THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 123Lavallee. But in the spring, when 'the return of gentle sunlit days'
gave him 'the exact illusion, to the point of hallucination, of the
time when we used to see Edgar Aubert home', he met a young
man who was very like Aubert indeed. He duly told Billy, who
was about to visit Paris on leave; he also sent an oval seating-plan
of an enormous dinner-party at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes for a
select ten of his very best friends, and the names of seven more
who came after dinner-'l'm afraid the list isn't quite complete,'
he added apologetically. Willie Heath is in the place of honour
on Mme Proust's left, while Proust is separated from them by
Comte Charles de Grancey and Robert de Flers. Of the ten
dinner-guests, four are counts (Grancey, Flers, Louis de la Salle
and Gustave de Waru) and two viscounts; the after-dinner
guests are all untitled. 'If only I'd known you were coming I'd
have put off the dinner,' he said; but Billy was not allowed to
meet Heath on this visit, and there was never to be another
opportunity.
It was almost as if Aubert had fulfilled his promise of coming
next year, 'whatever happens'. Willie Heath was quite alarmingly
like Aubert. He not only spoke English, he was English; he was
deeply religious, like Edgar, though after a Protestant upbringing
he had been converted to Catholicism at the tender age of twelve;
and in his eyes there was the same look of melancholy premoni-
tion and resignation as in Aubert's. Of all their circle he was the
most serious, and yet the most childlike, not only in the purity of
his heart, but in his bursts of delightful, unselfconscious gaiety.
Proust noted with some envy that the secret of making Willie
laugh seemed denied to himself, whereas Charles de Grancey,
with stories of his schooldays, could always send Willie into
fits.
They met in the Bois de Boulogne. The morning sunlight
slanted through the new leaves as Proust advanced to their
meeting-place: there, under the trees, erect yet reposing in his
pensive elegance, stood Willie, his eyes already fixed on his friend;
and a strange thought came into Proust's mind. In 1891, the first
year of their student life, Robert de Billy had shown him Van
Dyck's portraits of young English cavaliers in the Louvre: "you
see, Marcel," he had explained, "they're all going to be killed soon
in the Civil War, and you can tell it in their faces." How like the
doomed Duke of Richmond, standing under dark green foliage,