DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN '7'
summer at Mme Lemaire's Tuesdays in the Rue Monceau, where
Hahn's singing of his own song -cycle from poems of Verlaine,
Les Chansons Grises, immediately became the rage: he was to be
one of the chief performing stars of her musical evenings for the
next two decades. His voice was a light but rich tenor; he leaned
far back, playing his own accompaniment to his own songs, with
half-closed eyes and a convincing air of inspiration. A malicious
observer would notice that his singing head cocked from side to
side, like a bird's, as he darted keen glances through his long eye-
lashes at each member of his audience, to make sure that all were
properly mesmerised. But he possessed the serious charm, the
intelligence and moral distinction that Proust sought in the ideal
friend. Their friendship was passionate for the next two years,
and temperate but unclouded for the rest of Proust's life.
Reveillon was a rambling seventeenth-century country-house,
turreted and moated, with large formal flower-gardens surrounded
by dense forest. The interior decoration, in which real flowers
from the gardens alternated with painted flowers from Mme
Lemaire's brush, resembled that of La Raspeliere under the reign
of Mme Verdurin.^1 On the first day Proust and Hahn took a walk
in the gardens, talking as they went, until they passed a crimson
border of Bengal roses, when Proust suddenly became silent.
"Would you be annoyed if! stayed behind a minute?" he asked,
in the sad, gentle, childish voice which was so characteristic of him.
"1 want to have another look at those roses." When Reynaldo
returned, after walking all round the house, he found his friend
standing motionless, frowning and oblivious, biting one end of
his long moustache which he held between his teeth with his left
hand, still staring at the roses. Reynaldo passed by once more,
till he heard Marcel calling and running after him; with a feeling
of amused respect he divined that it would be better to ask no
questions ahout his friend's state of trance, and they resumed their
conversation as though nothing had happened.^2 Proust can hardly
have forgotten that there were Bengal roses in the Pre Catelan
at Illiers, so this curious episode cannot have been an onset of
unconscious memory, like the eating of the madeleine; it was,
rather, the kindred effort to wrest the secret of a natural object,
1 II, 917, etc.
2 Andree shows similar tact when the Narrator wishes to contemplate the
hawthorns in the country near Balhec (r, 922); so does Saint-Loup (II, 157).