SOMETIME DURING LATE 1896 OR EARLY 1897, Marcel, grown increasingly high-strung and nervous, exploded in anger at his mother. The precise cause of the confrontation is not clear, but it apparently erupted over his lavish spending habits, requests for new and expensive wardrobe items, or such activities as taking Laure Hayman out every morning for a springtime drive, often followed by lunch-pleasures that, as he confessed to Mme Straus, cost him so much that he “hadn’t a penny left for flowers.”1 Such extravagant behavior, given his inability to work and earn any money, posed a serious problem for his parents, who were concerned about both the family budget and Marcel’s utter disregard for money. The altercation with his parents occurred when Marcel, angered at their attempt to rein him in and humiliated because he thought their manservant Jean had overheard the scolding, flew into a rage and smashed a valuable vase. Afterward from his room, Marcel wrote his parents a letter of apology. Later in the evening, he received this note from his mother:
My dear boy,
Your letter has done me good—your father and I were feeling very badly. I assure you that I didn’t mean for one moment to say anything whatsoever in front of Jean and if I did it was quite unintentional. Let’s never speak of it again. From now on let the broken glass be what it is at temple—a symbol of indissoluble union.
Your father wishes you good night and I kiss you tenderly.
J. P.
PS. I have to come back to the subject after all: be sure not to go into the dining room with bare feet, because of the glass.2
Proust left two versions of the incident, one in Jean Santeuil, the other related almost two decades afterward to his housekeeper Céleste Albaret.3 Neither account provides complete details about the altercation; each ends with the symbolic union of mother and son. The crisis had erupted over a pair of gloves.4 Marcel had become infatuated with a demimondaine who lived in the Bois; after many attempts, he finally received her permission to call. Wanting to appear as elegantly attired as possible, he had entreated his mother to buy him a new tie and “the most beautiful pair of yellow gloves she could find.” Jeanne returned with a very pretty sailor-knot tie but without the coveted yellow gloves. Instead, she had purchased a gray pair she thought he would like. He was infuriated. In his anger and haste to punish his mother, he seized a beautiful antique vase she prized and smashed it on the floor. His mother had not flinched, but said simply: “‘Well, my little Marcel, this will be what it is in Jewish weddings. You broke the cup; our love will only be the greater.’” Marcel ran to his room, shut the door, and wept for hours over the great pain he had caused his mother. The story, as related by Proust to Céleste, had an amusing ending. When he arrived for his rendezvous with the cocotte, wearing his new tie, gloves, and carrying a huge bouquet of flowers, what he saw, instead of the elegant, romantic interlude he had pictured, was a scene from a Flaubert novel: a bailiff and his men were busy repossessing the fancy harlot’s furnishings.
An unpublished source claims that Marcel’s tantrum was caused by his mother’s condemnation of a photograph showing Marcel with Robert de Flers and Lucien Daudet. Marcel, beaming with bemused contentment, is seated with Robert standing behind him and Lucien next to him, his forearm on Proust’s shoulder. Lucien gazes down at Marcel in a way that could be described as amorous. Did this picture spark a violent argument between Proust and his parents because it reminded them of his homosexual inclinations?5
In his New Year’s greetings to Montesquiou, Marcel pledged anew his gratitude and admiration, although “somewhat wounded” by the “unmerited disaffection” the count had made him feel.6 Montesquiou, still indignant because Marcel had snubbed the ceremony at Douai and continued to amuse their friends with his imitations, replied: “My dear Marcel, It is the transparent subterfuge of those who feel themselves at fault to pretend to think they have been injured and try to hide their real guilt behind a false susceptibility.” Marcel should appreciate, as had their mutual friends, “my indulgence towards your congenial and somewhat evasive person,” and the poet reminded his disciple, that although he might at times judge him severely, he had also had “only too many occasions to acknowledge your many virtues, among others honesty and delicacy. And I am pleased to do so when you are not present. Indulgence, however, has never meant sycophancy.” His New Year’s gift to Marcel was “my voice, crying out in the social wilderness, where your good qualities are rather going to seed.” Shrewdly observing that Marcel made of his faults the virtues of his books, Montesquiou quoted from Pleasures and Days and declared that the length of his letter showed a “pledge of my interest,” of which, he hinted, Marcel would “have better proof.” Montesquiou planned to include a chapter from Proust’s book in his forthcoming anthology Roseaux pensants (Thinking reeds).
Proust, who had been unaware of Montesquiou’s intentions about Pleasures and Days, expressed gratitude in his reply for the unusually long letter and attempted to justify his behavior. He assured the count of his eagerness to “re-enlist” in the rolls of Montesquiou’s friends, a position he admitted having abandoned: “My admiration for you has remained unchanged and always shall. I had merely ceased to harbour the slightest feeling of friendship.” Montesquiou, while genuinely well disposed toward him, enjoyed taunting Marcel and returned his letter as though he were a professor marking a composition, complete with a grade and marginal comments: “The highest mark being 20, this little epistolary exercise deserves no more than minus fifteen. The teacher.” Montesquiou attributed another comment by Proust to bitterness over not having received from the count a written appreciation of Pleasures and Days.7 Marcel’s book was soon to receive attention from the most undesirable source.
On February 3 Jean Lorrain wrote a second virulent article in Le Journal, in which he mocked Marcel and his friends by attacking Pleasures and Days. Lorrain maintained that France had written the preface because he could not deny his beautiful prose to Mme Arman, in whose home he had dined so often. He characterized Proust’s book as filled with “inane flirtations in a dated, pretentious, and precious style.” What really distinguished Proust’s “delicate volume” as the epitome of its genre were Madeleine Lemaire’s illustrations. Lorrain described the drawing for “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” whose title he misspelled, as “two jugs,” for “Violante ou la mondanité,” “two rose leaves,” remarking parenthetically, “I’m not making this up.” Then, aiming at Proust and his illustrator, Lorrain intoned sarcastically, “Madame Lemaire’s ingenuity has never been so perfectly adapted to an author’s talent.” Commenting on the rarefied, silly-sounding names of some of Proust’s aristocratic specimens, such as Heldemonde, Aldegise, and Hercole, Lorrain noted that such appellations represented the pure aristocracy of the old regime, and he called for the whip to punish the offender. Lorrain saved the worst blow for last: “Rest assured,” he alerted his readers, “that for his next book, M. Marcel Proust will obtain a preface from M. Alphonse Daudet... who will not be able to refuse this preface either to Mme Lemaire or to his son Lucien.”8
Like everyone else, Lorrain had noticed Lucien’s pretty face and effeminate nature, traits the journalist despised. In his newspaper column, the acid-penned chronicler consistently attacked men in the social limelight who shared his homosexual inclinations. Effete homosexuals especially aroused his ire, although Lorrain himself often appeared bejeweled and perfumed, his mustache dyed red with henna. Lorrain fancied boys also, but—like Proust’s baron de Charlus—he favored tough ones, sailors or butcher boys, from the lower classes. His letters and memoirs tell of narrow escapes from severe beatings; once sailors, offended by his blatant sexual advances, attempted to drown him.
