AFTER GRADUATION, MARCEL PLANNED a series of visits and vacations with friends. In September, a few days before his mother and Robert went to Salies for her to take another cure, Marcel left on vacation with Horace Finaly and his family to the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend.1 Horace, a Condorcet classmate who shared Proust’s interest in metaphysics, was the son of Hugo Finaly, a wealthy Jewish banker.
By the time of Proust’s visit, the ancient fishing port of Ostend had become one of Europe’s most fashionable summer playgrounds. But Marcel, who missed his mother, saw only the somber hues of the immense gray sea. Although Marcel was genuinely fond of Horace and his family, he had never been so far away from his mother. He wrote to her at Salies, confessing his low morale and loneliness. She answered immediately, expressing her surprise that he was so upset and promising her “dear poor little wolf” that she would write every day.2 Lest he regret not being with them in Salies, she painted a bleak picture. It was so hot that no one dared go out until after five. And Robert, for once in his life, had experienced some setbacks. He had been suffering from terrible nosebleeds, one of which had kept him up all night.3 Robert, who was only sixteen, had elected to take the baccalaureate exam after his year in rhetoric and had failed. Fretting about Marcel’s regimen in Ostend, Jeanne wondered whether he was eating properly and asked him to send the details of his schedule and meals.
During this vacation spent apart, she replied to Marcel’s plaintive letters, seeking to lift his spirits and offering advice. In one letter she even devised a form for him to use, showing how eager she was to monitor his routine: “Could you not also, dearest, date each of your letters, so that I can more easily follow things. Then tell me: arose at ——, went to bed at ——, hours outside ——, hours of rest ——, etc.” Hoping that new books might distract Marcel, Jeanne had arranged for a bookseller to mail him a copy of Victor Hugo’s play Ruy Blas and a book on nineteenth-century art. Because she knew that he was practicing his German with the Finalys, who spoke it fluently, she closed by sending him a thousand kisses: “Tausend Küsser.”4
In mid-September Jeanne was alarmed to receive a letter from Marcel stating his intention to return home for a performance of Tosca, starring Sarah Bernhardt. She wrote immediately, urging him to remain with the Finalys until she and Adrien and he all converged, from their separate travels, on Paris at the end of the month. As for the stomach ailments of which he constantly complained, she warned him against taking a powdered medication he had procured, a remedy she considered detestable. At the end of her letter she joined Marcel in hoping the Republicans would carry the day in the upcoming elections and declared herself like him a member of the “intelligent liberal conservative party,” her way of indicating the somewhat liberal yet independent political stance of their family.5
Having survived his separation from his mother, Marcel returned to Paris in late September. Less than two months remained before he must report for military duty at Orléans. Sometime in October he received an invitation to Mme Arman de Caillavet’s salon, where he met the contemporary writer he admired the most: Anatole France.
Mme de Caillavet, née Léontine Lippmann, lived in a sumptuous town house at 12, avenue Hoche, near the Arc de Triomphe. Mme Arman, as she was called, had met France in 1883 and not long afterward became his mistress, despite being a married woman. Caillavet was said to be furious with jealousy at his wife’s betrayal, but he remained discreet. All three parties went to extraordinary lengths to hide a liaison known to all. France practically lived in the house, where he took his meals with the couple, yet every day the three played the same comedy for the sake of appearances. France and Léontine began the day by making love in the writer’s flat, then they returned to avenue Hoche for lunch. When guests came at tea time, France, hat in hand as though just arriving, would enter through the drawingroom door and announce, “I happened to be in the neighborhood and felt I had to pay my respects.”6 France divorced his wife, who was left to raise their two-year-old daughter Suzanne. Léontine, like Proust’s future society hostess Mme Verdurin in the Search, had a nearly fanatical devotion to literature and the arts. Her liaison with France gave her the opportunity to create a literary salon in which he was the sun around whom lesser planets revolved.
Among the frequent guests at Mme Arman’s Sunday receptions or Wednesday dinners were the playwrights Alexandre Dumas fils and Georges de Porto-Riche; the writers Jules Lemaître, Ernest Renan, and Pierre Loti; and such political figures as Georges Clemenceau and Raymond Poincaré, both future leaders of France. Proust also met Charles Maurras, who later became a leading conservative journalist and a zealous monarchist. By the time Marcel left Paris to begin basic training, he had become acquainted, through the Baignèreses, the Strauses, and the Caillavets, with many members of the capital’s artistic, literary, and political elite.
