ON HIS RETURN HOME FROM THE SERVICE, Marcel did not appear eager to attend parties, but on November 22, only a week after his discharge, he accepted an invitation to Mme Straus’s Sunday reception. First he sent her a huge bouquet of giant chrysanthemums, which French horticulturists had learned to grow by imitating the Japanese. Then he wrote to say that he would come just this once, but first he had to see his tailor. Because he had gone straight from high school into the service, he had just realized how impoverished his civilian wardrobe had become. He ordered a new frock coat to wear because his jacket was “too frightful.”1
Marcel, exhausted by his parents’ relentless urgings, had finally agreed to attend law school and to consider the diplomatic service as a career. In late November he began an ambitious program of studies by enrolling in the Faculté de droit (School of law) and at the École libre des sciences politiques (Free school of political science), a course of studies for future French diplomats who must pass the foreign service examination. Marcel’s only consolation on enrolling at the École libre des sciences politiques had been the delight of encountering Robert de Billy, who did want to be a diplomat.
Among Marcel’s professors were Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Albert Sorel, Paul Desjardins, and Albert Vandal. Marcel did not particularly like his political science courses, except those taught by Sorel and Leroy-Beaulieu. Sorel, known for his strictness, was a distinguished historian who had already begun publishing his vast eight-volume history L’Europe et la Révolution française. Leroy-Beaulieu was one of the most eminent representatives of the French liberal tradition. Billy recalled that Marcel listened attentively to the lectures of Sorel and Leroy-Beaulieu but did not bother to take notes.2
In Vandal’s class Marcel found it difficult not to be distracted by the professor’s nervous tic, which caused one eye to flutter. While lecturing to his students about the maddeningly complex affairs of the Orient, Vandal relished telling stories intended to fix in their minds a particular treaty or major event. A favorite anecdote involved a Serb who, one day in Belgrade, went to draw water from a well. A Turkish soldier attempted to stop him, and when the Serb persisted, the Turk killed him. Vandal ended the often told tale with his standard dramatic summation: “Gentlemen, from that well sprang a conflagration that engulfed the entire Orient.” Marcel, on hearing the emotional quiver in the voice and registering the batting eye that failed to hide the look of satisfaction on Vandal’s face, seized his blank notebook and dashed off a poem, indicating his complete indifference to the subject matter and his contempt for the professor’s pedagogic methods:
Vandal, the fop, parades his wit
Gabriel and Jean don’t give a shit
Nor does Robert, nor even Marcel
Who’s much less solemn than usual.3
At least Marcel had outgrown the practice of passing notes of seduction to the handsome boys in the class. No doubt he still felt the urge to do so, but the naïve, barely tolerated excesses of adolescence would be certain to provoke a scandal among adults. He had learned to be discreet.
After class, Marcel and Robert would walk toward the Right Bank and home. They were often accompanied by Gabriel Trarieux, a future symbolist poet, and Jean Boissonnas, who, like Billy, was to become a diplomat. The young men discussed poetry, aesthetics, paintings, and society—anything but political science.4 Occasionally, Proust and Billy stopped by the Louvre Museum on the way home. As they roamed the vast galleries, Billy served as guide. His passionate interest in art and antiquities had been nurtured in secondary schooling, where art and art history were part of the curriculum. One visit to the museum had been inspired by Marcel’s intense admiration of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les Phares” (Guiding Lights), in which the poet paid homage to great painters.5 As Marcel and Robert viewed painting after painting, Marcel recited the lines that Baudelaire had written to evoke works of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, and others.
As Billy steered Marcel through the wing devoted to French painting, he realized that the works of the great seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin held no interest for his friend. Marcel was drawn instead to the seaport paintings of Claude Lorrain, a precursor of impressionism who liked to paint harbors seen in the light of sunset, and to the more intimate sunsets of Dutch painter Aelbert Cuyp. The play of light, especially on water, enchanted Marcel. But the portrait that held Marcel’s attention the longest was Van Dyck’s painting of The Duke of Richmond. Billy had remarked that the splendid young men of the era whose portraits could be admired in museums throughout Europe were destined to be slaughtered during the civil war by Oliver Cromwell’s unconquerable Ironsides regiment. Marcel remembered this theme of unforeseen tragedy awaiting the English youths in full flower when he wrote the poem addressed to Van Dyck that begins
Tu triomphes, Van Dyck, prince des gestes calmes,
Dans tous les êtres beaux qui vont bientôt mourir.6
You triumph, Van Dyck, prince of calm gestures,
In all the beautiful creatures who will soon die.
Proust’s first independent publications were several pieces that appeared in the short-lived journal Le Mensuel, which, as its name indicated, appeared monthly in Paris.7 During its one-year run beginning in October 1890, Le Mensuel published at least three pieces by Proust.8 With its gray-blue cover and price of fifty centimes, Le Mensuel may not have had a much larger circulation than the little magazines the boys had created at Condorcet, but at least it was a real journal. Its first issue, proposing to readers a simple digest of the month’s main events in politics, society, and the theater, was on sale in four bookstores in the eighth arrondissement, where Marcel no doubt discovered it and decided to become a contributor.9 The February 1891 issue contained two of his pieces: a poem dedicated to a friend and entitled simply “Poésie” (Poetry) celebrated love; “Pendant le carême” (During Lent) reviewed a lecture series on the new singing sensation Yvette Guilbert.
Proust’s generation had now reached adulthood and had begun to enjoy all the pleasures of the Belle Époque. The bohemian crowd of writers, painters, and musicians flocked to the café-concerts, cabarets, and music halls to ogle the cancan dancers and hear the most popular singers. Yvette Guilbert, whose trademark pair of long, black gloves can be admired in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous portrait, was considered the most intelligent and literary of the performers and one who delivered her songs in a nearly flawless diction. Her appearance in February at the Théâtre de l’Application caused a mighty traffic jam as the cabs and carriages of her eager fans crushed into the rue de Saint-Lazare.
Hugues Le Roux, a prolific novelist and journalist, had delivered five lectures on the chanteuse under the general title “Fin-de-siècle Ingenuity and Mlle Yvette Guilbert.” In his review for Le Mensuel, Marcel gently scolded Le Roux for having delivered so many lectures on a popular entertainer, one more than another journalist, Louis Ganderax, had devoted to Molière.10 By attempting to formulate “scientific” theories on popular singing, Proust wrote, Le Roux had taken too seriously what was intended as pure entertainment, frequently of the most vulgar and salacious sort. Guilbert, one of the Belle Époque’s legendary performers, was no different from the others insofar as content was concerned. Marcel, like all her fans, had too often relished the spicy delights of her songs to endorse Le Roux’s amusing but unconvincing depiction of Yvette as an ingenue.
The same issue of Le Mensuel carried Marcel’s poem dedicated to Gustave Laurens de Waru, a nobleman Marcel’s age who was among the young men in his circle during his university years.11 Gustave was the son of Comte Pierre Laurens de Waru, and his mother’s sister was Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, née Laure de Sade, a direct descendant of the infamous marquis. The poem that begins L’amour monte des cœurs comme une odeur de roses (Love rises from hearts like an odor of roses) lacks originality or any other distinction. A paean to love, it ends with the Baudelairian image of the poet drowning in the unnamed lover’s indifferent, languorous, and mystical eyes.
Adrien read Marcel’s pieces in Le Mensuel with a father’s pride, proclaiming confidently, “Marcel will be elected to the Académie française.” Dr. Proust may have exaggerated the merit of Marcel’s essays, but he took the occasion to encourage his son and bolster his morale. There was no harm in writing so long as it did not interfere with his studies. Writing, after all, was something one could do easily in one’s spare time.