Marcel knew that he could not let pass Lorrain’s insinuation that he and Lucien were lovers, and he challenged the columnist to a duel. In spite of his nervous, sickly condition, Marcel did not fear exposing himself to danger, perhaps even death. Léon Daudet said that although Marcel was normally the most amiable of men, when offended, he responded like dynamite, or a lion that had been given a flick of the finger.9 This powder-keg temper is a trait Proust gave first to Jean Santeuil and then to the Narrator, neither of whom hesitates to fight a duel when provoked.10
Marcel chose as his seconds Jean Béraud, a distinguished painter, and Gustave de Borda, a socialite with a delightful wit, whose dexterity and finesse in so many duels had earned him the nickname “Sword-Thrust Borda.” Securing Borda’s services provided Marcel with a warranty of distinction and integrity. Béraud, whom Proust knew well from Madeleine Lemaire’s salon, was an excellent choice, given his expertise in handling such matters. He was particularly eager to serve in this instance because he had been piqued by Lorrain’s attacks on his friends. As his seconds Lorrain chose the painter Octave Uzanne and the novelist Paul Adam. The four seconds met at Béraud’s residence but were unable to resolve their differences, and a duel was judged necessary. It would be fought with pistols on Saturday, February 6, in the forest of Meudon just outside Paris. Proust’s primary worry, he later told Montesquiou, was not the bullets but having to rise, dress, and go out in the morning. Fortunately, his seconds were able to arrange an afternoon confrontation.
Saturday dawned cold and rainy. Reynaldo was among those who accompanied Marcel on the carriage ride, through woods filled with oak and birch trees, to the meeting place at the Tour de Villebon. Once both parties had arrived, the men went quickly about their business. After stepping off twenty-five paces, each duelist fired one shot at the other, neither scoring a hit. Proust had apparently taken aim at Lorrain, because his bullet hit the ground almost on the journalist’s right foot.11 After the exchange of fire, the seconds for both parties declared the matter resolved. Was it Marcel’s decision not to shake hands with the despised scan-dalmonger, or did his seconds prevent him from making the gesture of reconciliation?12 Later that day Hahn noted briefly in his diary: “Today Marcel fought with Jean Lorrain, who had written an odious article about him in Le Journal. For the last three days he has shown a sangfroid and firmness that appear incompatible with his nerves, but that does not surprise me at all.”13 Marcel’s pluck had also impressed Béraud, a veteran of many such confrontations.14 Perhaps the real Marcel was not, after all, the one depicted by Blanche in the portrait but the one who had enjoyed military life and had sought to prolong his enlistment. Paul Morand, a diplomat and writer who knew Proust later in life, said that although Proust was often depicted as being weak and effeminate, nothing was further from the truth: “Proust had a lot of authority, what the English called ‘poise,’... and, at the same time, lots of courage. He looked you right in the eye, with a somewhat defiant air, like D’Artagnan, head back. He was very courageous.”15
On the day following the duel, as was customary, Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, and Le Journal printed an account of the proceedings, signed by all the seconds.16 On Sunday morning Mme Arman wrote to Marcel to thank him “for your sweet thought and take you to my heart for being so brave and coming back to us safe and sound from your adventure.” As for the “monster” Lorrain, she regretted that Proust’s aim had not been better.17
The duel came at the time when Proust had promised to deliver the manuscript of Jean Santeuil to Calmann-Lévy. The formless mass of its pages was nowhere near ready for submission. Marcel had been far too optimistic about finishing the manuscript, whose pages he had multiplied without imposing any order or structure. For the remainder of 1897, Proust’s productivity would reach its lowest level for the years during which he labored on Santeuil’s story. Lorrain’s attacks on Pleasures and Days may have intensified Proust’s misgivings about his ability to complete the work. Would his new hero Jean be seen as pandering to the beau monde of the faubourg Saint-Germain? And what about the names he had chosen? Would Sentleur, M. d’Utraine, Rustinlor, M. de Traves, Mme d’Alériouvres, and so forth be received with the same derision?18 Although somewhat discouraged and still at sea about where the story was heading, Proust did not abandon Jean Santeuil, which remained his only literary project, and drafts would continue to pile up over the next few years, like leaves without a central trunk and branches, pages without a plot or unifying point of view.
The Marcel most people thought they knew was the one Jacques-Émile Blanche had depicted: the spoiled, idle socialite. Now Lorrain’s articles had tarred him as an effeminate snob who only dabbled in literature, an unflattering image that persisted in the minds of many, including friends, whose warnings about the dangers of high society seemed fulfilled. A group of these friends, indifferent to the disappointment and humiliation he had already suffered, soon mounted another attack, meant to be funny, on his hapless first book.
At the end of February, Marcel became confused about Lucien’s schooling and thought that he had just passed his baccalaureate exams. He sent the supposed graduate a congratulatory telegram, saying that he had heard the news by chance and gently reproached Lucien for not having informed him. This oversight, Marcel remarked, suited Lucien’s apparent determination to avoid him. The demise of Marcel’s intimate relationship with Lucien had been a slow drifting apart, noticeably different from the flashes of jealousy, spite, hurt feelings, reproaches, and sorrow that marked the end of his passionate friendship with Reynaldo.
With spring approaching, the duel behind him, and his love life at a lull, Marcel began to think of adding a historical backdrop to Jean Santeuil. Writing to congratulate Édouard Rod on his recent novel Là-Haut, Proust flattered the author by linking Rod’s book to what he especially admired in one of George Eliot’s novels: “It is this panoramic painting, not only of places but also of events that I so loved in a novel like Middlemarch.” Proust thought that if he could construct the right historical panorama for Jean Santeuil, he could then devote his attention to the depiction of individual passions, show the import and consequences of apparently trivial events, and decode them to reveal the general laws of the human condition. Easy in theory, perhaps, such a program was nonetheless extremely ambitious.
Marcel had known for some time that he wanted to be a writer, but he had never specifically declared that he wanted to be a novelist. He had proved that he could write sketches and fully developed short stories of some merit, but he feared that the formless pages of Jean Santeuil would never constitute a novel. Now, perhaps inspired in part by Rod’s novel and Middlemarch, he began to take a closer look at national events, attempting—like Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert, his great predecessors in the French novel—to set his story against the social and political background of his day.
On March 14 Marcel invited Prince Constantin de Brancovan to attend a session at the Chamber of Deputies, for which he had obtained two tickets through President Félix Faure’s office. The debate concerned Greece’s takeover of Crete, then under Turkish rule, and the ensuing international crisis. France, along with other European powers, had already committed troops to prevent Greece from annexing Crete. In the coming months Marcel attended other sessions in the legislature and trials related to the Dreyfus Affair. Although Proust followed the Dreyfus case closely, the cause célèbre interested him less as material for a novel than did Jean’s friendship with Henri de Réveillon, the intrigues of salon life, or the beauty of flowers, mountains, and the sea. While listening to the trials, Marcel took notes and wrote portraits of the key figures, but as with everything he wrote for Jean Santeuil, the purpose of his journalistic notes remained unclear.
In his final year as a medical student, Jacques Bizet had rented a small studio apartment on the top floor of a fine old house on the Île Saint-Louis.19 In spite of its modest size, Jacques converted the space into a study and seductive bachelor pad, one of whose finest features was a narrow terrace from which Bizet and his friends enjoyed a superb view of the rooftops of Paris. Among the regulars were Fernand Gregh and Daniel Halévy, determined, like Proust, to make their marks as writers, and the future lawyers Robert Dreyfus and Léon Yeatman.
