men could still sign up for one year. Marcel was among the many who rushed to enroll.