THE STUDENT IN SOCIETYflattered and amused, but untouched by his love, and he ceased
to love her. In May 1893, by which time he had pursued four more
women and begun at last to love young men, she married Gaston.
Proust was asked to be best man, but declined; he refused even
to go to dinner in their new home, writing: "How could you
invite me, Madame? If you didn't understand that I couldn't come,
you will be equally unable to understand my reasons for declin·
ing!" It is rumoured that Gaston de Caillavet, like Robert de
Saint-Loup, was not altogether a faithful husband, though his
wife, unlike Gilberte, was thought too naive to notice it. Once,
it is said, when he went out for the first time after an illness,
Jeanne asked him where he had spent the day. "I went to the Bois
de Boulogne, my dear." "But it's been raining all day! What ever
did you do there?" "Oh, I just sat on a seat." "Really, dear, do
you think that was. wise?" For Proust this marriage of the first
friend and the first love of his early manhood was buried ever
deeper beneath the weight of later events in which it had no part;
until seventeen years later, when A fa Recherche was already
begun, he met the beautiful daughter of Gaston and Jeanne-~s
his Narrator met the daughter of Saint-Loup and Gilberte at the
Princesse de Guermantes's final party-and realised its ideal
significance. In real life the marriage was no miraculous recon-
ciliation of two worlds: husband and wife were both from the
same layer of the upper bourgeoisie, and it was Gaston who,
through his mother, was half Jewish. But in his novel it became
the symbol of the meeting of the two ways ofIlliers and Combray,
and the incarnation of that meeting in the person of Mile de Saint-
Loup.
In September 1891 Proust visited Cabourg, where he was over-
come by memories of his boyhood holidays there with his dead
grandmother, and wrote to his mother on the 9th the letter
already quoted: 'How different it is from those seaside holidays
when Grandmother and I, lost .i 0. one another, walked battling
with the wind and talking.' '1 hese weeks correspond to the
Narrator's delayed grief during the early part of his second visit
to Balbec. Towards the end of the month he moved to Trouville
for a stay at Mme Charlotte Baigneres's villa Les Fremonts, high
on a hill over the Channel, the original as we shall see later of
La Raspeliere with its 'three views'. On the promenade he was
impressed by a rouged, middle-aged, great lady, whose sinuous