Bizet and his group enjoyed staging amateur theatricals, musical reviews, and shadow plays inspired by those presented at the famous cabaret Le Chat noir. Casting about for an appropriate subject for a satirical review, the group quickly hit upon the idea of roasting Marcel and his recent publishing fiasco. The silhouettes and decors for the show, entitled “Les Lauriers sont coupés” (The laurel wreaths have been cut), were created by artist friends who were exceptionally talented: Jean-Louis Forain, Jacques-Émile Blanche, and Paul Baignères. The title may have come from Maurras’s review of Pleasures and Days, which he ended by saying that in Ancient Greece, a new, distinguished young poet was presented with “myrtle, rose, and laurel.”20 Robert Dreyfus was recruited to help with Bizet’s production, as well as two “nice little chanteuses,” whose contributions to the enterprise may not have been solely lyrical. The producers selected the cast according to the special talents of each. Yeatman, who imitated Proust’s voice and intonation to perfection, took the lead role, but only after some persuasion, because he feared offending the hypersensitive author. Dreyfus recorded in his diary what the audience heard while silhouettes of Proust and Ernest La Jeunesse, who wrote for La Revue blanche, were projected on a screen:
Proust, to Ernest La Jeunesse: Did you read my book?
La Jeunesse: No, sir, it is too expensive.
Proust: Alas, that’s what everyone says.... And you, Gregh, did you read it?
Gregh: Yes, I cut the pages in order to review it.
Proust: And did you, like the others, find it too expensive?
Gregh: Oh, no, no, you certainly get your money’s worth.
Proust: You’re quite right! M. France’s preface, four francs, Mme Lemaire’s illustrations, four francs, Reynaldo Hahn’s music, four francs, my prose, one franc. A few poems by me, half a franc.
The total comes to 13 francs 50 centimes, that’s not outrageous for the money.
La Jeunesse: But, Sir, there’s a lot more than that in the Almanach Hachette and it only costs twenty-five centimes!
The little show was something of a hit; La Vie parisienne even published a flattering notice. As word of the review spread, Bizet was astonished to see many members of the social set mounting the steps to his small apartment. “Lauriers” had a long run for a private, nonprofessional production: three consecutive evenings, March 18–20. Marcel, although deeply wounded when he heard about the review, tried to be a good sport. His friends thought that they had been gentle in their satire, but although Marcel said nothing to any of them, they got wind of his unhappiness.21 Marcel had escaped unharmed from his duel with Lorrain only to be wounded in his pride by the barbs of his friends’ mockery. Pleasures and Days had attracted a fair amount of attention, but not the kind of which he had dreamed.
Marcel enjoyed a busy winter season of dinner parties and evenings at the theater and opera. He occasionally saw Hahn’s captivating cousin Marie Nordlinger. In January he accompanied her to the Louvre to see the tiara of Saïtapharnès, a scandalous fake that had rocked the Paris art world. In the following summer Reynaldo took Marcel and Marie to visit the studio of Alexander Harrison, the painter who had befriended them at Beg-Meil.
Marcel saw Montesquiou more often during this period, sometimes accompanying him on visits and excursions.22 In mid-April Le Figaro published poems by the count that Delafosse had set to music. That merited a congratulatory letter from Marcel, who said that he found the poems ravishing. He also informed Montesquiou that he intended to go to the Palais des Beaux-Arts and view the count’s portrait by Giovanni Boldini.23 Boldini’s canvas, the most talked about painting in the 1897 salon, showed the vain count holding and admiring a cane that had belonged to Louis XV. The resourceful Yturri had acquired this treasure for Montesquiou’s remarkable cane collection at the sale of Edmond de Goncourt’s estate.24 The count, who had already been portrayed by Whistler, Blanche, and La Gandara, may have regretted posing with the cane, given the ridicule and danger to which this decision was about to expose him.
Various Paris wits had their fun at Montesquiou’s expense as they described his picture. Geneviève Straus said he looked like “a toad headed for the strawberries.”25 Jean Lorrain, who particularly enjoyed goading the count, informed his readers: “We see him again this spring, executed by Boldini, the habitual deformer of little, agitated, and grimacing ladies, otherwise known as the Paganini of the peignoirs.”26 Lorrain did not scruple to make an obscene suggestion: the caption of the picture of Montesquiou gazing at the cane, should be, “Where shall I put it? or Indecision.”27
On May 4 tragedy struck Paris at a charity bazaar organized by some of the city’s most fashionable women. The Bazar de la Charité had set up its counters, where luxury items and novelties were to be sold by volunteers under a large, striped canvas tent on a vacant lot, surrounded on three sides by buildings. As an added attraction, a huge movie projector had been hoisted high above the stands to project a new film, “L’Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert Houdin” (The disappearance of a woman at Robert Houdin’s) by Georges Méliès.28 Across the top of the tent a vast awning had been stretched as a shield against the light and heat. Streams of elegant ladies and gentlemen arrived, clad in all their finery—the women wearing large, flowery chapeaux and the men sporting their top hats, scenting the air, as they moved about, with the finest French perfumes and colognes.
Suddenly, a fire broke out near the film projector and spread to the awning. Amid shouts of “Fire!” the flames spread rapidly, engulfing the awning and the tent, whose panels of burning canvas rained down on the crowd below. Thick clouds of smoke filled the tent, which began to reverberate with horrible screams and moans. Most of the crowd ran away from the fire toward the back of the tent, where the exit was blocked. Men and women, their clothes aflame, rushed toward the others, in a vain attempt to escape the inferno. Bodies began to pile up; many died from asphyxiation. Geneviève Straus, who had been in the tent when the fire started, somehow knew that the only way to safety lay in walking straight into the fire. That moment of aplomb saved her life.29
After the catastrophe, which claimed 140 lives, rumors circulated that a few society men from Paris’s best clubs had used their canes to clear women out of their way as they beat a path to safety. Montesquiou, who had remained at home that day, was named as one of the offenders. To compound the offense, the rumor added that Montesquiou had been seen later at the morgue, using his cane to brush aside articles of clothing as he studied the charred remains of victims, among whom he expected to find relatives and friends. Lorrain wasted no time in giving credence to this slander in his column. Evoking the Boldini portrait of the count “hypnotized in the adoration of his cane,” Lorrain accused Montesquiou of being a coward and a brute, a man who used his cane as a “cudgel for living women and as tongs for dead women, henceforth sadly renowned in the annals of masculine elegance!”30 Montesquiou again ignored Lorrain’s vile insults; a man of noble birth, a direct descendent of D’Artagnan, could not engage in combat with a gutter journalist. Trouble soon came from an altogether different quarter.
On May 21 the Académie française awarded Fernand Gregh’s La Maison de l’enfance the Prix Archon-Despérouse, with its purse of two thousand francs. Proust, who had seen his own book become an object of derision, sent Gregh a congratulatory note that the recipient found rather perfunctory.31 Was Marcel slightly jealous, as well as disappointed, because he believed Pleasures and Days, for all its flaws, superior to Gregh’s book? Or was he simply too preoccupied with a large dinner party he had planned, whose date had to be suddenly advanced to accommodate Anatole France, set to depart on his usual springtime cruise?
