140 MARCEL PROUSTful interest in Lesbianism was likewise founded on real ex-
perience.^1
It was perhaps in the winter of 1893-94 that Proust frequented
the Saturdays of the great Pamassian Heredia at II bis Rue
Balzac. Guests had the choice of two rooms: their host's study,
full of poets and cigar-smoke, and the drawing-room, which
Proust preferred, where Heredia's three lovely daughters, Helene,
Louise and Marie, were surrounded by a group of admiring young
men. He met there Pierre Louys (who married Louise and ill-
treated her), the symbolist Henri de Regnier, thirty years old,
with a monocle and long drooping moustaches (who married
Marie), and possibly Andre Gide, whom he might also have met
with Paul Valery and the painter Maurice Denis at the Finalys'
in the winter of 1892. In parody of her father's campaign for
election to the Academie F ranc;aise Marie organised a secret
society of her friends known as the Academie Canaque, which
might be roughly translated as 'the Cannibal Academy'. She was
Queen of the Academy, Proust was Perpetual Secretary, with the
task of calling the meetings and keeping the minutes, and
members included Pierre Louys, Regnier, Paul Valery, Femand
Gregh, Leon Blum, the economist and banker Raphael Georges
Levy, the poet Ferdinand Herold, and the young politicians
Philippe and Daniel Berthelot. The formal speech of thanks for
1 If this is so, then the experience of the confession must be looked for in
the years before Avant La nuit was written; and indeed there seems to be little
later evidence of Proust's acquaintance with Lesbians before an advanced
stage in the composition of A fa Recherche. There are a few slight and
dubious indications that this early experience, if it occurred, may have been
connected with Marie Finaly. There is a single short reference to female
homosexuality in Proust's work before Avant fa nuit, in the short story
Violante, au La Mondaniti, in which the heroine is unsuccessfully assaulted
by a Lesbian. Violante was published in Le Banquet in February 1893; and
since it is perhaps the most mature of the Le Banquet pieces, it can hardly. have been written before Proust's visit to the Finalys in August 1892.
Violante is a young girl who is led astray from the life of the spirit and the
imagination by a love of society; and although in this respect the character
undoubtedly reflects Proust's own feelings of guilt, we have found him later
accusing Marie Finaly of having taken the same wrong path. Perhaps, then,
Violante resembles Marie Finaly in stiil other ways. Marie was the first
original of Albertine; as her brother Horace was an original of Bloch, she
may also have had some resemblance to Bloch's Lesbian sisters; and she may
have activated the theme of the Proustian hero's jealousy of Lesbian infidelity
which begins in Avant La nuit and ends in Alhertine Dispaflu.