138 MARCEL PROUST
not dissatisfied with this first step tOwaIds family acquiescence in
his literary career. As he told his father with unconscious fore-
sight: 'anything but literature and philosophy for me would be
temps perdu' -Time Lost.
His progress as a writer had already reached a new stage. After
the demise of Le Banquet, in March 1893, several of the homeless
banqueters, including Gregh, Leon Blum, Jacques Baigneres and
Proust himself, had been offered hospitality by the Revue Blanche.
This was a high-class, mildly avant-garde little review, founded
in 1891 by the wealthy Polish brothers Thadee and Alexandre
Natanson. Verlaine, Mallarme, Heredia, Barres, Jean Lorrain,
Pierre Louys and the young Andre Gide were among its con-
tributors. Nine sketches by Proust, of the kind that had already
appeared in Le Banquet, were published iIi the Revue Blanche for
July-August 1893; a short story, Melancolique Vdtegiature de
Madame de Breyves, was in the September number; and several
of another group of six sketches, which did not appear till
December 1893, were written before this September. The greater
part of what was to be Les Plaisirs et les Jours was therefore
already in existence by September 1893; and towards the end of
the month, encouraged by his year's reprieve from the horrors
of earning a living, Proust began to plan their publication in
volume form. He mentioned the idea to Mme Lemaire a few days
after Willie Heath's death on 3 October; and to his delight she
offered-or consented-to illustrate the book with the execrable
drawings and brushwork which would, he hoped, ensure its
success in fashionable circles. He immediately approached Heath's
family for permission to dedicate his volume to his dead friend:
'they seemed quite pleased with the suggestion,' he wrote to Billy
early in November, but a further application to Aubert's parents,
to ask that Edgar's name might be coupled with Willie's, came to
nothing.
Any attempt to distinguish autobiographical elements in the
Revue Blanche sketches must be made with caution. As a rule they
have the impersonal air of literary exercises, and there is little of
the special feeling which in Proust marks personal experience. The
love incidents-nearly all the sketches are about love-are
derivative from the contemporary high-society fiction of France
and Bourget, and contain almost nothing which can be linked
with Proust's emotional life at this time. Proust sometimes tells