On November 11, 1889, at the age of eighteen, Proust enlisted in Paris for a year of military service in the 76th Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion, 2d Company, stationed at the Coligny barracks in the city of Orléans. The new law on military service provided that for the last time a volunteer would be able to choose his regiment. By selecting Orléans, Marcel could remain close to Paris and his family. By November 15, he had traveled south to his new city on the Loire River. In 1889 Orléans was a town of more than sixty thousand inhabitants and a rich history. In 1429 a peasant girl had earned glory and ultimately sainthood by liberating the city from the English, a triumph that earned Jeanne d’Arc the epithet of “maid of Orléans.” Because Marcel loved history and had read works of ancient history as well as Augustin Thierry’s books about the Norman invasion of England, he had long been interested in military strategy. In the questionnaire he completed at age thirteen, he had listed as his favorite painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, who often depicted military scenes.7 Proust was about to see for himself what a soldier’s life was really like.
He reported to the Coligny barracks at 131, rue du Faubourg Bannier, where he underwent the standard induction procedure, received his kit, had his hair cut short, and was vaccinated. His military record describes Marcel as having dark brown eyebrows, brown hair, low forehead; his nose and mouth are listed as medium, his chin round, and his face oval. The slender volunteer’s weight was not recorded, but he stood five feet, six inches. One week later, cadet Proust began the foot soldier’s basic training, which included fencing, swimming, and calisthenics.
The minister of war had decreed that the last crop of volunteers be dispersed through all the companies and have the same obligations as the recruits from the lower classes. This meant that although Marcel was allowed to live among cadets who were more or less of his own social background, he trained with young men from extremely modest families.8 Proust was later to choose friends and lovers from the working class; his initial encounters with such youths made a favorable impression.
The first description Proust wrote about his military experience is a short piece he entitled “Tableaux de genre du souvenir” (Memory’s genre paintings), in which young men, usually of modest station, are caught at some ordinary moment in their lives. Marcel had been struck by the soldiers’ physical beauty, combined with a simplicity to which he was unaccustomed: “The rural character of the places, the simplicity of some of my peasant comrades whose bodies were more beautiful and more agile, their minds more original, their hearts more spontaneous, their characters more natural than in the case of the young men I had known before, or those I knew afterwards.”9 This is the first time Proust expressed what will become a constant theme in the Search, his admiration for the naturalness and comeliness of the common people. Proust included “Memory’s Genre Paintings,” like most of the short stories he wrote over the next several years, in Les Plaisirs et les jours (later translated as Pleasures and Regrets), published in 1896.
Marcel adapted quickly to life in the barracks, with its spartan conditions. The hard, narrow bed, reveille, the dash to gulp down a cup of café au lait before leaving on a long march through the countryside, all had an unanticipated appeal for Marcel. In the barracks Marcel grew accustomed to the stench of tobacco and tried to be one of the boys. A scene from Jean Santeuil describes a similar impulse: “Jean, just a little intoxicated by the dinner and the gaiety (he had thought it incumbent upon himself to drink brandy and indulge in a cigar, holding the smoke for a long time in his mouth before expelling it, so as to persuade himself that he was just like his new acquaintances ...), sat trembling with happiness at Henri’s side under the great blanket.”10 He enjoyed being on familiar terms with the other trainees, using their language, calling a new friend “old man” or “chum,” actions that made him feel like one of them.11
Eager as he was to adapt to military life, Marcel was beset by his usual health problems. Not long after his arrival the captain asked him to take a room in town because the violent coughing fits that often plagued him during the night disturbed the other cadets in their sleep. Lodging cadets in town violated the rules, but the officers looked the other way. Marcel found a suitable room for twenty-five francs a month near the barracks in a small house belonging to a Mme Renvoyzé, who offered room and board at 92, rue du Faubourg Bannier. Here Marcel took his meals with friends, served them wine sent by his parents from Paris, and enlisted Mme Renvoyzé to make him and his friends a rum and orange juice punch. He got along well with his landlady, whom he rewarded with large tips for her additional services, and he later recalled fondly their many “pleasant little chats.”12 In Jean Santeuil, Proust described the little house and Mme Renvoyzé, using her real name, and the evenings spent by the fire with his fellow cadets, who wrote letters, drank champagne (against the rules), and even read the Manual of Military Theory. The boys enjoyed playing pranks on one another, smoking cigars, and hiding the champagne from the officers.