As Marcel explored the rarefied air of elegant salons and the private boxes in theaters and at the opera, he met beautiful women and handsome men whose chic, wit, and haughtiness quickly seduced him. He pandered to them, flattering them, seeing them much as they saw themselves, as divine creatures. Later, he would satirize their superficiality and pretentiousness, but now he reveled in their company as he studied the visible incarnations of lineage and rank, money and power, taste and glamour.
Marcel went to the theater as often as possible. On a Saturday in March he accompanied the Strauses, along with Jacques Bizet and Jacques Baignères, to the Odéon Theater to see the revival of Germinie Lacerteux, a famous play by the Goncourt brothers. The play, based on their naturalist novel, told the “true” story of their servant Rose Malingre, who, as a girl, had suffered rape and pregnancy, and had ended her days miserably in a workhouse. In the revival, the title role was played by the newly celebrated actress Réjane, whose performance devastated Marcel. He left the theater with his eyes red from weeping and claimed to have contracted a permanent sadness.12
The day following the play, he went to Mme Straus’s Sunday reception. He had left home intending to study, but along the way he had seen some lilac branches and had been unable to resist the urge to bring some of the purple flowers to Mme Straus. He informed her that he had a ticket for the following Friday’s performance of a play by Stanislas Rzewuski, L’Impératrice Faustine. Would she attend? He had, since reserving his ticket, found a more amusing alternative for the evening and would attend the play only if he could contemplate Mme Straus. As an additional sign of his devotion, he told her that Holy Friday was approaching, “the first anniversary of the first letter I received from you, and your handwriting, while remaining just as moving, is becoming more strangely new and as though I had never seen it.”13 Mme Straus, who adored Marcel, dismissed such nonsense.
Marcel, frustrated that Mme Straus did not take him seriously as a suitor, wrote to her in the guise of a spurned courtier, heading his letter “The truth about Madame Straus.” It is a short letter meant to be frank about who she is, a woman with many appealing traits but of little substance. Yet he was overwhelmed by her beauty, wit, and charm. Above all, the letter is a literary exercise, a quick, lightweight sketch, in the tradition of seventeenth-century French moralists, which shows that Proust already saw his friends not just as themselves but as the products of his imagination. This is one of the first instances in which Proust observed salon behavior and hinted at its superficiality, albeit in a teasing, flattering manner:
At first, you see, I thought you loved only beautiful things and that you understood them very well—but then I saw that you care nothing for them—later I thought you loved people, but I see that you care nothing for them. I believe that you love only a certain mode of life which brings out not so much your intelligence as your wit, not so much your wit as your tact, not so much your tact as your dress.... Because you charm, do not rejoice and suppose that I love you less. To prove the contrary... I shall send you more beautiful flowers and you will be angry, Madame, since you do not deign to favour the sentiments with which I have the painful ecstasy to be
The most respectful servant of your Sovereign Indifference Marcel Proust14
These flowers and their accompanying sycophantic prose proved to be no more seductive, of course, than the roses he had, as a schoolboy, thrust upon Mme Chirade in the dairy shop. Marcel was playacting, and no one, including himself, took him seriously.
On May 1, at Gabriel Trarieux’s, Marcel met a young man only two years older than himself who shared his ambition to become a writer: André Gide.15 Like many of his generation, Gide was currently under the influence of the symbolists, but he, unlike Marcel, was beginning to make a name for himself in literary circles as opposed to social ones. At twenty-two Gide was a humorless young man, filled with doubt and self-loathing, who shared Proust’s sexual orientation but, having been raised in a strict Calvinist environment, suffered from crushing guilt.
Gide, who was a meticulous diarist, must not have been impressed by his first encounter with Marcel Proust, for there is no mention of him in Gide’s diary entries for 1891. Young Gide, despite serious misgivings about the influence of society people on aspiring writers, had read Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du dandysme et de Georges Brummel until he practically knew it by heart. Unlike Proust, Gide felt ill at ease and made a poor impression with his “sad visage, his seriousness, and his timidity.”16 Proust’s and Gide’s paths did not cross again for another two decades, until Gide stood in Proust’s way and denied him an opportunity to publish Swann’s Way, the first part of the Search.
When summer arrived, Marcel pursued his law studies, enrolling for new courses in June. But law was far from being his only preoccupation and certainly not his greatest interest. He was often seen at the new tennis club on boulevard Bineau in Neuilly with Jeanne Pouquet and her beau Gaston de Caillavet.17 Gaston went nearly every day to play tennis with his friends on a new hard court in the middle of a vacant lot surrounded by a picket fence. The English enthusiasm for lawn tennis had spread to France, and new facilities were springing up here and there. Soon Marcel came along with his friends to the tennis court, not for the game but to be with Jeanne, whom he continued to adore. While the other young men strained to keep their eyes on the ball, Marcel could barely take his eyes off the vivacious, attractive girl. Not since the days when he had rushed breathless to the Champs-Élysées to find Marie de Benardaky at play had Marcel been so eager to spend time with a pretty girl. She was, he later recalled, the second great love of his youth.
In her memoirs Jeanne remembered that Marcel, unable to take part in so “violent” a game as tennis, came to the boulevard Bineau court to chat in the circle of girls and their mothers, who listened to him intently under the sparse shade provided by the young trees. The women quickly pressed Marcel into service by putting him in charge of the refreshments. Now the courtier arrived bearing a large box full of snacks. When the weather was especially hot, the ladies obliged him to go to a nearby café in search of beer and lemonade, which he brought back, moaning under the weight, in a hideous basket borrowed from the bartender.
Days at the court became an alfresco symposium, with Marcel holding forth while he and the women balanced drinks and napkins as they sat, nibbling and chatting. When a stray ball landed near Marcel, distracting him and the girls from their conversation, the athletes were pleased to have disrupted what Marcel referred to as the “court of love.” Marcel would accuse the players of having fired the ball in their direction “with malice aforethought.” Jeanne felt that Gaston and the other men were, perhaps without realizing it, jealous of Marcel because of the charm and tenderness that radiated from him and that he inspired in return. But Gaston knew that Jeanne’s heart belonged to him and that Marcel, in spite of his great intelligence and ability to amuse, could never be taken seriously as a suitor.
Marcel spent his September vacation in Cabourg. While there he was frequently invited to visit the Arthur Baignèreses in their lovely villa, Les Frémonts, perched on a hill overlooking Trouville. From the villa Marcel admired the grand vistas of sea and farmland, remarking the contrasts between the vast sameness of the water to the north and west and the varied spectacle of the sloping countryside to the east and south, where lush, green fields were populated by sheep grazing in the apple orchards.18
During this stay he wrote a short piece entitled “Choses normandes” (Aspects of Normandy), describing that juxtaposition of rich, hilly farmland and the infinite perspective of the sea, for Le Mensue’s September issue, which was to be its last. The essay also expressed his puzzlement at the vacation habits of his countrymen, who chose to leave the seashore just at the moment he found ideal, forsaking clear skies and gentle breezes because members of the leisured classes considered it elegant to leave the beaches at the end of August to go to the country.19
When Proust’s hotel closed at the end of September, the Baignèreses invited him to be their guest at Les Frémonts, granting his wish to be unfashionable and remain on the coast well beyond the season. On October 1, before dinner, another guest at the villa, the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, drew Marcel’s portrait in pencil, a likeness that served as the basis for the full-length oil portrait he soon undertook. The pencil sketch reveals a more serious and introspective Marcel than the foppish man-about-town Blanche was to depict in the painting. Ten years Proust’s senior, Blanche had long been a fixture of the social scene. Although Blanche lived near Uncle Louis in Auteuil, Marcel and the painter had met in a Paris salon. Their encounter at Les Frémonts was the beginning of a long and sometimes stormy friendship.
