118 MARCEL PROUSTone of the very few occasions on which his love for a woman
was returned, for Gregh says again: 'he and the charming Marie
felt for one another a childish and reciprocated love'. It is
characteristic of Proust that one of the first signs of their sym-
pathy was a common regard for one of his friends, Robert de
Billy: 'She talks about you and the nobility of your mind every
day,' Proust wrote to Billy, 'in fact I'm quite amazed at the moral,
indeed almost religious preoccupations of this girl.' For the first
time his love was associated with music: the strange colour of
Marie's eyes, the season of the year, the seascapes of their clifftop
walks, seemed fully expressed by Faure's setting of Baudelaire's
Chant d' Automne. Fifty years later Gregh could still remember his
friend ecstatically and discordantly humming, with half-closed
eyes and head thrown back, 'J' aime de vas longs yeux la lumiere
verdatre.'l A few years afterwards Marie became the wife of a
nobleman ofItalian family, Thomas de Barbarin, and the mother
of three children; in spite of her Jewish parentage she adopted, as
Proust regretfully put it, 'anti-Dreyfusism in the name of good
taste'; and she died of Spanish influenza at the end of the First
World War.
A curious sketch called 'Moonlight Sonata' in Les Plaisirs et
les Jourr-relates to this summer, and was suggested by his brief
love for Marie Finaly. After driving all day with the pale
'Assunta', the Narrator asks her to go home in the carriage and
leave him to rest; he falls asleep near Honfleur in 'a double avenue
of great trees, within sound of the sea'-the Allees Marguerite-
dreams of an eery cold sunset, and wakes to find himself flooded
in moonlight. Assunta returns, saying: "My brother had gone to
bed, I was afraid you might be cold"; she wraps her cloak round
him, puts her arm round his neck, and they walk weeping in the
moonlight. Perhaps the game of ferret took place on the clifftop,
as it does in A l' Ombre; but more probably it happened in Paris,
as in Jean Santeuil,3 for Proust's letters in the following winter
show him playing party-games in a circle which apparently
1 The Narrator (1, 674) associates another line of Baudelaire's poem with
Balbec: 'I wondered whether Baudelaire's uray of sunlight on the sea" was
not the same that at this very moment was burning the sea like a topaz,
fermenring it till it became as pale and milky as beer, as frothy as milk ... .-
:. Pp. l1)2-7
a Pldiade, I, 918-21; Jean Santeuil, vol. 3, 247-9