The list of distinguished gentlemen invited to dine chez Proust on May 24 included Robert de Montesquiou, Boni de Castellane, Anatole France, Reynaldo Hahn, Jean Béraud, Gustave de Borda, Édouard Rod, Gaston de Caillavet, and one of Montesquiou’s portraitists, La Gandara. Ladies were not included because Mme Proust was still in mourning and could not make an appearance. The guest list had been more troublesome to draw up than usual, and not only because of the exclusion of lady friends. The Dreyfus Affair had begun to complicate social events by making it difficult if not impossible to invite all one’s friends, some of whom inevitably were no longer on speaking terms, having taken opposite sides in the increasingly emotional debate about whether or not Dreyfus was guilty. According to the brief account in the next day’s Le Gaulois, Proust’s dinner was a success: “The celebrated Dr. Proust, father of M. Marcel Proust,” having put in an appearance welcomed by all, “withdrew, leaving his son to do the honors at this beautiful dinner, during the course of which wit at its most Parisian never ceased to sparkle.”32
Montesquiou may have believed that the terrible rumors circulating about him after the Bazar de la Charité disaster had died down. Unfortunately for him, the rumors persisted. The count soon received the same insulting accusation to his face from a quarter much superior to Jean Lorrain’s mire. On June 5 Montesquiou had asked Baronne Adolphe de Rothschild to show him and some of his artist friends her impressive collection of artworks and curios. After the viewing of the collection, Delafosse was to give a concert. Among those who accompanied the count were La Gandara, the designer and glassmaker Émile Gallé, and the caricaturist Sem. The baroness had also invited the poet Henri de Régnier, his wife, and her two sisters. Montesquiou, who had long been at odds with Régnier, recalled the incident that occurred when the group took their hats and canes to leave. One of the sisters, commenting on Robert’s beautiful cane, had remarked, “with a frankly hostile tone, that it was of a size to clear a way for oneself in a catastrophe.”33 Régnier suggested that a fan or a muff would suit Montesquiou better.34 Montesquiou, greatly offended, decided to demand satisfaction. He chose as his seconds Maurice Barrès and the portly marquis de Dion; Régnier asked the historian Henry Houssaye and the much in demand Jean Béraud to represent him.35 Although Régnier seemed willing to find some accommodation, Montesquiou declined somewhat discourteously all attempts to avoid a fight.
Proust, who read about the impending duel in Le Figaro of June 8, wrote immediately to the feuding poets, expressing his fears for their safety and reminding each that he was a friend of the other. The duelists met the following afternoon at the pont de Neuilly. Montesquiou, his illustrious swashbuckling ancestor notwithstanding, did not make an impressive swordsman as he flailed his blade around in the air. The duel ended when Régnier wounded Montesquiou’s thumb. The two adversaries refused to shake hands, making reconciliation impossible. Montesquiou retired to his family’s château de Charnisay at Preuilly in Touraine to nurse his wounded hand. Marcel wrote to him there, expressing his relief that no greater harm had come to the count, who had been, “everyone said, so brave.”36
Montesquiou began to look with displeasure upon Léon Delafosse, with whom he had become bored. The count had launched the musician in high society by arranging for him to play for such hostesses as Mme Lemaire and Mme de Pourtalès and by sponsoring concerts in the Salle Érard—not to mention featuring him at his own magnificent parties. But Montesquiou had recently detected signs not only of ingratitude but of disloyalty on the part of his protégé. Léon enjoyed—too much, Montesquiou may have thought—the company of the Brancovans, distant relatives of the count’s. Princesse Rachel Brancovan, a longtime friend of Paderewski’s, was an excellent pianist. When Delafosse performed for her circle, he was among true connoisseurs, who appreciated his talents, and he found it impossible to hide his pleasure. Montesquiou decided that the time had come to break with Delafosse and banish him from his entourage. Yturri begged him to reconsider, asking him where would he ever find “so gifted an interpreter to explain his moods and calm his tempers.”37
On June 17 Delafosse, unaware of the count’s malicious intentions, performed at a party his settings of Montesquiou’s poems, as he had faithfully done for so long. Delafosse received the first indication of having fallen from favor when he was refused permission to dedicate a composition to Comtesse Greffulhe. In an outburst as mad as those Proust later attributed to the baron de Charlus, Montesquiou put the “arriviste” in his place: “Little people never see the efforts one makes to descend to their level and never climb up to one’s own!” He then threatened to make certain that the doors that had opened to the musician through the count’s “sovereign protection” were slammed shut, reducing Delafosse to “strumming some Moldavian or Bessarabian clavichord for a pittance. You have only been an instrument of my thought, you will never be more than a musical mechanic.” A short time later when Montesquiou and Delafosse chanced to cross paths and his former protégé attempted to greet him, the count observed in a superb display of hauteur: “It is natural that one bows when passing the cross, but one must not expect the cross to return the bow.”38
All the count’s friends had fun with the pianist’s name (de la fosse, meaning “from the pit”): Mme Howland called him “this little pit”; for Mme de Brossia he became “the dead-end pit.” Montesquiou replied to those who asked what had become of Delafosse, “He fell into his name.” Marcel joined the chorus of those who mocked Delafosse, adopting another of Montesquiou’s play on words: brouillé, which is used when one is on bad terms with another, also means “scrambled” in cooking. Marcel, who had anointed Delafosse the Angel, now echoed Montesquiou’s derisive epithet and referred to the disgraced musician as the œuf brouillé or scrambled egg.39
Proust remembered Montesquiou’s antics, including his infatuation with Delafosse, when he depicted Charlus’s passion for the violinist Morel. Although Charlus was a creation of Proust’s imagination, some aspects of his character were directly inspired by Montesquiou, including his colossal pride and the tendency to violent outbursts. In The Guermantes Way, Charlus becomes annoyed at the Narrator for not having understood his overtures of friendship. When the perplexed youth attempts to apologize for whatever offense he might have committed, Charlus explodes: “Do you suppose that it is within your power to offend me? You are evidently not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?”40 Such conceited acrimony sounded like vintage Montesquiou.
In June, Montesquiou abandoned the Pavilion Montesquiou at Versailles for another home, which he named the Pavillon des Muses, opposite the Bois de Boulogne in the fashionable Paris suburb of Neuilly. On entering the dining room guests saw the count’s portrait by Whistler next to the majestic fireplace. Boldini’s portrait of the count with the notorious cane greeted visitors from an easel in the White Salon, just to the right of the door opening into the Salon des Roses.41
On June 23 Proust wrote to thank Montesquiou for the laudatory remarks he had written about Pleasures and Days in his latest book, Roseaux pensants.42 Montesquiou had returned Marcel’s many favors by reprinting a story and characterizing his prose as “silken” and his verses as “harmonious.”43 Marcel explained that if he were not so unwell he would have come in person to thank the count. Due to terrible sleepless nights, he often went to bed at eight in the morning and slept until three in the afternoon. This bizarre sleep pattern had not yet become fixed, but it was becoming more frequent, a development that alarmed his long-suffering parents, who, try as they might, could do little to alter their son’s regimen. Letters like the one to Montesquiou contained what was to become a familiar refrain to Marcel’s friends: “Don’t call too early.”44 Too early for Marcel now meant before two or three in the afternoon.