When Marcel returned to Paris for the beginning of a new academic year, he and his parents engaged again in heated debates about his future plans. During a visit, Nathé, to Marcel’s horror, brought up the subject of a career, thus sparking another dispute. Writing to his grandfather, Marcel requested that Nathé not bring up the subject again until it had been resolved.20 His parents, in whose house he lived and who controlled the purse strings, prevailed again, and on November 5 Marcel enrolled for his second year in law school and at the École libre des sciences politiques. A week later he was swooning with ecstasy because Mme Straus had written that she was still his friend: “These divine words of yesterday, when you proved that you are unsurpassed—as in everything—in the art of making hearts vibrate until they break.”21
The visit of the Irish poet and novelist Oscar Wilde was the great event of Paris literary salons that late fall. Wilde, who had published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a year earlier, had yet to write Salomé or the light comedies on which much of his fame rests today. His reputation in France, where his novel was not yet known, derived from his poems and fairy tales, as well as from his wit and eccentricities. Although Wilde’s hosts may have been at pains to explain the precise nature of his accomplishments, they had no doubt that his gifts were authentic and would lead him to greatness. Everyone said that he was a gifted conversationalist, perhaps the most extraordinary causeur of his epoch. And even though he spoke the language of Racine and Molière with a deplorable English accent, his vocabulary was prodigious, his style eloquent, and fluent French poured from his large, voluptuous lips. Wilde relished being the new French sensation. Like Proust, whom he soon met, Wilde enjoyed society because he “found in it both the satisfaction of his vanity and an inexhaustible source of fatuity.”22
It was during this stay in Paris that Wilde remarked to Enrique Gomez Carrillo, a young Guatemalan diplomat he met at the Café d’Harcourt, “I have put all my talent into my works. I have put all my genius into my life.”23 Wilde, inspired by French art, especially Gustave Moreau’s paintings and Stéphane Mallarmé’s verses, began to write Salomé. Contemplating his attraction to the story of the veiled dancer and the Christian martyr, he remarked to Gomez, “I flee from what is moral as from what is impoverished. I have the same sickness as Des Esseintes.”24 Des Esseintes, one of late-nineteenth-century France’s most famous literary characters, had been created by Joris-Karl Huysmans in a novel entitled À rebours (Against the grain, 1884). This figure with a strange sounding name is a hyperaesthete, a decadent hero said to have been inspired in large part by one of the most intriguing and vain men in Parisian society, Comte Robert de Montesquiou—a person with whom Proust was eager to become acquainted.
Whereas Montesquiou was svelte and supremely elegant, the arbiter of taste and fashion, Wilde was a large man with exaggerated features. In his journal Marcel Schwob, another of Wilde’s French hosts, observed that his guest was addicted to opium-tainted cigarettes and absinthe and portrayed him as “a big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more.”25 But when André Gide met Wilde he saw an altogether different person; the love-starved Gide gazed at a creature whose overpowering “beauty” captivated him. Gide’s first diary entry for 1892, dated January 1, speaks of Oscar’s disconcerting effect: “Wilde, I believe, did me nothing but harm. In his company I lost the habit of thinking.”26 For his part, Wilde was appalled at many aspects of Gide’s character. Young André needed molding; most of all he had to liberate himself from his strict, conservative, religious upbringing. Wilde told Gide that his lips were “too straight, the lips ‘of someone who has never lied. I must teach you to lie, so your lips will be beautiful and curved like those on an antique mask.’”27 The previous summer Wilde had found for himself just such a pair of lips, beautiful and curved, on the face of a young English nobleman, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde, who was to become the most notorious homosexual celebrity of the era, was in many regards the polar opposite of the austere, virginal, deeply religious Gide. It was only after the transforming encounter with Wilde that Gide began to confront and display his own homosexuality.
Sometime that fall Wilde met Proust. According to Mme Arthur Baignères’s two grandsons, it was in her drawing room that Jacques-Émile Blanche introduced the two writers. In their account of the meeting and the subsequent visit Wilde paid Marcel, Wilde was touched by the “enthusiasm for English literature evinced by Proust, by the intelligence revealed by his questions about Ruskin and George Eliot. . . and willingly accepted Marcel’s invitation to dinner at boulevard Hauss-mann.” Wilde arrived at the Proust apartment ahead of Marcel, who was running late. After having been shown into the drawing room, where he met Proust’s parents, Wilde’s “courage failed” him and he hid in the bathroom, which is where Marcel found him when he rushed in, breathless. Wilde then said, “Goodbye, dear M. Proust, goodbye.” Marcel’s parents told him that before Wilde had retreated to the bathroom, he had looked around the drawing room and commented, “How ugly your house is.”
Is this account true? Two inaccuracies may indicate that the story is apocryphal. In 1891 Proust had not read John Ruskin, none of whose works had been translated into French, a task to which Proust later applied himself; nor did he reside at 102, boulevard Haussmann, an address that was not to be his until fifteen years later, after the deaths of his parents. The same remark about “your ugly house” is given to Charlus in the Search, when he calls upon the Narrator. It is the same disparaging comment that another aesthete, Robert de Montesquiou, made a few years later on viewing the Proust apartment and the often decried furnishings. Wilde was certainly capable of such impertinence. At any rate, Marcel had observed, if only briefly, the man to whom he later alluded in his novel as a martyr to society’s prejudices, a man who dared to yield to sexual temptation and whose petulance and pride led to his downfall and humiliation.28
Early in 1892 Proust began collaborating on a monthly literary review created by a young poet, Fernand Gregh, and a small group of Condorcet graduates. Jacques Bizet had invited his friends with literary aspirations to meet in his mother’s salon, where the founding took place. It was here that Gregh met Proust, who had graduated from Condorcet two classes ahead of him. In addition to Fernand, Jacques, and Marcel, the founders were Robert Dreyfus, Louis de La Salle, Daniel Halévy, and Horace Finaly. After a long debate over a variety of titles—those discussed included Literary Anarchy, Paths in the Fog, and The Guitars—Daniel Halévy, inspired by their Platonic ideals, proposed the one that was chosen: Le Banquet, the French title of Plato’s Symposium.29
The founders agreed to pay monthly dues of ten francs, a sum they found considerable, but one that would guarantee their autonomy. With a budget of approximately one hundred francs a month Gregh believed they could print four hundred copies of a magazine with a professional look, especially with a good connection in the publishing world. Jacques had just the right contact through a close childhood friend, Eugène Reiter, now director of the newspaper Le Temps. It was like old times: Condorcet classmates writing, editing, and publishing their own works. Only now they could afford a real printer for their copy and letterhead for their correspondence.