Marcel’s friends from Condorcet relished hearing tales of his adventures. A rumor circulated that Marcel was proving to be a soldier unlike any other, spoiled by his superiors to the point that his breakfast was brought to him in bed. This does not seem impossible, for Marcel, a mere private, had his own orderly. Although volunteers served in the ranks, they were treated more or less like officer-cadets and were permitted, regulations notwithstanding, to employ a comrade-in-arms to look after their uniforms and equipment.13
Many of the privileges Marcel enjoyed were no doubt due to his indulgent commanding officer Colonel Arvers, “who was sensitive to the prestige of his civilian rank and open to letters of recommendation” supplied by Proust’s family. It was thanks in large part to Arvers’s indulgence that Marcel, despite his precarious health, was able to survive his military training. The colonel excused “early morning parades, and jumping ditches during training in equitation.”14 But Marcel does not seem to have abused his privileges. There is evidence that, perhaps to his own surprise, he found life in the military a stimulating change from the cozy family nest.
Proust’s immediate superior officer was an aristocratic lieutenant named Comte Armand-Pierre de Cholet, a handsome, elegant bachelor of twenty-five who belonged to the best clubs in Paris: the Cercle de la rue Royale, the Société Hippique, an equestrian club, and the exclusive Jockey Club. Cholet apparently liked this strange but zealous private. His demonstration of friendship seemed an inexplicable kindness that Proust remembered when creating the young aristocrat Comte Saintré in Jean Santeuil and, in the Search, Robert de Saint-Loup, an officer fascinated with military strategy.
Another of Marcel’s superiors was company commander Captain Walewski, otherwise known as Comte Charles Colonna-Walewski, the grandson of France’s most famous military genius: Napoléon Bonaparte. Walewski’s father, Alexandre-Florian-Joseph Colonna, Comte Walewski, came into the world as the illegitimate son of Napoléon and his Polish lover Marie Laczynska. Marcel and his fellow cadets believed they saw in Captain Walewski a strong resemblance to his illustrious grandfather. Like Cholet, the count was a member of the Jockey Club, of which his father had been one of the founders. The club had been created to restore French horse breeding, after the decimation suffered during the Napoleonic Wars, to its former superior level.15 Proust and his fellow cadets admired Walewski’s “gentleness [and] his politeness as a commanding officer,” traits his grandfather Bonaparte might not have considered the most important for a military officer.16
Marcel closely observed these two officers, each representing one of France’s opposing political and historical forces: the ancient nobility, epitomized by Cholet, and the more recent nobility of the Empire represented by Walewski. Saintré, Cholet’s counterpart in Jean Santeuil, “thought it good policy to show that he and his friends were ready to be on good terms with republicans and commoners, provided they were neither dirty, stupid nor blasphemous.” The more conservative among Jean’s friends and those who, like Cholet, descended from the old nobility, usually expressed, not surprisingly, “royalist or religious opinions.”17
Comte Saintré and Prince Borodino, Walewski’s equivalent in Jean Santeuil, regard each other with contempt. Borodino knows that Saintré’s ancestors would never have employed Borodino’s grandfather as a gamekeeper “because of his Jewish extraction and revolutionary opinions.” Borodino returns Saintré’s scorn, however, because he “had inherited a glorious name” of a great Napoleonic victory and “was the son of a War Minister who had been the Emperor’s friend,” whereas Saintré’s grandfather had been an obscure, inglorious administrator during the great days of the Empire. Borodino lacks bloodlines and the prestige that comes from a long tradition; but men of the old nobility, like Saintré, had grown ineffectual, affected, and increasingly irrelevant.18 Both were unaware that they belonged to a vanishing world whose extinction was to be accelerated by the industrial revolution and World War I. This future sea change became part of the Search’s historical tapestry.
At Orléans, Proust began accumulating mental notes about the social behavior of men in the ranks and of the officers who trained them. As a young man intensely curious about all the rituals and dramas of the human comedy, who loved his comrades in arms but was generally unfit for military life, Marcel saw that the army was, in many regards, a reflection of society at large.
