THE DUCHESSE AND ALBERTINE liSus far more anxious to find a way into certain drawing-rooms of
the nobility than to devote himself to literature,' wrote Robert
Dreyfus. This unfortunate tendency could be detected even in
his writing: his characters were duchesses and countesses with
absurd names, with whom dazzling young heroes of independent
means fell in love and were frequently loved in return. His prose
style was as faded and artificial as it was graceful and highly
finished; and he used it for subtle investigations into the psycho-
logy of snobism (was he for or against it?), and love and jealousy
in high society. It was alarming to see in one so young so total a
disenchantment, so final a disbelief in any values more real than
those of the social marionette show he described. Perhaps most
distressing of all, his work was already too nearly perfect: it left,
as it seemed, almost no room for evolution into something more
important; it could only become an ever more brilliant pastiche
of Bourget and Anatole France. The judgment of his friends of
Le Banquet would only be confirmed by his writings during the
next ten years, by the remainder of Les Plauirs et les Jours and,
if they could have read it, Jean Santeuil. They may be pardoned
for failing to foresee that he would attain greatness through
revelation and metamorphosis.
And yet, Le Banquet contains the seeds of A la Recherche, how-
ever different they may seem, as is natural to seeds, from the
future tree. Already Proust is trying to use his own experience
of life as a metaphorical representation of universal truths: here
is Mme Hayman as the courtesan Heldemone, Mme Straus as 'a
lady whose intelligence was revealed only by a subtler grace',
Mme de Chevigne as a bird-goddess; there is a glimpse of army-
life, a child who jumps out of the window for love of a little girl,
a band of girls at the seaside, a seascape in Normandy, with the
shadows of the clouds and the 'pale pathways' left by the currents.
Both these last reminiscences belong to a holiday in August 1892.,
when he went to Balbec, stayed at La Raspeliere, and met
Albertine.
She was the sister of one of his associates on Le Banquet,
Horace Finaly, a former schoolfellow who was the son of a
wealthy Jewish banker. Proust had spent part of September 1889
on a visit to the Finalys at Ostend, and on the following 13
December Horace had travelled down to Orleans to see his friend
on military service. He was duly pumped on his return by Mme