Gregh, who met Proust just as he was nearing the peak of his society period, observed the “elegant young man in tails,” with thick, dark hair, in his buttonhole a white camellia, the flower in vogue among the smart set. Marcel’s spiffy appearance was somewhat attenuated by his shirtfront, which looked rather “fatigued” because it had been folded and unfolded so many times.30 Gregh later remembered that friends, even those who were not homosexual, found Proust handsome. When Gregh told his new friend that he looked like a Neapolitan prince out of a Paul Bourget novel, Marcel laughed with delight. Marcel was aware of the impression he made and took some pride in the admiring glances that followed him as he moved through drawing rooms crowded with the era’s beautiful people.31 Gregh characterized as juvenile Marcel’s preoccupation with the slight hump in his nose, caused by his childhood fall on the Champs-Élysées. But what astonished Gregh most was Proust’s extraordinary intelligence: “His mind possessed resources that seemed truly infinite.”32 His brilliance was evident in conversation, and even in his flattering remarks, but especially in his “magnificent eyes . . . like those of a fly, with a thousand facets,” allowing him to examine twenty sides of a subject, making him prodigiously inventive and ingenious.33
A letter from Marcel early in the year indicated that he had begun to adopt a schedule at variance with the rest of the world, one that was to provoke many family disputes and ultimately result in his reversing day and night. In a note inviting Gregh to an informal family dinner, Marcel asked him to stop by and inform a member of the household whether he could accept, but urged him not to ring the doorbell, for “I go to bed extremely late and sleep until nearly noon.”34
Marcel’s new hours were not well adapted to the needs of a university student, but they were perfectly suited to someone who wanted to make a career of a glamorous night life, including the society of Princesse Mathilde, the daughter of King Jerome of Westphalia and a niece of Napoléon I. Over seventy when Marcel met her at Mme Straus’s, Princesse Mathilde represented the vestiges of Napoleonic glory. Tremendously proud of her heritage, she boasted of her Corsican origin and took great pleasure in remarking to ancien régime nobles whenever they deplored the French Revolution: “The French Revolution! If it weren’t for the French Revolution I would be selling oranges in the streets of Ajaccio.”35 In 1887 Mathilde abruptly ended her long friendship with the historian Hippolyte Taine after he published an article depicting Napoléon I as an upstart Italian condottiere. The next day the princess sent Mme Taine her calling card with the letters RRC. marked on it: pour prenare congé (to take leave), indicating that she was ending her relationship with the Taines. A wag suggested that the initials really stood for princesse pas contente (princess not happy).
Upon entering Mathilde’s home in the rue de Berri, which fairly swarmed with eagles and bees—Napoleonic decorative motifs—Marcel felt that he had stepped back in time. Not only did the princess’s residence, furnished in Empire Style, recall the glory days of the First Empire, her salon had hosted literary giants as well, such as Gustave Flaubert and Alexandre Dumas. Her soirée began early, with dinner served at 7:30. Like many hostesses she invited one group for dinner, after which others would arrive for the rest of the evening. When guests entered, Mathilde rose to greet the new arrivals, addressing each with a personal remark, giving the guest the impression that he or she was the evening’s main attraction.
Proust noticed that the princess, who was short and plump, wore an enormous black pearl necklace, her favorite piece of jewelry. She had a passion for pearls and liked to add new and rare ones to the already magnificent string. Except for her pearls, Marcel found her simplicity remarkable, especially regarding birth and rank. Her “somewhat male gruffness” was somehow rendered endearing by an “extreme sweetness.” Marcel’s own charm, wit, and intelligence made an excellent impression. The veterans, who remembered how she used to dote on her recent, treacherous lover, the enameler and poet Claudius Popelin, began to refer to Marcel as Popelin the younger.36
When Proust began to attend the princess’s salon, it was still dominated by an older generation of writers, intellectuals, and socialites. Among the contemporary writers whom Marcel encountered in her salon were Edmond de Goncourt, a veteran from the earliest days, now grown quite elderly; the poet José-Maria de Heredia, and the historian Gustave Schlumberger. Marcel also saw Émile and Geneviève Straus and noted that upon arriving, Émile looked around the room with a malicious air, no doubt rating the success of a rival salon.
The mixture of Mathilde’s salon may have been too liberal for some. Here ancien régime aristocrats met and conversed with those upstarts from the Empire nobility. The princess also received members of chic Jewish society, many of whom had held important posts during the Second Empire. The Jewish element, increasingly numerous, provoked the outrage of the anti-Semites Edmond de Gon-court and Léon Daudet, who detested everything connected with Jews and the Empires, First and Second.37 After one party, Daudet noted in his diary: “The imperial dwelling was infested with Jews and Jewesses.”38
The princess had a favorite set of anecdotes about those in her entourage, especially her rather simple-minded reader, the baronne de Galbois. Proust, who savored good stories, remembered these examples of innocent imbecility when he created Mme de Varambon. In the Search, Mme de Varambon, who is the princesse de Parme’s lady-in-waiting, repeats a number of naïve remarks that Proust collected from Mathilde’s stories. One evening when snow had been forecast, Mme de Varambon tells a departing guest that he has nothing to fear. “It can’t snow anymore because they have taken the necessary steps to prevent it: they’ve sprinkled salt in the streets!”39
For Proust, perhaps the most important acquaintance he made at Mathilde’s salon was Charles Ephrussi, a respected art critic, the founder and director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and author of a fine essay on Albrecht Dürer. Ephrussi, an important inspiration for Swann, had devoted his life to studying and appreciating art. He greatly admired Vermeer, whose paintings were to become increasingly important to Proust. Marcel questioned Ephrussi about paintings with such eagerness to learn more about them that the art critic invited the young man to view his fine collection, which included works by Gustave Moreau and Claude Monet.
One evening in March, returning home late from a party at which he had admired Comtesse Mailly-Nesle dressed in red, Marcel began to write “Cydalise,” a sketch of a society woman.40 By the time he had finished, the red dress had turned white and the portrait resembled more than anyone else Laure de Chevigné, with whom he had become infatuated that spring. He rose early every day to rush to the avenue Marigny, his “highway of hope,” where he waited to see the lady glide by on her morning stroll.41 Mme de Chevigné, whom he probably met in Mme Straus’s salon in 1891, kept her own exclusive salon—one Proust could only dream of entering. Proud to be a descendant of the most notorious figure in French literary history, the marquis de Sade, Mme de Chevigné resented Marcel’s spying on her and determined to remain aloof, a tactic that only heightened his curiosity.
Marcel saw in Mme de Chevigné’s features traces of Gustave de Waru, an androgynous conflation of aunt and nephew of the sort that always fired Marcel’s imagination and libido. Both these beautiful, desirable, yet distant creatures possessed a hooked nose he found “moving,” and grace and glamour that surely indicated divine birth. In “Cydalise” the author sees the lady described as Hyppolyta at the theater, where Marcel often admired the fabulous beauties of Paris society. After describing her leaning “on the railing of her box,” from which “her white-gloved arms rise straight to her chin,” Proust wrote that Hyppolyta “makes one think of a bird dreaming on one elegant and slender leg. It is also charming to watch her feather fan fluttering and beating its white wing.” Whenever he encounters “her sons or nephews, who have, all of them, the same beak-like nose, the thin lips, the piercing eyes and too delicate skins,” he is moved by the recognition of “her race, the issue, I am sure, of a goddess and a bird.” Such creatures, he wrote, add the “idea of the fabulous to the thrill of beauty.”42
The texts that Proust began to write during this period and on through the Jean Santeuil era, which lasted until approximately 1900, constitute the writer’s sketchbook, to which he would return and select items for further development. Proust used “Cydalise” many years later as the basis for a similar description of his most famous female aristocrat, the sublimely haughty Oriane de Guermantes, splendidly on display in her box at the opera. The young Narrator also rises mornings and rushes out to glimpse the worldly goddess, who resembles her nephew Saint-Loup, passing down the street.43
In the winter of 1891–92, Marcel had befriended a new acquaintance of Robert de Billy’s, Edgar Aubert, two years older than himself. Billy, whose noble rank and Protestant religion allowed him to move freely among the Swiss aristocracy, had met Aubert during the summer and learned of his plans to come to Paris in the fall as an attaché to the Swiss embassy.44 Edgar, the son of a distinguished Geneva magistrate, was a solid fellow with the straight thick neck of an athlete. Like Billy, he loved sports, especially tennis and mountain climbing.