As a rule Marcel had leave only on Sundays. Since he had to report back to the barracks in the evening, he would board the train in Orléans early in the morning to hurry home to his mother, who usually met him at the Gare d’Austerlitz when the train arrived at 10:39 A.M. After a warm embrace, they rode home in a carriage, exchanging news and gossip all the way. In the summer they often boarded a steamboat at a dock near the train station and enjoyed the leisurely cruise down the Seine to the Pont Mirabeau, where they took a carriage for the short ride to Auteuil. After spending the day with his family, Marcel, eager to see his friends, paid a late afternoon visit to Mme de Caillavet’s salon, where he always enjoyed conversing with Anatole France.
Some who met Marcel at Mme Arman’s found him “handsome, even a bit too handsome, with over-brilliant, over-big eyes, and the disquieting beauty of a weak youth.”19 Others found the nineteen-year-old cadet slightly comical in a blue capote that was too big for him, wearing red epaulettes and trousers, “all bundled up in his uniform, his head thrown back and tilted to one side, nearly lying down in one of the large easy chairs that overflowed with cushions, making his warlike attire look ridiculous.”20
Marcel quickly became friends with his hostess’s son Gaston, the future author of highly successful comedies. Although Gaston had graduated from Condorcet only two years ahead of Marcel, they had never met at school. By the time Marcel enlisted, Gaston had nearly finished his military service as a gunner stationed at Versailles.21 A bright, unpretentious man with a ready wit, Gaston treated Marcel with great respect, having noticed his remarkable intelligence and sensitivity. In their Sunday conversations the two soldiers exchanged ideas about literature, the theater, and music.
Gaston and Mme Arman were the first of his new friends who encouraged him to write.22 Flattered because these two people lived in the presence of Anatole France, Marcel began to share with them—and even with France—his ideas for poems and stories in which he intended to depict life in the leisured class. One day France remarked how fond Marcel was of “intellectual life,” to which the young man replied, “I am not at all fond of things of the intelligence, but only of life and of movement.” France had missed the mark. Marcel attached little importance to intelligence; what he “really envied and admired was the grace of those who live instinctively.”23 Proust eventually grew weary of society people because he found too many who used intellectual pretentiousness to mask ignorance, prejudices, and snobbery.
Mme Arman’s salon held another strong attraction for Marcel. Jeanne Pouquet was a beautiful, clever, vivacious girl of fifteen, who was practically engaged to Gaston. Marcel soon fell in love with Jeanne, but dared not court her: “My affection for Gaston . . . had an unsought-for vaccination effect. It made me immune to the acute suffering caused by my love for Mile Pouquet.”24 This relationship set a pattern that Marcel would follow with future couples: he would “fall in love” with the fiancée or mistress of a man who appealed to him. Such an arrangement had a number of advantages: he could love the woman from a safe distance, exchange confidences with the man and woman about each other, observe the dynamics of sexual love, and have the illusion that he was an active participant experiencing all the joys, enthusiasms, and jealous sufferings of both partners. It was also an ideal vantage point for a novelist.
Marcel’s lack of hope in wooing Jeanne did not prohibit him from seeking her out or attempting to become more closely attached. He arrived one day with a triumphant air at Mme Pouquet’s home. Having found a little château to rent near Orléans, he had come to invite Jeanne and her mother, along with Gaston, Mme de Caillavet, and some of their friends for a sojourn in the country. Jeanne pointed out that if the château were small, it would not accommodate many friends. “We laughed at Marcel’s silly ideas; but perhaps he was only enjoying his fantasies without really believing in them.”25
Marcel had become fascinated with photographs. It was a fairly simple matter to obtain pictures of his male friends, but those of girls and women presented great obstacles. Exchanging photos was considered a gesture of intimacy, not to be taken lightly. The picture Marcel most coveted was Jeanne’s. She always believed that the four poses he had taken of himself in uniform near the barracks were part of a scheme to obtain her photograph in return. He intended to give the photos to Jeanne and the girls he met while attending dancing lessons that Mme Pouquet had arranged for Jeanne and her friends. The idea of exchanging photographs scandalized the girls’ mothers, who vetoed Marcel’s proposal. When Gaston heard about Marcel’s attempt to obtain a picture of Jeanne, he became furious and demanded an explanation. Marcel assured his friend that he meant no harm, and, to show his good will, he dedicated one of his photographs to Gaston.
