Marcel Proust: A Biography

136 MARCEL PROUST
two couples had not met. Proust and La Salle ascended the Righi
by funicular and the Alp Grfun on foot, seeing from the summit
a dim blue vista that led to Italy; and by the lake of Sils-Maria
they watched a flight of pink butterflies cross the water and
return. Then, after three weeks, the party moved for a last week
to the Lake of Geneva, to find a miniature working-model of
Parisian society: it was in expectation of this that Proust had
defensively told Billy: 'I shall be meeting lots of women.' There
was Laure Baigneres in her Villa Quatorze at Clarens, after which
(in allusion to the Belgian Comtesse ViIain-Quatorze whom
Louis XIV ennobled after a delightful visit) she was nicknamed
Comtesse Villa-Quatorze. At Amphion, in her Villa Bassaraba,
was Princesse Rachel de Brancovan, who played Chopin so
beautifully but so reluctantly, with a musical agony that recalls
Mme Verdurin's. "Oh, not to-day, Monsieur, I couldn'tI" she
would cry: "Oh, what torture! No, it would kill me, feel my
hands, they're frozen!" She was one of the leaders of musical
society in Paris, a patroness of Paderewski, Faure and Enesco.
Perhaps Proust first met at this time her wild and pretty sixteen-
year-old daughter Anna, the future poetess and Comtesse de
N oailles, who was later to be his friend. But as he travelled
from hostess to hostess round the lake he thought of Aubert's
sad, ironic eyes, and reproached himself, as he wrote to Billy,
for enjoying the beauty that poor Edgar would never see
again.
In September he spent a fortnight with Mme Proust at the
Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, at the western end of the
boarded promenade-an original of that on which the little band
of girls walks at Balbec-which the society gossip columns called
'the summer boulevard of Paris'. Summer, however, was nearly
over: evening mists rose in the valley behind the hotel, and the
fireplaces, it seemed, were not intended to contain fires. There
was only one lavatory to each storey, and the partitions between
the bedrooms were too thin; but at least this meant that his
mother would hear his tapping on the wall, as did his grandmother
long ago, and visit him as soon as he woke. Perhaps he saw Marie
Finaly again: at least, he nostalgically quoted to his father aher
his return Baudelaire's line, which he associated with her, about
'Ie soleil rayonnant sur la mer'. But Dr Proust was in no mood for
quotations. Marcel, if all went well, would soon pass his law