IIO MARCEL PROUSTde Miromesnil and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore. Each
day, when the countess drew near, his love combined with the
pangs of guilt and danger which his conduct invited, to produce
an agonising palpitation of the heart: as he confessed to her long
afterwards, "I had a heart-attack every time I saw you." At last
he unwisely ventured to stop and speak; but the embarrassed lady
only uttered a furious: "FitzJames is expecting me," and sailed
on to her morning call on Comte Robert de FitzJames, leaving
him standing. Such was the end of this strange and pathetic love-
affair. Next year, when the countess saw that his behaviour was
normal, his infatuation ended, and his position in society more
assured, she was perfectly charming, like the Duchesse at Mme
de Villeparisis's matinee; and they remained on ostensibly friendly
terms until twenty-eight years later, when with mixed feelings
she found her former beauty and cruelty immortalised in the love
of the Narrator for the Duchesse de Guermantes. Meanwhile, in a
vain attempt to improve his status in her eyes, or at least to
procure her photograph, he scraped acquaintance with Gustave
and Jacques de Waru, the sons of her sister who was married to
Comte Pierre de Waru-but with no more success than the
Narrator when he sought similar help from the Duchesse's
nephew Saint-Loup.l
In his half-incestuous pursuit of ladies old enough to be his
mother Proust had now courted in turn a bourgeois hostess, a
courtesan and a society beauty. He can hardly have hoped or
wished for success with Mme Straus or Laure Hayman; but from
the Comtesse de Chevigne a serious rebuff was even more in-
evitable, and he made it doubly humiliating by the absurd form
he chose for his wooing.^2 He was bitterly and unforgettably hurt,
and his rage and despised love remained unaltered in his un-
conscious mind until they should be called upon. The character
of the Duchesse de Guermantes was created not only by aesthetic
laws, but by a long memory for love and revenge. In 1920, as we
shall see, he made sure that the elderly countess should see this
and be duly offended; and to exacerbate and reconcile her he
deployed his unfaded adoration and anger as if the incident in the
1 II, 79, 103
2 Nevertheless, he perhaps had daydreams of success with Mme de
Chevigne: in an early version of A fa Recherche the Comtesse de Guermantes,
who later tumt'd into the Duchesse, becomes the mistress of the hero.