When it came time for Marcel to leave Mme de Caillavet’s drawing room, his friends loaded him down with sandwiches and cakes for the train ride back to Orléans. “Nothing was more comical than to see Marcel making his way around the drawing-room to say his good-byes, encumbered with his kepi and his little packages and hurried along by Gaston, who feared he’d miss his train.”26 Gaston would leave his other friends to accompany Marcel on the carriage ride to catch the 7:40 express train to Orléans. Once they had cleared the drawing room, Gaston and Marcel would rush down the stairs and jump into the carriage that had been waiting for half an hour. They promised the driver a huge tip if he got them to the station on time. Marcel, fearful of missing the express and having to take the slow train, knew that if he arrived late he stood an excellent chance of being confined to the barracks for four days. When the carriage finally reached the station, Marcel leapt from it before the driver could bring it to a complete stop. Gaston, wanting to make certain that his friend caught the train, followed close on Marcel’s heels, all of which made the driver think he had been hoodwinked, so he ran after them shouting insults. This extraordinary scene was repeated nearly every Sunday. On one occasion, Gaston, under the spell of Marcel’s conversation and charm, rode with him all the way to Orléans. Marcel thrived on the attention. On New Year’s Day, 1890, Marcel praised Gaston so highly to his fellow cadets, who had never even met the paragon of thoughtfulness, that they sent him a “message conveying their respect!”27
On the weekend of December 13, for some reason Marcel’s leave was canceled. The only consolation was that Horace Finaly had paid him a visit that Friday. His mother wrote that it was impossible for her to come visit him, as she did on occasion when he stayed in Orléans, because his grandmother had fallen ill. Despite the alarming news, Jeanne did not seem too concerned. Adèle was so good at hiding the seriousness of her sickness from those who loved her that at first the family failed to appreciate how rapidly her uremia was progressing. She also proved to be a somewhat difficult patient; her doctor had prescribed a milk diet, but she would take the liquid only in small doses and on condition that it not taste like milk.
Jeanne, who feared Marcel’s morale might sink at the canceled leave and the long months ahead, told him that she had thought of a way to make the time of his enlistment seem shorter: “Take eleven bars of the chocolate you’re so fond of, make up your mind to eat one and no more at the end of each month—you’ll be amazed at how quickly they go—and your exile with them. I believe I’m talking nonsense, giving you stupid advice that will only aggravate your dyspepsia.” She ended her letter by paraphrasing a line from Corneille, that old celebrator of duty and manly valor: “Keep well and win the battle, the reward will be your happiness and ours.”28
By the time he came home on Christmas leave, Marcel had passed, if only barely, enough of the basic training requirements to be admitted to the instruction squadron. This made him eligible for promotion to the rank of noncommissioned officer. He was relieved at having advanced to the next level of soldiering, but he found the holidays to be dreary for the family, as concern mounted over his grandmother’s condition. Shortly after he had returned to his post, Adèle’s condition worsened, and she died on January 3, 1890, one month before her sixty-sixth birthday. Marcel had not arrived home in time to say good-bye to his grandmother, whose funeral he attended on January 5. In the days that followed, Marcel, who had adored his grandmother, did not seem strongly affected by her death.