After nearly thirty years of happy summer retreats at Auteuil, Adrien and Jeanne found it difficult to admit that those days had gone forever. In July they rented a chalet in the Parc-des-Princes at the entrance to the Bois, only a few minutes from where Uncle Louis’s house had stood in rue La Fontaine. The Proust family, determined to act as though little had changed, kept to its old routine as much as possible. Dr. Proust went daily to the Hôtel-Dieu, either in the omnibus or by the trolley that ran from Auteuil to Saint-Sulpice. Marcel helped his parents maintain the illusion that little had changed by taking the train from the Saint-Lazare station to Auteuil nearly every evening to dine with them. As he observed his parents that summer, he registered the unmistakable signs of approaching old age: their skin was wrinkled, their hair gray, and both were too corpulent and incapable of moving about with ease. He soon had a fresh reminder of how quickly time speeds away with those we love.
On July 15 Reynaldo’s father Carlos died in his country home at Saint-Cloud, near Paris. Marcel went immediately to console his grieving friend. Upon returning to Paris, he wrote Reynaldo, inquiring whether he could help in any way: “Unless you tell me to, I won’t come. I am thinking of you though, my poor boy. I love you with all my heart.”45 Barely able to tolerate travel and the countryside during pollen season, Marcel did not wish to return to Saint-Cloud unless Reynaldo insisted.
Marcel and Reynaldo had long watched the stoic suffering of another father, Alphonse Daudet, wracked with pain caused by the final stages of syphilis contracted in his youth. In August, just before Marcel’s departure for Germany, La Presse published his essay on Daudet, in which he praised the writer’s noble quest for “truth, beauty, courage,” and his heroic endurance while struggling against a painful, debilitating disease.46
Marcel and his mother returned to the Oranienhof at Kreuznach because she believed that the treatments there were beneficial to her health. Because Marcel disliked this spa and they were to remain for several weeks, he intended to devote much of his time to reading works he hoped would inspire his writing. He sent a quick note to Lucien, asking which authors or books he should add to his list. He especially sought advice about British and Russian writers whose works he had heard praised. He peppered Lucien with questions; he wanted to know who wrote The Brothers Karamazov. “And has Boswelle’s [sic] Life of Johnston [sic] been translated?” And finally, “What’s the best of Dickens (I haven’t read anything)?”47 Over the course of his life he showed a preference, among foreign authors, for British and Russian novelists.
Proust did not limit his research to bookish sources. On September 1 he solicited advice of Mme de Brantes, whose social knowledge and taste he had come to appreciate. She was taking the waters at Marienbad, too far away, he lamented, or he would gladly have paid her a visit, for there was no one at Kreuznach whom he knew or even wished to meet. Desiring information about old regime aristocrats, he had read, on Mme de Brantes’s recommendation, Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais; he “didn’t think much of it,” but he found in Balzac’s novel Gobseck some portraits of old nobles of the kind he needed for his novel. He sought character traits not to imitate, he said, but for inspiration. Mildly chastising Mme de Brantes for never having been willing to tell him anything, he asserted that she might be his best source for the information: “In five minutes a clever woman or a man of taste can sum up the experiences of several years.” He promised to show her his sketch of the duc de Réveillon so that she could tell him how accurately he had portrayed the “tics, the prejudices, the habits” of such a personage. Etiquette among the nobility interested him particularly; for example, he inquired of Mme de Brantes whether offering the left hand was meant to show contempt and, if so, was that because of “not being well born or of not being in society?”48 Proust continued to amass information about etiquette in high society, much of which he later used, often for comic effect, in scenes showing how members of the upper crust greeted, or refused to greet, people whom they considered their inferiors. Robert Dreyfus recalled that during the years Proust was writing Jean Santeuil, he studied the fabulous denizens of high society with the same diligence that an entomologist applied to the observation of ant colonies.49
In Paris on October 24, Marcel attended a concert featuring Hahn’s composition “Nuit d’amour bergamasque.” Marcel pronounced the work charming and noted with satisfaction that it had received two rounds of applause.50 When a favorable review appeared in Le Journal, Marcel wrote immediately to thank a new acquaintance at the newspaper, the journalist and novelist Louis de Robert, whose novel Papa had been published the same day as Pleasures and Days.51 What had particularly caught Proust’s attention was the novel’s hero, a young man who wanted to become a writer. Alluding to Jean Santeuil, Proust told Robert that his example would “perhaps encourage” him to create such a youth. Until now he had seriously doubted whether a book with such a protagonist could succeed. Many years later, Louis de Robert was to advise Proust about preparing Swann’s Way for publication.
In July, President Faure, on the occasion of the publication of Adrien Proust’s book La Défense de l’Europe contre la peste, thanked him personally for his tireless, effective efforts against disease. Dr. Proust had persevered in his determination to protect Europe from cholera epidemics. In February he had traveled to Venice, where he and a colleague represented France at the International Health Conference. The conference had been convened because a fresh outbreak of cholera in Bombay had alarmed European officials, who feared the plague might spread westward. In October, President Faure and his wife invited Dr. and Mme Proust to accompany them to Rambouillet, whose medieval château had recently been designated the presidential summer residence. Marcel may have urged his parents to find out, should the opportunity arise, where the president stood on the Dreyfus case.
In October an incident occurred in Mme Straus’s salon that showed the increasing tension in French society over the Dreyfus Affair. A longtime friend of the Strauses, Joseph Reinach, a politician and lawyer, revealed to those present that Commandant Esterhazy was almost certainly the spy and the author of the bordereau. On hearing Reinach’s remarks, which they considered outrageous and treasonous, Edgar Degas, Jules Lemaître, Jean-Louis Forain, and Gustave Schlumberger, four men who had enjoyed the Strauses’ hospitality and friendship for many years, rose in disgust and left the salon, never to return.52 Reinach, who became the first major historian of the Dreyfus Affair, made the Straus salon a center of Dreyfusard activity.
The following month the Dreyfus Affair finally erupted throughout French society. On November 13 Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, vice president of the senate and an elder statesman of unimpeachable integrity, published in Le Figaro a letter declaring that Dreyfus was innocent and that the real spy was known to authorities. Scheurer-Kestner offered the public no proofs, but his reputation was such that anyone who had been neutral or had entertained doubts should have been impressed by his stance.
On November 15 Mathieu Dreyfus, who, alongside Dreyfus’s wife, had been fighting for three years to prove his brother’s innocence, sent to Minister of War Jean-Baptiste Billot an open letter denouncing Esterhazy as the traitor and author of the bordereau. Ten days later Zola published his first article in Le Figaro supporting Dreyfus’s cause by defending Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, now under attack for having spoken in Dreyfus’s favor. Zola concluded his defense with the sentence that soon became famous as a slogan for the Dreyfusards: “La Vérité est en marche, et rien ne l’arrêtera” (Truth is on the march, and nothing can stop it).53
Zola’s second article defending the Jews appeared in Le Figaro on December 1. On that day Daniel Halévy, in a bitter mood because of the maddening scandal, went to the opera, where he met Fernand Gregh, Louis de La Salle, and Jacques Baignères. Once in the great hall and under the spell of the music, Daniel tried to forget briefly the controversy swirling around Dreyfus. After the opera, the four friends went to Weber’s café in the rue Royale, a favorite meeting place just around the corner from the Proust apartment. Here they talked until 1:30. Their conversation centered around art and reality, “the forgetting of everything in the presence of a beautiful work of art.” Gregh got carried away and proclaimed that “art is the only reality since it is absolutely unreal.” Daniel, unwilling to take flight on aesthetic paradoxes, reflected that in these sorry days reality gripped them only too tightly; he stubbornly maintained that “the most exalted work of art is the virtue of the strong.”54 He and his friends must find and enlist distinguished public figures strong enough and brave enough to confront Dreyfus’s enemies, vanquish villainy, and exonerate Dreyfus and the Jews. Their idealistic hopes were soon dashed.