To Marcel, Edgar seemed a sensitive person of strong character and resolve, but one who had not yet found his purpose in life. A good-looking young man with a fine mind and distinguished manners, he had all the qualities necessary to appeal to Proust. Billy described him as “full of personal charm and literary taste.”45 During the winter season Marcel and Robert took Edgar with them to a few of the salons, notably those of Mme Straus and Mme Henri Baignères, where their new friend won admirers with his “serene curiosity, his taste for elegance,” and his cosmopolitan outlook, the result of having already lived in London and Berlin. At the Finalys’, Edgar impressed everyone with his command of English. Marcel, clearly fascinated by the young polyglot, peppered Aubert with questions about literature and society in the English and German capitals and about his own family. Marcel occasionally met Edgar for lunch or a walk in the Tuileries Gardens.
When Marcel requested Edgar’s photograph, the Genevan not only obliged but copied on the back a few lines of verse from an English poet. Marcel, who envied his fluency in English, had to read his favorite anglophone authors, like George Eliot and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in translation. As he scrutinized Edgar’s face in the photograph, Marcel thought the verse rather mournful and worried about his friend’s melancholy temperament, “his charming sadness.”46 Marcel’s unrequited longings, so blatantly expressed in his high school texts, now were submerged in the mysterious, melancholy moods—not unlike those of Watteau’s Fêtes galantes—of the sketches he penned for Le Banquet.
The April issue of Le Banquet contained several short pieces by Marcel, including “Cydalise.” Forthcoming issues of the cooperative review were to contain similar pieces. “Les maîtresses de Fabrice” (Fabrice’s mistresses) and “Snobs 1,” from the May issue, allude perhaps to Mme Straus, who enjoyed “balls, horse-racing or even gambling.”47 At year’s end Marcel wrote to her, again proclaiming: “I love mysterious women, since you are one, and I have often said so in Le Banquet, in which I would often have liked you to recognize yourself.”48 “Snobs,” like a number of pieces from this year and the next, warns against the dangers of dissipating one’s talents in society or one’s virtues in snobbery.
The May 25 issue of Littérature et critique carried Marcel’s laudatory review of Comte Armand-Pierre de Cholet’s travel memoir, Voyage en Turquie d’Asie: Arménie, Kurdistan et Mésopotamie. Marcel praised his former lieutenant’s display of superior intelligence and admirable energy, proven by his undertaking the difficult and dangerous expedition, and his compelling narration of its successful completion. Cholet’s account, filled with “amusing legends” and picturesque observations, contained descriptions that have the “limpidity of watercolors,” all told with the authentic accent that derives from scenes “directly observed, or better still, accomplished or endured personally, an accent always inimitable and that goes straight to the heart.”49
In early June, Marcel wrote Gregh an angry letter about the contents of the latest issue of Le Banquet. Proust was incensed that Gregh and the others had accepted an article by Léon Blum containing his thoughts on the suicide of one of his friends.” After calling Blum’s article so nationalistic in tone that it might have been written by one of Maurice Barrès’s lackeys, Proust attacked the piece as being dishonorable and stupid.50 The reasons for his unusually harsh remarks are unclear. Blum, who was to distinguish himself as a critic, writer, and political leader, did not deserve such condemnation. Marcel’s colleagues rejected his opinion. In spite of his virulent opposition and status as a member of Le Banquet’s review committee, Proust failed to stop publication of two additional articles by Blum in the July issue.
In the latter half of June, Proust took a series of exams in history and political science, which he passed without distinguishing himself.51 On the Friday afternoon preceding the last exam on Saturday, he sent Mme Straus a bouquet of flowers with a letter, telling her he would have to miss her afternoon reception on Saturday because his history professor had ruined “my divine Saturday, my day of true happiness, by scheduling my examination in the afternoon rather than in the morning.” Because she had teased him about being “lazy” and “interested only in society,” he assured her that he had worked “very hard.”
In July, Marcel began visits every Saturday morning to Jacques-Émile Blanche’s home in Auteuil to sit for a full-length portrait in oil. The studio and family home were located in a beautiful garden with thick-branched trees; Proust wrote later that Jacques had found fame as a painter in Auteuil, whereas he had found only hay fever.52 Blanche was a society painter, who frequently produced portraits of prominent figures from the intellectual and artistic milieus of Paris and London. His recent portraits of his compatriots included Edgar Degas, Maurice Barrès, Stéphane Mallarmé, and—just before Proust—André Gide.53
During the portrait sessions Blanche and Proust exchanged many stories about the salons they frequented. At idle moments Marcel noted the furnishings that reflected Blanche’s taste for the latest British fashion: an English straw-bottomed chair, a mirror-wardrobe, Liberty curtains, and a reproduction of Whistler’s portrait of Pablo Sarasate. The mingling of light from the lush garden outside with that reflected from the pistachio-colored door and the green water closet often gave the studio an aquarium-like atmosphere.54
Tall, well dressed, and somewhat effeminate, Blanche was, according to Proust, a great conversationalist but a difficult friend.55 The relationship between Marcel and his portraitist was often strained, sometimes to the breaking point. Blanche delighted in gossip, often slandering his friends or setting them at odds with each other. Léon Daudet, a future friend of Marcel’s and a chronicler of the era, wrote that he always avoided Blanche “like the plague.”56 But Marcel and Blanche, at the beginning of their relationship, enjoyed each other’s company.
In his memoirs, Blanche recalled Marcel’s normal attire when out in society: he wore butterfly collars and once a fading orchid as a boutonniere, “a gift no doubt from Lord Lytton the English Ambassador.”57 Later Proust “went in for pale green ties, loosely knotted, baggy trousers, and a frock coat with voluminous skirts.” Blanche also remembered Proust’s absentmindedness and extravagant, generous nature, all traits that made life endlessly complicated, not only for Marcel himself but for his friends, who were forced to run a permanent lost and found agency for him—though they were royally compensated:
He carried a Malacca cane which he had a way of twirling whenever he stooped to pick up a dropped glove (his gloves were pearl gray with black stitching, and were always crumpled and dirty), or was engaged in putting on or taking off its fellow. He was forever leaving odd gloves about, or would implore their return by post, in exchange for a new pair, or for half a dozen new pairs, which he liked to present as a thank-you to anyone who would be kind enough to find his strays for him. The same thing was constantly happening to his umbrellas, which he left in cabs or in the halls of his friends’ houses. No matter how dilapidated they might be, he continued to use them when his appeal for their return was answered, though he invariably bought the friend in question a new one at Verdier’s. His top hats very soon took on the appearance of hedgehogs or Skye terriers, as a result of being brushed the wrong way, or rubbed against the skirts or furs of his driving companions.58
After each sitting, the painter and his model would have lunch with Jacques’s father, Dr. Antoine Blanche, home from his nearby private asylum, where his patients included prominent writers, as well as Mme Straus and her relatives. As Proust later recorded, lunch included spontaneous psychological counseling from the good doctor, who “out of professional habit would from time to time urge me to remain calm and moderate. If I expressed an opinion that Jacques contradicted too vehemently, the doctor, admirable for his knowledge and goodness but accustomed to dealing with insane people, would sharply reprimand his son: ‘Come, come, Jacques, don’t torment him, don’t perturb him.’” Then, turning to Marcel, “‘Pull yourself together, my child, try to remain calm; he doesn’t believe one word of what he said; drink some cool water, in little sips, while you count to a hundred.’”59
Blanche did not record what his thoughts were while he painted Marcel, though he was struck by “the pure oval face of a young Assyrian.”60 But in retrospect he realized that even then he had noticed Marcel’s seemingly indefinable age, a quality with which the novelist later endowed the Narrator. Was this striking, engaging person a child, an adolescent, a man? Blanche recorded that at twenty years of age, Proust had acquired this timeless “ambiguity.” The best way to characterize him, his portraitist thought, was by the epithet “dear to Freud, . . . polymorphous.”61 Years later Blanche speculated about how Marcel, with “his needs for tyrannical possession,” must have appeared to his Condorcet classmates, how he must already have borne “the troubling signs of the pure artist.” Blanche wondered whether such a one elected by the gods can love, can be loved? He concluded that the answer was no; a person like Proust can only exist alone.62 Blanche had identified an essential aspect of his subject’s nature, attributable, no doubt, to the pure artist: polymorphous or Protean, Proust would become all the things and people he captured in his seamless, magical net of words and placed in the pages of his book.