His mother, whose grief was extreme, went into full mourning. In the coming year, she revisited the coast at Cabourg, where she sat on the beach and reread Mme de Sévigné’s letters from the copy that her mother had always carried with her. She walked in the wind and the rain, just as her mother had loved to do, remembering days that would never return. In the Search, when depicting the Narrator’s mother grieving over her mother’s death, Proust remembered this vision of Jeanne Proust on the beach: “Dressed in black and carrying her mother’s sunshade, advancing with timid, pious steps over the sands which beloved feet had trodden before her,... she looked as though she were going in search of a corpse which the waves would cast up at her feet.”29 For years afterward Jeanne mourned the dreadful dates of January 3 and 5. On those sad anniversaries of her mother’s death and funeral she canceled all entertainment and social engagements. She did not insist that her family follow her example, but simply requested that “they should be true to what they genuinely felt.”30
By January a flu epidemic reached Orléans. Before it ran its course, twenty-five thousand people—nearly half the population of the city—were laid low.31 As bitter cold weather set in, warm fires and champagne parties were more appealing than ever after a day spent in military drills outdoors. In the evenings, the soldiers, despite their winter uniforms of long greatcoats and heavy shakos, returned from training exhausted and chilled to the bone. By February 7 the officers believed the cadets were ready for their first strenuous march. A local newspaper reported the occasion: “Today the 76th infantry regiment, drums and bugles leading the way, left their Coligny quarters around 11:30 for a route march that took them beyond the Loire River. Although they left in a light fog and heavy snow, the gallant regiment returned in the afternoon when the sun was beaming in all its splendor. The soldiers appeared to have bravely borne the hardships of their first march!”32
During this time when winter seemed eternal, Marcel and a fellow infantryman, André Mayrargues, were invited to dine at the official residence of the prefect, Paul Boegner.33 A young gunner from the 30th artillery regiment, Robert de Billy, had also been invited. Billy, having spent the first three months of his training determined to achieve the military ideal of endurance and discipline, was proud of his progress and honored by the dinner invitation. Convinced, as he strode smartly toward the prefect’s official residence, that his regiment was the best in France, and terrified at the thought of committing a gaffe in public before any noncommissioned officers, Billy intended to be a sterling representative of his regiment. He arrived bristling with swagger and fairly gleaming with polished leather and metal, wearing “boots as shiny as mirrors, brass buttons that had been patiently polished, white gloves freshly washed.”34 Such were the proud cadet’s self-congratulatory thoughts when he entered the drawing room and promptly encountered the two infantrymen from the 76th Regiment: Proust and Mayrargues.
Billy did not find Marcel’s spit and polish up to standard: the greatcoat was too loose for his slight body; his gait and his manner of speaking were certainly not those one expected from a soldier. But Billy was struck by the large, inquisitive eyes and his extraordinary, charming, supple sentences that drew one irresistibly toward him. “Marcel at nineteen was intensely curious and the variety of his questions astonished and perplexed me. Nourished on Platonic dialogues, he hoped by interrogating his friends on subjects about which they often knew nothing to discover a new point of view. But for him the world was not a succession of shadows in a cave. He was interested in substance and investigated how a personality is formed by diverse influences, apparently contradictory, but harmonized by life.”35
Billy was at a loss to understand what appealed to him about this bizarre young man, not at all the kind of person with whom he would normally stand and chat. Yet something made him overlook Marcel’s baggy uniform and unsoldierly mannerisms and wish to see him again. The encounter marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship that Billy later compared to Flaubert’s unlikely pair of companions, Bouvard and Pécuchet, opposite in so many ways and yet strangely complementary. Billy had received a Protestant education and had traveled, unlike Marcel, who only dreamed of doing so, to a few major European cities and visited their art museums. Both men loved classical music. Billy, in order to further his appreciation, had regularly attended the concerts at the Conservatory. During their frequent conversations at Orléans, Marcel spoke to him about his years at Condorcet, especially about Darlu and the noble thoughts exchanged among his classmates in philosophy. To Billy, a graduate of the sterner, traditional Lycée Louis-le-Grand, such sentiments seemed exaggerated, perhaps even scornful, but at times he was willing to believe his new friend and to picture the Condorcet symposia as sublime.36 Marcel, still under the spell of Darlu, considered himself a philosopher.
On March 3 Proust was admitted to the company college and became a second-class administrative officer in the territorial army. When spring finally arrived, the citizens of Orléans marveled at the exceptionally fine weather and the beauty of the first flowers, all of which seemed to enhance the spectacle of the freshly trained and synchronized troops drilling on the parade ground. The local newspaper described their marching in step as “simply admirable” and the sight of them trooping by as “marvelous.”37 Did Marcel sense that he too had changed? here were moments when he thought it possible that he might live apart from his family, that he might even pursue a career in the military.