On the way home Fernand related to Daniel what he had seen a day earlier when he had stopped by the offices of Le Figaro. Léon Daudet and Maurice Barrès, two staunch anti-Semites, had come to pressure the newspaper’s director, Ferdinand de Rodays, to adopt a “neutral” editorial stance by closing the paper’s columns to Zola and all who questioned Dreyfus’s guilt and the integrity of the army. Meanwhile, the government continued to pretend that there was no developing crisis. On December 4 Prime Minister Jules Méline, who opposed revision and hoped the clamor for a retrial would die down and vanish, reassured his countrymen: “I will say right away what will be the last word in this debate: There is no Dreyfus Affair. There is none at present and there will be no Dreyfus Affair.”55 Méline’s comments were far from being the last word; his countrymen were on the verge of a painful, divisive debate that would take years to resolve.
Zola’s third and last article in Le Figaro appeared on December 5. The newspaper that had long stood for openness and justice reacted to a deluge of canceled subscriptions and refused to publish any more articles critical of the army. Daudet, Barrès, and their allies had succeeded in blocking Zola’s access to one of the capital’s most influential dailies.
As Marcel and others in his circle worked to collect signatures from prominent men willing to support Zola’s efforts, Halévy grew disgusted with the cravenness of many writers to whom they appealed. He noted in his diary: “Life is proving to be ignoble.”56 On December 12 Jacques Bizet showed Daniel a letter from Porto-Riche in which the playwright abandoned the cause. On the same day Marcel wrote Daniel to inform him that Anatole France had signed their petition supporting Zola’s crusade. Marcel’s early success had made him optimistic: “I will try to obtain for you all possible signatures.” On reflection, he wondered whether he should ask Jules Massenet, as intended, because he had just remembered that the composer’s brother was a general. He decided to try Massenet anyway, but he recommended against Daniel’s proposal that Alphonse Daudet be asked to sign the petition, saying that such an appeal would be unkind, given the author’s chronic pain. Even so, Marcel said that he would speak to Daudet privately about signing: “If it disturbs him, he won’t do it.” Proust’s success did not cheer Daniel and Jacques for long, because they had but a single signature—albeit a distinguished one—on the sheet that should have been covered with names of courageous leaders who stood for justice. Anatole France, Daniel reflected, noticing the irony, was “the immoralist and the skeptic, who had so often attacked Zola.”57 France, who had been a member of the Académie française for only a year, was rapidly becoming disillusioned with the politics of his fellow “Immortals.” The Academy, like most of France’s traditional institutions, was made up almost exclusively of anti-Dreyfusards. Once he became committed to Dreyfus’s case, France refused to attend meetings.58
Nothing could deter Émile Zola, who had committed his honor, his fame, and his fortune to the cause. The energy and spirit he had marshaled to create the hundreds of characters in the twenty novels of the Rougon-Macquart series now were channeled into the effort to save Dreyfus and the soul of France. His pamphlet to youth would attempt to reinvigorate his young countrymen’s sense of justice. When Daniel and Fernand reported their lack of success to Zola, he suggested that they use their petition as a reply to his appeal to youth. Jacques and Daniel decided to abandon the solicitation of Paris’s most prominent citizens because they were too cowardly. Instead, they heeded Zola’s advice and concentrated on their peers.59
On December 13 Zola’s “Letter to Youth” went on sale as a brochure urging the students of the Latin Quarter and all young intellectuals to rally to Dreyfus’s cause. Marcel followed the events through the newspapers and by exchanging information with friends and acquaintances, many of whom occupied—or were intimately connected with those who did occupy—high places in the government. Proust later claimed to have been the first Dreyfusard because he obtained France’s signature, but in fact he participated only briefly in the first part of the campaign.60
Shortly after Zola’s letter was published, death took a distinguished writer who had often rivaled and opposed the author of Germinal. On December 16 Alphonse Daudet suffered a stroke; he died the following day. Marcel and Reynaldo had hurried to comfort the family on receiving news that Alphonse’s condition was desperate. Proust’s short tribute, “Adieux,” appeared in La Presse on December 19, the day before the funeral.61
In early January 1898, Esterhazy had gone before a court-martial, whose true purpose was to erase doubts about his guilt. Zola became outraged when he realized that the real spy would be proclaimed innocent by the army and the press. Using his fury to invigorate his accustomed eloquence, Zola composed an open letter to President Faure. Fully aware of the personal, financial, and legal dangers to which he was exposing himself, the writer used his prestige and wide readership to fix attention on the list of indictments he was preparing to hurl at those he knew to be guilty. Like his most recent pieces, this letter would go on sale in brochure form, but ideally it should also appear in a widely circulated Paris daily. At the last moment Zola had the idea of bringing his letter to Ernest Vaughan, the director of L’Aurore. Both Vaughan and Georges Clemenceau, a politician who also served as the newspaper’s political editor, “were immediately enthusiastic.” Clemenceau came up with the sensational title “J’accuse.”62
“J’accuse” appeared in a special edition on the morning of January 13. At the end of the letter to the president and the nation, Zola enumerated the accusations that provided the title. He began with the officer he believed to be at the origin of the whole sorry business: “I accuse Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical artisan of the judicial error, without knowing it, I am willing to believe, and then of having defended his nefarious work for three years through the most grotesque and culpable machinations.” Then followed a number of paragraphs, each beginning with the resounding and damning J’accuse until Zola had named Generals Billot, Mercier, de Boisdeffre, Gonse, and de Pellieux, Commandant Ravary, the three handwriting experts, and the offices of war. Finally, he wrote, “I accuse the first Court Martial of having violated the law in convicting a defendant on the basis of a document kept secret, and I accuse the second Court Martial of having covered up that illegality on command by committing in turn the juridical crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.”
Zola’s letter hit the streets like a bombshell, no doubt one of the most deafening explosions ever produced in France by a single pen. At the end of his letter, Zola had listed the press laws that he was violating and called for his own prosecution to begin at once. The following day L’Aurore published a petition, known as the “Manifesto of the Intellectuals,” condemning “the violation of juridical norms in the 1894 trial and the iniquities surrounding the Esterhazy affair.”63 The several hundred names on the petition had been collected by a group of aspiring writers that included Marcel Proust, Fernand Gregh, the Halévy brothers Élie and Daniel, and Jacques Bizet. Robert Proust had also signed the petition. In addition to their own signatures and those of other friends, such as Léon Yeatman, Robert de Flers, and Louis de La Salle, the petition bore the names of both Émile Zola and Anatole France.64
Adrien was furious with his sons for publicly acknowledging their support of Alfred Dreyfus and for placing their father in an embarrassing situation with his colleagues and his close friend Félix Faure. Dr. Proust belonged to the government establishment and shared, like most of his colleagues in medicine, many of their conservative, rightist views.65 For a week he refused to speak to Marcel and Robert.
