82 MARCEL PROUST
costumes which he now saw for the first time and the talent of
his friends. He interrupted every line with uncontrollable laughter
and cries of "Bravo!" At the end of the rehearsal the indignant
cast rounded upon him and took back the prompt-book. That
night he wrote an extremely bad poem, 'On a Young Lady who
this evening played Cleopatra, to the present trouble and future
damnation of a young man who happened to be present', contain-
ing the lines:
'You have dethroned the Queen oj Nile, for you
Are both the artist and the work of art.'Soon afterwards Gaston wrote for Jeanne a one-act play called
Colombine. They asked Proust to be Pierrot: "You're just right
for the part, you're so pale and your eyes are so big!"; but he
refused to act on the stage a character which he was already
playing in real life.
In the summer of 1891 he frequented with Gaston and Jeanne
a tennis-court in the Boulevard Bineau at Neuilly. Instead of
playing he sat under the trees with the girls in a group which the
others scornfully called 'gossips' corner' and 'the Court of Love'.
He was made responsible for the refreshments, and arrived
carrying a huge cardboard box of cakes; and when everyone was
hot with playing he was sent to a near-by cafe and returned
groaning and panting with a basket of beer and lemonade. Some-
times a tennis ball hurtled among the glasses and girls of the
Court of Love, and he would cry with justified indignation, "You
did that on purpose." He was photographed kneeling and
strumming on a tennis-racket for a guitar at the feet of Jeanne
standing on a chair, while Gabrielle Schwartz, Gabriel Trarieux
and the Daireaux and Dancognee girls struck attitudes around
them. His emotions among this little band later became associated
with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees and the budding grove of
girls at Balbec. In 1912, when he '.las about to publish in Le Figaro
an early version of his love for Gilberte, he wrote to Jeanne:
'Y ou will find amalgamated in it something of my feelings when
I wasn't sure whether you would be at the tennis-court. But
what's the use of recalling things which you took the absurd and
unkind course of pretending never to notice!"
After two years his relationship with Jeanne had become static
and thoroughly explored, and therefore uninteresting. Jeanne was