Marcel Proust: A Biography

THE STUDENT IN SOCIETY (^103)
where Mme Aubernon puts away the dolls, male or female, that
don't amuse her any more." Perhaps he could be induced to
reform? Brochard was persuaded to give him a good talking to,
"so that you can recover all the ground you've lost. People would
soon forget your horrible language, and everything else, if you
took as much trouble to be nice as you do to make enemies."
Doasan listened without a word, till Brochard had quite finished,
but only said, "It can't be helped, I prefer my vices to my
friends." When Proust first attended a Wednesday he became
aware that the dreadful Baron's eyes were staring at him, in a fixed,
vacant gaze which pretended not to see him. He remembered the
incident twenty years later when describing the meeting of
Charlus and the Narrator at Balbec. But in 1892 at the Rue
d' Astorg its significance must have been a little different: the eyes
of Baron Doasan expressed not a questioning desire, but the
recognition by one active invert of another. Proust was not a
potential conquest, but a possible rival or even betrayer; and
Doasan forbade his cousin to receive "that 'little Marcel''', but in
vain. Montesquiou, the other original of Chari us, whom Proust
was to meet a year later, was also an occasional guest of Mme
Aubernon; but these two halves of Charlus were at daggers
drawn, and it is said that Montesquiou's faithful secretary Gabriel
d'Yturri was stolen by him from Doasan.
The train for Cceur-Volant, on which I)oasan's conversation
was so embarrassing for Proust and his fellow-guests, left Saint-
Lazare at 5 p.m., stopped for several minutes at every local
station, and took over an hour for the journey. At Louveciennes
the guests disembarked, amid titters and elbow-nudging from
bystanders convulsed by their incongruous appearance in full
evening-dress, into three decrepit victorias sent by Mme
Aubernon. As at La Raspeliere, there was a long pull to the crest
of the hill, where their hostess awaited them on the terrace. In
her park was a lake with ducks, whose keep in bread was said by
her cheating servants to cost a fortune-"It couldn't have been
more expensive if I'd had illegitimate children," she declared-
and a meadow with two pretty little cows. Just before dinner
Doasan would say to the men: "Let's go and take a look at the
cows"; and on the way each would step discreetly behind a tree,
for indoor sanitation at Cceur-Volant was limited, and reserved
for the ladies.