On January 13 Col. Georges Picquart was arrested and confined to the fortress of Mont-Valérien. Because he would be the principal witness for Zola’s defense, the military decided to discredit him further before the trial. On February 1 he appeared before an investigatory board composed of directors from the general staff, who by a vote of four to one recommended that Picquart be retired from the army “for reason of grave misdeeds while in office.”66 The army immediately made the recommendation public in order to cast doubt on the testimony Picquart would soon give in criminal court.
Marcel, fascinated by the scandal’s latest turns and the courageous role assumed by one of France’s most acclaimed writers, sought passes to attend Zola’s trial, which was to last from February 7 to February 23. Zola was represented by Fernand Labori, a distinguished and fearless lawyer, who defended Picquart later in the year and, in 1899, Dreyfus himself at the retrial of the court-martial at Rennes. Although Labori lost all three cases—cases that were unwinnable in the current climate—no one questioned his zeal and skill in defending his famous clients. Marcel easily obtained the passes; the real challenge for him was to rise early and arrive at the courtroom on time. In Jean Santeuil, Proust used his own experience at the trial to describe his hero’s attendance: “For a month past his whole way of life had changed. Every morning he started early from home so as to arrive in good time for the Zola trial at the Cour d’Assises, taking with him no more than a few sandwiches and a small flask of coffee, and there he stayed, fasting, excited, emotionally on edge, till five o’clock.”67
An event Marcel had long anticipated coincided with the Zola trial and competed for his attention. After years of waiting, Hahn’s opera L’Île du rêve was finally to be produced. Albert Carré, who had succeeded Carvalho as director of the Opéra-Comique, selected Hahn’s opera for his first production. Rehearsals began just as the Zola trial was getting under way. Marcel, eager to aid in the preparations for the March 23 première, divided his time between the trial at the Palais de Justice and rehearsals at the Opéra-Comique.
What Proust wrote about Zola’s trial for Jean Santeuil was sketchy at best. The figure at the trial who captivated Proust was Picquart, a genuine hero, a man of unflinchable moral rectitude, who, though anti-Semitic himself, had risked his career, reputation, liberty, and even his life in the name of justice. Marcel saw in Picquart a philosopher, a courageous idealist.68 His depiction of Picquart’s gait, rapid, confident, and free, anticipates that of Saint-Loup, the character who in the Search was to represent a certain military ideal. On February 26, not long after Zola had been found guilty of defaming the army, the army dismissed the uncompromising Picquart from its ranks.
In Jean Santeuil there is very little about the actual events of the affair.69 In the section about the Zola trial, there is nothing about Zola, nearly nothing about his lawyer, and little else connected with the actual trial. This raises the questions of how many sessions Marcel actually attended and why he did not glean more from the experience. If Marcel had hoped his close-hand observation of a major political and social crisis would enable him to coalesce the plotless, structureless pages of his manuscript into a coherent, compelling narrative, he must have been disappointed. Historical writing and social commentary were major concerns of his future novel, but told in relation to the private odyssey of an individual whose purpose in the world would remain hidden for a long time. He ultimately concluded that the “realist” novel, with its accumulation of details and facts, was far inferior to the product of the creative imagination. Although Proust never entirely shunned the muse of history, his forte was to be the exploration of perception and human psychology. Historical events, like salon intrigues, held his attention primarily when useful in discovering the psychological laws that govern human behavior.
By the time Proust wrote his mature novel, he understood exactly the best use to make of the cause célèbre. In the Search, the Dreyfus Affair shows how social entities thought to be enduring evolve under the influence of cultural and social upheavals: “It was true that the social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning and... the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.”70 Proust had already witnessed examples of betrayal in the Straus and Caillavet salons when emotion overcame reason and people suddenly ended lifelong friendships. The affair, which in many cases made new enemies of old friends and new friends of people previously shunned because of status, rearranges the social constellations of the Search. For Mme Swann, who, because of her scandalous past as a cocotte, must start at the bottom of the heap, the Dreyfus case is a godsend, allowing her to associate with women from the best circles, now recruiting newcomers not according to distinctions of birth and breeding and social rank but based on whose side they had taken in the affair.71 If choosing sides against Dreyfus gives a boost to Odette’s ambitions to scale the social ladder, Mme Verdurin, whose sole raison d’être is her salon, suffers a major setback in society by supporting Dreyfus: “Mme Verdurin . . . though a sincere Dreyfusard . . . would nevertheless have been glad to discover a social counterpoise to the preponderant Dreyfusism of her salon. For Dreyfusism was triumphant politically but not socially. Labori, Reinach, Picquart, Zola were still, to people in society, more or less traitors, who could only keep them estranged from the little nucleus. And so, after this incursion into politics, Mme Verdurin was anxious to return to the world of art.”72
His public support of Dreyfus lost Marcel few friends. Billy said that Marcel managed his relations so well because he had a keen sense of justice but detested cliques.73 Marcel did suffer at least one social casualty, though. For Jacques-Émile Blanche, who loved gossip and delighted in setting his friends against each other, the Dreyfus Affair presented the opportunity for endless feuding. Marcel’s relationship with Blanche became strained because of Dreyfus, and they stopped speaking to each other for thirteen years. Blanche speculated that Dreyfus’s plight had awakened in Marcel an awareness of his Jewish heritage that had been submerged by his Catholic upbringing and the solid professional and social status of his bourgeois family.
According to Léon Blum, who was Jewish, one’s racial status did not determine a Jewish intellectual’s decision to become a Dreyfusard.74 Proust, who in any case had never considered himself Jewish, wanted truth and justice to prevail. He and his brother had been raised in accordance with the marriage contract signed by his parents, as Catholics who enjoyed all the benefits of a well-established bourgeois family. Although Proust’s religious beliefs as an adult wavered between atheism, agnosticism, and deism, he was to receive a Christian burial. Marcel never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage—he had reminded Montesquiou of it when the count made a disparaging remark about Jews—but defending his mother’s race was not his motive for supporting Dreyfus.
Proust later recalled that during the Dreyfus years an anti-Semitic newspaper, La Libre Parole, had mentioned him as one of the “young Jews” who had attacked Barrès for his anti-Semitic views. Marcel’s first impulse had been to rectify the statement that he was a Jew, but given the political climate he decided not to do so.75 He took Dreyfus’s side because of his own ideals. Proust made no objections if a friend harbored doubts about Dreyfus’s innocence, as he explained to Constantin de Brancovan, when he sided with the Dreyfusards.76 What could not be disputed, by any objective observer, was that little if any of the evidence used to convict Dreyfus had been valid.
One consequence of the affair was to make Jews who had been thoroughly assimilated into French society remember their origins. Unfortunately, the controversy also created many anti-Semites, as friends who harbored latent bigotry saw in Jews whom they had loved new incarnations they now loathed. Before Dreyfus, Blanche noted, there had been no noticeable distinctions made between one’s Jewish and Christian friends; the word anti-Semite had no meaning.77
In Proust’s circle there was a dramatic example of how the Dreyfus Affair changed people. Edgar Degas and Ludovic Halévy, now in their sixties, had been close friends since childhood. Although Halévy had converted to Catholicism, like many assimilated Jews, he had never sought to hide his heritage.78 Ludovic’s sons Élie and Daniel worshiped Degas, who had been a part of the Halévy circle before they were born. Daniel noted in his journal in 1890, long before the Dreyfus Affair, that the Halévys considered Degas “not just an intimate friend but a member of our family.” For years the painter had come to their house for Thursday dinner and lunches several times a week. Degas had made so many drawings of the Halévys in their home that the works filled two large “Halévy Sketchbooks.” The breakup came in the autumn of 1897, when Degas sat silently through dinner, at the end of which he rose and left without ever again saying a word to the Halévys.
