Marcel Proust: A Biography

Chapter 8

THE DUCHESSE AND ALBERTINE

E

ITHER at Mme Lemaire's or at Mme Straus's, for she was
to be seen, a celestial visitor from the Faubourg Saint-
Germain, at both these salons, Proust met Comtesse Laure de
Chevigne. He therefore had a perfect right to raise his hat when
he met her in the street, a better right than the Narrator's to salute
the Duchesse de Guermantes, whom he knew only by sight and
as the son of her bourgeois lodgers. On the first occasion their
morning meeting must have seemed to the hurrying countess a
negligible but natural occurrence, on the next a curious co-
incidence, on the third an ill-bred attempt, surprising in so elegant
a young man, to presume on a casual acquaintance with a social
superior. But when, day after day, she encountered the same lifted
straw-hat and dark, infatuated eyes, she realised the dreadful truth.
It was worse even than a snobbish persecution: the wretched
young man was in love with her.
He had discovered that Mme de Chevigne took her daily walk
along the Avenue de Marigny; and there he loitered every March
morning of 1892 under the budding chesrnuts, until he saw her
erect shape gliding in the distance, carrying a case of visiting-
cards, with a hat trimmed with blue cornflowers over her radiant
blue eyes-'unpickable periwinkles sunlit by an azure smile'.
Sometimes, in the vain hope of disguising his subterfuge, he
would wait near her house at 34 Rue de Miromesnil-not un-
observed by Jeanne Pouquet, who lived at No. 62 in the same
street-or in the Avenue Gabriel beside the Champs-Elysees.
Once, on a morning when Mme de Chevigne unaccountably
failed to pass, he brought Robert de Billy to see her. He varied
his routine, walking sometimes on the opposite pavement, some-
times on the same side as the countess. One morning he would
stare greedily as soon as the blue hat appeared far away, while
next day he would notice her, with an ostentatious start of
surprise, only as they met and passed. Sometimes he lurked behind
the glass door of Emile Paul's bookshop, at the corner of the Rue