Marcel’s dominant traits, “unshakable energy and persistence,” were evident at the time, but apparently serving no good purpose. His determination seemed aimed at tracking beautiful, elusive women or their male counterparts, young dukes with whom he began to dine more and more often. This was the Proust—the dandy and social climber—whom Blanche depicted in the portrait, an altogether different creature from the one he had quickly drawn in pencil that fall day in Trouville. In the oil portrait, not exhibited publicly until the following year, Marcel stares out at the world with the demeanor of a foppish snob, with the slightly bewildered air of a rising young man about town whose most serious thoughts are his physical appearance and the rank of the hostesses whom he assiduously courts.
The July issue of Le Banquet contained three untitled “études” or studies by Marcel. In the first he experiments with a universal theme that was to become a dominant one in the Search, dramatized with a Proustian twist: the absolute subjectivity or blindness of erotic desire and the inevitable disappointment that comes with possession.63 The theme is stated in an opening maximlike sentence, then dramatized by the story: “Desire makes all things flourish, possession withers them.” The second study speaks of the fear that society women have of expressing themselves, of being too serious, and of thus seeming to be vacuous.64 The final study, of another embryonic theme, depicts a person’s eyes as the windows through which her past may be read and hints at the false promises seen therein that the lover will believe. Remarks later made by Proust to Mme Straus suggest that this conceit was inspired by her dark, melancholy eyes. Those eyes, now blackened further by a decline into neurasthenia and an increasing dependency on drugs for solace, never ceased to fascinate Marcel.65
In late July or early August, Marcel wrote to Fernand, addressing him now as “my dear little Gregh,” to complain about the impending series of law exams that forced him to study all day, and about his horrible asthma attacks that kept him up all night so that by evening he was drained of energy and will. To make matters worse, he was lonely; his family had gone to Auteuil, leaving him alone to cope with law books and suffocation. Could Gregh stop by for a moment?66 One friend who did spend some time with Marcel was Aubert, whom he always found “so charming, witty, and kind.”67 The remaining summer days to be spent in Paris were rapidly drawing to an end, and soon he and his friends would be leaving to begin their long vacations. Aubert intended to vacation with Billy in Switzerland. Marcel would be going to Normandy, but first he must pass these infuriating exams on topics that held no interest for him.
Marcel took the first exam on August 4, with mixed results, receiving three white balls and three red ones, white indicating “satisfactory,” the ominous red “barely satisfactory.”68 He was not alarmed at this point. Perhaps he was overly confident; perhaps he simply did not care.
On Sunday, August 7, despite another law exam scheduled for the coming week, Marcel made the short trip from Paris to Saint-Gratien to call upon Princesse Mathilde in her château de Catinat. There he met a distinguished, elderly gentleman right out of the history books he had been studying: Comte Vincent Benedetti, who had been France’s ambassador to Berlin in 1870. It was Benedetti’s famous, fruitless interview with Emperor Wilhelm I at Ems in July 1870, the purpose of which was to secure a renunciation to the Spanish throne from Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, that provided Bismarck with the casus belli that precipitated the Franco-Prussian War. The count, whom Mathilde invited each year to be her houseguest for several months, impressed Marcel with his intelligence and grace.69
As the final days of summer 1892 approached, Marcel studied for his exams and made preparations for vacationing in Trouville as a guest of the Finalys, who had rented, on his recommendation, Les Frémonts from the Arthur Baignèreses. Inspired perhaps by Blanche’s furnishings, Marcel had purchased a number of Liberty ties for his vacation. Billy and Aubert called to say good-bye before leaving for Saint-Moritz. Although Edgar remained uncertain about his future plans, he told Marcel, with the calm assurance of a strong, healthy youth: “No matter what happens I shall return.” Marcel, who hated farewells and could not bear the thought of being deprived of such pleasant company, felt great relief on hearing Aubert’s pledge. He still dreamed of a Utopian life in which he would be surrounded by admiring, handsome youths.
From Auteuil during the second week of August, Marcel wrote to Billy at Saint-Moritz to tell him that he had failed the second half of his law exam, a disappointment that plunged his family into a “state of depression.” Marcel provided no further details because he was too upset; he would leave, as planned, for Trouville the following Sunday. He closed by saying that he embraced Billy and Aubert, whom he loved with all his heart. “Do you see how useful sealed letters are? I could never have done that with a non-sealable letter.”70
Many of Marcel’s friends were vacationing near Trouville. The Strauses had rented Mme Aubernon de Nerville’s “adorable property,” the Manoir de la Cour Brûlée located at the base of the hill that rose from the shore to Les Frémonts. Mme Straus had invited Fernand Gregh to vacation with them, naïvely believing that the aspiring poet and brilliant student would have a good influence on Jacques, who had begun to show early signs of instability that made his mother fear he might inherit the family disorders of depression and neurasthenia.71 She hoped that Jacques’s problems were merely those he shared with many his age, who, like Marcel, did not appear committed to studies and a serious career.
Although Marcel clearly enjoyed the summer and seemed relatively free from health problems, there was at least one alarming episode. One day he dropped by to see Fernand and Jacques, who were busy developing photographs in an improvised darkroom. Marcel waited in an adjoining room for them to finish. Suddenly, the two photographers heard Marcel make a strange noise. They rushed out to see what was happening and found him nearly unconscious in a corner of the room. Fortunately, Marcel recovered quickly from his mysterious malaise.72 Had he feigned the spell to attract attention or was his distress genuine?
Fernand, who often came with Jacques to call at Les Frémonts, took a keen interest in the wealthy Jewish family that had rented the villa, and especially in Mary Finaly, Horace’s nineteen-year-old sister. Horace, who eventually became director of the Bank of Paris and the Netherlands and, for a time, minister of finance, “was a somewhat short and stout young man, given to metaphysics and melancholy.” But the most imposing figure was the family patriarch, the “great man,” Baron Horace de Landau, who had made his fortune in Italy representing the Rothschilds during the railway boom of the 1860s.73 M. de Landau relished being surrounded by his niece, whom he adored, and her family. After dinner a servant would bring the baron, still at table, an enormous German pipe that extended from his mouth nearly to the floor. As Landau talked and drew on the pipe, great clouds of smoke, as thick and steady as those from a locomotive, spewed from his mouth.
