MARCEL PROUST
fever at Kabinda in the Sudan in 1893, in the fourteenth month of
his journey across Africa. This suggested Saint-Loup's exile to
Morocco as a punishment for his extravagant gifts to Rachel.
One of the companions of Charles Haas in Tissot's painting is
Prince Edmond de Polignac; some say it was he who introduced
Proust to Haas. He was the son of Charles X's reactionary
minister, a kind, witty, rapidly ageing man, with the bearing of a
great nobleman and the face of a scholar: "He looked like a
castle-tower converted into a library," said Proust. The prince
was devoted to music, and was himself a composer of some
distinction, but lacked the money to have his works performed.
Montesquiou and Comtesse Greffulhe arranged his wedding in
December 1893 to Winnaretta Singer, the heiress to the Singer
sewing-machine millions, whose sister Isabelle had married the
Duc Decaze in 1888. Jacques Emile Blanche remembered the
prince jumping over a chair at the Blanches' Dieppe villa, by way
of proving he was still young enough to marry, and old Mme
Blanche saying: "So the lute is going to marry the sewing-
machine." However, their union was extremely happy, and the
prince's compositions were now performed in their studio in the
Rue Cortambert by full orchestras and choirs. Proust heard there
Faure's sonata, one of the models for the Vinteuil Sonata. He also
recalled with delight the unexpected arrival of his Condorcet
tyrant M. Cucheval, and the butler saying to the prince: "This
gentleman says his name is Cucheval, ought I to announce him
all the same?"; and indeed, when one thought of it, the school-
master's name was hardly fit to be pronounced before ladies. In
the studio hung the prince's favourite picture, a study by Monet
of tulips in a field near Haarlem, snatched from him at a sale a
few years before by Miss Singer and now providentially returned.
A single point of difference marred their union: the princess loved
fresh air, and the prince hated draughts. When his friends teased. him for sitting in a corner of the studio, smothered with travelling-
rugs as if in a railway-carriage, he would murmur with a smile:
"Ah well, as Anaxagoras says, this life is a journey"; and Proust
gave the remark to the dying Bergotte.^1
Another salon which Proust entered about this time was that
of Comtesse Pauline d'Haussonville, a daughter of the Duc
d'Harcourt. She was tall, haughty and statuesque, was said to
1 III, [84