THE DUCHESSE AND ALBERTINE 117Finaly were Bloch father and son, it would follow (though
nothing is known of his morals) that Baron Landau was Nissim
Bernard. But Proust took the exquisitely Jewish name of Nissim
from one of two banker brothers, Abraham and Nissim Camondo,
who had come from Constantinople to live in a magnificent
mansion in the Rue de Monceau, near Mme Lemaire, where they
were to be seen strolling side by side in the garden, still wearing
their fezzes.
Early in August 1892 Proust had passed the first part of his law
exam with credit, but failed in the oral ('my family is awfully sick
about it,' he wrote to Robert de Billy). On Sunday the 14th he
left for Trouville with Louis de la Salle, armed, he told Billy,
'with Liberty ties of all possible shades', to spend a few weeks at
Les F remonts. The villa stood high above the sands of the
Trouville bathing-beach, at the top of the hill at whose foot was
the Hotel des Roches Noires, where he had stayed with his grand-
mother in the summers of his childhood: it was one of the
originals of the Grand Hotel at Balbec. But Les F remonts itself
possessed the celebrated three views of La Raspeliere. Its wide
bay-windows commanded three distinct prospects, the blue
waters of the Channel, the coast past Cabourg as far as Lion-sur-
Mer, and the inland orchards of Normandy. Other fellow-
banqueters, Gregh and Trarieux, were staying near by with
Jacques Bizet at the Manoir de la Cour Brulee, which Mme Straus
had hired for the season from Mme Aubernon. The walks and
carriage-drives with Albertine and her friends, the flowerless,
fruiting hawthorns and apple-trees of the hinterland of Balbec,
belong to this summer. The young men visited the ivy-covered
churches of Hennequeville and Criqueboeuf (the Carqueville to
which Mme de Villeparisis takes the Narrator and his grand-
mother in her carriage),' on the way to Honfleur, and the mile-
long avenues of pines and rhododendrons, above the estuary of
the Seine, called Les Allees Marguerite; they went to the races at
Deauville, where Proust bet and lost; and one of their companions
was the first original of Albertine.
Horace Finaly's sister Marie was a pale, pretty girl with sea-
green eyes, alternately gay and grave: F ernand Gregh gave her
the role, in her Shakespearean family, of Ophelia. 'We were all
more or less in love with Marie,' he writes; and for Proust it was
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