The Finalys were enchanted with Les Frémonts, finding the villa to be as beautiful as Marcel had promised. The house had been perfectly sited on the high hill to take full advantage of the property’s extraordinary vistas. Fernand noticed that Marcel was attracted to Mary, with her pretty, rather pale face, and sea-green eyes, “a delightful girl, by turns laughing and serious, with whom we were all a little in love.”74 She and Marcel shared a love of music, and gazing into her eyes, he would quote Baudelaire’s hypnotic line from “Chant d’automne” (“Autumnal”): “J’aime de vos longs yeux la lumière verdâtre” (“How sweet the greenish light of your long eyes!”), or hum the music Gabriel Fauré had composed for the poem.75
Marcel’s mother sent brief letters about family activities at Auteuil: the suffocating heat wave that had blasted the Paris region, forcing them to sleep downstairs in the cooler confines of the billiard room, was at last abating. She also reported that they were reading Émile Zola’s new novel La Débâcle, an account of Napoléon III’s humiliating defeat at Sedan and its aftermath, a time she could never forget.
Marcel devoted most of his letter-writing time to his friends Billy and Aubert in Switzerland. A letter in late August to Billy expressed Proust’s delight at the effect created by his Liberty ties of “every hue.” He also mentioned a new friend, Comte Pierre de Segonzac, who had recently survived being struck by lightning, from whom Marcel regularly received letters ten pages long: “Finally, I have found the friend of my dreams, tender and epistolary. It is true that he only uses a single stamp and each time I have to pay thirty centimes for postage due. But what would one not do for love? Now I am going to crawl under the covers, but first I shake your hands quite affectionately. And even, if you like, I embrace you as well as my little Edgar Aubert.”76
His mother sent a note in the morning mail complaining about the lack of letters from him. Jeanne seemed unwilling to believe that “no news was good news.” Marcel was engaged with parties and other social activities. He had recently been to the racetrack at Deauville with Mme Straus and had lost money on a horse.77 Had his flirtations with green-eyed Mary distracted him from answering his mother’s last letter and two he had received from Aubert? Usually “tender and epistolary” himself, Proust had become rather lackadaisical regarding his duties. Perhaps he was concentrating on writing fiction. He used the back of the note from his mother to begin a story for Le Banquet on vanity.
“Violante ou la mondanité” (Violante, or worldly vanities), divided into four short chapters, was Proust’s most effective sustained narration to date and contains a number of themes that were to be developed in the Search: the struggle of will against the forces of habit; one adolescent’s loss of innocence to another already expert at enjoying the pleasures of the flesh; and an episode involving an attempted lesbian seduction.78 He also wrote a prose poem entitled “La Mer” (The sea).79
While Marcel enjoyed the company at the villa and the nocturnal sessions with his muse, Billy and Aubert were making the most of their vacation in the Alps. The weather remained so splendid that the two friends spent many hours outdoors; they played tennis with a young Raja and climbed several summits. At the end of the vacation both men looked vigorous, their faces freshly tanned from the days spent on the courts and the slopes. Before saying good-bye and going their separate ways, they made plans to meet in Paris later in the autumn. Within a week of leaving Saint-Moritz, Billy received the heart-breaking news that on September 18 Aubert had died suddenly of acute appendicitis. Billy wrote immediately to Marcel at Trouville to convey the tragic news without stating the cause of death, perhaps because he had not yet been informed.
On Friday morning, September 23, Marcel received the “crushing letter” and wrote to Billy: “I’m very sad, my dear Robert, and I wish you were here with me so we could talk about Aubert together.” Aubert’s “return to Paris was one of the joys I was most looking forward to. He was so sure of returning, always saying ‘In any case I shall be back next year.’ Now those words break my heart.” Marcel regretted bitterly that he, usually so prompt in replying, had not taken time to answer Edgar’s last two letters. “I beg you to write and tell me what his illness was, whether he knew how serious it was, what relations he has left behind, whether they resemble him, a thousand things that would not have interested me before, but are so precious to me now because they are the last things I shall know of him.”80 The death stunned Marcel, who mourned not only the company of the attractive young man so full of promise but the loss of all the information he had hoped to glean, the intimate exchange of memories, aspirations, enthusiasms, and projects. This death also reminded him of how little time one might have to accomplish one’s goals. Other reminders, just as cruel and unexpected, were to follow.
At the end of September there was great excitement at the villa when Baron Horace de Landau purchased Les Frémonts from the Baignèreses, for the sum of 152,000 francs, as a gift for his niece Mme Hugo Finaly.81 For Marcel’s part in bringing the two parties together, M. de Landau presented him with a sumptuous cane, which Gregh said looked like a cross between a sugar stick and a royal scepter.82
After his return to Paris, Marcel and his parents decided that because he had failed the second part of his law exam in August, it would be wise for him to take private lessons with a M. Monnot to supplement his course work. Although he had a law exam scheduled for November 5, Marcel busied himself during October by reviewing Henri de Régnier’s volume of poems Tel qu’en songe (As in a dream) for Le Banquet.83 Only a few days before the exam he wrote to Laure Hayman a letter full of playful flattery.84 With the exuberant missive to his “Dear friend, dear delight,” came a bouquet of fifteen chrysanthemums. “I should so much have liked to attend that eighteenth-century party, to see those young people who ... gathered around you. How well I understand them! That a woman who is merely desirable, a mere object of lust, should divide her worshippers and incite them against one another is only natural. But when a woman, like a work of art, reveals to us the most refined charm, the subtlest grace, the most divine beauty, the most voluptuous intelligence, a common admiration for her forges a bond and makes for brotherhood. The worship of Laure Hayman makes men co-religionists.” He ended by proposing that the nineteenth century be called the “century of Laure Hayman, the reigning dynasty being that of the Saxes,” and asking her to forgive him for “all this foolishness.” He then asked permission to call on her after the exam. In the postscript he mentioned what may have been all along the purpose of his fanciful flattery: he angled for the opportunity to meet “the man whom I desire above all to see,” her lover Paul Bourget, whom he had never had the luck to encounter.
While waiting for an introduction to Bourget, Marcel was kind enough to arrange for Gregh to meet an emerging philosopher whose reputation would endure. On November 7 Gregh received word that Marcel had succeeded in arranging a dinner with Henri Bergson. He instructed Gregh to arrive “at 7 sharp, no tails,” because Bergson was in mourning.85 Earlier in the year Marcel had been best man in the wedding when Bergson married Mme Proust’s cousin Louise Neuburger. Although Gregh intended to become a poet, he was working toward an advanced degree in philosophy. There was no other luminary in the field whom Gregh would rather meet than Bergson. Bergson had already been singled out as the rising philosopher by the social snobs, as well as the intellectual ones who flocked to his public lectures.