In April, Jeanne wrote that she was finding some consolation for the loss of her mother in literature, particularly in Mme de Sévigné’s letters. Quoting the marquise’s declaration of devotion to her children, Jeanne wrote, “‘I know another mother who counts herself for nothing, who has wholly given herself over to her children.’ Doesn’t that apply perfectly to your grandmother? Except that she wouldn’t have said it.” Jeanne described for Marcel her activities of the day. Because Adrien was not coming home, she and Robert had lunched early. After cleaning the keyboard of Marcel’s piano, as she described it, she sat down and practiced exercises for an hour, while Robert read his physics book. Sitting at the piano so long had made her “stiff and rheumatic,” a more and more frequently heard complaint. After settling into a comfortable chair, she had dictated algebra problems to Robert. With his baccalaureate examination rapidly approaching, Robert was taking no chances this time. Some complaint by Marcel had apparently inspired her to consult Adrien, whose hygienic restrictions she relayed: “no swimming or riding for the present.”38
In late June, Marcel stopped writing to his mother. The postponed grief for his grandmother at last overwhelmed him. Had the arrival of summer awakened memories of happy days with her at Auteuil and on the Normandy beaches? Only now did he realize the true dimensions of his loss.39 Marcel withdrew into himself and confided in no one, not even his mother. When he resumed his letters to Jeanne, he apologized for not having written, telling her that he had spent his time weeping, lost in sadness, and had not wanted to add his sorrow to hers, which he knew to be nearly unbearable. She answered that he had been wrong not to write, that she could only be touched by knowing he was thinking of his grandmother, and she urged him not to make a practice of keeping silent for fear of making her sad, because such action would only defeat his purpose. She then tried to calm his grief: “Think of her, cherish her memory with me, but don’t let yourself spend whole days in fits of tears that fray your nerves and that she would not have wanted. On the contrary, the more you think of her, the more you should try to be as she liked you to be, and to behave as she wanted you to behave.”40
Marcel’s superiors may have denied him some leaves in July or August, perhaps because his leggings were insufficiently polished or for other demerits, as happened at least six times during the year. Jeanne’s August letters contain no mention of health problems or sadness. By the end of the summer Marcel had adjusted so well to life in the military and, with the end in sight, had begun to enjoy what he would later recall as one of the happiest periods of his life. He even skipped at least one Sunday trip to Paris. His mother wrote to him on Sunday morning August 10, with a touch of humor, “Since you said nothing about not coming, I stopped my presses yesterday.”41 Had she known he would not come home, she told him, paraphrasing Macbeth, he would have seen “Auteuil wood come to Orléans.” If he would like to have lunch on Tuesday, she would come to Orléans as she had on a previous occasion.
Why did Jeanne not encourage Marcel to be more independent as she had a year before, when he was so miserable in Ostend? Why did she not rejoice that he was content to stay in Orléans with his fellow soldiers? Had she become sad and lonely since losing her mother? No one made her feel loved and cheered her more than Marcel; no one more savored, as they did together, the pleasures of reading and exchanging gossip. Marcel realized after her death that she had underestimated his ability to manage on his own, but as long as she lived they maintained a pattern of mutual emotional dependency.
On August 18 Jeanne informed Marcel that she had dispatched Robert to visit her father, whose health had not been good. That morning she had prohibited Nathé from taking his bath, because she was afraid that he was too unsteady and might fall. Since her mother’s death, Jeanne had assumed the responsibility of looking after her father and his household. Although her brother Georges, now a judge, still lived at home, within less than a year, the forty-three-year-old bachelor surprised his family by deciding to marry a widow by the name of Amélie Oulman. The new couple moved to 22, place Malesherbes, and Nathé Weil found himself alone, with only his servants for company.
In the summer Marcel became a secretary at divisional headquarters, a post he soon lost because the chief of staff found his handwriting illegible.42 This setback concerned his parents, who worried that their obviously gifted son lacked the discipline to succeed. In a letter Jeanne mentioned disapprovingly the situation of a friend’s son, Marcel’s age, who wanted to be a painter. He has his “master’s degree in literature, but when it comes to choosing a career, he is childishly indecisive.”43 She made this observation with no further comment, yet Marcel could not have missed the point. His mother was anticipating a decision that was rapidly approaching: he would soon be out of the service and had no serious career plans.
In the final ranking of his class, Marcel finished near the bottom, sixty-third out of sixty-four. He still had the option of taking a second exam and becoming an officer. Years later Marcel maintained that his health had prevented his being a better soldier. His low ranking can be explained in part, no doubt, by his never having learned to swim. Nor did he receive any scores for the army gymnastics exercise known as the bridge-ladder, a rigorous drill in which the men had to move rapidly across a ladder laid flat over a trench.44 Yet on the exam at the end of the year, he scored a fairly decent “assez bien.”