How did Marcel the idealist maintain his close friendship with a rabid anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard like Léon Daudet? Even before the Dreyfus scandal created new bigots like Degas, Daudet had not hidden his anti-Semitism. But with Marcel and Léon the difference of opinion over Dreyfus never became a personal matter, while Marcel and Blanche quarreled over the issue and stopped speaking for years.
As for Montesquiou, he lost no friends over the affair. To the count, who had never lacked inspiration for ending friendships and banishing people from his circle, the Dreyfus business must have seemed like an unneeded luxury. Montesquiou chose not to take it too seriously and to remain blithely above the fray, although he tended to believe that Dreyfus was an innocent man. He was heavily influenced in this by his adored cousin Élisabeth de Greffulhe, who was well connected with Kaiser Wilhelm II and his court and had likely been informed through private channels that Dreyfus had never spied for Germany. According to Léon Daudet’s book on the Dreyfus Affair, Mme de Greffulhe went to Berlin to hear from the emperor’s own lips that Dreyfus was not a traitor. Daudet, of course, believed that this report, too, was part of the Jewish conspiracy.79
By summer the family’s attention centered not on Marcel’s health but on his mother’s. A fibroid uterine tumor of considerable size had been discovered and had to be removed. Adrien, who knew the risks involved, had been nearly mad with anxiety. To lessen the chances of Jeanne’s being upset, Adrien, Marcel, and Robert decided to tell no one beyond the immediate family about the operation until it was over. Dr. Terrier, a colleague of Adrien’s, would perform the surgery. On July 6 Mme Proust underwent a major and difficult pelvic operation, lasting three hours, during which an unusually large, but apparently benign, tumor was removed. There had been moments during the ordeal when the surgeons feared that she would die.
Dr. Proust and his sons, greatly relieved that she had survived the operation, now grew concerned about her recovery. It was evident that it would be a long time before she regained her strength. They decided that it would be better not to tell her that she had nearly died. When Marcel visited her on the day after the operation, she, unaware of his extreme anguish over nearly having lost her forever, managed to be witty and, as always, to brighten his existence. In an unanticipated reversal of roles, Marcel began to serve as his mother’s attendant and protector. Jeanne’s doctors refused to let her rise from the bed; they also forbade many normal activities, including her favorite: reading. Looking after his mother, concentrating his energy on her illness and recovery, seemed to make him stronger and more independent. As her recovery progressed, he made plans to visit friends and perhaps even travel abroad, once she was well again. Jeanne suffered two minor complications in August, which prevented Marcel from seeing Léon Yeatman and visiting Montesquiou at Versailles. He wrote to Léon, telling him that he hoped to see him later at the seaside in September, perhaps in Dieppe, where he would accompany his mother if she was able to go.
Adrien and Marcel continued to observe Jeanne’s recovery in the hospital and waited for her to decide where to spend the late summer vacation. Until then their own plans must remain uncertain. By the end of August, Robert, unable to obtain postponement of his army reserve training, reported to Châlons for the annual twenty-eight days of exercises. Jeanne was now well enough for Adrien to leave for Vichy, where he believed the thermal springs, used from Roman times, rejuvenated his gall bladder and kidneys. Marcel would remain with Jeanne and accompany her on vacation; unlike her husband, she remained devoted to the shores of Normandy.80
In July there had been startling developments in the Dreyfus Affair. The unscrupulous Esterhazy had swindled his nephew Christian out of his savings. When Christian understood how his uncle had taken advantage of his innocence and trust, he denounced the culprit to the authorities and informed them that Esterhazy had forged telegrams sent to Picquart with the intention of implicating him in the spy case. On July 12, one week before a jury found Zola guilty again of defaming the French army, Esterhazy was arrested and charged with robbing his nephew and sending fraudulent telegrams.81 The next day Picquart was arrested again and imprisoned in Mont-Valérien on the charge of having divulged secret military documents. He was held there, often in solitary confinement, for nearly a year. Later in the summer the army finally discharged Esterhazy on the true but vague grounds of “habitual misconduct.”
The arrest of the real traitor set in motion a series of events that precipitated the beginning of the end for those who had framed and prosecuted Dreyfus. On August 13 Col. Hubert-Joseph Henry was identified as the forger of the bordereau, the principal document used to convict Dreyfus at his secret trial. Charles Maurras, a royalist and rabid anti-Semite, characterized Henry’s crime as a “patriotic forgery.”82 After confessing to a number of such “patriotic” forgeries used as evidence to convict Dreyfus, Henry was placed in the same prison that held Picquart. On August 31 he committed suicide. Generals de Boisdeffre and de Pellieux resigned. In September, Du Paty de Clam, heavily implicated in the many criminal and treasonous acts of Major Esterhazy, was forced to retire from active service.
On September 31 Marcel attended Jaurès’s public lecture on the Dreyfus Affair. Gregh was there, too, and read a poem that he had written to Picquart. Marcel decided to send Colonel Picquart an inscribed copy of Pleasures and Days to help the prisoner pass the hours more quickly. Getting a parcel to Picquart, kept under tight security, proved extremely difficult, but “after no end of trouble,” Proust succeeded in having the book smuggled into the colonel’s cell.83 There is no record of Picquart’s response to the thoughtful writer.
By October, Mme Proust was home from the clinic, fully recovered and feeling quite well. She soon left for Trouville, accompanied by Marcel and her maid. After their arrival Marcel reported to his father that Jeanne had made the trip without difficulty and seemed to be doing well. Using the elevator for comfort and to conserve her energy, Jeanne had at four o’clock gone down to the garden, where she remained until six-thirty without feeling tired in the least. The Proust men were relieved to see so many signs of her recuperation.
Not long after his arrival Marcel made a day trip up the coast to Dieppe to see Reynaldo, a guest at Madeleine Lemaire’s villa, where he was composing a work he called “Destiny.”84 Marcel enjoyed walking with Reynaldo and Mme Lemaire along the cliff overlooking the sea. It was like old times—or nearly so. Back in Trouville, Marcel, in a nostalgic mood, wrote to Reynaldo, saying how he missed their happy days together and suggesting ways in which those moments could be revived. He proposed they meet halfway between Trouville and Dieppe, or if that wasn’t possible, he would try to visit Reynaldo in the fall, wherever he might be. Having evoked the bittersweet memories of the days when they were intimate, he congratulated Reynaldo on the public letter he had written in support of Picquart. But then Marcel returned to his affection for Reynaldo, calling him “My dear little one” and telling him that his recent silence, far from being the silence that precedes oblivion, was “like undying embers that brood an ardent, intact love.”85 He had no other love. “Is it the same with you? See you soon, Marcel.” In the first postscript he sounded the nostalgic note again by wondering if Beg-Meil would tempt Reynaldo at all; then he asked for news of Dieppe: “Send gossip.”86 Reynaldo always remained devoted to Marcel, but he did not share Marcel’s inclination to resume their passionate friendship.