Gregh recorded his impressions of this first dinner at the Prousts’. He knew that he was meeting another accomplished person in Dr. Proust, who struck him as a “superb man,” though “a little too corpulent, but with a noble visage.” Gregh observed that Robert resembled his father just as Marcel did his mother, who was a “delicious woman, an incomparable mother.” Next to the hefty couple, Bergson’s marked thinness was all the more evident, but he had an enormous head, and his slightest remarks sparkled with intelligence.86 What amazed Fernand most, perhaps, was how intently Bergson, whose great introspection was evident, listened to others, as though every fiber of his being was tuned to the words being spoken.87
As 1892 drew to a close, Marcel continued to press Mme Straus to accord him more of her time by granting private interviews. He pleaded for a great Platonic love, complaining that he must always share her company with so many others. On the rare occasion when he succeeded in seeing her alone, he wrote, she never had more than five minutes, and even then “you are thinking of something else. But that’s nothing so far. If one speaks to you of books, you find it pedantic, if one speaks to you of people, you find it indiscreet (if one informs) and curious (if one inquires), and if one speaks to you of yourself, you find it ridiculous.” And just when he was on the point, for the hundredth time, of finding her “a lot less delicious . . . suddenly you grant some little favour that seems to indicate a slight preference, and one is caught again.”88 To which Mme Straus replied, ignoring his entreaties and assuring him of her friendship, that he was dotty.89
Sometime late in 1892 or early 1893 Marcel answered questions in a second keepsake book. A number of the queries were the same as in the first questionnaire, but in most cases his opinions had evolved or become more refined. His affection and admiration for his mother had not, would not ever change. “My greatest misfortune would be: Not having known my mother and grandmother.” His favorite prose writers were no longer George Sand and Augustin Thierry but Anatole France and Pierre Loti, two contemporary writers, one of whom he could claim as a friend and mentor. Musset, the favorite poet of his adolescence, had been replaced by Charles Baudelaire, by far the one he most admired, and Alfred de Vigny. Marcel’s heroes in real life remained his philosophy teachers, Darlu from the lycée and Émile Boutroux, a distinguished philosopher of science with whom he studied at the Sorbonne. His preferred musicians were a trio of Germans: Schumann, Beethoven, and Wagner, the last whose music had become the rage among many in French society, creating a division between those who, like Proust, considered themselves Wagnerites and those who vehemently denounced this new foreign music. Marcel and his friends had discovered Wagner at the Sunday concerts they attended. Gregh described their astonishment as they listened, experiencing with each fragment “the ecstasy of a revelation.”90
Proust’s answers to what qualities he most preferred in a man or a woman reveal an increasingly complex view of human sexuality, acknowledging androgyny and its appeal for him. My favorite qualities in a man: “Feminine charm.” My favorite qualities in a woman: “Manly virtue and openness in friendship.” Another answer shows a new concern about his lack of will: My greatest fault: “Not to know how to, not to be able to ‘will.’” He may have been made acutely aware of this personal flaw by his parents, who frequently lectured him about changing his behavior, going out less frequently, studying harder, and keeping normal hours; they urged him to stop spending so much money on flowers and other gifts for friends and hostesses, and to stop giving exorbitant tips.
Some of Marcel’s answers contained touches of humor. Asked to name the military action he most admired, he replied enthusiastically, “My year of service!” But the majority of his replies show a need for affection. His favorite occupation was no longer, as it had been at sixteen, “reading, daydreaming, poetry, history, theater,” but, in a single word, “loving.” He wanted to be petted and spoiled and to live in a country “where certain things I desire would come true as though by enchantment and where feelings of tenderness would always be shared.”
Perhaps he feared that he would never find a true companion. Who could possibly satisfy his great need for affection and devotion? Although he genuinely liked women and was sensitive to their seductive charms, he seems already to have understood that he could not find fulfillment in their love. In spite of the obvious— perhaps too obvious—flirtations with attractive young women like Jeanne Pouquet, and occasional rumors about girlfriends or cousins he might marry, nothing indicates that Marcel or his parents ever considered marriage a serious prospect for him. In 1892, when Marcel was twenty-one and Gregh only nineteen, they wrote portraits of each other. Fernand took his title from the character Marcel had created for his sketches of Italian comedy, Fabrice, and in the first line stated Marcel’s greatest wish: “Fabrice needs to be loved.”91
On December 31, when the government announced the year’s honors for distinguished service to France, Dr. Adrien Proust was named commander in the Légion d’honneur. Marcel, proud of his father’s most recent distinction, celebrated the arrival of 1893 at the Finalys’ sumptuous Paris mansion.
At the beginning of the new year Robert de Billy, much to Marcel’s sorrow, left for Berlin, where he assumed his first diplomatic post as a trainee. Soon afterward Marcel wrote to Billy, confessing that he was not doing anything worthwhile. Paul Baignères had asked him to pose for a portrait, “providing a pretext for my recent inactivity.”92 Although he lamented the lack of any great change in his “sentimental life,” he did boast of a new, attentive friend who came to see him nearly every day, “the young and charming and intelligent and good and affectionate Robert de Flers. Ah! you other Robert, hurry back to Paris to learn how one must love one’s friends.”93 Flers, another of Le Banquet’s authors, became, after Dreyfus and Billy, the third Robert in Proust’s intimate circle. A student of law and literature, Flers was to have a distinguished career as a journalist and coauthor of light comedies with Gaston de Caillavet and, later, Francis de Croisset.
On January 25 Marcel enrolled in law school for the new term. The next day he wrote to Billy about a parcel that had arrived unexpectedly, containing a memento that Aubert had chosen for him. The unnamed souvenir and the prospect of a premature spring gave him the illusion of Edgar’s presence. Then Marcel, turning to practical matters, informed Billy that only one day after registration he had already lost his assignment sheets: “Do be kind enough to give me another list of the four examinations I should take and the books I should read. . . . Don’t forget.” Did it occur to Proust that Billy might find it odd for him to request information, readily available at his law school in Paris, from a faraway friend in Berlin? Adrien, alarmed at Marcel’s lack of progress and commitment, insisted that he continue the private law lessons at home with M. Monnot. Pierre Lavallée, a friend from Condorcet, who also wanted to increase his own chances of passing the exams, sometimes joined Marcel for the help sessions that would last until the end of July.
Marcel’s last contribution to Le Banquet was an article in the February issue about a new club, which Proust apparently joined, where students from the École libre des sciences politiques staged mock parliamentary debates. In his piece Marcel heaped praise on his fellow students, many of whom were socially prominent and certain to be future deputies, at one point declaring that each of them was endowed with “true political genius.”94 Gregh, who feared that the debaters were being flattered and treated to Proustifications, placed a disclaimer at the bottom of Marcel’s article, saying the opinions expressed were solely those of the author. Whether or not Marcel’s feelings were wounded, the March issue, the eighth and the last, contained nothing by him. Without giving a reason or saying farewell to its readers, Le Banquet ceased to exist. Robert Dreyfus later wrote that the little magazine had run its course; the coffer was empty and the young writers had “played enough” at their declared vocation.95
Marcel, who had published fifteen sketches, stories, essays, and reviews, filling approximately forty pages in Le Banquet, began to entertain the idea of collecting these pieces and others unpublished, or to be written, into a volume. He had in mind several stories, some more ambitious than any he had written so far, to flesh out a small volume of “exquisite” prose. Surely, such a book would impress his father, please his mother, signal his accomplishment—however slight for the moment—and prove to all his determination to devote himself exclusively to writing.
He and his friends had reached the age where it was time not only to begin a career but to think of matrimony. On April 11 Gaston Arman de Caillavet married Jeanne Pouquet. In May the newlyweds left for an extended honeymoon trip to Italy, accompanied by Gaston’s mother and Anatole France. Marcel envied Gaston’s happiness and wondered whether he would ever depart on such a journey with his beloved, to a land filled with art treasures like those found in Rome, Florence, and Venice.
He feared not. He invented stories in which he was the male lover or the female lover; he cursed the exclusiveness of one sex and dreamed of being an androgyne or a hermaphrodite, some fabulous creature who would experience the delights of both sexes, who would not be condemned to wander in the desert of homosexual desire. Perhaps he envied Oscar Wilde, a writer who had achieved a name for himself, who had married and fathered two children and yet, so rumor said, kept young men for a different kind of love in a London hotel. Would he ever marry? Would he ever have a family? The thought of the entanglements, complications, and obligations of conjugal love horrified him. He intended to have only one master/mistress of his soul—literature.
Meanwhile, he continued to pay court to society ladies, pretending more and more as he spun tales in his mind that he was one himself and that, if he were, he would find the perfect lover—or if not, a cad who would make him sublimely unhappy. His friends had already divined who he was: polymorphous, ambiguous, and a pure artist. But what would he write? And how could he convince his parents to yield in the struggle to force him to choose a despised career?