By the end of the month the rarity of Marcel’s letters angered his mother. After a scolding from her, he promised to make amends. Had he failed to write because he had been annoyed by the pointed reference to his lack of career plans, or had he simply been busy enjoying himself with his fellow soldiers? She accepted his apology, but not without conditions: he must “purchase ten notebooks with large sheets and two packages of white envelopes” and use these to write her sixty letters, approximately one for each remaining day of his military service.45 Just when Marcel appeared to be showing signs of independence, his mother discouraged his pulling away.
In September the family celebrated Robert’s graduation from the lycée with a baccalaureate in sciences and letters. Only seventeen, the younger son intended to enter the university and begin studies leading to a medical degree. As summer came to an end, Marcel accepted an invitation to spend his September vacation leave as the guest of his parents’ friends M. and Mme Derbanne at Cabourg, a popular seaside resort in Normandy, just west of Trouville and Deauville. The stay was brief and not particularly pleasant, because he arrived fatigued and complaining of his usual ailments.
Marcel returned to the regiment on Monday, September 22. The next day he wrote to his father in the south of France to apologize for not having written daily as promised, explaining that because of his weariness he had spent most of his Cabourg leave in bed. Adrien was taking the waters at Aix-les-Bains as a guest of Dr. Henry Cazalis, a colleague who also wrote poetry, mainly Buddhist verses, under the pseudonym Jean Lahor. Cazalis was a friend of several writers, including Guy de Maupassant, also visiting him in Aix. At the height of his career as the author of numerous short stories, such as “Boule de suif” (Tallow ball) and “La Maison Tellier,” and novels like Une Vie and Bel-Ami, Maupassant, at forty, had begun to suffer from the effects of tertiary syphilis and desperately sought remedies for his ills.46 He feared most what might happen to his mind and his ability to write. Marcel, in his letter, wondered whether Maupassant would remember him from Mme Straus’s salon. Although Marcel did not particularly admire Maupassant’s works, he was pleased that his father had met the writer. Perhaps Adrien had seen that writing could bring fame and fortune. “I hope you liked Maupassant. I don’t believe he knows me; I’ve only met him twice.” Marcel then reported on his own condition: “I don’t feel at all bad (except my stomach) and I’m not even suffering from the general melancholia, brought on by this year of absence that, if not its cause, can at least serve as a pretext and excuse for it. But I am finding it very hard to concentrate, to read, learn by heart, remember.”
In closing, he told Adrien that before he had left Cabourg, some housemaids, no doubt attracted by his uniform, had scandalized his hosts by blowing kisses to him. Marcel said that the maids of Orléans, whom he had abandoned to go to Cabourg, were now taking their revenge. Always clever at weaving quotations into his letters, he cited a line of verse by Dr. Cazalis to explain one maid’s fury at him for having “disdained the flowers of her naked breasts.”47 Could Adrien have taken any encouragement at his son’s mention of naked breasts—even if shunned—or did he continue to fear that Marcel’s sexual tastes were inclined in the wrong direction? Had Marcel’s remark about an inability to concentrate been a hint that he was in no condition to begin his university studies on leaving the military?
At the end of Proust’s year in the military, Lieutenant Cholet presented him with a signed photograph: “To Marcel Proust, volunteer cadet, from one of his torturers.”48 In the end the torture had been delicious. Contrary to tradition and expectations for most young men—above all, for one with his constitution, tastes, and personality—Proust had enjoyed his military year. His letters and writings never veer from depicting life in the service in the most positive, enthusiastic, and at times nearly lyrical terms. “It’s curious,” Proust wrote to a friend some fifteen years later, that we “should have seen the army, you as a prison, I as a paradise.”49 Once his year was up, Proust believed that he had ingratiated himself to the point where all the officers liked him and he had learned to make himself “so useful!” He attempted to reenlist, but the army turned him down.50
Discharged on November 14, Proust remained on the military roster as an active sous-officier or noncommissioned officer in the army reserve, for his training, though marginal, had been satisfactory.51 When he came home to resume civilian life, his mother, who could now end her daily bulletins of love, support, and advice, carefully packed away his tailor-made uniform in a box that Proust was to keep for the rest of his life. Although his single ambition was to write, he could no longer postpone facing his parents’ demands that he decide what university degree and professional goal he wished to pursue.